Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land (American Studies Series) - Softcover

Caffrey, Margaret M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0292753640 ISBN 13: 9780292753648

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 1989

Synopsis

Poet, anthropologist, feminist—Ruth Fulton Benedict was all of these and much more. Born into the last years of the Victorian era, she came of age during the Progressive years and participated in inaugurating the modern era of American life. Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land provides an intellectual and cultural history of the first half of the twentieth century through the life of an important and remarkable woman.

As a Lyricist poet, Ruth Benedict helped define Modernism. As an anthropologist, she wrote the classic Patterns of Culture and at one point was considered the foremost anthropologist in the United States—the first woman ever to attain such status. She was an intellectual and an artist living in a time when women were not encouraged to be either. In this fascinating study, Margaret Caffrey attempts to place Benedict in the cultural matrix of her time and successfully shows the way in which Benedict was a product of and reacted to the era in which she lived.

Caffrey goes far beyond providing simple biographical material in this well-written interdisciplinary study. Based on exhaustive research, including access for the first time to the papers of Margaret Mead, Benedict's student and friend, Caffrey is able to put Benedict's life clearly in perspective. By identifying the family and educational influences that so sharply influenced Benedict's psychological makeup, the author also closely analyzes the currents of thought that were strong when Victorianism paralleled the Modernism that figured in Benedict's life work. The result is a richly detailed study of a gifted woman.

This important work will be of interest to students of Modernism, poetry, and women's studies, as well as to anthropologists.

About this title

About the Author

Margaret M. Caffrey is Associate Professor of History at Memphis State University.

From Publishers Weekly

Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture is still widely read, but how many readers are aware that this anthropologist was also a modernist poet, part of the Lyricist circle that included Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan? How many know that she considered herself a feminist, convinced of the need to do away with the "dead rubbish of conventionalism" surrounding women? In this impassioned, masterful biography, Caffrey, assistant professor of history at Memphis State University, treats Benedict's life as an exhilarating intellectual adventure. An emotionally withdrawn farm girl who suffered from attacks of vomiting and partial deafness, Benedict blossomed under her academic mentor Franz Boas. As her marriage to controlling, strong-willed Stanley Benedict withered, she became a close friend, then lover, of Margaret Mead. Her disillusionment with Judeo-Christianity, her study of myths as collective wish-fulfillment and her rejection of Victorian prudery all found expression in her cultural relativism.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0292753640
• ISBN 13: 9780292753648
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448