WEBVTT - Ruth Benedict 0:00:01.320 --> 0:00:04.280 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production 0:00:04.400 --> 0:00:11.000 of iHeartRadio. 0:00:11.920 --> 0:00:14.560 Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. 0:00:14.680 --> 0:00:16.640 Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. 0:00:16.800 --> 0:00:20.079 Today we are going to talk about Ruth Fulton Benedict, 0:00:20.200 --> 0:00:22.799 who was one of the first women to become really 0:00:22.840 --> 0:00:26.600 prominent in the field of anthropology. She had a big 0:00:26.640 --> 0:00:29.200 impact on that field, but I think in terms of 0:00:29.240 --> 0:00:34.320 like general name recognition outside of the world of anthropology today, 0:00:34.360 --> 0:00:38.920 she's probably overshadowed by some of her students, including Zoraineilhurston 0:00:39.040 --> 0:00:43.000 and Margaret Meade. We will be talking a bit about 0:00:43.040 --> 0:00:46.600 Margaret Meade in this episode two because her life was 0:00:46.680 --> 0:00:50.920 deeply connected to Benedicts, both personally and professionally. And while 0:00:50.960 --> 0:00:53.640 both of these women were really influential, they also faced 0:00:53.680 --> 0:00:56.960 a lot of criticism, both in their lifetimes and afterward. 0:00:57.840 --> 0:01:00.440 Some of this is because they were women working in 0:01:00.440 --> 0:01:04.000 a field that was at the time heavily dominated by men, 0:01:04.200 --> 0:01:07.039 and some of their ideas went against the trends and 0:01:07.120 --> 0:01:10.120 the standards of the day. But other criticisms were about 0:01:10.160 --> 0:01:12.559 like the actual content of their work. 0:01:12.680 --> 0:01:14.080 Some of those are more. 0:01:14.360 --> 0:01:18.240 Well founded, like you could have a whole podcast series 0:01:18.880 --> 0:01:22.280 picking it apart point by point. There are definitely plenty 0:01:22.440 --> 0:01:26.640 of academic texts that are full of very detailed criticisms 0:01:26.640 --> 0:01:29.839 of both of them. That is not what this episode 0:01:29.959 --> 0:01:33.160 is for. What we are doing here is taking a 0:01:33.319 --> 0:01:37.479 broader look at Ruth Benedict's life and influence. 0:01:38.240 --> 0:01:41.440 Ruth Fulton was born on June fifth, eighteen eighty seven. 0:01:42.200 --> 0:01:45.039 Margaret Meade wrote a biography of her that named her 0:01:45.080 --> 0:01:48.520 birthplace as Shenango Valley in the northern part of New York, 0:01:49.000 --> 0:01:51.040 but other sources say that she was born in New 0:01:51.120 --> 0:01:55.640 York City. Ruth's maternal grandparents lived in Norwich, New York, 0:01:55.760 --> 0:01:58.440 in Shenango County, and that is where she lived for 0:01:58.520 --> 0:02:01.440 part of her childhood, so if she was really born 0:02:01.480 --> 0:02:03.680 in New York City, that may be the source of 0:02:03.680 --> 0:02:04.520 that discrepancy. 0:02:05.720 --> 0:02:09.880 Ruth's mother, Bertise Joanna Shaddock Fulton, was a school teacher 0:02:09.960 --> 0:02:13.440 who had graduated from Bassar and her father, Frederick, was 0:02:13.440 --> 0:02:17.440 a surgeon, but Frederick died in March of eighteen eighty 0:02:17.520 --> 0:02:19.960 nine at the age of only thirty one, a few 0:02:19.960 --> 0:02:24.400 months before Ruth turned two. Ruth's little sister, Marjorie, was 0:02:24.440 --> 0:02:28.240 only three months old Frederick's cause of death was some 0:02:28.360 --> 0:02:31.800 kind of infection that he probably contracted on the job. 0:02:32.280 --> 0:02:34.760 He had apparently gone to Trinidad with the hope of 0:02:34.840 --> 0:02:38.079 recovering there, and then died about ten days after getting 0:02:38.120 --> 0:02:38.639 back home. 0:02:39.440 --> 0:02:42.000 This, of course, would have been hard for any family, 0:02:42.520 --> 0:02:45.720 and Ruth remembered her mother as grief stricken and always 0:02:45.760 --> 0:02:49.600 worried about money, which is understandable considering her husband's death 0:02:49.880 --> 0:02:53.000 at such a young age and because they had financial 0:02:53.000 --> 0:02:57.040 trouble without his income. But this whole thing seems to 0:02:57.080 --> 0:03:01.720 have been particularly hard on Bertise, truly devastated by her 0:03:01.800 --> 0:03:05.680 husband's death, and as his anniversary approached every March, it 0:03:05.760 --> 0:03:08.360 was like she relived it and then the whole family 0:03:08.520 --> 0:03:10.480 was traumatized all over again. 