Dyk, Ruth (1901–2000)

views updated

Dyk, Ruth (1901–2000)

American suffragist and psychologist. Born Ruth Belcher, Mar 25, 1901, in Portland, Maine; grew up in Newton Center, Massachusetts; died Nov 18, 2000, in Rochester, NY; dau. of Annie Manson Belcher (one of the 1st women admitted to Tufts Medical School) and Arthur Fuller Belcher (lawyer); attended Wellesley College; Simmons College, MA in economics; also attended University of Wisconsin and University of California at Berkeley; m. Walter Dyk (anthropologist, died 1972); children: Timothy Dyke (judge); Penelope Carter.

Worked as a psychiatric social worker with delinquent girls in upstate NY, then as a researcher at the Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York in Brooklyn; wrote Anxiety in Pregnancy and Childbirth (1950), Psychological Differentiation (1962), and (with husband) Left Handed (1980), an anthropological study of Navajo Indians; an active suffragist in her early years, was campaigning for women in politics at age 99.