June 7, 2023 • 41 mins
Ruth Fulton Benedict was one of the first women to become really prominent in the field of anthropology. She had a huge impact, but she’s often overshadowed by some of her students, including Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead.
Research:
- Banner, Lois W. “Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle.” New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2003.
- Banner, Lois W. “Mannish Women, Passive Men, and Constitutional Types: Margaret Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies as a Response to Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture.” Signs. Vol. 28, No. 3, Gender and Science: New Issues (Spring 2003). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/345325
- Benedict, Ruth, 1887-1948, and Gene Weltfish. The Races of Mankind. New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1943.
- Borovoy, Amy. “Ruth Benedict and the Study of Japanese Culture.” UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. 8/26/2020. Via YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfZYIGltfsE
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Ruth Benedict". Encyclopedia Britannica, 13 Sep. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ruth-Benedict. Accessed 17 May 2023.
- Burns, J. Conor. "Anthropology." History of Modern Science and Mathematics, edited by Brian S. Baigrie, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002. Gale In Context: Science, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CV2640700006/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=4a63896c. Accessed 22 May 2023.
- Kent, Pauline. “Japanese Perceptions of ‘The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.’” Dialectical Anthropology, June 1999, Vol. 24, No. 2 (June 1999). https://www.jstor.org/stable/29790600
- Lie, John. “Ruth Benedict's Legacy of Shame: Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Study of Japan.” Asian Journal of Social Science , 2001, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2001). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23653936
- Mead, Margaret and Ruth Benedict. “An Anthropologist At Work Writings Of Ruth Benedict.” Secker & Warburg. 1959.
- "Patterns of Culture." American Decades Primary Sources, edited by Cynthia Rose, vol. 4: 1930-1939, Gale, 2004, pp. 645-647. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3490200798/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=fa7f9002. Accessed 17 May 2023.
- "Ruth Fulton Benedict." Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/BT2310017919/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=0181011f. Accessed 17 May 2023.
- "Ruth Fulton Benedict." Scientists: Their Lives and Works, UXL, 2006. Gale In Context: Science, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K2641500229/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=4fba0976. Accessed 17 May 2023.
- Salamone, Frank A., 2018. “Life‑affirming versus Life‑denying Cultures : Ruth Benedict and Social Synergy”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris. https://www.berose.fr/article1333.html?lang=en
- Schachter, Judith . "Ruth Benedict". In obo in Anthropology. 18 May. 2023. <https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0204.xml>.
- Vassar Encyclopedia. “Ruth Benedict ’1909.” 2009. https://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/distinguished-alumni/ruth-benedict/
- Yong, Daniel. “Ruth Benedict: Strength in Disability.” University of Chicago. 12/13/2020. https://womanisrational.uchicago.edu/2020/12/13/ruth-benedict-strength-in-disability/
- Young, Virginia Heyer. “Ruth Benedict: Beyond Relativity, Beyond Pattern.” Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology. Series editors Regna Darnell and Stephen O. Murray. University of Nebraska Press. 2005.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Today we are going to talk about Ruth Fulton Benedict,
who was one of the first women to become really
prominent in the field of anthropology. She had a big
impact on that field, but I think in terms of
like general name recognition outside of the world of anthropology today,
she's probably overshadowed by some of her students, including Zoraineilhurston
(00:39):
and Margaret Meade. We will be talking a bit about
Margaret Meade in this episode two because her life was
deeply connected to Benedicts, both personally and professionally. And while
both of these women were really influential, they also faced
a lot of criticism, both in their lifetimes and afterward.
Some of this is because they were women working in
(01:00):
a field that was at the time heavily dominated by men,
and some of their ideas went against the trends and
the standards of the day. But other criticisms were about
like the actual content of their work.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Some of those are more.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well founded, like you could have a whole podcast series
picking it apart point by point. There are definitely plenty
of academic texts that are full of very detailed criticisms
of both of them. That is not what this episode
is for. What we are doing here is taking a
broader look at Ruth Benedict's life and influence.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Ruth Fulton was born on June fifth, eighteen eighty seven.
Margaret Meade wrote a biography of her that named her
birthplace as Shenango Valley in the northern part of New York,
but other sources say that she was born in New
York City. Ruth's maternal grandparents lived in Norwich, New York,
in Shenango County, and that is where she lived for
(01:58):
part of her childhood, so if she was really born
in New York City, that may be the source of
that discrepancy.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Ruth's mother, Bertise Joanna Shaddock Fulton, was a school teacher
who had graduated from Bassar and her father, Frederick, was
a surgeon, but Frederick died in March of eighteen eighty
nine at the age of only thirty one, a few
months before Ruth turned two. Ruth's little sister, Marjorie, was
only three months old Frederick's cause of death was some
(02:28):
kind of infection that he probably contracted on the job.
He had apparently gone to Trinidad with the hope of
recovering there, and then died about ten days after getting
back home.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
This, of course, would have been hard for any family,
and Ruth remembered her mother as grief stricken and always
worried about money, which is understandable considering her husband's death
at such a young age and because they had financial
trouble without his income. But this whole thing seems to
have been particularly hard on Bertise, truly devastated by her
(03:01):
husband's death, and as his anniversary approached every March, it
was like she relived it and then the whole family
was traumatized all over again.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So Ruth remembered her childhood as lonely and sad a
lot of the time. She also contracted measles when she
was a baby or a toddler, a little unclear on
the exact age, but afterwards she was hard of hearing.
She and other people described her as deaf or partially deaf,
or in Mead's words quote just deaf enough to miss
(03:33):
a great deal of what was being said. Before others
recognized it, but nobody realized what was going on with
her hearing until Ruth started school. That meant that, in
addition to growing up in a home that was dominated
by grief and anxiety, Ruth was really isolated. She often
couldn't understand what people were saying to her, especially if
(03:56):
it was noisy or if there were multiple people talking
at once, and until someone noticed her hearing loss, she
also didn't understand why so much of what was happening
around her was so confusing. So the first mass produced
hearing aids didn't hit the market until Benedict was in
her twenties, and once they became available, she seems to
(04:17):
have preferred not to use them. So in Ruth's childhood
and teen years, she became withdrawn and very shy. She
thought her sister, who was prettier and happier, was their
mother's favorite. Ruth didn't really like to be touched, and
except for an imaginary friend, she mostly played alone. But
she loved to read and to write, and she came
(04:40):
to enjoy her solitude. She later wrote of this quote,
happiness was in a world I lived in all by myself,
and for precious moments she also said that she learned
that quote I could always without fail have myself for company,
and that if I didn't talk to anybody about the
things that mattered to me, no one could have take
(05:00):
them away.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
When she was young, Ruth also experienced some kind of
recurring illness that she described as bilious attacks. About every
six weeks, she would have a bout of intense vomiting,
and this continued for years until she started menstruating, and
at that point she started experiencing period pain on about
the same cycle. This ran alongside cycles of depression and anger,
(05:26):
and what she described as rages or tantrums as an adult.
She said these tantrums ended after her grandmother made her
kneel on the floor by a lit candle and pray
to God that she would never lose her temper again.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Ruth and her sister Marjorie were cared for largely by
their grandmother and an aunt, while their mother tried to
earn enough money to support them. Bertie took teaching jobs
in a couple of different cities before being hired as
a librarian in Buffalo, New York in eighteen ninety nine,
when Ruth was about twelve.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
After moving to Buffalo, Ruth and Marjorie got scholarships to
Saint Margaret's Episcopal Academy for Girls, which they attended from
nineteen hundred to nineteen oh five. Then the two sisters
went on to Vasser together and they graduated in nineteen
oh nine. Ri's degree was in literature. She graduated Phi
Beta Kappa and won awards for her poetry and essays.
(06:21):
After graduation, the sister spent a year in Europe with
a couple of friends, and that was paid for by
their friends' families.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Soon after returning from Europe, Marjorie married Robert Freeman. Marjorie, Robert,
and bertis All moved to Pasadena, California. Ruth stayed behind
in Buffalo for about a year before rejoining her mother
and sister. She spent some time in California teaching at girls'
schools before meeting biochemist Stanley Benedict on a trip back
(06:49):
to New York. They got married on June eighteenth, nineteen fourteen.