0:03:11.600 --> 0:03:15.880 So Ruth remembered her childhood as lonely and sad a 0:03:15.919 --> 0:03:19.280 lot of the time. She also contracted measles when she 0:03:19.400 --> 0:03:22.400 was a baby or a toddler, a little unclear on 0:03:22.440 --> 0:03:25.400 the exact age, but afterwards she was hard of hearing. 0:03:25.919 --> 0:03:29.320 She and other people described her as deaf or partially deaf, 0:03:29.600 --> 0:03:32.960 or in Mead's words quote just deaf enough to miss 0:03:33.000 --> 0:03:35.560 a great deal of what was being said. Before others 0:03:35.640 --> 0:03:40.360 recognized it, but nobody realized what was going on with 0:03:40.480 --> 0:03:44.880 her hearing until Ruth started school. That meant that, in 0:03:44.920 --> 0:03:47.720 addition to growing up in a home that was dominated 0:03:47.760 --> 0:03:52.600 by grief and anxiety, Ruth was really isolated. She often 0:03:52.600 --> 0:03:55.960 couldn't understand what people were saying to her, especially if 0:03:56.000 --> 0:03:58.800 it was noisy or if there were multiple people talking 0:03:58.840 --> 0:04:02.240 at once, and until someone noticed her hearing loss, she 0:04:02.480 --> 0:04:05.680 also didn't understand why so much of what was happening 0:04:05.720 --> 0:04:10.560 around her was so confusing. So the first mass produced 0:04:10.560 --> 0:04:13.480 hearing aids didn't hit the market until Benedict was in 0:04:13.520 --> 0:04:17.039 her twenties, and once they became available, she seems to 0:04:17.080 --> 0:04:21.000 have preferred not to use them. So in Ruth's childhood 0:04:21.000 --> 0:04:24.880 and teen years, she became withdrawn and very shy. She 0:04:25.000 --> 0:04:28.320 thought her sister, who was prettier and happier, was their 0:04:28.360 --> 0:04:32.440 mother's favorite. Ruth didn't really like to be touched, and 0:04:32.640 --> 0:04:36.600 except for an imaginary friend, she mostly played alone. But 0:04:36.760 --> 0:04:40.080 she loved to read and to write, and she came 0:04:40.120 --> 0:04:43.640 to enjoy her solitude. She later wrote of this quote, 0:04:43.680 --> 0:04:46.719 happiness was in a world I lived in all by myself, 0:04:46.839 --> 0:04:50.719 and for precious moments she also said that she learned 0:04:50.880 --> 0:04:54.920 that quote I could always without fail have myself for company, 0:04:55.360 --> 0:04:57.359 and that if I didn't talk to anybody about the 0:04:57.400 --> 0:05:00.320 things that mattered to me, no one could have take 0:05:00.360 --> 0:05:00.839 them away. 0:05:01.640 --> 0:05:04.920 When she was young, Ruth also experienced some kind of 0:05:04.960 --> 0:05:10.320 recurring illness that she described as bilious attacks. About every 0:05:10.400 --> 0:05:13.279 six weeks, she would have a bout of intense vomiting, 0:05:13.720 --> 0:05:17.719 and this continued for years until she started menstruating, and 0:05:17.760 --> 0:05:20.960 at that point she started experiencing period pain on about 0:05:20.960 --> 0:05:26.320 the same cycle. This ran alongside cycles of depression and anger, 0:05:26.400 --> 0:05:30.679 and what she described as rages or tantrums as an adult. 0:05:30.720 --> 0:05:33.680 She said these tantrums ended after her grandmother made her 0:05:33.800 --> 0:05:36.800 kneel on the floor by a lit candle and pray 0:05:36.880 --> 0:05:39.200 to God that she would never lose her temper again. 0:05:40.400 --> 0:05:43.400 Ruth and her sister Marjorie were cared for largely by 0:05:43.440 --> 0:05:46.760 their grandmother and an aunt, while their mother tried to 0:05:46.800 --> 0:05:51.000 earn enough money to support them. Bertie took teaching jobs 0:05:51.040 --> 0:05:53.800 in a couple of different cities before being hired as 0:05:53.839 --> 0:05:57.320 a librarian in Buffalo, New York in eighteen ninety nine, 0:05:57.400 --> 0:05:58.800 when Ruth was about twelve. 