WHITING, Beatrice Blyth 1914-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born April 14, 1914, in Staten Island, NY; died of pneumonia, September 29, 2003, in Cambridge, MA. Anthropologist, educator, and author. Whiting was known for her cross-cultural work on the development of behavior and gender identity in children and adolescents. Her undergraduate work was completed at Bryn Mawr College in 1935, and she went on to receive a doctorate from Yale University in 1942. After being a lecturer in social relations at Brandeis University from 1949 to 1952 and a researcher at Wellesley University from 1951 to 1953, Whiting joined the faculty at Harvard University as a research associate in 1952. She became a lecturer in social anthropology from 1963 to 1969, a lecturer in education from 1969 to 1974, and a full professor of anthropology and education from 1974 until her 1980 retirement as professor emeritus. Whiting was well known for the research she did with her husband, the late John W. M. Whiting, on such projects as the Six Cultures Study of Socialization, which investigated how parents raised their children in various countries and how this affected child development. Some of her research was funded by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (1971-73, 1973-77), the Guggenheim Foundation (1975), and the Ford Foundation (1976). The Whitings also founded the Child Development Research Unit in Nairobi, Kenya, and, after their retirement, directed the Comparative Adolescence Project until 1985. Whiting, who was a distinguished scholar at the Henry A. Murray Center at Cambridge during the early 1980s, was the author of numerous influential papers about child and adolescent behavior and development, as well as coauthor of Children of Six Cultures: A Psycho-Cultural Analysis (1975) and Children of DifferentWorlds: The Formation of Social Behavior (1988). She was the author of Paiute Sorcery (1950), editor of Six Cultures: Studies in Child Rearing (1963), and coeditor of Handbook of Cross-Cultural Human Development (1981). For her contributions to science, Whiting received a Distinguished Service Award from the American Anthropological Association in 1982, a Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the Society for Research in Child Development in 1987, and a Career Contribution Award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology in 1989.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Boston Globe, October 23, 2003, p. B20. New York Times, October 19, 2003, p. A30.

ONLINE

Harvard University Gazette,http://www.news.harvard.edu/ (October 9, 2003).