Journal #6: Alice Fletcher & Ruth Benedict

In 1989 two biographies were published about female anthropologists, each by a feminist author: A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians by Joan Mark and Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land. They were both reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Mary Beth Norton. The subjects of the biographies each led lives that did not fit harmoniously within mainstream culture. Despite their many similarities, their experiences also included many important differences.

Alice Fletcher was born in 1838, and shortly thereafter her father died. Apparently abused by a stepfather, Fletcher's household as an adult was "asexual." She lived with an "informally adopted" Native American with whom she carried on a somewhat mysterious relationship, and a writer/photographer named E. Jane Gay.

Fletcher worked as an allotment agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, assigning individual landholdings to Native Americans who resented having to abandon their traditions of communal property. In 1890, a woman named Mary Copley Thaw donated funding to the Peabody Museum to be used by Fletcher to study Native Americans. Fletcher, in time which provided her with "no female role models" and "no feminist theorists to guide her," became "one of the first people to do field work i the modern sense of the term." This renders it all the more significant that she demonstrated an interest in the role of women in both her own society and in that of Native Americans. F. W. Putnam, the male curator of the Peabody Museum, lent credibility to Fletcher's endeavors by virtue of his support for her work.

Ruth Benedict was born in 1887, and like Fletcher her father died when she was an infant. Like Fletcher, her domestic life was unconventional: she carried on a love affair with famed anthropologist Margaret Mead. And like Fletcher her career was lent critical support by a prestigious male. In Benedict's case, Franz Boas at Columbia University advocated for her to be made a regular faculty, which she finally was in 1931.

However, Alice Fletcher and Ruth Benedict lived in different eras. Benedict attended Vassar University, where she encountered impressive female professors. She ultimately received her doctorate. Benedict was familiar with feminist thinkers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner, and her work was overtly feminist. Her example as an accomplished female professional teaching at Columbia may help explain why Columbia produced far more female Ph.D.'s in anthropology than either Harvard or the University of California at Berkeley.

Works Referenced:

MARY BETH, NORTON. "ALIENS IN THE TRIBE." New York Times Book Review (1989): 20. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 16 Nov. 2010.