0:05:59.480 --> 0:06:02.839 After moving to Buffalo, Ruth and Marjorie got scholarships to 0:06:02.880 --> 0:06:06.520 Saint Margaret's Episcopal Academy for Girls, which they attended from 0:06:06.600 --> 0:06:10.480 nineteen hundred to nineteen oh five. Then the two sisters 0:06:10.520 --> 0:06:13.279 went on to Vasser together and they graduated in nineteen 0:06:13.320 --> 0:06:17.520 oh nine. Ri's degree was in literature. She graduated Phi 0:06:17.560 --> 0:06:20.840 Beta Kappa and won awards for her poetry and essays. 0:06:21.560 --> 0:06:24.479 After graduation, the sister spent a year in Europe with 0:06:24.520 --> 0:06:26.840 a couple of friends, and that was paid for by 0:06:26.880 --> 0:06:28.000 their friends' families. 0:06:28.920 --> 0:06:34.520 Soon after returning from Europe, Marjorie married Robert Freeman. Marjorie, Robert, 0:06:34.600 --> 0:06:38.840 and bertis All moved to Pasadena, California. Ruth stayed behind 0:06:38.880 --> 0:06:42.120 in Buffalo for about a year before rejoining her mother 0:06:42.200 --> 0:06:46.040 and sister. She spent some time in California teaching at girls' 0:06:46.040 --> 0:06:49.880 schools before meeting biochemist Stanley Benedict on a trip back 0:06:49.920 --> 0:06:54.120 to New York. They got married on June eighteenth, nineteen fourteen. 0:06:54.839 --> 0:06:57.320 It seems like Ruth was happy for the first year 0:06:57.440 --> 0:07:01.000 or so of their marriage. In a journal that December, 0:07:01.040 --> 0:07:04.360 she wrote, quote, five months ago, with all my consciousness 0:07:04.360 --> 0:07:06.599 of the power of loving that was the greatest part 0:07:06.640 --> 0:07:09.479 of me. With all the hunger and thrust of my love, 0:07:09.640 --> 0:07:12.520 I had no notion of its strength and depth and 0:07:12.600 --> 0:07:16.160 power of healing. No wonder the days seemed dreary and 0:07:16.200 --> 0:07:20.600 empty enough without this satisfying comradeship, this ardent delight, this 0:07:20.720 --> 0:07:24.120 transforming love. Now that I have it, it is what 0:07:24.240 --> 0:07:28.520 gives meaning to all of life. But Ruth's journals from 0:07:28.560 --> 0:07:31.680 their courtship and their early marriage also contain a number 0:07:31.680 --> 0:07:35.200 of references to her and Stanley hurting one another, without 0:07:35.280 --> 0:07:38.800 really going into much detail. She also wanted to have 0:07:38.840 --> 0:07:42.600 a baby, but they weren't able to. Then in nineteen seventeen, 0:07:42.680 --> 0:07:46.440 Stanley was injured in a lab accident. He inhaled toxic 0:07:46.560 --> 0:07:49.720 gas that he was researching as a potential wartime weapon. 0:07:50.480 --> 0:07:53.640 This worsened some issues that he was already having with 0:07:53.760 --> 0:07:57.760 high blood pressure and insomnia. He and Ruth wound up 0:07:57.800 --> 0:08:02.080 at odds over where and how to live. She preferred 0:08:02.080 --> 0:08:04.480 the city. She wanted to be in Greenwich Village, and 0:08:04.560 --> 0:08:07.920 that was too noisy for him. He wanted to live 0:08:07.960 --> 0:08:10.480 out in the suburbs and spend lots of time at 0:08:10.480 --> 0:08:13.120 his summer cabin in New Hampshire. And that was just 0:08:13.240 --> 0:08:17.320 too isolated for her. She finally wound up renting a 0:08:17.440 --> 0:08:20.360 room in Greenwich Village and staying there during the week 0:08:20.400 --> 0:08:23.840 and then going back to Stanley on the weekends, which 0:08:24.400 --> 0:08:25.960 was really unconventional. 0:08:26.360 --> 0:08:28.960 I feel like that would even be considered unconventional now. 0:08:29.040 --> 0:08:31.320 Yeah, I know a number of people who for like 0:08:31.440 --> 0:08:34.559 work reasons, for the most part, have had residences in 0:08:34.600 --> 0:08:39.040 two different cities, but like, this was unheard of. Really. 