It seems like Ruth was happy for the first year
or so of their marriage. In a journal that December,
she wrote, quote, five months ago, with all my consciousness
of the power of loving that was the greatest part
of me. With all the hunger and thrust of my love,
I had no notion of its strength and depth and
(07:12):
power of healing. No wonder the days seemed dreary and
empty enough without this satisfying comradeship, this ardent delight, this
transforming love. Now that I have it, it is what
gives meaning to all of life. But Ruth's journals from
their courtship and their early marriage also contain a number
of references to her and Stanley hurting one another, without
(07:35):
really going into much detail. She also wanted to have
a baby, but they weren't able to. Then in nineteen seventeen,
Stanley was injured in a lab accident. He inhaled toxic
gas that he was researching as a potential wartime weapon.
This worsened some issues that he was already having with
high blood pressure and insomnia. He and Ruth wound up
(07:57):
at odds over where and how to live. She preferred
the city. She wanted to be in Greenwich Village, and
that was too noisy for him. He wanted to live
out in the suburbs and spend lots of time at
his summer cabin in New Hampshire. And that was just
too isolated for her. She finally wound up renting a
room in Greenwich Village and staying there during the week
(08:20):
and then going back to Stanley on the weekends, which
was really unconventional.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
I feel like that would even be considered unconventional now.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, I know a number of people who for like
work reasons, for the most part, have had residences in
two different cities, but like, this was unheard of. Really.
When she was.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Living a few years into the marriage, Ruth was feeling
bored and unfulfilled. She had been raised in a devoutly
Baptist family, but she had left the church. A lot
of her classmates at Vassar had been active in various
causes like women's suffrage, but none of those causes had
really captured her attention. She tried to folks on writing poetry,
(09:01):
publishing under the name Anne Singleton, and took on other
writing projects. Eventually, she started on a book that she
called Adventures in Womanhood, planning to include biographies of Mary
Wollston Craft, Margaret Fuller, and Olive Schreiner. She finished a
draft on Mary Wollston Craft, but when she couldn't find
a publisher who was interested, she put the project aside.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
In nineteen nineteen, still looking for something to keep her
mind occupied, Ruth Benedict enrolled in a class at the
New School for Social Research in New York City, which
had been founded that same year. The new School was
established by professors who had resigned from Columbia University after
being censured for their opposition to the US involvement in
(09:44):
the war. It was open to students regardless of sex,
and was specifically focused on higher education for adults, especially
on subjects that were related to social issues in political science.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Benedict's first class at the New School was Sex in Ethnology,
taught by anthropologist and folklorist Elsie Clues Parsons, who became
one of Benedict's mentors. Another mentor was anthropologist and sociologist
Alexander Goldenweisser, who had been born in Ukraine and immigrated
to the US in nineteen hundred.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Both of them had worked and studied with Franz Boas,
and they encouraged Benedict to pursue a graduate degree at
Columbia University, where Boas was teaching. We will get into
this some more after a sponsor break before we talk
(10:41):
about Ruth Benedict's work with Franz boas, we should talk
a little bit about the development of anthropology as a
field and the state of that field when she started
studying it. So anthropology as a scientific and academic discipline
was established primarily by Western European men. Interest in studying
(11:01):
the cultures and peoples of the world really flourished alongside
global exploration and colonization by European powers, and a lot
of the people carrying out that research did so from
the perspective that Western European culture was the pinnacle of
human achievement. So from the beginning, a lot of this
research was rooted in inherently racist ideas. It imagined humanity in.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
A hierarchy, with white people at the top and all
other races lowered down. Cultures that had not had a
lot of contact with Europeans were framed as primitive, with
these allegedly primitive people supposedly in their natural state, unaffected
by things like industrialization. Of course, not every single individual
person working in anthropology was espousing these kinds of ideas,
(11:50):
but by the late nineteenth century, a lot of the
writing coming out of the field was really Eurocentric and
either implicitly or explicitly to other peoples and cultures as
less sophisticated, less developed, and generally inferior.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
One anthropologist who really pushed back on a lot of
this was Franz Boas. He was born into a Jewish
family in Germany in eighteen fifty eight and immigrated to
the United States in eighteen eighty six. He started teaching
at Columbia University ten years later, and he was enormously
influential as both an anthropologist and a teacher. He argued
(12:29):
that race and culture were not biologically determined, and that
no one race or culture was superior to the others,
either genetically or otherwise. He also argued that culture wasn't
biologically determined at all, that instead, cultures arose from a
collection of local, historical, and interpersonal influences. Some of Boas's
(12:53):
ideas are summed up as cultural relativism. That's the idea
that a culture's beliefs, values, and practices should be studied
and understood from the point of view of the culture itself,
not by making value judgments from outside that culture or
comparing it to some kind of supposedly universal standard. In
that case, universal usually really meant Western European. So that's
(13:17):
not to suggest that Boas's work was perfect or that
there's nothing to criticize about it. For example, as we
mentioned in our episode on physical anthropologist W. Montague Cob,
Boas carried out excavations of indigenous burial sites that he
later admitted felt basically like grave robbing. He also represented
a turning point in the field, not an ending point. So,
(13:41):
for example, the term primitive and the idea that so
called primitive cultures were in a more natural or authentic
state that still showed up in his work in the
work of some of his students. And while a lot
of the people that Boas trained tried to be anti
racist in their work, that did not necessarily extend to
(14:02):
their treatment of other traits like gender or sexuality. Also,
just in general, it's virtually impossible for a person to
totally shed every single one of their preconceptions in all
of their cultural baggage when studying another culture.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
So Boas and his students were still seeing and studying
and interpreting the world through their own lenses, even if
they really were making an effort not to. But he
actively intentionally and prolifically tried to dismantle a lot of
the racist ideas that were taken for granted within the field,
and he trained a generation of other anthropologists to do
(14:39):
the same. One of those anthropologists was Ruth Benedict. She
started her graduate studies at Columbia in nineteen twenty one
when she was thirty four. Boas became a mentor and
a father figure. She and some of the other students
called him Papa Frands. She admired and respected his work,
but learning from him could also be challenging for her.
(15:03):
In addition to his having a pronounced German accent, he
was also known for mumbling when he talked. I saw
him described as a notorious mumbler, which made it hard
for somebody with hearing loss to undersod. Oh my gosh,
I can't even imagine.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
But Benedict really impressed him, so much so that he
convinced Columbia to accept her classes from the New School
as part of her pH d work, allowing her to
complete her degree in nineteen twenty three after only two years.
Her dissertation was the concept of the Guardian Spirit in
North America, and it was drawn from existing research on
(15:40):
the idea of the guardian spirit in indigenous cultures. She
published it under the name Ruth Fulton Benedict, including her
maiden name this way that was also unconventional.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Her dissertation caught the attention of one of Boas's former students,
Edward Sapiir. Sapiram Benedict bonded over anne anthropology and their
shared love of poetry. They wrote poems to each other,
and they wrote letters from about nineteen twenty three to
nineteen thirty five. Sometimes this was multiple letters every week.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
While studying under Franz Boas, Benedict also worked as his
teaching assistant at Barnard College. Barnard had been founded in
eighteen eighty nine and was the first college in New
York City to offer degrees to women. It was and
is affiliated with Columbia University, which did not admit women
as undergraduates until the fall of nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
It's not a typo. Barnard is where Benedict met Margaret Mead,
who at the time was a senior in college, and
at first Mead was not impressed with Benedict at all.
Ruth Benedict wore the same dress every day, and it
was addressed that Mead did not think was very flattering.
This was apparently because men wore the same suit to
(16:57):
teach in every day, and Benedict thought that women should
be able to follow the same standard. Benedict also had
a really hard time speaking in front of the students,
even though she had taught at girls' schools years before.
She really struggled with her shyness and her hearing loss.
It took her years to really be comfortable with public speaking.
