Elsie Clews was born in New York City on November 27, 1875 to a socially prominent family. Her father, Henry Clews, founder of a New York bank, was the son of an immigrant Staffordshire potter, and her mother was Lucy Madison Worthington. Even as a young child, Elsie Clews showed an independence and determination that did not go well with the debutante role that her social position required her to conform to. Early on she was a critic of the very upper class society her family belonged to. She refused the debutante role her family expected of her and pursued an education instead. She entered the newly founded Barnard College, from which she received her A. B. degree in 1896. She continued her studies at Columbia University, receiving her Master of Arts degree in 1897 and her Ph.D. in 1899 in Sociology.
She taught sociology at Barnard College from 1899 to 1902 and was a Lecturer at Columbia from 1902 to 1905. In 1900 she married New York attorney, Herbert Parsons. They had four children who survived infancy: Elsie ("Lissa," 1901), John Edward (1903), Herbert (1909), and Henry McIlvaine (1911). She left her teaching position when her husband was elected to Congress in 1905 and the family moved to Washington, D. C. From then on Elsie Clews Parsons spent her considerable energy writing. Serious controversies arose in 1906 when her book, The Family, was published. She was condemned for her feminist ideas that were very radical for the time. She ignored the criticism and continued to write on subjects she believed to be important. Though in 1913, when her book, Religious Chastity, was published, she used the name "John Main", so that her husband's political career would not be damaged. She was active in the organization, Women's Peace Party, during World War I, and was an outspoken advocate of pacifism.
She not only believed in the need for equality for women but was a strong advocate for male equality as well. The extramarital affairs she and her husband engaged in furthered her ideas about the need for gender equality. In her 1906 book she shocked many when she wrote about the issue of trial marriage, her belief that sex education should be taught candidly and her approval of premarital sexual exploration. Her early books did receive attention in the press, but they did not sell well. The Family, as of January 31, 1918, had sold only 3,904 copies. Old Fashioned Woman had sold 1,193, Fear and Conventionality 690, Social Freedom 427, and Social Rule 281. Mr. Putnam said she would have to pay a subsidy when she submitted the manuscript of Social Freedom, as he said it would not appeal to scholars or the general reader. She had to underwrite the publication of both Social Freedom and Social Rule. Even though her early sociological works were considered unimportant by scholars and the public, their merits were appreciated by critic H. L. Mencken. "I know of no other work," he said, " which offers a better array of observations upon that powerful complex of assumptions, prejudices, instinctive reactions, racial emotions and unbreakable vices of mind which enters so massively into the daily thinking of all of us."
She became more interested in anthropology during the late 1910s. After a trip to the southwest and seeing American Indian cultures first hand, she started what some call the second phase of her career. The rest of her life was spent doing field research in New Mexico, Arizona, Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean. She was still interested in the interrelation between personality and culture. As she continued her work, she was less outspoken about her ideals and became known as the "quiet feminist". She believed her work would speak for her. Her first interest was in the Pueblo Indian culture of the American Southwest, a culture that demanded even more conformity than her own. After twenty -five years of research and the publication of numerous articles, her research was published in two volumes, Pueblo Indian Religion, originally published in 1939 and recently reissued in paperback by the University of Chicago Press. Franz Boas, one of the founders of modern anthropology, described these volumes as containing "a summary of practically all we know about Pueblo religion and an indispensable source book for every student of Indian life." Her fascination with Spanish influences and her desire to study cultures still very much alive and functioning led her to do extensive fieldwork in Mexico. The book that resulted was Mitla, Town of the Souls (1936).
Folk-Lore of the Antilles, French and English (3 vols., 1933-43) is considered outstanding in its field. In Negro folklore her contributions were so extensive as to lead Melvile Herskovits to describe them, after her death, as "the bulk of the available material in this field: they are so important that no significant work can be done in the future without using them as a base." The distinguished University of California at Berkeley anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, described how her career had its beginning. "Her society had encroached on her," he wrote after her death, "she studied the science of society to better to fight back against society." All of her books in her early sociological studies was concerned with the free expression of personality in the face of the constraints of convention.
Her achievements as an anthropologist were widely recognized by her colleagues. She was President of the American Folklore Society in 1919-20 and served as Associate Editor of its journal from 1918 until her death. She served as treasurer (1916-22) and president (1923-25) of the American Ethnological Society. Most significant, in 1940 she was the first woman elected President of the American Anthropological Association.
Some of her other publications are:
The Old Fashioned Woman (1913)
Fear and Conventionality (1914)
Social Freedom (1915)
Social Rule (1916)
Elsie Clews Parsons died on December 19, 1941 in New York City.
Parsons, Elsie Clews. A Woman's Quest for Science: Portrait of Anthropologist Elsie Clews Parson
Lavender, Professor Catherine
1998 Elsie Clews Parsons, The Journal of a Feminist. Electronic document, http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/parsons.html , accessed July 24, 2009.
Reichard, Gladys E.
1943 Elsie Clews Parsons. The Journal of American Folklore,
56(219):45-48.
Written by: Lillian Dolentz, 2009