0:08:39.240 --> 0:08:39.880 When she was. 0:08:39.880 --> 0:08:43.720 Living a few years into the marriage, Ruth was feeling 0:08:44.000 --> 0:08:47.600 bored and unfulfilled. She had been raised in a devoutly 0:08:47.640 --> 0:08:50.600 Baptist family, but she had left the church. A lot 0:08:50.600 --> 0:08:53.280 of her classmates at Vassar had been active in various 0:08:53.320 --> 0:08:56.760 causes like women's suffrage, but none of those causes had 0:08:56.800 --> 0:09:01.319 really captured her attention. She tried to folks on writing poetry, 0:09:01.440 --> 0:09:04.360 publishing under the name Anne Singleton, and took on other 0:09:04.400 --> 0:09:08.040 writing projects. Eventually, she started on a book that she 0:09:08.160 --> 0:09:12.439 called Adventures in Womanhood, planning to include biographies of Mary 0:09:12.440 --> 0:09:16.960 Wollston Craft, Margaret Fuller, and Olive Schreiner. She finished a 0:09:17.040 --> 0:09:19.720 draft on Mary Wollston Craft, but when she couldn't find 0:09:19.720 --> 0:09:22.440 a publisher who was interested, she put the project aside. 0:09:23.400 --> 0:09:26.439 In nineteen nineteen, still looking for something to keep her 0:09:26.480 --> 0:09:30.480 mind occupied, Ruth Benedict enrolled in a class at the 0:09:30.559 --> 0:09:33.440 New School for Social Research in New York City, which 0:09:33.440 --> 0:09:36.719 had been founded that same year. The new School was 0:09:36.840 --> 0:09:40.840 established by professors who had resigned from Columbia University after 0:09:40.880 --> 0:09:44.720 being censured for their opposition to the US involvement in 0:09:44.760 --> 0:09:48.680 the war. It was open to students regardless of sex, 0:09:48.720 --> 0:09:53.640 and was specifically focused on higher education for adults, especially 0:09:53.640 --> 0:09:57.240 on subjects that were related to social issues in political science. 0:09:57.960 --> 0:10:01.640 Benedict's first class at the New School was Sex in Ethnology, 0:10:02.000 --> 0:10:06.240 taught by anthropologist and folklorist Elsie Clues Parsons, who became 0:10:06.280 --> 0:10:11.160 one of Benedict's mentors. Another mentor was anthropologist and sociologist 0:10:11.240 --> 0:10:15.120 Alexander Goldenweisser, who had been born in Ukraine and immigrated 0:10:15.120 --> 0:10:16.760 to the US in nineteen hundred. 0:10:17.679 --> 0:10:20.720 Both of them had worked and studied with Franz Boas, 0:10:20.920 --> 0:10:24.679 and they encouraged Benedict to pursue a graduate degree at 0:10:24.679 --> 0:10:28.920 Columbia University, where Boas was teaching. We will get into 0:10:28.960 --> 0:10:41.480 this some more after a sponsor break before we talk 0:10:41.520 --> 0:10:45.280 about Ruth Benedict's work with Franz boas, we should talk 0:10:45.440 --> 0:10:48.600 a little bit about the development of anthropology as a 0:10:48.640 --> 0:10:51.840 field and the state of that field when she started 0:10:51.880 --> 0:10:56.960 studying it. So anthropology as a scientific and academic discipline 0:10:57.000 --> 0:11:01.800 was established primarily by Western European men. Interest in studying 0:11:01.840 --> 0:11:05.720 the cultures and peoples of the world really flourished alongside 0:11:05.760 --> 0:11:10.800 global exploration and colonization by European powers, and a lot 0:11:10.840 --> 0:11:14.319 of the people carrying out that research did so from 0:11:14.360 --> 0:11:18.080 the perspective that Western European culture was the pinnacle of 0:11:18.160 --> 0:11:21.560 human achievement. So from the beginning, a lot of this 0:11:21.679 --> 0:11:26.959 research was rooted in inherently racist ideas. It imagined humanity in. 0:11:26.920 --> 0:11:29.720 A hierarchy, with white people at the top and all 0:11:29.760 --> 0:11:33.439 other races lowered down. Cultures that had not had a 0:11:33.480 --> 0:11:37.000 lot of contact with Europeans were framed as primitive, with 0:11:37.120 --> 0:11:41.480 these allegedly primitive people supposedly in their natural state, unaffected 0:11:41.520 --> 0:11:46.760 by things like industrialization. Of course, not every single individual 0:11:46.800 --> 0:11:50.400 person working in anthropology was espousing these kinds of ideas, 0:11:50.760 --> 0:11:53.439 but by the late nineteenth century, a lot of the 0:11:53.480 --> 0:11:56.880 writing coming out of the field was really Eurocentric and 0:11:57.040 --> 0:12:01.760 either implicitly or explicitly to other peoples and cultures as 0:12:01.840 --> 0:12:05.559 less sophisticated, less developed, and generally inferior. 