(17:18):
But then Benedict led the students on one of their
regular visits to the American Museum of Natural History and
Mead asked her for more information about one of the
exhibits they were looking at. Benedict was clearly flustered, but
said she would bring something to their next class, and
she brought a copy of one of her own published papers,
and Mead was so impressed that she gave Benedict another
(17:41):
chance as an instructor. Mead eventually found Benedict to be knowledgeable, creative,
and compassionate toward her students, and she started recommending the
course to other students at Barnard. Benedict and Meade became
friends and colleagues, with Benedict encouraging Meade to pursue an
advanced to in anthropology, including giving her three hundred dollars
(18:04):
of her own money, which she described as a no
strings attached fellowship. Meade started graduate study at Columbia in
nineteen twenty three, and that same year she got married
to anthropologist Luther Cressman, and toward the end of nineteen
twenty four, Benedict and Meade started having an affair. This
was obviously something they kept secret, both of them were
(18:27):
married to other people. As anthropologists, they both wrote about
cultures that viewed gender and sexuality much different than in
much of the United States, but in their own culture
this was something that could have ruined their reputations and
their careers. There was also the fact that Benedict was
more than a decade older than Meade and had been
(18:48):
her teacher. I'm actually a little fuzzy on whether Benedict
was still Mead's teacher at this point. There was already
a very well established trope of predatory life lesbians in media,
so older women in positions of authority like teachers and
headmistresses taking advantage of and corrupting their students and books
(19:10):
and movies. This really damaging stereotype would make their affair
seem particularly salacious if it was discovered. In nineteen twenty four,
Mead also started an affair with Edward Sapier. While Sapier
and Ruth Benedict were close friends, it seems like their
relationship was platonic. Their letters to one another don't suggest
(19:32):
that it was romantic, and when they met, he was
married and devoted to his wife, Florence, But Florence died
in nineteen twenty four, and after that Mead pursued him.
Sapier was the one to tell Benedict about this relationship,
and she was deeply hurt by it. It seems like Sapierre, Benedict,
and Luther Cressman all wanted more from Margaret Meade than
(19:55):
she really wanted to give. She was an advocate of
free love. This was one of a number of love
triangles or in this case, quadrangles over the course of
Mead's life.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Although Benedict was really hurt over Mead's affair with Sapir,
she didn't and their relationship over it. The two women
wrote numerous letters back and forth after Mead left for
field work and Samoa in nineteen twenty five, at a
time when it was incredibly unusual for a woman to
be sent to do field work on her own. When
Meade returned to the US, she wrote one of the
(20:27):
books that she would become famous for, Coming of Age
in Samoa, a Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization.
That book came out in nineteen twenty eight, and although
this book was about adolescence in Samoa, it included descriptions
of sexuality among Samoan youth, and that's really what it
became most known for.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
So this episode isn't about Mead, but it would be
weird if we didn't mention that Mead's work and this
book specifically have been the subjects of intense criticism. Mead's
most vocal critic was New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman, who
made totally different observations during his own field work in Samoa.
(21:08):
He published two different books arguing that Meade's work was
totally incorrect. Critics of Freeman's work have pointed out that
he was working in a different part of Samoa, and
that a lot had changed in the decades between when
Mead did her research and when he did his, including
there being an increasing influence from Christianity. This became known
(21:30):
as the Mead Freeman controversy. It went on for decades.
My basic read on it is that there are valid
criticisms of both of them. Of course, Benedict had her
own life and work going on during all of this,
and we're going to talk about that after we pause
for a sponsor break. In nineteen twenty five, Ruth Fulton
(21:58):
Benedict started editing the Journal of American Folklore. She worked
as its editor until nineteen forty. She also undertook field
work among Puebloan peoples in the southwestern United States. Because
of her hearing loss, she had to conduct most of
this work through interpreters and choose those interpreters very carefully
(22:18):
because they had to be willing to dictate everything they
were interpreting to her while she wrote it all down
word for word. This is a very time consuming and
laborious process, but it also led her to be really
pretty careful. In a lot of her field work. She
tended to work in this like slow, methodical way.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
On Margaret Mead's voyage home from her field work in Samoa,
she met New Zealand anthropologist Reo Fortune. We're guessing on
that pronunciation, and she was immediately attracted to him. Benedict
felt like she had to compete with Fortune in a
way that she had not with Meaeds other partners, and
then ultimately led to her ending their romantic relationship. Benedict
(22:58):
and Meade continued to be called leagues and close friends
for the rest of Benedict's life, though including Benedict eventually
being named Guardian Timeade's daughter. In nineteen twenty eight, Benedict
tried to publish a book of poetry, but again was
rejected by publishers. She did keep writing poetry, but at
this point she mostly stopped trying to do it professionally.
(23:20):
A couple of years after that, she and Stanley separated.
Apart from their other struggles, he really had not supported
her going to graduate school or establishing her own career
as an anthropologist. It was only after their separation that
Benedict was paid for her teaching work at Columbia.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Before that point, it was assumed that she didn't need
to be paid because she was being financially supported by
her husband.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
In nineteen thirty four, Benedict published Patterns of Culture, which
is considered to be her most important work. This book
compared three indigenous cultures, the Zuni of southwestern North America
based on her own field work, the Dobu of Papua
and nig Guinea based on fieldwork done by Margaret Meade
in Reo Fortune, and the Quakwakawacta also known as the
(24:06):
quaky Utle of the Pacific Northwest, based on fieldwork by
Franz Boas. This book outlined her ideas about the relationship
between culture and personality, including that culture was personality. Writ large,
she described how the way a person lived and thought
was extensively shaped by the culture they were living in.
(24:26):
Each culture also had its own definitions for what was
normal and what was deviant, and so that could only
be examined for a particular person within the context of
their own culture. Some of the specifics of this don't
hold up as well today, like she labeled the cultures
she was writing about using terms like Apollonian, Dionysian, and paranoid.
(24:47):
But this book became a bestseller. It was translated into
fourteen different languages. It helped popularize the idea of cultural
relativism among lay people, and it introduced people to the
field of anthem apology more generally, as was the case
with her mentor Franz Boas, she was really trying to
see passed the biases and eurocentrism of earlier work, and
(25:10):
to get away from the assumption that traits that were
common in European cultures were actually universal. In nineteen thirty seven,
Benedict was promoted to associate professor at Columbia, making her
the first woman on the Columbia faculty to receive tenure.
But her work at the university soon became challenging. The
years she got tenure, Franz Boas retired, a number of
(25:35):
faculty and students thought she was the best candidate to
take his place. In a lot of ways. She had
been acting as chair of the anthropology department under his direction,
but instead Ralph Linton was named as his successor. While
Linton had done his graduate work at Columbia, he had
never become close to Boas, like so many other students had.
(25:56):
He and Benedict really did not get along, and in
a letter to Meade, she called him a swine. By
this point, Ruth Benedict was a widow. Stanley Benedict had
died in December of nineteen thirty six, she'd also started
a relationship with Natalie Raymond. At one point, Benedict wrote
in her journal, quote, loving Nat and taking such delight
(26:18):
in her, I have the happiest condition for living that
I've ever known. Although Benedict and Meade had not been
romantically involved in quite some time, and Benedict had seen
other people in the intervening years, they were still really close,
and Mead seems to have been pretty upset about Benedict
loving somebody else quite so much. Benedict and Raymond broke
(26:40):
up sometime in nineteen thirty eight, and in nineteen thirty
nine Benedict met psychologist Ruth Valentine. By nineteen forty they
were living together, and their relationship continued for the rest
of Benedict's life. Benedict wrote a letter to Mead in
which she said, quote, We've been comfortable together. I know
she thinks God made me out of rare and spell clay,
(27:00):
but she doesn't bother me about it.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
I love that. It's so cute. During these same years,
Benedict started intentionally focusing her published work on combating racism.
