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Ruth Mcbride's Case Study

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When Ruth McBride was a teenager in Suffolk, VA, all she wanted was to be like the other teenagers in her school, white Anglo Saxon protestant Americans (McBride, 2006, p 109). In other words, she would have liked to conform to norms of the society that she spent most of her time with. However, because she was a Jew in the rural south in the 1930’s and 40’s, and because she was the child of an abusive and overbearing Orthodox Jewish father, she never had a chance to try (McBride, 2006). To conform to the norms of her society, Ruth would have had to remain obedient to her father and had as little interaction as possible with non-Jews and African American people but that was not what Ruth did. As a result of the situations that Ruth found …show more content…

Ruth had been forbidden to spend time with Frances or any other non-Jew by her father. As Myers tells us, there are four factors that determine obedience, emotional distance, closeness and legitimacy of the authority, whether the authority is part of an institution respected by the person and the effects of having an associate that is willing to be disobedient (Myers, 2015). There was an emotional distance between Ruth and her father as he had not shown love to his family. Because of this lack of a loving home, the emotional and physical abuse she endured, and the mistreatment of the African American people whose seeming happiness and warmth she admired, Ruth did not have a strong sense of her father’s authority. Similarly, she did not view the Jewish “institution’ her father was part of as legitimate because she had felt ostracized by them due to their judgment of her family business. Lastly, Ruth had a confederate in Frances, as she was willing to break with the social norms of her society and befriend Ruth (Myers, 2015; McBride, 2006). Ruth was starved for love and companionship and perhaps for someone else to confirm her worth because she lacked this in her home life (McBride, 2006). Having taken this small step to nonconformity, it was easier for Ruth to move on to larger acts of nonconformity. Similar to the foot-in-the-door phenomenon and Milgram’s experiments described

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