Ruth Fulton Benedict (June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909. After studying anthropology at the New School of Social Research under Elsie Clews Parsons, she entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1921, where she studied under Franz Boas. She received her Ph.D. and joined the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she shared a romantic relationship, and Marvin Opler were among her students and colleagues. Benedict was president of the American Anthropological Association and also a prominent member of the American Folklore Society. She became the first woman to be recognized as a prominent leader of a learned profession. She can be viewed as a transitional figure in her field by redirecting both anthropology and folklore away from the limited confines of culture-trait diffusion studies and towards theories of performance as integral to the interpretation of culture. She studied the relationships between personality, art, language, and culture and insisted that no trait existed in isolation or self-sufficiency, a theory that she championed in her 1934 book Patterns of Culture. Early life Childhood Benedict was born Ruth Fulton in New York City on June 5, 1887, to Beatrice (Shattuck) and Frederick Fulton. Her mother worked in the city as a school teacher, and her father was a homeopathic doctor and surgeon. Although Mr. 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. His illness caused the family to move back to Norwich, New York, to the farm of Ruth's maternal grandparents, the Shattucks. A year later, he died ten days after he had returned from a trip to Trinidad to search for a cure. Mrs. Fulton was deeply affected by her husband's passing. Any mention of him caused her to be overwhelmed by grief; every March, she cried at church and in bed. Ruth hated her mother's sorrow and viewed it as a weakness. For Ruth, the greatest taboos in life were crying in front of people and showing expressions of pain. She reminisced, "I did not love my mother; I resented her cult of grief." 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