Editing Ruth Benedict (section)

==Early biography==
===Childhood===
Benedict was born Ruth Fulton in [[New York City]] on June 5, 1887, to Beatrice (Shattuck) and Frederick Fulton.<ref name="Young 2005">Young 2005</ref><ref name="Caffrey">Caffrey 1989.</ref><ref>{{cite encyclopedia|encyclopedia=Encyclopedia.com |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/benedict-ruth-1887-1948 |title= Ruth Benedict 1887-1948}}</ref> Her mother worked in the city as a school teacher, and her father was a [[homeopathy|homeopathic]] doctor and surgeon.<ref name="Young 2005"/> Fulton loved his work and research, but they eventually led to his premature death, as he acquired an unknown disease during one of his surgeries in 1888.<ref name="Benedictsto">Benedict 1959: 97–112</ref> His illness caused the family to move back to [[Norwich, New York|Norwich]], New York, to the farm of Ruth's maternal grandparents, the Shattucks.<ref name="Caffrey"/> A year later, he died ten days after he had returned from a trip to [[Trinidad]] to search for a cure.<ref name="Benedictsto"/>

Beatrice Fulton was deeply affected by her husband's passing. Any mention of him overwhelmed her with grief; every March, she cried at church and in bed.<ref name="Benedictsto"/> Ruth hated her mother's sorrow and viewed it as a weakness. For Ruth, the greatest taboos were crying in front of people and showing expressions of pain.<ref name="Benedictsto"/> She reminisced, "I did not love my mother; I resented her cult of grief."<ref name="Benedictsto"/> The psychological effects on her childhood were thus profound, since "in one stroke she [Ruth] experienced the loss of the two most nourishing and protective people around her—the loss of her father at death and her mother to grief".<ref name="Caffrey"/>

As a toddler, she contracted [[measles]], which left her [[partial deafness|partially deaf]]; that was not discovered until she began school.<ref name="mead">{{cite book |author-last=Mead |author-first=Margaret |author-link=Margaret Mead |date=1977 |title=An anthropologist at work: writings of Ruth Benedict |publisher= Greenwood Press |isbn= 978-0-8371-9576-6}}</ref> Ruth had a fascination with death as a young child. When she was four years old, her grandmother took her to see an infant that had recently died. Upon seeing the dead child's face, Ruth claimed that it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.<ref name="Benedictsto"/>

At seven, Ruth began to write short verses and to read any book that she could get her hands on. Her favorite author was [[Jean Ingelow]], and her favorite readings were ''A Legend of Bregenz'' and ''The Judas Tree''.<ref name="Benedictsto"/> Through writing, she gained approval from her family. Writing was her outlet, and she wrote with an insightful perception about human reality. For example, in her senior year of high school, she wrote a piece, "Lulu's Wedding (A True Story)", in which she recalled the wedding of a family serving-girl. Instead of romanticizing the event, she revealed the true unromantic arranged marriage that Lulu went through because the man would take her even though he was much older.<ref name="Caffrey"/>

Although her fascination with death started at an early age, she continued to study how death affected people throughout her career. In her book ''Patterns of Culture'', Benedict shows how the [[Puebloan peoples|Pueblo]] culture dealt with grieving and death. She describes in the book that individuals may deal with reactions to death, such as frustration and grief, differently from one another. Societies all have social norms that they follow; some allow more expression in dealing with death, such as mourning, but other societies do not permit its acknowledgement.<ref name="Young 2005"/>

===College and marriage===
After high school, Ruth and her sister entered St Margaret's School for Girls, a college preparatory school, with the help from a full-time scholarship. The girls were successful in school and entered [[Vassar College]] in September 1905, where Ruth thrived in an all-female atmosphere.<ref name="Caffrey"/> Stories were then circulating that going to college led girls to become childless and remain unmarried. Nevertheless, Ruth explored her interests in college and found writing as her way of expressing herself as an "intellectual radical" - as her classmates sometimes labelled her.<ref name="Caffrey"/> The author [[Walter Pater]] (1839-1894) influenced her greatly during this time as she strove to be like him and to live a well-lived life. She graduated with her sister in 1909 with a major in English Literature.<ref name="Caffrey"/> Unsure of what to do after college, she received an invitation from a wealthy trustee of the college to go on an all-expense-paid tour around [[Europe]]. Accompanied by two girls from [[California]] whom she had never met, Katherine Norton and Elizabeth Atsatt, she traveled through [[France]], [[Switzerland]], [[Italy]], [[German Empire|Germany]], and [[England]] for one year with the opportunity of various home-stays throughout the trip.<ref name="Caffrey"/>

Over the next few years, Ruth took up many different jobs. She first tried paid social-work for the Charity Organization Society; later she accepted a job as a teacher at the [[Harvard-Westlake School|Westlake School for Girls]] in [[Los Angeles]], [[California]]. While working there, she gained an interest in [[Asia]] that would later affect her choice of fieldwork as a working anthropologist. However, she was unhappy with that job as well and, after one year, left to teach English in [[Pasadena, California|Pasadena]] at the [[Miss Orton's Classical School for Girls|Orton School for Girls]].<ref name="Caffrey"/> Those years were difficult, and she experienced depression and severe loneliness.<ref name="Benedictjou">Benedict 1959: 118–155. "In spite of myself bitterness at having lived at all obsessed me; it seemed cruel that I had been born, cruel that, as my family taught me, I must go on living forever.... I am not afraid of pain, nor of sorrow. But this loneliness, this futility, this emptiness—I dare not face them."</ref> However, through reading authors like [[Walt Whitman]] and [[Richard Jefferies]], who stressed a worth, importance, and enthusiasm for life, she held onto hope for a better future.<ref name="Benedictjou"/>

The summer after her first year teaching at the Orton School, she returned home to the Shattucks' farm to spend some time in thought and peace. There, [[Stanley Rossiter Benedict]], an engineer at [[Weill Cornell Medical College|Cornell Medical College]], began to visit her at the farm. She had met him by chance in [[Buffalo, New York|Buffalo]], New York around 1910. That summer, Ruth fell deeply in love with Stanley as he began to visit her more, and she accepted his proposal for marriage.<ref name="Caffrey"/> Invigorated by love, she undertook several writing projects to keep busy besides the everyday housework chores in her new life with Stanley. She began to publish poems under different pseudonyms: Ruth Stanhope, Edgar Stanhope, and Anne Singleton.<ref name="Benedictdia">Benedict 1959: 55–79</ref> She also began work on writing a biography of [[Mary Wollstonecraft]] and other lesser-known women who (she felt) deserved more acknowledgement for their work and contributions.<ref name="Caffrey"/>

By 1918, the couple had begun to drift apart. Stanley suffered an injury that made him want to spend more time away from the city, and Ruth was not happy when the couple moved to [[Bedford Hills, New York|Bedford Hills]], far away from the city.