This really started after the November Program, also known as
Krischtelnocht in November of nineteen thirty eight. Afterward, Benedict really
felt that she had a duty to do more to
(27:23):
educate people about racism. In nineteen thirty nine she took
a sabbatical and wrote a book called Race Science and Politics,
which was both anti racist and anti fascist, and then
in nineteen forty she also joined the Committee on National Morale.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Benedict and Gene Weltfish adapted Race Science and Politics into
a shorter pamphlet called The Races of Mankind, paid for
by the Public Affairs Committee. The pamphlet described all of humanity,
regardless of race, as related quote the Bible story of
Adam and Eve, father and mother of the whole human race,
told centuries ago this same truth that science has shown
(28:01):
today that all the people of the Earth are a
single family and have a common origin. Science describes the
intricate makeup of the human body, all its different organs
cooperating and keeping us alive. It's curious anatomy that couldn't
possibly have just happened to be the same in all
men if they did not have a common origin. This
(28:23):
pamphlet went on to say that human beings are quote
what the Bible says, they are brothers in their bodies
is the record of their brotherhood. Although fifty five thousand
copies of this pamphlet were printed for members of the
US Armed Forces, there were members of Congress who called
it communistic and it wasn't ultimately distributed. There's also a
(28:44):
film version of this pamphlet that was commissioned by the
United Autoworkers CIO. This pamphlet is a pretty interesting read
today because it is explicitly arguing against racism while also
using language that is considered insensitive or even a f
offensive by today's standards. Also, as you can tell from
the passages we just read, it's written with a specific
(29:07):
audience in mind, and some parts of it really don't
hold up. Like quote, the Russians have welcomed cultural differences
and they have refused to treat them as inferiorities. No
part of the Russian program has had greater success than
their racial program. As we talked about in our episode
on Paul Robson and the Peakskill Riots, there were definitely
(29:28):
black Americans who traveled or immigrated to the Soviet Union
and found it to be free from the kind of
racial discrimination they experienced at home. But as we talked
about in our episode on the Holadamor, Russia and the
Soviet Union had a long history of oppressing people of
non Russian ethnic identities, including Ukrainians.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
In nineteen forty three, Benedicts started working for the Office
of War Information, applying her study of anthropology to US
interactions with people who were living and occupy and then
this led to a focus on understanding Japan, both understanding
how to approach Japan as a wartime enemy and understanding
(30:10):
how to successfully occupied Japan once presumably the Allies won
the war. Her research in this area became Report number
twenty five submitted to the Office of War Information, and
that was later adapted into the book The Chrysanthemum and
the Sword, which was published in nineteen forty six. Ruth
Benedict did not speak Japanese and had never been to Japan.
(30:34):
Since the US was at war with Japan, going there
for field work was out of the question, so this
research was what she described as quote culture at a distance.
She drew from her early education studying literature. As she
examined and analyzed Japanese media and historical documents, she interviewed
people who had immigrated from Japan and Japanese prisoners of war.
(30:57):
She basically immersed herself in Japanese cult as much as
she could without leaving the United States. Like the Races
of Mankind pamphlet, Report Number twenty five was written for
a specific audience, this time the US government and military,
and it was for a specific purpose, which was to
help political and military leaders understand their wartime enemies. They
(31:20):
could make strategic decisions that would ideally help win the war,
and then after the war was over, make decisions that
would help make the occupation go as smoothly as possible,
like without a lot of uprisings or insurgency.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Although Benedict tried to approach Japan in a way that
was sympathetic and compassionate, her work suggested that culture was
learned that also meant that it could be changed. She
thought changing it was necessary and agreed that Japan needed
to be democratized. She thought an occupation by Allied forces
after the war would be necessary, but that the occupation
(31:57):
should be compassionate and fair. She was also one of
the people who strongly advocated for the Japanese emperor to
remain as a figurehead after the Japanese surrender to help
ensure stability during the occupation, although this also meant that
he never faced any kind of prosecution or accountability for
war crimes committed by Japan during the war.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
And the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Benedict framed Japanese culture
as a collection of dualities. The chrysanthemum represented beauty and order,
and the sword stood for death and discipline. One point
that became a big takeaway was that, in her view,
Japanese culture was focused more on shame, while American culture
(32:41):
focused more on guilt. This sort of shame culture guilt
culture dichotomy is really a pretty small part of the book,
but it really took off like it's one of the
things that has really stuck around. The Chrysanthemum and the
Sword is really not an accurate look at Japanese culture today,
and realistically it was also pretty limited in what it
said about Japanese culture in the nineteen forties. There are
(33:04):
also some glaring gaps, like she doesn't discuss the impact
of the US atomic bombing of the cities of Hiroshima
or Nagasaki, something that she argued wasn't yet fully felt
in Japan at the time she wrote it. She also
doesn't acknowledge that Japanese immigrants to the United States and
their American born children who were US citizens were held
(33:25):
in concentration camps during the war. That's something we covered
in more detail in a two parter in twenty seventeen.
So today this book is seen more as an example
of how the United States viewed Japan and itself after
the end of World War II. This book was also
widely discussed in Japan after it was published. There were
(33:46):
meetings in symposia and ongoing discussions within Japanese academia and
among other Japanese commentators. A lot argued that it was
at best superficial. Some suggested that Benedict had cherry picked
details to kind of line up with her pre existing
ideas or to make her work more acceptable to American authorities.
(34:06):
At the same time, though this book became a best
seller in Japan, selling at least two million copies there
by the start of the twenty first century, it became
part of a genre called nehan genron or works about
Japan and Japanese identity, and that's a genre that existed
before World War two, but became incredibly popular in Japan afterward,
(34:28):
and as a final note on the Chrysanthemum and the
Sword in it, Benedict wrote, quote, the tough minded are
content that differences should exist. They respect differences. Their goal
is a world made safe for differences, where the United
States may be American to the hilt without threatening the
peace of the world, and France maybe France, and Japan,
maybe Japan, on the same conditions. This statement is very
(34:52):
frequently paraphrased as the purpose of anthropology is to make
the world safe for human differences, and attributed to Ruth Benedict,
although she never really said this shorter version. In nineteen
forty six, Ruth Benedict received the annual Achievement Award of
the American Association of University Women. In nineteen forty seven,
she was elected president of the American Anthropological Association, and
(35:15):
that same year became a Fellow in the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. In nineteen forty eight, she became
the first woman to become a full professor at Columbia University.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Also in nineteen forty eight, Benedict launched the Columbia University
Research in Contemporary Cultures program that was funded by the
US Office of Naval Research. She planned to collaborate with
Margaret Meade and others to study contemporary cultures at a distance.
This is also sometimes described as a study of national character.
(35:47):
This was a huge four year project, bringing in one
hundred twenty scholars of sixteen nationalities representing fourteen academic disciplines.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
But Benedict died before it really got under way. Had
a heart attack in September of nineteen forty seven, shortly
after returning from a trip to Europe to speak at
a seminar in Czechoslovakia. Doctors told her she had to
rest and keep her mind off of work for the
sake of her heart. Margaret Meade was with her and
wrote of this period quote in the five days she lived,
(36:19):
she never referred to work again, but put all her
effort into staying quietly alive until Ruth Valentine got back
from California.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Ruth Valentine was there by the end. Ruth Benedict died
on September seventeenth, nineteen forty eight, at the age of
sixty nine. Ruth Valentine was the executor of her estate
and Margaret Meade was her literary executor. Meade lived until
nineteen seventy eight, and in nineteen fifty nine she published
an Anthropologist at Work, Writings of Ruth Benedict. This book
(36:50):
included her own thoughts on Benedict's life and work, in
addition to selections from Benedict's writing. One thing that's included
is Benedict's piece on Mary Way host Kraft that she
had written back in the nineteen teens. On October twentieth,
nineteen ninety five, Ruth Benedict was honored with a postage stamp. Today,
the Association for Queer Anthropology, which is a section of
(37:12):
the American Anthropological Association, awards an annual Ruth Benedict Award
Quote to acknowledge excellence in a scholarly book written from
an anthropological perspective about a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
That is Ruth Benedict.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Do you have some listener mail as well?
