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Elsie Clews Parsons

Elsie was born in 1875 to an affluent and politically involved family. Her father was a banker and her mother was a socialite. Elsie was different from most girls at an early age. Her parents had a loveless marriage and from this upbringing she was motivated to question her parent’s sexual and social world. At a very early age she rebelled against the roles of women, and would escape through books. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of her favorite authors when she was young. Her mother wanted her to follow the expected role of a debutante, but Elise wanted more from her life and pursued her education. First she attended  Bernard College and received her AB after completing Bernard she when on to Columbia for her PhD in Sociology. At Columbia she met Franklin Giddings who she intellectually connected to and both were involved with the Settlement movement which tried to bring the rich and the poor closer together. As Elsie pursued her discipline she met Gabriel Tarde, Elsie truly connected with Tarde and his “notions of imitation, invention and conversation gave Elsie the basis of her life’s work”(Deacon 37). Elsie loved the outdoors and was very comfortable camping and participating in boating, kayaking and other outdoor activities. When she needed down time being outdoors reinvigorated her. She was a woman whose ideas were ahead of her time. She wrote many papers on family and sexuality and was a rebel for her time. In 1900 she married Herbert Parsons a politically active lawyer and what was known as an experimental marriage. It was experimental because she wanted to see if a career woman could have a career, marriage and children and be successful at all three. Parsons wrote 4 major papers during this period “Religious Chasty” (1913), “The Old Fashioned Women “(1913) “Fear and Conventionality” (1914) “Social Freedom” (1915) and “Social Rule” (1916). These papers did not make her very popular with the Church or main stream society. These were radical ideas for a woman of these times. Elsie entered Anthology at a time when the discipline was new. Her gang and mentors were Alexander Goldenweiser, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, and Pliny Goddard. Parson’s worked with Pliny Goddard on an ethnological study in 1913 and his methods in the field helped to clarify her ideas in the field. He had great respect and admiration for her work. Parsons embraced feminism and believed that feminism was linked to Anthropology. “She was a passionate participant yet a cool observer”(Deacon122).She believed that sex was one of the most difficult barriers to cross. She was pro-birth control and never had a problem expressing her radical views. She wanted to live her life without the constraints of society and wanted to “reconstruct herself as a truly new woman who was, as she put it unclassified and unclassifiable”(Deacon 130). Herbert was on the committee for Public lands when he was asked to travel to New Mexico Elsie went with him. It was on the trip that she met “Clara True who was a rancher, horse trader, school teacher and was the deputy excise commissioner for the Indian Bureau” (Deacon 84). She stayed with her on her ranch and rode through the ranch on horseback with an Indian guide. She became fascinated by the area and Indian culture, and she was more interested in what the guide would not tell her. It was not the Archeology that she was interested in, it was the culture. Parsons made many trips to the southwest between 1910 until 1941 conducting ethnographic studies of the Pueblo Indians. Two of the papers she wrote on the Southwestern Indians are “Tewa Tales” in 1926 and “Pueblo Indian Religion’ in 1939. Parson presented her landmark paper on “Spanish Elements “ in 1928 at the International Congress of Americanists in New York. Parson died as she lived, unconventional. Her wishes were that she be “cremated and her ashes left at the crematory, if they cannot be left there then burial, but not in a cemetery and without a grave stone, no funeral, and no religious services whatsoever”(Deacon 378). Her children fulfilled her wishes.



Works Citation

Deacon, Desley. Elsie Clews Parsons : Inventing Modern Life. University of Chicago Press, 1997. Women in Culture and Society. EBSCOhost, lsproxy.austincc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.lsproxy.austincc.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=42094&site=ehost-live.

http://www.greatarchaeology.com/archaeologist_list.php?archaeologist=162

http://amphilsoc.org/collections/view?docId=ead/Mss.Ms.Coll.29-ead.xml