ANTHROPOLOGIST

The Role of a Father.

When asked about her formative years, Ruth Benedict acknowledged the important role her father had played in her childhood. A homeopathic surgeon whose success was thwarted by illness and who died when she was twenty-one months old, he became in her understanding of his memory a man fascinated with work and research, which she sought to equal. She attended Vassar College and graduated in 1909 after having been exposed to various ideas concerning women's rights, including the rights of women to study and have a profession. In 1914 she married Stanley Rossiter Benedict, a professor of biochemistry. In 1921, after spending eighteen months at the New School, she entered the Ph.D. program at Columbia, where Franz Boas became her mentor. She enjoyed anthropology because of the community of minds she encountered and also for the challenge of creating a space for herself as a woman.