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Have a listener Facebook comment from Kelly and it is
about our recent episode on Hasukura Sunanaga, and Kelly wrote,
just listen to this. I researched it recently due to
another podcast. Throughout the episode, you pronounced the Spanish missionaries
(37:53):
name so Leto. It is, in fact, so Tello. Your
pronunciation made me go back and check my sources think
I had transposed the letters. But this time it wasn't me, No, Kelly,
it was not you, thank you, It was me. It
was me here. So it's embarrassing to make silly mistakes
(38:13):
in front of everyone, and then you're on a podcast
and they just stay out there for the remainder of
time wherever. So I'm sorry for making this mistake.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
That.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
What's funny to me about this one is that I
actually finished writing that episode almost a week before we
recorded it, which is unusual. So every morning I would
get up to and get to my desk and I
would read back over that outline and like make little
minor copy tweaks and stuff like that. And I did
(38:42):
that like every day for like three or four days
in the row before we actually recorded it, and somehow
overlooked the fact that I consistently spelled this guy's name
wrong the entire time, and also at some point in
the middle of the episode flipped to two syllable and
how I had typed out Hasakorusnanaga's name. That one we
(39:05):
caught when we were recording, though I don't know how
I managed to consistently make the same mistake throughout the
whole entire episode, but I am sorry for having done
that and not caught it in my many many rereads
of that episode. Thank you Kelly for spotting it and
(39:26):
letting us know.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
I feel like that's one of those things that starts
where I don't know about you. You may not have
this problem, but I do know other people who have
worked as copy editors sometimes do. It's like you have
to fight it a lot because your brain autocorrect stuff. Yeah,
and then you never realize you've done it, and then
it's too late and you have relearned it the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Yep, this is absolutely true. And there also are just
a number of regular English words that you or I
or both of us have suddenly realized we've been saying
wrong our entire lives, Like in the middle of recording
an episode, uh what never Yeah, probably because one or
(40:10):
the other of us learned that word by reading and
made a mental pronunciation for it thirty five or more
years ago. That has just been with us that whole time.
So anyway, I'm sorry for somehow flipping those letters around.
Thank you again for letting me know if you would
like to write to us about this or any other
(40:32):
podcast where at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. We're
all over social media at misson History. That's we'll find
our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe
to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else
you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in
(40:54):
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Today we are going to talk about Ruth Fulton Benedict,
who was one of the first women to become really
prominent in the field of anthropology. She had a big
impact on that field, but I think in terms of
like general name recognition outside of the world of anthropology today,
she's probably overshadowed by some of her students, including Zoraineilhurston
(00:39):
and Margaret Meade. We will be talking a bit about
Margaret Meade in this episode two because her life was
deeply connected to Benedicts, both personally and professionally. And while
both of these women were really influential, they also faced
a lot of criticism, both in their lifetimes and afterward.
Some of this is because they were women working in
(01:00):
a field that was at the time heavily dominated by men,
and some of their ideas went against the trends and
the standards of the day. But other criticisms were about
like the actual content of their work.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Some of those are more.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well founded, like you could have a whole podcast series
picking it apart point by point. There are definitely plenty
of academic texts that are full of very detailed criticisms
of both of them. That is not what this episode
is for. What we are doing here is taking a
broader look at Ruth Benedict's life and influence.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Ruth Fulton was born on June fifth, eighteen eighty seven.
Margaret Meade wrote a biography of her that named her
birthplace as Shenango Valley in the northern part of New York,
but other sources say that she was born in New
York City. Ruth's maternal grandparents lived in Norwich, New York,
in Shenango County, and that is where she lived for
(01:58):
part of her childhood, so if she was really born
in New York City, that may be the source of
that discrepancy.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Ruth's mother, Bertise Joanna Shaddock Fulton, was a school teacher
who had graduated from Bassar and her father, Frederick, was
a surgeon, but Frederick died in March of eighteen eighty
nine at the age of only thirty one, a few
months before Ruth turned two. Ruth's little sister, Marjorie, was
only three months old Frederick's cause of death was some
(02:28):
kind of infection that he probably contracted on the job.
He had apparently gone to Trinidad with the hope of
recovering there, and then died about ten days after getting
back home.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
This, of course, would have been hard for any family,
and Ruth remembered her mother as grief stricken and always
worried about money, which is understandable considering her husband's death
at such a young age and because they had financial
trouble without his income. But this whole thing seems to
have been particularly hard on Bertise, truly devastated by her
(03:01):
husband's death, and as his anniversary approached every March, it
was like she relived it and then the whole family
was traumatized all over again.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So Ruth remembered her childhood as lonely and sad a
lot of the time. She also contracted measles when she
was a baby or a toddler, a little unclear on
the exact age, but afterwards she was hard of hearing.
She and other people described her as deaf or partially deaf,
or in Mead's words quote just deaf enough to miss
(03:33):
a great deal of what was being said. Before others
recognized it, but nobody realized what was going on with
her hearing until Ruth started school. That meant that, in
addition to growing up in a home that was dominated
by grief and anxiety, Ruth was really isolated. She often
couldn't understand what people were saying to her, especially if
(03:56):
it was noisy or if there were multiple people talking
at once, and until someone noticed her hearing loss, she
also didn't understand why so much of what was happening
around her was so confusing. So the first mass produced
hearing aids didn't hit the market until Benedict was in
her twenties, and once they became available, she seems to
(04:17):
have preferred not to use them. So in Ruth's childhood
and teen years, she became withdrawn and very shy. She
thought her sister, who was prettier and happier, was their
mother's favorite. Ruth didn't really like to be touched, and
except for an imaginary friend, she mostly played alone. But
she loved to read and to write, and she came
(04:40):
to enjoy her solitude. She later wrote of this quote,
happiness was in a world I lived in all by myself,
and for precious moments she also said that she learned
that quote I could always without fail have myself for company,
and that if I didn't talk to anybody about the
things that mattered to me, no one could have take
(05:00):
them away.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
When she was young, Ruth also experienced some kind of
recurring illness that she described as bilious attacks. About every
six weeks, she would have a bout of intense vomiting,
and this continued for years until she started menstruating, and
at that point she started experiencing period pain on about
the same cycle. This ran alongside cycles of depression and anger,
(05:26):
and what she described as rages or tantrums as an adult.
She said these tantrums ended after her grandmother made her
kneel on the floor by a lit candle and pray
to God that she would never lose her temper again.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Ruth and her sister Marjorie were cared for largely by
their grandmother and an aunt, while their mother tried to
earn enough money to support them. Bertie took teaching jobs
in a couple of different cities before being hired as
a librarian in Buffalo, New York in eighteen ninety nine,
when Ruth was about twelve.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
After moving to Buffalo, Ruth and Marjorie got scholarships to
Saint Margaret's Episcopal Academy for Girls, which they attended from
nineteen hundred to nineteen oh five. Then the two sisters
went on to Vasser together and they graduated in nineteen
oh nine. Ri's degree was in literature. She graduated Phi
Beta Kappa and won awards for her poetry and essays.
(06:21):
After graduation, the sister spent a year in Europe with
a couple of friends, and that was paid for by
their friends' families.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Soon after returning from Europe, Marjorie married Robert Freeman. Marjorie, Robert,
and bertis All moved to Pasadena, California. Ruth stayed behind
in Buffalo for about a year before rejoining her mother
and sister. She spent some time in California teaching at girls'
schools before meeting biochemist Stanley Benedict on a trip back
(06:49):
to New York. They got married on June eighteenth, nineteen fourteen.
It seems like Ruth was happy for the first year
or so of their marriage. In a journal that December,
she wrote, quote, five months ago, with all my consciousness
of the power of loving that was the greatest part
of me. With all the hunger and thrust of my love,
I had no notion of its strength and depth and
(07:12):
power of healing. No wonder the days seemed dreary and
empty enough without this satisfying comradeship, this ardent delight, this
transforming love. Now that I have it, it is what
gives meaning to all of life. But Ruth's journals from
their courtship and their early marriage also contain a number
of references to her and Stanley hurting one another, without
(07:35):
really going into much detail. She also wanted to have
a baby, but they weren't able to. Then in nineteen seventeen,
Stanley was injured in a lab accident. He inhaled toxic
gas that he was researching as a potential wartime weapon.
This worsened some issues that he was already having with
high blood pressure and insomnia. He and Ruth wound up
(07:57):
at odds over where and how to live. She preferred
the city. She wanted to be in Greenwich Village, and
that was too noisy for him. He wanted to live
out in the suburbs and spend lots of time at
his summer cabin in New Hampshire. And that was just
too isolated for her. She finally wound up renting a
room in Greenwich Village and staying there during the week
(08:20):
and then going back to Stanley on the weekends, which
was really unconventional.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
I feel like that would even be considered unconventional now.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, I know a number of people who for like
work reasons, for the most part, have had residences in
two different cities, but like, this was unheard of. Really.
