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Ruth Benedict Biography & Facts

Ruth Fulton Benedict (June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909. After studying anthropology at the New School of Social Research under Elsie Clews Parsons, she entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1921, where she studied under Franz Boas. She received her Ph.D. and joined the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she shared a romantic relationship, and Marvin Opler were among her students and colleagues. Benedict was president of the American Anthropological Association and also a prominent member of the American Folklore Society. She became the first woman to be recognized as a prominent leader of a learned profession. She can be viewed as a transitional figure in her field by redirecting both anthropology and folklore away from the limited confines of culture-trait diffusion studies and towards theories of performance as integral to the interpretation of culture. She studied the relationships between personality, art, language, and culture and insisted that no trait existed in isolation or self-sufficiency, a theory that she championed in her 1934 book Patterns of Culture. Early biography Childhood Benedict was born Ruth Fulton in New York City on June 5, 1887, to Beatrice (Shattuck) and Frederick Fulton. Her mother worked in the city as a school teacher, and her father was a homeopathic doctor and surgeon. Mr. Fulton loved his work and research, but they eventually led to his premature death, as he acquired an unknown disease during one of his surgeries in 1888. His illness caused the family to move back to Norwich, New York, to the farm of Ruth's maternal grandparents, the Shattucks. A year later, he died ten days after he had returned from a trip to Trinidad to search for a cure. Mrs. Fulton was deeply affected by her husband's passing. Any mention of him overwhelmed her with grief; every March, she cried at church and in bed. Ruth hated her mother's sorrow and viewed it as a weakness. For Ruth, the greatest taboos were crying in front of people and showing expressions of pain. She reminisced, "I did not love my mother; I resented her cult of grief." The psychological effects on her childhood were thus profound, since "in one stroke she [Ruth] experienced the loss of the two most nourishing and protective people around her—the loss of her father at death and her mother to grief". As a toddler, she contracted measles, which left her partially deaf; that was not discovered until she began school. Ruth had a fascination with death as a young child. When she was four years old, her grandmother took her to see an infant that had recently died. Upon seeing the dead child's face, Ruth claimed that it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. At seven, Ruth began to write short verses and to read any book that she could get her hands on. Her favorite author was Jean Ingelow, and her favorite readings were A Legend of Bregenz and The Judas Tree. Through writing, she gained approval from her family. Writing was her outlet, and she wrote with an insightful perception about human reality. For example, in her senior year of high school, she wrote a piece, "Lulu's Wedding (A True Story)", in which she recalled the wedding of a family serving-girl. Instead of romanticizing the event, she revealed the true unromantic arranged marriage that Lulu went through because the man would take her even though he was much older. Although her fascination with death started at an early age, she continued to study how death affected people throughout her career. In her book Patterns of Culture, Benedict shows how the Pueblo culture dealt with grieving and death. She describes in the book that individuals may deal with reactions to death, such as frustration and grief, differently from one another. Societies all have social norms that they follow; some allow more expression in dealing with death, such as mourning, but other societies do not permit its acknowledgement. College and marriage After high school, Ruth and her sister entered St Margaret's School for Girls, a college preparatory school, with the help from a full-time scholarship. The girls were successful in school and entered Vassar College in September 1905, where Ruth thrived in an all-female atmosphere. Stories were then circulating that going to college led girls to become childless and remain unmarried. Nevertheless, Ruth explored her interests in college and found writing as her way of expressing herself as an "intellectual radical" - as her classmates sometimes labelled her. The author Walter Pater (1839-1894) influenced her greatly during this time as she strove to be like him and to live a well-lived life. She graduated with her sister in 1909 with a major in English Literature. Unsure of what to do after college, she received an invitation from a wealthy trustee of the college to go on an all-expense-paid tour around Europe. Accompanied by two girls from California whom she had never met, Katherine Norton and Elizabeth Atsatt, she traveled through France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and England for one year with the opportunity of various home-stays throughout the trip. Over the next few years, Ruth took up many different jobs. She first tried paid social-work for the Charity Organization Society; later she accepted a job as a teacher at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, California. While working there, she gained an interest in Asia that would later affect her choice of fieldwork as a working anthropologist. However, she was unhappy with that job as well and, after one year, left to teach English in Pasadena at the Orton School for Girls. Those years were difficult, and she experienced depression and severe loneliness. However, through reading authors like Walt Whitman and Richard Jefferies, who stressed a worth, importance, and enthusiasm for life, she held onto hope for a better future. The summer after her first year teaching at the Orton School, she returned home to the Shattucks' farm to spend some time in thought and peace. There, Stanley Rossiter Benedict, an engineer at Cornell Medical College, began to visit her at the farm. She had met him by chance in Buffalo, New York around 1910. That summer, Ruth fell deeply in love with Stanley as he began to visit her more, and she accepted his proposal for marriage. Invigorated by love, she undertook several writing projects to keep busy besides the everyday housework chores in her new life with Stanley. She began to publish poems under different pseudonyms: Ruth Stanhope, Edgar Stanhope, and Anne Singleton. She also began work on writing a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and other lesser-known women who (she felt) deserved more acknowledgement for their work and contributions. By 1918, the couple had begun to drift apart. Stanley suffered an injury that made him want to spend more time away from the city, a.... Discover the Ruth Benedict popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Ruth Benedict books.