Ruth Benedict

Her father caught something in surgery in 1888 and died the next year, ten days after coming home from Trinidad, where he had gone looking for a cure. Her mother wept every March, in church and in bed, for the rest of her life. Ruth Fulton wrote later that she did not love her mother and resented her cult of grief, and made a private rule against crying where anyone could see. Measles as a toddler left her partly deaf, which nobody noticed until she started school. Vassar, then charity work, then teaching girls in Los Angeles and Pasadena, and years she described as loneliness and futility. She married Stanley Rossiter Benedict in 1914 and published poems under other people's names.

She started taking classes at the New School around 1919, and Alexander Goldenweiser sent her to Columbia, where Franz Boas took her on and she called him Papa Franz. Her doctorate came in 1923, on the guardian spirit in North America, and she had already begun teaching at Barnard, where Margaret Mead sat in her first class. Patterns of Culture, in 1934, argued that a culture is a personality written large, and set the restrained Pueblo against the Plains and the Dobu of New Guinea. It went into 14 languages and stayed on reading lists for decades. In 1943 she and Gene Weltfish wrote The Races of Mankind, a cartoon pamphlet for American soldiers arguing that the races are brothers. Then The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, built from films, novels and interviews because she could not go to Japan.

Boas could not make her an assistant professor until 1931, and only then because her divorce from Stanley Benedict came through that year. When Boas retired in 1937 his students assumed the department was hers. Nicholas Murray Butler gave it to Ralph Linton, a war veteran who thought her whole approach was wrong, and for the next decade Columbia's anthropologists worked under two chiefs who never cited each other. She reached full professor two months before she died. The work took fire too. David Aberle answered that the Pueblo she painted as calm and ritual-bound could also be suspicious, retaliatory and warlike. Japanese readers found The Chrysanthemum and the Sword accurate and moralizing at once, and Takeo Doi argued that her split between shame cultures and guilt cultures put Japan underneath.

She died of a heart attack in New York on September 17, 1948, at 61, two months into the professorship. Margaret Mead took over the unfinished projects, edited and published Benedict's notes, and wrote the account of a relationship that had been, in its early period, erotic. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected her a fellow in 1947 and the American Anthropological Association made her its president. A 46-cent stamp followed in 1995 and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2005. Patterns of Culture is still assigned, usually with the Apollonian and Dionysian chapters flagged as the part that did not last.

Ruth Benedict's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America article
  Her Columbia dissertation under Franz Boas 1923
• Tales of the Cochiti Indians book
  Published by the Bureau of American Ethnology 1931
• Patterns of Culture book
  Translated into 14 languages and read as a textbook for decades 1934
• The Races of Mankind book
  An illustrated anti-racist pamphlet for American troops, with Gene Weltfish 1943
• The Chrysanthemum and the Sword book
  Anthropology at a distance — she never set foot in Japan 1946

• 1889 aged ~2 Her father dies and the family moves to a farm at Norwich He had gone to Trinidad looking for a cure and died ten days after coming home.
• 1909 aged ~22 Graduates from Vassar in English literature with her sister
• 1914 aged ~27 Marries Stanley Rossiter Benedict She wrote verse under three pen names during the marriage.
• 1921 aged ~34 Enters graduate study at Columbia under Franz Boas She was 34 and had been teaching schoolgirls in California.
• 1923 aged ~36 Takes her doctorate in anthropology
• 1931 aged ~44 Made assistant professor, which her divorce made possible Boas had wanted the appointment for years.
• 1934 aged ~47 Publishes Patterns of Culture
• 1937 aged ~50 Columbia gives the department to Ralph Linton instead of her The two ran a split department and never mentioned each other's work.
• September 17, 1948 aged 61 Dies of a heart attack in New York at 61

• Franz Boas 1858–1942
  Founded American academic anthropology and argued against racial determinism from Columbia University. mentor
• Margaret Mead 1901–1978
  Cultural anthropologist whose studies of Pacific Island societies shaped 20th-century social science. student, colleague and partner
• Zora Neale Hurston 1891–1960
  Novelist and folklorist whose work preserved Black Southern speech and culture and became central to the American canon. fellow student of Boas
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. fought the same race science
• Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964
  Commander who led major Pacific campaigns, oversaw Japan’s occupation, and became central to the Korean War controversy. ran the occupation she advised on