When she was.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Living a few years into the marriage, Ruth was feeling
bored and unfulfilled. She had been raised in a devoutly
Baptist family, but she had left the church. A lot
of her classmates at Vassar had been active in various
causes like women's suffrage, but none of those causes had
really captured her attention. She tried to folks on writing poetry,
(09:01):
publishing under the name Anne Singleton, and took on other
writing projects. Eventually, she started on a book that she
called Adventures in Womanhood, planning to include biographies of Mary
Wollston Craft, Margaret Fuller, and Olive Schreiner. She finished a
draft on Mary Wollston Craft, but when she couldn't find
a publisher who was interested, she put the project aside.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
In nineteen nineteen, still looking for something to keep her
mind occupied, Ruth Benedict enrolled in a class at the
New School for Social Research in New York City, which
had been founded that same year. The new School was
established by professors who had resigned from Columbia University after
being censured for their opposition to the US involvement in
(09:44):
the war. It was open to students regardless of sex,
and was specifically focused on higher education for adults, especially
on subjects that were related to social issues in political science.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Benedict's first class at the New School was Sex in Ethnology,
taught by anthropologist and folklorist Elsie Clues Parsons, who became
one of Benedict's mentors. Another mentor was anthropologist and sociologist
Alexander Goldenweisser, who had been born in Ukraine and immigrated
to the US in nineteen hundred.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Both of them had worked and studied with Franz Boas,
and they encouraged Benedict to pursue a graduate degree at
Columbia University, where Boas was teaching. We will get into
this some more after a sponsor break before we talk
(10:41):
about Ruth Benedict's work with Franz boas, we should talk
a little bit about the development of anthropology as a
field and the state of that field when she started
studying it. So anthropology as a scientific and academic discipline
was established primarily by Western European men. Interest in studying
(11:01):
the cultures and peoples of the world really flourished alongside
global exploration and colonization by European powers, and a lot
of the people carrying out that research did so from
the perspective that Western European culture was the pinnacle of
human achievement. So from the beginning, a lot of this
research was rooted in inherently racist ideas. It imagined humanity in.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
A hierarchy, with white people at the top and all
other races lowered down. Cultures that had not had a
lot of contact with Europeans were framed as primitive, with
these allegedly primitive people supposedly in their natural state, unaffected
by things like industrialization. Of course, not every single individual
person working in anthropology was espousing these kinds of ideas,
(11:50):
but by the late nineteenth century, a lot of the
writing coming out of the field was really Eurocentric and
either implicitly or explicitly to other peoples and cultures as
less sophisticated, less developed, and generally inferior.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
One anthropologist who really pushed back on a lot of
this was Franz Boas. He was born into a Jewish
family in Germany in eighteen fifty eight and immigrated to
the United States in eighteen eighty six. He started teaching
at Columbia University ten years later, and he was enormously
influential as both an anthropologist and a teacher. He argued
(12:29):
that race and culture were not biologically determined, and that
no one race or culture was superior to the others,
either genetically or otherwise. He also argued that culture wasn't
biologically determined at all, that instead, cultures arose from a
collection of local, historical, and interpersonal influences. Some of Boas's
(12:53):
ideas are summed up as cultural relativism. That's the idea
that a culture's beliefs, values, and practices should be studied
and understood from the point of view of the culture itself,
not by making value judgments from outside that culture or
comparing it to some kind of supposedly universal standard. In
that case, universal usually really meant Western European. So that's
(13:17):
not to suggest that Boas's work was perfect or that
there's nothing to criticize about it. For example, as we
mentioned in our episode on physical anthropologist W. Montague Cob,
Boas carried out excavations of indigenous burial sites that he
later admitted felt basically like grave robbing. He also represented
a turning point in the field, not an ending point. So,
(13:41):
for example, the term primitive and the idea that so
called primitive cultures were in a more natural or authentic
state that still showed up in his work in the
work of some of his students. And while a lot
of the people that Boas trained tried to be anti
racist in their work, that did not necessarily extend to
(14:02):
their treatment of other traits like gender or sexuality. Also,
just in general, it's virtually impossible for a person to
totally shed every single one of their preconceptions in all
of their cultural baggage when studying another culture.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
So Boas and his students were still seeing and studying
and interpreting the world through their own lenses, even if
they really were making an effort not to. But he
actively intentionally and prolifically tried to dismantle a lot of
the racist ideas that were taken for granted within the field,
and he trained a generation of other anthropologists to do
(14:39):
the same. One of those anthropologists was Ruth Benedict. She
started her graduate studies at Columbia in nineteen twenty one
when she was thirty four. Boas became a mentor and
a father figure. She and some of the other students
called him Papa Frands. She admired and respected his work,
but learning from him could also be challenging for her.
(15:03):
In addition to his having a pronounced German accent, he
was also known for mumbling when he talked. I saw
him described as a notorious mumbler, which made it hard
for somebody with hearing loss to undersod. Oh my gosh,
I can't even imagine.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
But Benedict really impressed him, so much so that he
convinced Columbia to accept her classes from the New School
as part of her pH d work, allowing her to
complete her degree in nineteen twenty three after only two years.
Her dissertation was the concept of the Guardian Spirit in
North America, and it was drawn from existing research on
(15:40):
the idea of the guardian spirit in indigenous cultures. She
published it under the name Ruth Fulton Benedict, including her
maiden name this way that was also unconventional.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Her dissertation caught the attention of one of Boas's former students,
Edward Sapiir. Sapiram Benedict bonded over anne anthropology and their
shared love of poetry. They wrote poems to each other,
and they wrote letters from about nineteen twenty three to
nineteen thirty five. Sometimes this was multiple letters every week.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
While studying under Franz Boas, Benedict also worked as his
teaching assistant at Barnard College. Barnard had been founded in
eighteen eighty nine and was the first college in New
York City to offer degrees to women. It was and
is affiliated with Columbia University, which did not admit women
as undergraduates until the fall of nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
It's not a typo. Barnard is where Benedict met Margaret Mead,
who at the time was a senior in college, and
at first Mead was not impressed with Benedict at all.
Ruth Benedict wore the same dress every day, and it
was addressed that Mead did not think was very flattering.
This was apparently because men wore the same suit to
(16:57):
teach in every day, and Benedict thought that women should
be able to follow the same standard. Benedict also had
a really hard time speaking in front of the students,
even though she had taught at girls' schools years before.
She really struggled with her shyness and her hearing loss.
It took her years to really be comfortable with public speaking.
(17:18):
But then Benedict led the students on one of their
regular visits to the American Museum of Natural History and
Mead asked her for more information about one of the
exhibits they were looking at. Benedict was clearly flustered, but
said she would bring something to their next class, and
she brought a copy of one of her own published papers,
and Mead was so impressed that she gave Benedict another
(17:41):
chance as an instructor. Mead eventually found Benedict to be knowledgeable, creative,
and compassionate toward her students, and she started recommending the
course to other students at Barnard. Benedict and Meade became
friends and colleagues, with Benedict encouraging Meade to pursue an
advanced to in anthropology, including giving her three hundred dollars
(18:04):
of her own money, which she described as a no
strings attached fellowship. Meade started graduate study at Columbia in
nineteen twenty three, and that same year she got married
to anthropologist Luther Cressman, and toward the end of nineteen
twenty four, Benedict and Meade started having an affair. This
was obviously something they kept secret, both of them were
(18:27):
married to other people. As anthropologists, they both wrote about
cultures that viewed gender and sexuality much different than in
much of the United States, but in their own culture
this was something that could have ruined their reputations and
their careers. There was also the fact that Benedict was
more than a decade older than Meade and had been
(18:48):
her teacher. I'm actually a little fuzzy on whether Benedict
was still Mead's teacher at this point. There was already
a very well established trope of predatory life lesbians in media,
so older women in positions of authority like teachers and
headmistresses taking advantage of and corrupting their students and books
(19:10):
and movies. This really damaging stereotype would make their affair
seem particularly salacious if it was discovered. In nineteen twenty four,
Mead also started an affair with Edward Sapier. While Sapier
and Ruth Benedict were close friends, it seems like their
relationship was platonic. Their letters to one another don't suggest
(19:32):
that it was romantic, and when they met, he was
married and devoted to his wife, Florence, But Florence died
in nineteen twenty four, and after that Mead pursued him.