0:12:06.600 --> 0:12:09.920 One anthropologist who really pushed back on a lot of 0:12:09.960 --> 0:12:13.880 this was Franz Boas. He was born into a Jewish 0:12:13.920 --> 0:12:17.200 family in Germany in eighteen fifty eight and immigrated to 0:12:17.200 --> 0:12:20.600 the United States in eighteen eighty six. He started teaching 0:12:20.600 --> 0:12:24.880 at Columbia University ten years later, and he was enormously 0:12:24.960 --> 0:12:29.360 influential as both an anthropologist and a teacher. He argued 0:12:29.400 --> 0:12:33.240 that race and culture were not biologically determined, and that 0:12:33.400 --> 0:12:36.920 no one race or culture was superior to the others, 0:12:36.960 --> 0:12:41.800 either genetically or otherwise. He also argued that culture wasn't 0:12:41.840 --> 0:12:47.599 biologically determined at all, that instead, cultures arose from a 0:12:47.640 --> 0:12:53.240 collection of local, historical, and interpersonal influences. Some of Boas's 0:12:53.320 --> 0:12:57.320 ideas are summed up as cultural relativism. That's the idea 0:12:57.320 --> 0:13:00.480 that a culture's beliefs, values, and practices should be studied 0:13:00.520 --> 0:13:03.679 and understood from the point of view of the culture itself, 0:13:04.040 --> 0:13:07.400 not by making value judgments from outside that culture or 0:13:07.720 --> 0:13:12.280 comparing it to some kind of supposedly universal standard. In 0:13:12.320 --> 0:13:17.320 that case, universal usually really meant Western European. So that's 0:13:17.360 --> 0:13:20.480 not to suggest that Boas's work was perfect or that 0:13:20.559 --> 0:13:24.120 there's nothing to criticize about it. For example, as we 0:13:24.200 --> 0:13:28.280 mentioned in our episode on physical anthropologist W. Montague Cob, 0:13:28.440 --> 0:13:32.160 Boas carried out excavations of indigenous burial sites that he 0:13:32.280 --> 0:13:37.280 later admitted felt basically like grave robbing. He also represented 0:13:37.360 --> 0:13:41.400 a turning point in the field, not an ending point. So, 0:13:41.679 --> 0:13:44.480 for example, the term primitive and the idea that so 0:13:44.640 --> 0:13:48.599 called primitive cultures were in a more natural or authentic 0:13:48.720 --> 0:13:51.840 state that still showed up in his work in the 0:13:51.880 --> 0:13:55.200 work of some of his students. And while a lot 0:13:55.240 --> 0:13:58.640 of the people that Boas trained tried to be anti 0:13:58.800 --> 0:14:02.880 racist in their work, that did not necessarily extend to 0:14:02.920 --> 0:14:07.400 their treatment of other traits like gender or sexuality. Also, 0:14:07.760 --> 0:14:10.880 just in general, it's virtually impossible for a person to 0:14:10.880 --> 0:14:14.760 totally shed every single one of their preconceptions in all 0:14:14.800 --> 0:14:17.440 of their cultural baggage when studying another culture. 0:14:18.160 --> 0:14:21.400 So Boas and his students were still seeing and studying 0:14:21.440 --> 0:14:24.480 and interpreting the world through their own lenses, even if 0:14:24.520 --> 0:14:28.280 they really were making an effort not to. But he 0:14:28.800 --> 0:14:33.040 actively intentionally and prolifically tried to dismantle a lot of 0:14:33.080 --> 0:14:36.200 the racist ideas that were taken for granted within the field, 0:14:36.640 --> 0:14:39.440 and he trained a generation of other anthropologists to do 0:14:39.560 --> 0:14:43.920 the same. One of those anthropologists was Ruth Benedict. She 0:14:44.040 --> 0:14:47.360 started her graduate studies at Columbia in nineteen twenty one 0:14:47.440 --> 0:14:51.280 when she was thirty four. Boas became a mentor and 0:14:51.320 --> 0:14:54.680 a father figure. She and some of the other students 0:14:54.720 --> 0:14:59.200 called him Papa Frands. She admired and respected his work, 0:14:59.400 --> 0:15:02.600 but learning from him could also be challenging for her. 0:15:03.080 --> 0:15:05.800 In addition to his having a pronounced German accent, he 0:15:05.920 --> 0:15:10.040 was also known for mumbling when he talked. I saw 0:15:10.160 --> 0:15:15.520 him described as a notorious mumbler, which made it hard 0:15:15.600 --> 0:15:18.000 for somebody with hearing loss to undersod. Oh my gosh, 0:15:18.000 --> 0:15:18.840 I can't even imagine. 