"My feeling is that in Ruth Benedict, as in few others, a consistency of character, of calling, and of theoretical conception can be identified. That is, her anthropology was, in some basic way, her own self embodied" (Mintz, 1981:145).
Ruth Benedict's life story has been presented by at least three different biographers, each of whom emphasizes different themes and patterns in her life to characterize her and her work. I will summarize the similar points and suggest some of the different readings. She was also her own biographer, at Mead's urgings, and she emphasized the importance of her father's death and her deafness.
Ruth Fulton was born on June 5, 1887 in New York City, the first child to Bertrice and Fredrick Fulton. Bertrice did not work outside their home, but had graduated from Vassar college in 1882. Ruth's father, Fredrick, was a doctor and did cancer research. Ruth's sister, Margery, was born in December 1888, and three months later Fredrick died of a fever.
Each biographer recognizes Fredrick's death as having a dramatic influence on Ruth's life. Ruth herself, in her unfinished biographical essay, suggests both that she vividly remembers the actual events (although she was under two years old), and that this early experience with death precipitated a life-long morbidity, particularly exposed in her poetry. Indeed, Ruth begins her autobiography with this event, stating:
"The story of my life begins when I was twenty-one months old, at the time my father died (97)...My mother was crushed by my father's death...She took me into the room where he lay in his coffin, and in an hysteria of weeping implored me to remember. Nothing is left to me consciously of this experience, but if it is suppressed it would go a long way to explain the effect my mother's weeping has always had upon me" (quoted in Mead 1974:98).
She goes on to explain how her father's death continued to explicitly impact her view of life, and suggests a dualistic world view that other biographers have related to the separation between Benedict-as-anthropologist and Benedict-as-poet (leaving unclear exactly where Benedict-as-wife should be).
"Certainly from my earliest childhood I recognized two worlds, whether or not my knowledge was born at that tragic scene at my father's coffin – the world of my father, which was the world of death and which was beautiful, and the world of confusion and explosive weeping which I repudiated. I did not love my mother; I resented her cult of grief, and her worry and concern about little things. But I could always retire to my other world, and to this world my father belonged. I identified him with everything calm and beautiful that came my way" (quoted in Mead 1974:98).
After her father's death, Ruth, her mother, and sister, moved to her maternal grandparents' farm in New York State. The family infused their daily living with Baptist teachings, and Ruth was particularly enraptured by her grandmother (Modell 1983:30)
Ruth had always been independent, but, when she started kindergarten, her independent streak was re-diagnosed as deafness, a result measles. Her deafness would later play a substantial role in her style of anthropological field method. Particularly in comparison with her more social younger sister, Ruth seemed very much the quiet outsider. "If she did not want to hear her mother, at times she literally could not, for a childhood attack of measles left her partially deaf and exacerbated her sense of alienation" (Babcock, 1995:106).
Growing up, Ruth and her immediate family (her mother never remarried) moved first to Missouri, then Minnesota and Buffalo, New York, to enable her mother to work as a teacher. Both Ruth and Marjory attended St. Margaret's Girls' High School and were offered scholarships to study at Vassar College. Ruth attended Vassar from 1905 to 1909, majoring in literature.
After graduation, Ruth traveled to Europe with friends from college, and then took a series of social work and teaching jobs. In 1911, she moved to Pasadena, California, and began work as a teacher at Westlake School for Girls, also spending time with her sister, her sister's new husband, and their two children.
Soon after she returned to Norwich, New York, in 1913, Stanley Benedict began calling on her regularly. Stanley was the brother of one of Ruth's college friends, and was working in New York City as a professor of biochemistry at Cornell Medical School. Modell suggests that Stanley intentionally evoked memories of Ruth's father, and worked on similar medical research:
"The most sensitive part of Stanley Benedict's courtship involved aligning himself with Ruth's father. He knew and fully appreciated Fredrick Fulton's cancer research" (Modell 1983:84). Although Ruth was not immediately sure if she wanted to be married, she finally accepted Stanley's proposal and they were married in July 1914.
