Whiting, Beatrice B

Beatrice Blyth Whiting, (1914−2004) was a leading anthropologist of childhood and professor emerita of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She, along with her husband and long‐time collaborator John W. M. Whiting, were pioneers in psychological anthropology and the comparative study of children. Born in New York on April 14, 1914, and graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1935, Beatrice Whiting became one of the first women to study anthropology at Yale. She did fieldwork among the Paiute Indians in Oregon and received her Ph.D. in 1943; her dissertation was published as a book, Paiute Sorcery: A Study of Social Control (1950). After working at both Brandeis University and Wellesley College, Whiting became a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1973 and was among the first women to be appointed to tenured professorships at Harvard University. She retired in 1980, then served as a distinguished fellow at the Henry A. Murray Center for the Study of Lives at Radcliffe College from 1980 to 1985.