San Antonio College Library

Poet, anthropologist, feminist -- Ruth Benedict was all these and much more. Born in 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. This book provides an intellectual and cultural history of the first half of the twentieth century through the life of an important and remarkable woman.

This book is both the history of a new approach to anthropology and the biography of a brilliant, sensitive, and elusive woman. It is the posthumous product of a long collaboration between two distinguished anthropologists, Ruth Benedict, who died in 1948, and Margaret Mead, who was first her pupil, then her friend and colleague, and now her literary executor and biographer. The approach can best be described in Ruth Benedict's own phrase: that a...

This book is a revealing biography of two eminent twentieth century American women. Close friends for much of their lives, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead met at Barnard College in 1922, when Mead was a student, Benedict a teacher. They became sexual partners (though both married), and pioneered in the then male-dominated discipline of anthropology. They championed racial and sexual equality and cultural relativity despite the generally racist, xenophobic,...

As anthropologists, public intellectuals, and feminists, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead played remarkable roles in twentieth-century life and thought--and far beyond the academy. Their work helped to popularize anthropology while introducing such terms as culture and racism into common parlance. At the same time, they contributed to wider debates about environmentalism, sexuality, the women's movement, and American foreign policy. In this collection,...