Ruth Benedict

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

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Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:01:12
Speaker 1: Some of those are more.

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:01:38
Speaker 1: 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 part of her childhood, so if she was really born in New York City, that may be the source of that discrepancy.

00:02:05
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:02:39
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:03:11
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 them away.

00:05:01
Speaker 1: 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, 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.

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:05:59
Speaker 1: 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. After graduation, the sister spent a year in Europe with a couple of friends, and that was paid for by their friends' families.

00:06:28
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 and then going back to Stanley on the weekends, which was really unconventional.

00:08:26
Speaker 1: I feel like that would even be considered unconventional now.

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:08:39
Speaker 1: 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, 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.

00:09:23
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:09:57
Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:11:26
Speaker 1: 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, 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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Speaker 1: 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 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. 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.

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Speaker 2: Uh.

00:15:19
Speaker 1: 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 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.

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:16:12
Speaker 1: 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.

00:16:34
Speaker 2: 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

00:20:05
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:20:48
Speaker 2: 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. 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 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 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 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.

00:22:37
Speaker 1: 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 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. 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.

00:23:38
Speaker 2: Before that point, it was assumed that she didn't need to be paid because she was being financially supported by her husband.

00:23:45
Speaker 1: 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 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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, but she doesn't bother me about it.

00:27:02
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:27:39
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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.

00:29:49
Speaker 2: 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 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. 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. 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 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.

00:31:35
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:32:20
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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.

00:35:26
Speaker 1: 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. This was a huge four year project, bringing in one hundred twenty scholars of sixteen nationalities representing fourteen academic disciplines.

00:35:56
Speaker 2: 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, she never referred to work again, but put all her effort into staying quietly alive until Ruth Valentine got back from California.

00:36:28
Speaker 1: 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 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 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.

00:37:28
Speaker 2: That is Ruth Benedict.

00:37:30
Speaker 1: Do you have some listener mail as well?

00:37:32
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:38:22
Speaker 1: That.

00:38:22
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 letting us know.

00:39:30
Speaker 1: 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.

00:39:50
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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.