RUTH BENEDICT-- The Biography by Margaret Mead--LEE SCHNEIDER REVIEW, THE JACKSON SUN, 1975

15 September 2017


Mead On Benedict A Bio That Misses
Ruth Benedict. By Margaret Mead. Columbia University Press: $8 95.
By LEE SCHNEIDER

It seems ironic that one common cri-ticism often leveled at Ruth Benedict's approach to culture studies may rebound to strike the second biography written by her friend and former colleague, Margar-et Mead.
What promised to be an integral por-trait of the first well-known woman social scientist — a discussion of the struggles and frustrations which Ruth Benedict experienced as a woman and as a cultural anthropologist — is diluted, becoming in the end only a "rags and tatters" approach to biography. As a young woman. Ruth Fulton Ben-edict kept a journal. From these accounts. and those of a fragmentary  autobiography, Mead describes the early years of her friend as a period of aliena-tion. "Happiness," she wrote as a child. "was a world I lived in all by myself, and for precious moments." Becoming a secondary school teacher in her late twenties, before her marriage to Stanley R. Benedict, she still found her-self at odds with the problems of identity: "There is one crown which perhaps is worth it all — a great love, a quiet home, and children."

But it seems she was not to have that one crown. Ruth Benedict could not have children, her manuscripts of poetry and biography remained unpublished. and she soon discovered that her prophecy had been realized — a great love is given to very few."
It was after she had embarked on a career of anthropology, in her search for "one's own individual world of effort and creation," that she and Stanley Benedict separated. Her marriage at an end, Ruth Benedict would devote her life and writ-ings to science — understanding the patterns of culture.
Both Benedict and Dr. Mead were to become two of America's most famous anthropologists, and the second part of the biography documents Ruth Benedict's achievements within and beyond the professional circle. Not only was she the author of two widely read books, "Patterns of Culture" and "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword," but Benedict also became a full professor at Columbia University, a staff member in the Office of War Information during the Second World War and, two years before her death, elected president of the American Anthropological Associa-tion in 1946.
The seven selections from Ruth Ben-edict's extensive writings were judicious-ly chosen by Margaret Mead to illustrate a range of thoughts — from the theoretical problems of culture study, magic and Indian mythology to popular articles on the nature of freedom.

This display of professional research and public recognition, however, masks the reader's initial interest: Did Ruth Benedict ever resolve the earlier prob-lems of her personal identity? ' The author of this biography seems to assume, because of the hard work and discipline which produced this wealth of published materials, that Ruth Benedict no longer thought of love, her poetry, alienation, family and marriage. Was Ruth Benedict, in her later years. only to remain a public figure?
One letter, reproduced in this book and written to Benedict while she was con-ducting field work among Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, asks this very question. "Is your own interest in primitive religion the result of a deep but acknowledged mysticism?" Margaret Mead evades those problems which this question presents, and so her book ends as a tribute rather than as a entical biography which could describe the life of one very remarkable woman.
The Jackson (TN) Sun--March 30, 1975