Behind the Scenes Minis: Lucy and Ruth

Published Jun 9, 2023, 4:00 PM

Holly talks about some of the details about Lucy Stone's life and husband that didn't make it into the episode. Tracy tells a story about first hearing of Ruth Benedict in an episode of "Designing Women."

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Molly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

We talked about Lucy Stone at Last, who we both thought we had done an episode on already, and we yeah, I mean her name's come up a number of times in prior episodes, but not her own one. Yeah, And I really, as I read about her and did more research, I really was just struck by what a good person she was. Some of it is very sad, though, Like there's an incident early on in her life that I was like, on the one hand, like this clearly shows the impulse of her heart to be very kind, and also no kids should ever do that, which is that when she was still pretty young, she was quite sick on and off for like a year, but she didn't tell her parents and she hid it because she didn't want her mom to have to do her chores for her, which is the sweetest and saddest thing on the planet.

Right.

Oh, her dad is a mixed bag. I mean, she definitely seemed like she grieved him, but and I think she loved him, but he wasn't particularly nurturing in a lot of ways, Like at one point he said really unkind things to her about her looks, and like, it's weird because there are a lot of writings about how oh Lucy was not very pretty, but then I've seen pictures and some of them she's very, very pretty, and Henry thought she was beautiful, So like, this is not cool.

Don't do that to your kids. There was a quote from her.

That really both broke my heart and that I really loved, because she was talking about like the difficulty of being the outlier, who is like a woman who refuses to fit into what people expect. She said, my mother always tried to submit. I never could, and how it just made her like angry to even think about it. That pay inequality that we talked about early on. Yeah, her first real taste of it personally was that one of her brothers was a school teacher and when he got six, she substituted for him, and that is how she found out that women were making like half of what men were. She's like, I taught the exact same courses, right, what's up with that? There was one thing about her relationship with Henry that I didn't include because I never really found a real source for it, and it's like a rumory, gossipy thing. But the place I saw at first was on the Library of Congress website where they printed an image. They included an image of her protest pamphlet that she wrote with Henry, and they mentioned like, hey, this wasn't all a sunny marriage, Like there were rumors of infidelity on his part, And I'm like, what where, Like, I don't, yeah, I don't know where that is. It's only ever very like obliquely mentioned, and it's never there's never any detail, which to me is like, so I didn't want to include it in the episode, but if you go looking and you see that, that's what's up. There are two other things about Henry that I wanted to mention. One is that not all of his family was actually okay with this marriage. Oh yeah, even though they all seemed to welcome her and be very friendly with her and admired her when he was like, we're getting married, apparently Elizabeth Blackwell in particular and one of their other sisters was like, We're like, yuck, why are you marrying a poor farmer?

Right?

It's like, oh no, I want to love you, Please don't be classistant Gris.

Yeah, I thought about.

Re airing her episode since she comes up in this one, but we've already run her as a Saturday Classic, and at least so far, we have not done a second round of Saturday Classics for the same episode.

Yeah.

I don't know if at some point we'll revisit that, because now we've been doing Saturday Classics for so long that some of there's some that you know, they were a Saturday Classic years ago.

Yeah, I don't know, but at this point we haven't been. So.

There's also this story about Henry and this is aside from his weird racist open letter, which is yeah, freaky digee, but this is to me funnier unless dark, although it is also not very complimentary of him, which is that at the Women's convention in Cleveland, which I think was the eighteen fifty three one, he decided he would like.

To speak no, no, oh, no, how'd that go?

He apparently rambled for like an hour about what it meant to be like a man and a husband that truly supports their wife. And I mean, I feel like I've actually heard the speech from people. But one of the papers made this comment that is so cutting but also made me chuckle, which was he forgot it was a women's convention.

Whoop.