0:15:19.560 --> 0:15:19.680 Uh. 0:15:19.880 --> 0:15:23.040 But Benedict really impressed him, so much so that he 0:15:23.120 --> 0:15:26.240 convinced Columbia to accept her classes from the New School 0:15:26.560 --> 0:15:29.240 as part of her pH d work, allowing her to 0:15:29.280 --> 0:15:33.320 complete her degree in nineteen twenty three after only two years. 0:15:34.080 --> 0:15:37.560 Her dissertation was the concept of the Guardian Spirit in 0:15:37.640 --> 0:15:40.880 North America, and it was drawn from existing research on 0:15:40.920 --> 0:15:44.800 the idea of the guardian spirit in indigenous cultures. She 0:15:44.880 --> 0:15:48.240 published it under the name Ruth Fulton Benedict, including her 0:15:48.320 --> 0:15:51.520 maiden name this way that was also unconventional. 0:15:52.320 --> 0:15:56.520 Her dissertation caught the attention of one of Boas's former students, 0:15:56.640 --> 0:16:01.440 Edward Sapiir. Sapiram Benedict bonded over anne anthropology and their 0:16:01.520 --> 0:16:05.080 shared love of poetry. They wrote poems to each other, 0:16:05.200 --> 0:16:08.320 and they wrote letters from about nineteen twenty three to 0:16:08.400 --> 0:16:12.200 nineteen thirty five. Sometimes this was multiple letters every week. 0:16:12.760 --> 0:16:16.160 While studying under Franz Boas, Benedict also worked as his 0:16:16.240 --> 0:16:20.200 teaching assistant at Barnard College. Barnard had been founded in 0:16:20.240 --> 0:16:22.640 eighteen eighty nine and was the first college in New 0:16:22.720 --> 0:16:26.280 York City to offer degrees to women. It was and 0:16:26.520 --> 0:16:30.400 is affiliated with Columbia University, which did not admit women 0:16:30.440 --> 0:16:33.600 as undergraduates until the fall of nineteen eighty three. 0:16:34.560 --> 0:16:40.600 It's not a typo. Barnard is where Benedict met Margaret Mead, 0:16:40.760 --> 0:16:44.000 who at the time was a senior in college, and 0:16:44.120 --> 0:16:47.600 at first Mead was not impressed with Benedict at all. 0:16:48.360 --> 0:16:50.800 Ruth Benedict wore the same dress every day, and it 0:16:50.880 --> 0:16:53.479 was addressed that Mead did not think was very flattering. 0:16:54.080 --> 0:16:56.960 This was apparently because men wore the same suit to 0:16:57.040 --> 0:17:00.000 teach in every day, and Benedict thought that women should 0:17:00.240 --> 0:17:03.800 be able to follow the same standard. Benedict also had 0:17:03.840 --> 0:17:06.600 a really hard time speaking in front of the students, 0:17:06.920 --> 0:17:10.160 even though she had taught at girls' schools years before. 0:17:10.600 --> 0:17:14.080 She really struggled with her shyness and her hearing loss. 0:17:14.200 --> 0:17:18.000 It took her years to really be comfortable with public speaking. 0:17:18.920 --> 0:17:21.639 But then Benedict led the students on one of their 0:17:21.680 --> 0:17:25.359 regular visits to the American Museum of Natural History and 0:17:25.480 --> 0:17:28.000 Mead asked her for more information about one of the 0:17:28.040 --> 0:17:32.240 exhibits they were looking at. Benedict was clearly flustered, but 0:17:32.400 --> 0:17:35.240 said she would bring something to their next class, and 0:17:35.320 --> 0:17:38.040 she brought a copy of one of her own published papers, 0:17:38.480 --> 0:17:41.359 and Mead was so impressed that she gave Benedict another 0:17:41.480 --> 0:17:46.760 chance as an instructor. Mead eventually found Benedict to be knowledgeable, creative, 0:17:46.880 --> 0:17:50.280 and compassionate toward her students, and she started recommending the 0:17:50.359 --> 0:17:54.879 course to other students at Barnard. Benedict and Meade became 0:17:55.000 --> 0:17:59.280 friends and colleagues, with Benedict encouraging Meade to pursue an 0:17:59.320 --> 0:18:04.400 advanced to in anthropology, including giving her three hundred dollars 0:18:04.440 --> 0:18:07.320 of her own money, which she described as a no 0:18:07.480 --> 0:18:12.320 strings attached fellowship. Meade started graduate study at Columbia in 0:18:12.400 --> 0:18:15.320 nineteen twenty three, and that same year she got married 0:18:15.359 --> 0:18:19.359 to anthropologist Luther Cressman, and toward the end of nineteen 0:18:19.359 --> 0:18:23.880 twenty four, Benedict and Meade started having an affair. This 0:18:24.119 --> 0:18:27.520 was obviously something they kept secret, both of them were 0:18:27.520 --> 