A native of Kevil, Kentucky, Ruth Stephens received a certificate from Western Kentucky State Normal School at Bowling Green in 1915. She then taught high school in Paducah. In 1934 she had received the MA degree and was working toward the PhD degree at Indiana University at Bloomington (awarded in 1934) when she joined the university faculty in 1929 as an instructor.
For more than 30 years (she retired in 1960), she taught history and current events—not only in the regular program but also in evening and extension classes and to any club or civic group that would listen. She made literally thousands of speeches and appeared as a news commentator regularly on local radio stations and then on television. In 1931 she was the recipient of a Carnegie Fellowship for World Peace, through which she studied international law at George Washington University and did research in the Library of Congress. She was the first woman in the College of Liberal Arts (now Arts and Sciences) to hold the academic rank of full professor.