Sapier was the one to tell Benedict about this relationship,
and she was deeply hurt by it. It seems like Sapierre, Benedict,
and Luther Cressman all wanted more from Margaret Meade than
(19:55):
she really wanted to give. She was an advocate of
free love. This was one of a number of love
triangles or in this case, quadrangles over the course of
Mead's life.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Although Benedict was really hurt over Mead's affair with Sapir,
she didn't and their relationship over it. The two women
wrote numerous letters back and forth after Mead left for
field work and Samoa in nineteen twenty five, at a
time when it was incredibly unusual for a woman to
be sent to do field work on her own. When
Meade returned to the US, she wrote one of the
(20:27):
books that she would become famous for, Coming of Age
in Samoa, a Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization.
That book came out in nineteen twenty eight, and although
this book was about adolescence in Samoa, it included descriptions
of sexuality among Samoan youth, and that's really what it
became most known for.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
So this episode isn't about Mead, but it would be
weird if we didn't mention that Mead's work and this
book specifically have been the subjects of intense criticism. Mead's
most vocal critic was New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman, who
made totally different observations during his own field work in Samoa.
(21:08):
He published two different books arguing that Meade's work was
totally incorrect. Critics of Freeman's work have pointed out that
he was working in a different part of Samoa, and
that a lot had changed in the decades between when
Mead did her research and when he did his, including
there being an increasing influence from Christianity. This became known
(21:30):
as the Mead Freeman controversy. It went on for decades.
My basic read on it is that there are valid
criticisms of both of them. Of course, Benedict had her
own life and work going on during all of this,
and we're going to talk about that after we pause
for a sponsor break. In nineteen twenty five, Ruth Fulton
(21:58):
Benedict started editing the Journal of American Folklore. She worked
as its editor until nineteen forty. She also undertook field
work among Puebloan peoples in the southwestern United States. Because
of her hearing loss, she had to conduct most of
this work through interpreters and choose those interpreters very carefully
(22:18):
because they had to be willing to dictate everything they
were interpreting to her while she wrote it all down
word for word. This is a very time consuming and
laborious process, but it also led her to be really
pretty careful. In a lot of her field work. She
tended to work in this like slow, methodical way.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
On Margaret Mead's voyage home from her field work in Samoa,
she met New Zealand anthropologist Reo Fortune. We're guessing on
that pronunciation, and she was immediately attracted to him. Benedict
felt like she had to compete with Fortune in a
way that she had not with Meaeds other partners, and
then ultimately led to her ending their romantic relationship. Benedict
(22:58):
and Meade continued to be called leagues and close friends
for the rest of Benedict's life, though including Benedict eventually
being named Guardian Timeade's daughter. In nineteen twenty eight, Benedict
tried to publish a book of poetry, but again was
rejected by publishers. She did keep writing poetry, but at
this point she mostly stopped trying to do it professionally.
(23:20):
A couple of years after that, she and Stanley separated.
Apart from their other struggles, he really had not supported
her going to graduate school or establishing her own career
as an anthropologist. It was only after their separation that
Benedict was paid for her teaching work at Columbia.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Before that point, it was assumed that she didn't need
to be paid because she was being financially supported by
her husband.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
In nineteen thirty four, Benedict published Patterns of Culture, which
is considered to be her most important work. This book
compared three indigenous cultures, the Zuni of southwestern North America
based on her own field work, the Dobu of Papua
and nig Guinea based on fieldwork done by Margaret Meade
in Reo Fortune, and the Quakwakawacta also known as the
(24:06):
quaky Utle of the Pacific Northwest, based on fieldwork by
Franz Boas. This book outlined her ideas about the relationship
between culture and personality, including that culture was personality. Writ large,
she described how the way a person lived and thought
was extensively shaped by the culture they were living in.
(24:26):
Each culture also had its own definitions for what was
normal and what was deviant, and so that could only
be examined for a particular person within the context of
their own culture. Some of the specifics of this don't
hold up as well today, like she labeled the cultures
she was writing about using terms like Apollonian, Dionysian, and paranoid.
(24:47):
But this book became a bestseller. It was translated into
fourteen different languages. It helped popularize the idea of cultural
relativism among lay people, and it introduced people to the
field of anthem apology more generally, as was the case
with her mentor Franz Boas, she was really trying to
see passed the biases and eurocentrism of earlier work, and
(25:10):
to get away from the assumption that traits that were
common in European cultures were actually universal. In nineteen thirty seven,
Benedict was promoted to associate professor at Columbia, making her
the first woman on the Columbia faculty to receive tenure.
But her work at the university soon became challenging. The
years she got tenure, Franz Boas retired, a number of
(25:35):
faculty and students thought she was the best candidate to
take his place. In a lot of ways. She had
been acting as chair of the anthropology department under his direction,
but instead Ralph Linton was named as his successor. While
Linton had done his graduate work at Columbia, he had
never become close to Boas, like so many other students had.
(25:56):
He and Benedict really did not get along, and in
a letter to Meade, she called him a swine. By
this point, Ruth Benedict was a widow. Stanley Benedict had
died in December of nineteen thirty six, she'd also started
a relationship with Natalie Raymond. At one point, Benedict wrote
in her journal, quote, loving Nat and taking such delight
(26:18):
in her, I have the happiest condition for living that
I've ever known. Although Benedict and Meade had not been
romantically involved in quite some time, and Benedict had seen
other people in the intervening years, they were still really close,
and Mead seems to have been pretty upset about Benedict
loving somebody else quite so much. Benedict and Raymond broke
(26:40):
up sometime in nineteen thirty eight, and in nineteen thirty
nine Benedict met psychologist Ruth Valentine. By nineteen forty they
were living together, and their relationship continued for the rest
of Benedict's life. Benedict wrote a letter to Mead in
which she said, quote, We've been comfortable together. I know
she thinks God made me out of rare and spell clay,
(27:00):
but she doesn't bother me about it.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
I love that. It's so cute. During these same years,
Benedict started intentionally focusing her published work on combating racism.
This really started after the November Program, also known as
Krischtelnocht in November of nineteen thirty eight. Afterward, Benedict really
felt that she had a duty to do more to
(27:23):
educate people about racism. In nineteen thirty nine she took
a sabbatical and wrote a book called Race Science and Politics,
which was both anti racist and anti fascist, and then
in nineteen forty she also joined the Committee on National Morale.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Benedict and Gene Weltfish adapted Race Science and Politics into
a shorter pamphlet called The Races of Mankind, paid for
by the Public Affairs Committee. The pamphlet described all of humanity,
regardless of race, as related quote the Bible story of
Adam and Eve, father and mother of the whole human race,
told centuries ago this same truth that science has shown
(28:01):
today that all the people of the Earth are a
single family and have a common origin. Science describes the
intricate makeup of the human body, all its different organs
cooperating and keeping us alive. It's curious anatomy that couldn't
possibly have just happened to be the same in all
men if they did not have a common origin. This
(28:23):
pamphlet went on to say that human beings are quote
what the Bible says, they are brothers in their bodies
is the record of their brotherhood. Although fifty five thousand
copies of this pamphlet were printed for members of the
US Armed Forces, there were members of Congress who called
it communistic and it wasn't ultimately distributed. There's also a
(28:44):
film version of this pamphlet that was commissioned by the
United Autoworkers CIO. This pamphlet is a pretty interesting read
today because it is explicitly arguing against racism while also
using language that is considered insensitive or even a f
offensive by today's standards. Also, as you can tell from
the passages we just read, it's written with a specific
(29:07):
audience in mind, and some parts of it really don't
hold up. Like quote, the Russians have welcomed cultural differences
and they have refused to treat them as inferiorities. No
part of the Russian program has had greater success than
their racial program. As we talked about in our episode
on Paul Robson and the Peakskill Riots, there were definitely
(29:28):
black Americans who traveled or immigrated to the Soviet Union
and found it to be free from the kind of
racial discrimination they experienced at home. But as we talked
about in our episode on the Holadamor, Russia and the
Soviet Union had a long history of oppressing people of
non Russian ethnic identities, including Ukrainians.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
In nineteen forty three, Benedicts started working for the Office
of War Information, applying her study of anthropology to US
interactions with people who were living and occupy and then
this led to a focus on understanding Japan, both understanding
how to approach Japan as a wartime enemy and understanding
(30:10):
how to successfully occupied Japan once presumably the Allies won
the war. Her research in this area became Report number
twenty five submitted to the Office of War Information, and
that was later adapted into the book The Chrysanthemum and
the Sword, which was published in nineteen forty six. Ruth
Benedict did not speak Japanese and had never been to Japan.