0:18:31.600 married to other people. As anthropologists, they both wrote about 0:18:31.680 --> 0:18:35.280 cultures that viewed gender and sexuality much different than in 0:18:35.520 --> 0:18:38.640 much of the United States, but in their own culture 0:18:39.040 --> 0:18:41.520 this was something that could have ruined their reputations and 0:18:41.600 --> 0:18:45.639 their careers. There was also the fact that Benedict was 0:18:45.720 --> 0:18:48.480 more than a decade older than Meade and had been 0:18:48.480 --> 0:18:52.440 her teacher. I'm actually a little fuzzy on whether Benedict 0:18:52.600 --> 0:18:56.440 was still Mead's teacher at this point. There was already 0:18:56.480 --> 0:19:01.440 a very well established trope of predatory life lesbians in media, 0:19:01.640 --> 0:19:05.520 so older women in positions of authority like teachers and 0:19:05.600 --> 0:19:10.880 headmistresses taking advantage of and corrupting their students and books 0:19:10.920 --> 0:19:15.040 and movies. This really damaging stereotype would make their affair 0:19:15.160 --> 0:19:20.520 seem particularly salacious if it was discovered. In nineteen twenty four, 0:19:20.840 --> 0:19:25.120 Mead also started an affair with Edward Sapier. While Sapier 0:19:25.200 --> 0:19:28.360 and Ruth Benedict were close friends, it seems like their 0:19:28.400 --> 0:19:32.560 relationship was platonic. Their letters to one another don't suggest 0:19:32.600 --> 0:19:35.239 that it was romantic, and when they met, he was 0:19:35.280 --> 0:19:39.680 married and devoted to his wife, Florence, But Florence died 0:19:39.760 --> 0:19:43.560 in nineteen twenty four, and after that Mead pursued him. 0:19:44.920 --> 0:19:47.880 Sapier was the one to tell Benedict about this relationship, 0:19:47.920 --> 0:19:51.879 and she was deeply hurt by it. It seems like Sapierre, Benedict, 0:19:51.920 --> 0:19:55.400 and Luther Cressman all wanted more from Margaret Meade than 0:19:55.440 --> 0:19:58.040 she really wanted to give. She was an advocate of 0:19:58.080 --> 0:20:01.120 free love. This was one of a number of love 0:20:01.200 --> 0:20:04.359 triangles or in this case, quadrangles over the course of 0:20:04.400 --> 0:20:05.879 Mead's life. 0:20:05.960 --> 0:20:09.160 Although Benedict was really hurt over Mead's affair with Sapir, 0:20:09.520 --> 0:20:12.840 she didn't and their relationship over it. The two women 0:20:12.920 --> 0:20:15.600 wrote numerous letters back and forth after Mead left for 0:20:15.640 --> 0:20:18.760 field work and Samoa in nineteen twenty five, at a 0:20:18.800 --> 0:20:21.879 time when it was incredibly unusual for a woman to 0:20:21.920 --> 0:20:24.880 be sent to do field work on her own. When 0:20:24.920 --> 0:20:27.159 Meade returned to the US, she wrote one of the 0:20:27.160 --> 0:20:30.120 books that she would become famous for, Coming of Age 0:20:30.119 --> 0:20:34.400 in Samoa, a Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. 0:20:35.160 --> 0:20:38.120 That book came out in nineteen twenty eight, and although 0:20:38.160 --> 0:20:42.000 this book was about adolescence in Samoa, it included descriptions 0:20:42.000 --> 0:20:45.520 of sexuality among Samoan youth, and that's really what it 0:20:45.560 --> 0:20:46.640 became most known for. 0:20:48.080 --> 0:20:50.720 So this episode isn't about Mead, but it would be 0:20:50.760 --> 0:20:53.640 weird if we didn't mention that Mead's work and this 0:20:53.760 --> 0:20:58.320 book specifically have been the subjects of intense criticism. Mead's 0:20:58.359 --> 0:21:02.919 most vocal critic was New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman, who 0:21:02.960 --> 0:21:07.720 made totally different observations during his own field work in Samoa. 0:21:08.280 --> 0:21:11.600 He published two different books arguing that Meade's work was 0:21:11.720 --> 0:21:16.119 totally incorrect. Critics of Freeman's work have pointed out that 0:21:16.160 --> 0:21:19.120 he was working in a different part of Samoa, and 0:21:19.200 --> 0:21:22.680 that a lot had changed in the decades between when 0:21:22.800 --> 0:21:25.920 Mead did her research and when he did his, including 0:21:25.920 --> 0:21:30.320 there being an increasing influence from Christianity. This became known 0:21:30.359 --> 0:21:34.520 as the Mead Freeman controversy. It went on for decades. 