I like, whoops. That made me laugh real hard. I don't know how she would have taken that, you know. Yeah, yeah, It's always hard to hear criticism of your beloved, and I'm sure they both heard plenty of it because they were very controversial in many ways, but it was kind of funny. I also didn't talk about the fact that she got thrown out of her church for being too radical at one point, oh wow, because it was very similar to the way that things went down with her schools, where it was like, you have to stop trying to make everybody an abolitionist at your level. You're too radical about it. You need to ease people into these ideas. And she was like nope. So I marvel at her. There's also another beautiful story, and I debated over whether I could tell this because it's very moving to me for some reason that I read in one of her biographies where they were talking about her at the end of her life and we talked about how pragmatic she was, but that as her body was failing towards the end, It was like, as a part of her body would fail, she would thank it for having taken care of her throughout her life.

Oh wow.

Instead of being like, oh now my leg won't move anymore, she'd be like, thank you, leg, you carried me a long way.

I don't know if that's not a quote.

I don't know if that's how she worded it, but like, what a beautiful way to approach the end of your life, like being grateful for everything, especially for someone that had not had an easy life. Right. She seemed to always kind of lead with gratitude, which is a really admirable and beautiful thing. Anyway, I have a lot of admiration for Lucy Stone. I'm sure there was some way in which she was a pill, but gosh, she mostly seems pretty great. I don't understand the thing with her husband's weird racist rant, and I don't know how she handled it, but no, that will.

Have to stay in mystery.

This week on the show, we talked about Ruth Fulton Benedict, and I am pretty sure the first time I ever heard her name was an episode of the TV show Designing Women.

That seems right.

There's an episode where they go on a trip to this like health spa, and Susanne decides that she's gonna get revenge on Julia and Mary Joe by memorizing all the answers to the copy of Trivial Pursuit. And so she bought two copies of game, one of them to freshly unwrap while they were there so it would look like it was a brand new game, but she bought a second copy. She I'm not really spoiling anything of this thirty some year old TV show, maybe longer than that at this point, just like this is the setup of the whole thing. But they have several of the you know, of the questions that they ask, and one of them is something like, you know, this anthropologist wrote the work patterns of Culture, and Julia and Mary Joe in Unison go Margaret Meade and Charlene goes raw. And that has really stuck in my head. So sometimes I'll just be minding my own business and my brain is like, Margaret mead Raw, that's great, And then Susanne goes, please Ruth Benedict, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

I have a lot of love for that show.

There are many aspects of it that have not aged well, and that episode has a lot of them.

So just be forewarned if you go to look that up.

Delightful show that was written in its tongue, it was.

Very written in it.

Yes, so yeah, there's a lot of body shaming in that episode in particular. So I really struggled as I was writing this on how much to focus on the many things you can criticize about Ruth Benedict's work, because we are talking about anthropological texts from like a hundred years ago at a time when the field was early in its process of trying to break away from a lot of eurocentrism and racism, right, So it's just it's got an underpinning that's fraught. Yeah, But like I still I wanted to talk about her life and her work and her influence and also acknowledge that, like, if you go read this, there's a lot of stuff in there that is imperfect at best. I watched a lecture that was about the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which described picking it apart point by point as almost a rite of passage for like anthropologists who were gonna focus on Japan, Like this is sort of like a thing that everybody goes through and their education is like totally picking apart her work because it's so often something that was like attempting to come from a better, more thoughtful place, and then parts of it you're like this, this is not correct. Though she wrote a lot about indigenous cultures in North America, she wrote a lot about the uh like sex and gender in indigenous cultures, including people that we might describe as like broadly in the umbrella of like transgender history today, right, And like, I was not even comfortable using some of the same terms that she used in that because while I think like that was the term that was used with her informants, it's a term that one hundred years later has very different connotations, and it was just all very complicated.

So I hope we.

Were able to adequately acknowledge the fact that it's like, as a body of work, it's gonna be fraught. But also she was really groundbreaking and influential in a lot of ways.

Right.

That's always like the trick when there's a person who is like the most progressive person of a time, and she was pretty progressive in a lot of ways. Yeah, that doesn't mean they're always the most progressive. Yeah, right, because of the evolution of thought and culture, which I wonder if she would be fascinated today. Yeah, like, oh, everything has changed in so many ways so quickly.

