Douglaston's Own: Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict, a one-time Douglaston resident, became the first woman to gain recognition in the field of anthropology during the 1930s.

Benedict was born in New York City in 1887 as Ruth Fulton. Her father was a surgeon and her mother worked as a city schoolteacher.

When Ruth was two years old, her father acquired a rare disease while performing a surgery and died.

While she resented her mother’s long-lasting grief over her father’s passing, she also grew to become obsessed with death. By the age of seven, she began to write short verses.

Ruth attended Vassar College, where she studied English, and spent her first year out of school traveling across Europe.

She started her career as a social worker for the Charity Organization Society and eventually went on to teach at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles and Pasadena’s Orton School for Girls.

In the summer of 1910, she returned home for a rest and met Stanley Benedict, whom she married. At this time, she began to publish poems under a variety of pseudonyms as well as write a biography about Mary Wollstonecraft, a philosopher and women’s rights advocate.

But Ruth’s marriage began to crumble after several years, so she began attending lectures at the New School for Social Research.

As a graduate student, she began to work with famed anthropology professor Franz Boas at Columbia University as well as teach at the college level.

During this time, she befriended anthropologist Margaret Mead. The two influential women frequently critiqued each other’s work and conducted fieldwork together.

There has been speculation that they were also involved romantically at one point.

Benedict’s first major work was “Patterns of Culture,” during which she explored the relationships between culture, language and art and argued that no trait existed in isolation.

She used the Pueblo cultures of the American southwest as a test study for the book.

In 1936, Benedict was made an associate professor at Columbia.

During World War II, she was recruited by the U.S. government for war-related research, leading to her publication of “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.”

That work was a study of the society and culture of Japan through its literature, news coverage, films and recordings.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt took Benedict’s suggestion to allow the Emperor of Japan’s to continue his reign following the war due to his significant role in that country’s popular culture.

In 1947, Benedict was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and became a full professor.

She died one year later of a heart attack.