After her marriage, Ruth stayed at home while Stanley worked. She wrote poetry, journal entries, and tried to write "chemical detective" short stories. This last project was intended to "revive' her marriage to Stanley, which had faltered from the start: "Stanley did provide the 'data' for the stories, and his wife wrote them out under the name 'Edgar Stanhope'"(Modell 1983:91).
Yet, the Benedicts had difficulties having children, and Ruth believed this further weakened their marriage. As Stanley retreated further into his research work, Ruth "pinned more and more hope on the wished-for child" as a way to both steady her marriage and, she hinted, "prove her sexuality" (Modell 1983: 95).
Unable to have children (she was never pregnant), Ruth turned to writing, completing poems and beginning a project to write biographies of independent women, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller and Olive Schreinder. When her Mary Wollstonecraft manuscript was rejected by Houghton Mifflin, she decided to take evening classes at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
When she enrolled in 1919, New School classes were $20 each, and only were held after 4 p.m. (Modell 1983:110). While at the New School, Ruth took social sciences classes taught by Elsie Clews Parsons and Alexander Goldenweiser, who had received his Ph.D. from the Columbia anthropology department.
After two and a half years, Parsons and Goldenweiser "decided" that Ruth should continue into an anthropology doctoral program, and introduced her to Franz Boas at Columbia (Modell 1983: 117). Working under Boas, Ruth completed her dissertation (entitled "The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America") in March 1923. The dissertation was based on library research.
As Ruth continued with her education, her marriage to Stanley became even more strained. Although they never legally divorced, Ruth rented an apartment in New York City in the early 1920's.
While teaching and researching at Columbia, Ruth began academic friendships that lasted her whole life. Edward Sapir, also a closet poet, first wrote Ruth in 1929 in response to an article version of her dissertation. They had a close friendship from 1922 until 1929, and "wrote about anthropology and poetry, gossiped and confided, and criticized each other's work" (Modell 1983:127). This friendship with Sapir facilitated an exchange of poetry, as both anthropologists worked through personal problems in their poetry. "Both Sapir and Benedict used poetry to express the agony of marriage unraveling" (Handler, 1986:143).
In 1920, Margaret Mead transferred into the Columbia undergraduate program, and began taking classes in anthropology. Their relationship was a close one, based on a close intellectual intimacy and occasional physical intimacy. As Benedict's most prolific biographer, Mead has published many versions of her representations of Ruth's life, particularly lingering on how their intellectual symbiosis.
Even after he died (in 19XX?) Stanley left Ruth a trust fund that "provided her with permanent financial eas" (Heilbrun, 1999:13). Although Ruth campaigned hard to garner funding for her students, she was never in a particular dire position herself (opposed, for example, to Zora Neale Hurston's position). Instead, she lobbied to support students and their fieldwork.
Although Ruth continued to teach and advise actively in the Columbia department, she was only given a full professorship in 1948, three months before she died. Indeed, the department became a more contentious place after Franz Boas' death in 1942 ("He uttered his last words, 'I have a new theory of race...', and before he could finish, collapsed and died in the arms of the person sitting next to him – the great French structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss"; Barnard 2001:102). Mintz suggests that Ralph Linton was antagonistic toward Benedict:
"I never heard Ruth comment on Linton, but his hostility toward her was intense. After I went to Yale in 1951, he was a colleague of mine until his death on Christmas Eve, 1953, and when he referred to Benedict, it was always with a good deal of animus. He would occasionally boast publicly that he had killed her, and he produced for me, in a small leather pouch, the Tanala material he said he had used to kill Ruth Benedict" (Mintz 1981:161).
Ruth Benedict died on September 17, 1948 at the age of sixty-nine of coronary thrombosis. She had just returned from a trip to Europe to gather ethnographic materials about the post-war recovery.