From: ALL TRUE! The Record of Actual Adventures That Have Happened to Ten Women of Today. Published by Brewer, Warren & Putnam (New York, 1931)

Editor’s note: I am providing excerpts from this source for interested parties because (a) it is difficult to obtain and (b) Freeman claims that the passage where Mead wrote that she ‘’received the whispered confidences . . . [of] the Samoan girls" is hard evidence that she was hoaxed (Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 26, 1999, p. 21). Although I cannot reproduce the entire source here, the following excerpts are those referring specifically to Mead’s study of Samoan female adolescents and her mention of Fa’apua’a. 

Freeman contends that the phrase "Samoan girls" refers to Fa'apua'a and Fofoa (who supposedly hoaxed Mead), when it is clear that Mead was referring to all of the Samoan girls she studied. The phrase "Samoan girls" is repeated in this generic sense throughout the chapter, from the first page on, before any mention of Fa'apua'a.

My reading of the entire article, but especially the passages below, is that Mead related how she was able to carry out an investigation of the intimate lives of "Samoan girls" (that Freeman claims she abandoned). Mead essentially wrote that she went "native," "losing her identity," in order to get intimate information about the girls in her study. I see no hard evidence of a  hoaxing. However, readers can judge this for themselves.

Excerpts from "LIFE AS A SAMOAN GIRL" by Margaret Mead

. . . I had been sent to the South Seas to study. . . the life of Samoan girls. I was to find out what sort of life girls lived in Samoa, whether they, like American girls, had years of tears and troubles before they were quite grown up (p. 94).

. . . The group of reverend scientists who sent me there had no very clear idea of how I was to do this. . . . Instead of making charts and keeping elaborate records, I had to learn to walk barefoot, eat raw the rich little tuitui fish which taste like custard, and to dance in Samoan dress with my skin rubbed with scented cocoanut oil, and a hibiscus flower carefully balanced behind my ear (pp. 94-95).

    In some ways I was lucky. I was twenty-three, but because the Samoans are tall and well built and I am not, I was about the height and build of a fifteen year old, and the Samoans aren’t very expert at guessing ages. My hair was bobbed, as was the hair of their girls in the teens. . . . And my cue was to become a Samoan girl as nearly as possible, to learn to eat their food, sleep on their mats, share their jests and above all share their manners. Just as the only way of exploring a cave is to enter it, so the only way in which I could be sure of knowing how a Samoan girl acted, was to try to act that way myself (p. 95). . . .

    But I also learned that no Samoan girl is in a hurry to marry. Life is very pleasant for a girl in her teens. In the morning she rises at dawn and bathes in the sea. Then there are two or three hours of work in the gardens or perhaps a long picnic-like excursion after fish. Outside the main village are little week-end fishing resorts where one or two families keep a couple of houses and a few mats. A party of young people with two or three older ones will go off for a week-end together. . . At night there would be a feast of the fish; the garlands would be worn by the dancers and if it were moonlight the young people would dance far into the night.

    The Samoan girl has no difficult problems to solve. She does not have a small family and a father or mother dependent upon her alone for sympathy or support; in each family there are ten or fifteen relations, and all share in bringing up the young and caring for the old. No one urges her to hurry, to decide what she is going to do in life, to be grown up (pp. 111-112).

. . . Two Samoan girls, Braided Roses, and Born-in-three-houses [Fa’apua’a and Fofoa], and I decided to go back in the boat to Ofu (p. 113)

    That night a reception was held in our honor. . . I sat between my two companions, dressed now, not as a white girl, but in a fine woven mat skirt, the broad white bark cloth sash, the tight bodice of a Samoan, with ankles, wrists, neck and hair wreathed with leaves and flowers, that I was asked my second difficult question [by the high chief Misa, who was being fresh with Mead by saying he would marry her and travel around the world with her] (p. 116). ...

    Here was a dilemma indeed [to politely turn down the offer]. Had I laid aside my white identity entirely when a chief on Tau had given me the name of the "Chosen Maiden" of that line, "Flower of Heaven"? Had I come to Ofu, not as Margaret Mead, not even as "Makelita," . . . but as "Flower of Heaven," an old Samoan name? I was dressed as a Samoan; for many months now I had walked barefoot along the spongy treacherous trails. I had been taught to dance the Samoan dances and this very evening I had danced as hostess courtesy to Misa while two of his talking chiefs danced beside me, lending comic relief to the stately measures demanded from a "Chosen Maiden.". . . In all things I had behaved as a Samoan, for only so, only by losing my identity, as far as possible, had I been able to become acquainted with the Samoan girls, receive their whispered confidences and learn at the same time the answer to the scientists’ questions (pp. 117-118).