43 Facts About Ruth Benedict

Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist.

Ruth Benedict was born in New York City, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909.

Ruth Benedict became the first woman to be recognized as a prominent leader of a learned profession.

Ruth Benedict 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.

Ruth Benedict 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.

Ruth Benedict's mother worked in the city as a school teacher, and her father was a homeopathic doctor and surgeon.

Ruth Benedict's illness caused the family to move back to Norwich, New York, to the farm of Ruth's maternal grandparents, the Shattucks.

Ruth Benedict hated her mother's sorrow and viewed it as a weakness.

Ruth Benedict had a fascination with death as a young child.

At seven, Ruth Benedict began to write short verses and read any book that she could get her hands on.

The girls were successful in school and entered Vassar College in September 1905, where Ruth Benedict thrived in an all-female atmosphere.

Nevertheless, Ruth Benedict explored her interests in college and found writing as her way of expressing herself as an "intellectual radical" as she was sometimes called by her classmates.

Ruth Benedict graduated with her sister in 1909 with a major in English Literature.

Ruth Benedict first tried paid social work for the Charity Organization Society, and later, she accepted a job as a teacher at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, California.

Ruth Benedict had met him by chance in Buffalo, New York around 1910.

That summer, Ruth Benedict fell deeply in love with Stanley as he began to visit her more and accepted his proposal for marriage.

Ruth Benedict began to publish poems under different pseudonyms: Ruth Stanhope, Edgar Stanhope, and Anne Singleton.

Ruth Benedict began work on writing a biography about Mary Wollstonecraft and other lesser-known women that she felt deserved more acknowledgement for their work and contributions.

Stanley suffered an injury that made him want to spend more time away from the city, and Ruth Benedict was not happy when the couple moved to Bedford Hills, far away from the city.

Ruth Benedict enjoyed the class and took another anthropology course with Alexander Goldenweiser, a student of noted anthropologist Franz Boas.

Ruth Benedict developed a close friendship with Boas, who took on a role as a kind of father figure in her life.

Ruth Benedict wrote her dissertation, "The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America," and received the PhD in anthropology in 1923.

Ruth Benedict started a friendship with Edward Sapir, who encouraged her to continue the study of the relations between individual creativity and cultural patterns.

Sapir and Ruth Benedict shared an interest in poetry and read and critiqued each other's work; both submitted to the same publishers and both were rejected.

Ruth Benedict taught her first anthropology course at Barnard College in 1922 and among the students was Margaret Mead.

One student who felt especially fond of Ruth Benedict was Ruth Landes.

When Boas retired in 1937, most of his students considered Ruth Benedict to be the obvious choice for the head of the anthropology department.

Ruth Benedict was understandably insulted by Linton's appointment, and the Columbia department was divided between the two rival figures of Linton and Ruth Benedict, both accomplished anthropologists with influential publications, neither of whom ever mentioned the work of the other.

Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were two of the most influential and famous anthropologists of their time.

In 1946, Ruth Benedict received the Achievement Award from the American Association of University Women.

Ruth Benedict was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1947.

Ruth Benedict continued her teaching after the war and advanced to the rank of full professor only two months before her death in New York on September 17,1948.

Ruth Benedict used the Nietzschean opposites of "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" as the stimulus for her thought about these Native American cultures.

Ruth Benedict describes how in ancient Greece the worshipers of Apollo emphasized order and calm in their celebrations.

Ruth Benedict described in detail the contrasts between rituals, beliefs, and personal preferences among people of diverse cultures to show how each culture had a "personality," which was encouraged in each individual.

Ruth Benedict was a senior student of Franz Boas when Mead began to study with them, and they had extensive and reciprocal influence on each other's work.

Ruth Benedict desired to show that each culture has its own moral imperatives that can be understood only if one studies that culture as a whole.

Ruth Benedict was among the leading cultural anthropologists who were recruited by the US government for war-related research and consultation after the US entered World War II.

One of Ruth Benedict's lesser-known works was a pamphlet "The Races of Mankind," which she wrote with her colleague at the Columbia University Department of Anthropology, Gene Weltfish.

Ruth Benedict is known not only for her earlier Patterns of Culture but for her later book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, the study of the society and culture of Japan that she published in 1946, incorporating results of her wartime research.

Ruth Benedict played a major role in grasping the place of the Emperor of Japan in Japanese popular culture, and formulating the recommendation to US President Franklin Roosevelt that permitting continuation of the Emperor's reign had to be part of the eventual surrender offer.

The Ruth Benedict Prize has two categories, one for monographs by one writer and one for edited volumes.

In 2005, Ruth Benedict was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.