0:21:35.119 --> 0:21:37.119 My basic read on it is that there are valid 0:21:37.160 --> 0:21:41.320 criticisms of both of them. Of course, Benedict had her 0:21:41.320 --> 0:21:43.840 own life and work going on during all of this, 0:21:43.960 --> 0:21:45.960 and we're going to talk about that after we pause 0:21:46.000 --> 0:21:58.560 for a sponsor break. In nineteen twenty five, Ruth Fulton 0:21:58.640 --> 0:22:02.400 Benedict started editing the Journal of American Folklore. She worked 0:22:02.440 --> 0:22:06.760 as its editor until nineteen forty. She also undertook field 0:22:06.800 --> 0:22:11.399 work among Puebloan peoples in the southwestern United States. Because 0:22:11.440 --> 0:22:13.800 of her hearing loss, she had to conduct most of 0:22:13.840 --> 0:22:18.560 this work through interpreters and choose those interpreters very carefully 0:22:18.680 --> 0:22:21.760 because they had to be willing to dictate everything they 0:22:21.760 --> 0:22:24.200 were interpreting to her while she wrote it all down 0:22:24.280 --> 0:22:27.720 word for word. This is a very time consuming and 0:22:27.800 --> 0:22:31.320 laborious process, but it also led her to be really 0:22:31.480 --> 0:22:33.719 pretty careful. In a lot of her field work. She 0:22:33.800 --> 0:22:36.840 tended to work in this like slow, methodical way. 0:22:37.520 --> 0:22:40.560 On Margaret Mead's voyage home from her field work in Samoa, 0:22:40.760 --> 0:22:44.760 she met New Zealand anthropologist Reo Fortune. We're guessing on 0:22:44.800 --> 0:22:49.080 that pronunciation, and she was immediately attracted to him. Benedict 0:22:49.200 --> 0:22:51.320 felt like she had to compete with Fortune in a 0:22:51.320 --> 0:22:54.199 way that she had not with Meaeds other partners, and 0:22:54.240 --> 0:22:58.320 then ultimately led to her ending their romantic relationship. Benedict 0:22:58.400 --> 0:23:01.080 and Meade continued to be called leagues and close friends 0:23:01.080 --> 0:23:04.520 for the rest of Benedict's life, though including Benedict eventually 0:23:04.600 --> 0:23:09.480 being named Guardian Timeade's daughter. In nineteen twenty eight, Benedict 0:23:09.520 --> 0:23:12.399 tried to publish a book of poetry, but again was 0:23:12.480 --> 0:23:16.480 rejected by publishers. She did keep writing poetry, but at 0:23:16.480 --> 0:23:19.280 this point she mostly stopped trying to do it professionally. 0:23:20.000 --> 0:23:22.800 A couple of years after that, she and Stanley separated. 0:23:23.119 --> 0:23:27.200 Apart from their other struggles, he really had not supported 0:23:27.200 --> 0:23:30.560 her going to graduate school or establishing her own career 0:23:30.560 --> 0:23:34.719 as an anthropologist. It was only after their separation that 0:23:34.760 --> 0:23:38.199 Benedict was paid for her teaching work at Columbia. 0:23:38.440 --> 0:23:40.879 Before that point, it was assumed that she didn't need 0:23:40.960 --> 0:23:43.600 to be paid because she was being financially supported by 0:23:43.640 --> 0:23:44.280 her husband. 0:23:45.480 --> 0:23:49.000 In nineteen thirty four, Benedict published Patterns of Culture, which 0:23:49.040 --> 0:23:52.280 is considered to be her most important work. This book 0:23:52.320 --> 0:23:56.840 compared three indigenous cultures, the Zuni of southwestern North America 0:23:56.880 --> 0:23:59.760 based on her own field work, the Dobu of Papua 0:23:59.760 --> 0:24:02.240 and nig Guinea based on fieldwork done by Margaret Meade 0:24:02.280 --> 0:24:05.960 in Reo Fortune, and the Quakwakawacta also known as the 0:24:06.160 --> 0:24:09.520 quaky Utle of the Pacific Northwest, based on fieldwork by 0:24:09.560 --> 0:24:13.800 Franz Boas. This book outlined her ideas about the relationship 0:24:13.840 --> 0:24:20.320 between culture and personality, including that culture was personality. Writ large, 0:24:20.400 --> 0:24:22.920 she described how the way a person lived and thought 0:24:23.000 --> 0:24:25.680 was extensively shaped by the culture they were living in. 0:24:26.480 --> 0:24:29.320 Each culture also had its own definitions for what was 0:24:29.400 --> 0:24:32.120