Her father was Joseph Schlossberg, a cofounder and long-term secretary-general[3] of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

[6] Landes began researching the social organization and religious practices of marginalized subjects with her masters thesis on Black Jews in Harlem.

[7] Under Benedict's mentorship, Landes shifted her focus toward Native Americans, the more traditional anthropological subjects.

In Ojibwa Sociology and Ojibwa Woman, Landes provides notes on kinship, religious rites and social organization, and in the latter, through the tales of chief informant Maggie Wilson, reported how women navigated within gender roles to assert their economic and social autonomy.

In 1938–1939, Landes worked in Bahia, Brazil, to study religious syncretism and identity construction among Afro-Brazilian Candomblé practitioners.

She wrote that the women-centered sphere of candomblé was a source of power for certain disenfranchised blacks and a creative outlet for what she called "passive homosexuals.

"[8] In her published work on these findings, City of Women (1947), Landes discussed how racial politics in Brazil shape many candomblé practices.

In 1941 to 1945, she was the representative for African-American and Mexican-American Affairs on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Committee on Fair Employment Practices.

[10] Her final place of work, McMaster University, has established The Ruth Landes Prize awarded each year to the student who has demonstrated outstanding academic achievement in anthropology.