(30:34):
Since the US was at war with Japan, going there
for field work was out of the question, so this
research was what she described as quote culture at a distance.
She drew from her early education studying literature. As she
examined and analyzed Japanese media and historical documents, she interviewed
people who had immigrated from Japan and Japanese prisoners of war.
(30:57):
She basically immersed herself in Japanese cult as much as
she could without leaving the United States. Like the Races
of Mankind pamphlet, Report Number twenty five was written for
a specific audience, this time the US government and military,
and it was for a specific purpose, which was to
help political and military leaders understand their wartime enemies. They
(31:20):
could make strategic decisions that would ideally help win the war,
and then after the war was over, make decisions that
would help make the occupation go as smoothly as possible,
like without a lot of uprisings or insurgency.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Although Benedict tried to approach Japan in a way that
was sympathetic and compassionate, her work suggested that culture was
learned that also meant that it could be changed. She
thought changing it was necessary and agreed that Japan needed
to be democratized. She thought an occupation by Allied forces
after the war would be necessary, but that the occupation
(31:57):
should be compassionate and fair. She was also one of
the people who strongly advocated for the Japanese emperor to
remain as a figurehead after the Japanese surrender to help
ensure stability during the occupation, although this also meant that
he never faced any kind of prosecution or accountability for
war crimes committed by Japan during the war.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
And the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Benedict framed Japanese culture
as a collection of dualities. The chrysanthemum represented beauty and order,
and the sword stood for death and discipline. One point
that became a big takeaway was that, in her view,
Japanese culture was focused more on shame, while American culture
(32:41):
focused more on guilt. This sort of shame culture guilt
culture dichotomy is really a pretty small part of the book,
but it really took off like it's one of the
things that has really stuck around. The Chrysanthemum and the
Sword is really not an accurate look at Japanese culture today,
and realistically it was also pretty limited in what it
said about Japanese culture in the nineteen forties. There are
(33:04):
also some glaring gaps, like she doesn't discuss the impact
of the US atomic bombing of the cities of Hiroshima
or Nagasaki, something that she argued wasn't yet fully felt
in Japan at the time she wrote it. She also
doesn't acknowledge that Japanese immigrants to the United States and
their American born children who were US citizens were held
(33:25):
in concentration camps during the war. That's something we covered
in more detail in a two parter in twenty seventeen.
So today this book is seen more as an example
of how the United States viewed Japan and itself after
the end of World War II. This book was also
widely discussed in Japan after it was published. There were
(33:46):
meetings in symposia and ongoing discussions within Japanese academia and
among other Japanese commentators. A lot argued that it was
at best superficial. Some suggested that Benedict had cherry picked
details to kind of line up with her pre existing
ideas or to make her work more acceptable to American authorities.
(34:06):
At the same time, though this book became a best
seller in Japan, selling at least two million copies there
by the start of the twenty first century, it became
part of a genre called nehan genron or works about
Japan and Japanese identity, and that's a genre that existed
before World War two, but became incredibly popular in Japan afterward,
(34:28):
and as a final note on the Chrysanthemum and the
Sword in it, Benedict wrote, quote, the tough minded are
content that differences should exist. They respect differences. Their goal
is a world made safe for differences, where the United
States may be American to the hilt without threatening the
peace of the world, and France maybe France, and Japan,
maybe Japan, on the same conditions. This statement is very
(34:52):
frequently paraphrased as the purpose of anthropology is to make
the world safe for human differences, and attributed to Ruth Benedict,
although she never really said this shorter version. In nineteen
forty six, Ruth Benedict received the annual Achievement Award of
the American Association of University Women. In nineteen forty seven,
she was elected president of the American Anthropological Association, and
(35:15):
that same year became a Fellow in the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. In nineteen forty eight, she became
the first woman to become a full professor at Columbia University.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Also in nineteen forty eight, Benedict launched the Columbia University
Research in Contemporary Cultures program that was funded by the
US Office of Naval Research. She planned to collaborate with
Margaret Meade and others to study contemporary cultures at a distance.
This is also sometimes described as a study of national character.
(35:47):
This was a huge four year project, bringing in one
hundred twenty scholars of sixteen nationalities representing fourteen academic disciplines.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
But Benedict died before it really got under way. Had
a heart attack in September of nineteen forty seven, shortly
after returning from a trip to Europe to speak at
a seminar in Czechoslovakia. Doctors told her she had to
rest and keep her mind off of work for the
sake of her heart. Margaret Meade was with her and
wrote of this period quote in the five days she lived,
(36:19):
she never referred to work again, but put all her
effort into staying quietly alive until Ruth Valentine got back
from California.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Ruth Valentine was there by the end. Ruth Benedict died
on September seventeenth, nineteen forty eight, at the age of
sixty nine. Ruth Valentine was the executor of her estate
and Margaret Meade was her literary executor. Meade lived until
nineteen seventy eight, and in nineteen fifty nine she published
an Anthropologist at Work, Writings of Ruth Benedict. This book
(36:50):
included her own thoughts on Benedict's life and work, in
addition to selections from Benedict's writing. One thing that's included
is Benedict's piece on Mary Way host Kraft that she
had written back in the nineteen teens. On October twentieth,
nineteen ninety five, Ruth Benedict was honored with a postage stamp. Today,
the Association for Queer Anthropology, which is a section of
(37:12):
the American Anthropological Association, awards an annual Ruth Benedict Award
Quote to acknowledge excellence in a scholarly book written from
an anthropological perspective about a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
That is Ruth Benedict.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Do you have some listener mail as well?
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Have a listener Facebook comment from Kelly and it is
about our recent episode on Hasukura Sunanaga, and Kelly wrote,
just listen to this. I researched it recently due to
another podcast. Throughout the episode, you pronounced the Spanish missionaries
(37:53):
name so Leto. It is, in fact, so Tello. Your
pronunciation made me go back and check my sources think
I had transposed the letters. But this time it wasn't me, No, Kelly,
it was not you, thank you, It was me. It
was me here. So it's embarrassing to make silly mistakes
(38:13):
in front of everyone, and then you're on a podcast
and they just stay out there for the remainder of
time wherever. So I'm sorry for making this mistake.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
That.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
What's funny to me about this one is that I
actually finished writing that episode almost a week before we
recorded it, which is unusual. So every morning I would
get up to and get to my desk and I
would read back over that outline and like make little
minor copy tweaks and stuff like that. And I did
(38:42):
that like every day for like three or four days
in the row before we actually recorded it, and somehow
overlooked the fact that I consistently spelled this guy's name
wrong the entire time, and also at some point in
the middle of the episode flipped to two syllable and
how I had typed out Hasakorusnanaga's name. That one we
(39:05):
caught when we were recording, though I don't know how
I managed to consistently make the same mistake throughout the
whole entire episode, but I am sorry for having done
that and not caught it in my many many rereads
of that episode. Thank you Kelly for spotting it and
(39:26):
letting us know.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
I feel like that's one of those things that starts
where I don't know about you. You may not have
this problem, but I do know other people who have
worked as copy editors sometimes do. It's like you have
to fight it a lot because your brain autocorrect stuff. Yeah,
and then you never realize you've done it, and then
it's too late and you have relearned it the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Yep, this is absolutely true. And there also are just
a number of regular English words that you or I
or both of us have suddenly realized we've been saying
wrong our entire lives, Like in the middle of recording
an episode, uh what never Yeah, probably because one or
(40:10):
the other of us learned that word by reading and
made a mental pronunciation for it thirty five or more
years ago. That has just been with us that whole time.
So anyway, I'm sorry for somehow flipping those letters around.
Thank you again for letting me know if you would
like to write to us about this or any other
(40:32):
podcast where at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. We're
all over social media at misson History. That's we'll find
our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe
to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else
you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in
(40:54):
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.