Editing Ruth Benedict (section)

===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.