But I don't know.

Yeah, if you read like old biographies of her, there's no mention of Ruth Valentine, there's no mention of Natalie Raymond.

There's maybe like rumor.

About her having a relationship with Margaret Meade. And as is incredibly often the case, this is not because the people who were writing about her seventy years ago, let's say, were like trying.

To hide something.

Most of the detail that we have about all those relationships is contained in letters between Ruth Benderdict and Margaret Meade. And Margaret Meade concealed all of those letters until, like it was in the terms of her will that they could not be available for researchers to access until like the nineteen nineties. And it wasn't just because of these relationships. It a lot of it was just, you know, there's gossip in between them about people who were still alive right at the time, right, And you don't necessarily want your person to a correspondence with all of your gossip being open to scholars while you're still alive. So I love the idea of her calculating how long will all the people we talk trash about live?

And when is this?

When is the public letters? It's it's really only been biographies that have been written since approximately nineteen ninety nine that have talked more about these relationships, especially in a either mentioning them at all or in a concrete way, like the biography that Margaret Mead wrote of Ruth Benedict doesn't mention Natalie Raymond at all.

It does mention Ruth Balentine.

That quote that we read about her remaining quietly alive until Ruth Falentine got back from California. That's for Margaret Mead's biography. But Margaret me does not elaborate on that relationship in any way, which is unsurprising given that this was like a biography that she wrote in nineteen fifty nine. So anyway, if you read much earlier stuff, you get a very different view of her personal life and her love life because that was the information that historians had to work from. Like that, there are some some biographies that are like in from the nineteen eighties or nineties where there were interviews with people who were like, oh, yeah, they were definitely a couple. But even then, like it was many many years after Ruth Benedict had died before any like people were willing to talk about that because there was so much stigma and so much.

Illegality and all of that.

Right. I also always wonder in those situations where even if some researcher has come across hints of the reality of the relationship, like if it doesn't even occur to them, yeah, you know what I mean, Where it's like if someone who is very much heterosexual is doing that research, if it doesn't even cross their mind that this could be a romantic relationship, they're like, oh, they were just good buddies, right. That has I think, you know, left a lot of stories, I'm told because it's just like not not a lens everyone would have well, And I think that's probably less the case for somebody now where I live in a world where in a lot I'm not gonna stay everywhere, But like, there are a lot more like out same sex couples now than when I was a teen, Like I did not know an outgay adult at all.

Until I was in college.

So like there's just a different worldview in play now versus in the like fifties and sixties.

Right, And.

As you know, there was a gay but the gay rights movement was becoming more visible to people who were not already part of it. Like that's still just like not a part of people's worldview necessarily. I think sometimes there are people on the Internet who talk about it in like an incredibly dismissive way, Like it's not because historians are dummy dumbheads. It's that everybody is working within the cultural framework that they are living in. And also in a lot of cases, we are talking about people who like intentionally went through all of their own personal writings and destroyed all of the pages that referenced their partner, right, Like, uh So, anyway, anyway, if you go read stuff about her that was written just forever ago, it's gonna be very different. I also just want to once again I recommended this on the show before, but there was a podcast called Sapiens. The fourth season of it is called Our Paths of the Future, and it's all about how black and Indigenous scholars are transforming the field of archaeology. There is some discussion of anthropology as related to it, and the last episode in particular, talks about w. Montague Cobb we've covered on the show before and the collection of human remains that he that he collected for study, and some conversation about like whether it is time to lay all of those people to rest. So I highly recommend the whole season of that podcast. Based on my listening of that season, I feel like probably the whole rest of the podcast is great, but that is the only season of it that I have actually listened to. So so anyway, if you're interested in how the field has changed and continues change through the influence of black and Indigenous scholars, that is a thing to listen to. Happy Friday, whatever is happening on your weekend. I hope it is great. I hope you don't make any embarrassing mistakes in public that can stick around for the rest of your life. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and on Monday with a brand new episode. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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