Bateson, Mary Catherine,
1939-2021, American linguist and anthropologist, b. New
York City, grad. Radcliffe (BA,1960), Harvard (Ph.D., 1963). The daughter of
Margaret Mead and Gregory
Bateson, both celebrated anthropologists, she enrolled at Radcliffe College,
completing her BA in two-and-a-half years, and subsequently earned a Ph.D.
from Harvard in linguistics focusing on Middle East languages. Bateson
married fellow Harvard student, J. Barkev Kassarjian, and the couple spent
several years living in the Philippines and Iran, leaving that country in
the wake of its revolution in the late ‘70s. In the 1980s, she turned
to writing about women’s lives, and is best known for her book,
Composing A Life (1989), based on her own and four of
her contemporaries’ experiences of sexism, racism, ageism, and
challenges as women working in academia. This led to subsequent studies on
human creativity and development. Bateson held several academic positions at
Harvard, Brandeis, Spelman, Amherst, and George Mason Univ., where at the
time of her passing she was professor emeritus of English and anthropology.
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