Ruth Landes/‘she-maverick’: A Jewish gendered late style

ABSTRACT

Landes’ anthropological theorizing, highlighting the connections between race, gender, sexuality and class, expressed an Eastern European Jewish female praxis well-established by the late 1920s and early ‘30s when Landes began her research career. Landes’ changing Jewish identification through her life resulted from gendered aging and the reformulation of Jewish racialization processes in the U.S. Her late life reflections are evidence of what Susan Watkins calls ‘gendered late-style’ as well as Jewish conceptions of time as anti-linear and counter-normative. I investigate how her Jewish socialist Yiddish-speaking family background inflected her interpersonal and professional networks and her writings on anti-racist, class and gender-based themes.

Abbreviations: RLP: Ruth Landes Papers; NAA: National Anthropological Archives; SI: Smithsonian Institution; RBP: Ruth Benedict Papers; ASC: Archives and Special Collections Library; VCL: Vassar College Libraries

KEYWORDS:

• Eastern European Jewish immigrant women
• history of Jews in anthropology
• Jewish women and aging
• gendered late style
• feminist anthropology

Acknowledgements

The archival research for this article was made possible by financial support from the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund, a program of the Reed Foundation. I would like to thank David Latham, the Program Director of the Reed Foundation for his continuous support of my research about Ruth Landes. I am grateful to the staff at the National Anthropological Archives including Jake Homiak, Lorain Wang, Caitlin Haynes and Adam Minakowski. I would like to thank Jean Rahier, Okezi Otovo, Alexandra Cornelius, Andrea Queeley and Vrushali Patil as well as the anonymous reviewers for comments on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Abby Suzanne Gondek http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5097-8910

Additional information

Funding

The archival research for this article was made possible by financial support from the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund, a program of the Reed Foundation.