Benedict died on September 17, 1948.

Sponsor Message.

After Benedict's death Mead took on the leadership of Research in Contemporary Cultures, concluding the work in 1951. She remained true to Benedict's vision of the project as an interdisciplinary and non-hierarchical enterprise that would highlight the perspective of women on society. Another important goal for Benedict was to create a working culture in which cooperation was valued. The result was extraordinarily successful: over fifty publications were produced.

In tribute to her mentor, Mead, who was Benedict's literary executor, wrote a biography of Benedict that included selections of her work and edited an extensive collection of Benedict's writings, An Anthropologist at Work (1959). In the introduction to the latter book, Mead said that she wanted "to set down what will otherwise be lost about how Ruth Benedict became a figure of transition, binding the broken sureties of a past age, to which she was fully heir, to the uncertainties which precede a new integration in human thinking, for we shall not look upon her like again."

Anthropology, the first of the social science disciplines to take sexuality--and particularly homosexuality--seriously as a field of intellectual inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has achieved a new impetus in the post-Stonewall era.

Blending elements from indigenous traditions and recently imported Western discourses of sexual identity, Japan is home to one of the most diverse and dynamic queer cultures in Asia.

A social role for individuals who crossed or mixed male and female characteristics was one of the most widely distributed institutions of native North America.

Although she was one of the most prominent and widely admired American anthropologists of her generation, Margaret Mead chose to keep her own bisexuality a secret.

The aesthetic of the important and influential Victorian critic Walter Pater reflected a homosexual sensibility.