Working Woman https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/29/review...

June 29, 1997

By TANYA LUHRMANN

A life of Elsie Clews Parsons, social rebel and founding mother of

anthropology
ELSIE CLEWS
PARSONS
his is the biography of a woman so interesting and
Inventing Modern Life.
effective -- a cross between Margaret Mead and
By Desley Deacon.
Georgia O'Keeffe -- that it is strange to reflect that,
Illustrated. 520 pp.
even as a member of a field she helped to establish, I Chicago:
had only a dim sense of who she was. Elsie Clews The University of
Parsons was born into the higher reaches of New York Chicago Press. $29.95.
society in 1874. She was an oppositional, if brilliant,
child. At 22, forced to accompany her mother to Paris
for the summer, she spent the months in the library translating Gabriel Tarde's
''Laws of Imitation,'' a study of the psychological processes of change. She
insisted not only on attending Barnard College but on taking a doctorate (in
education) at Columbia in 1899. ''Bear in mind,'' her aggrieved mother wrote to
her, ''that you have been allowed to direct your own life as against what we
thought best -- and we cannot see what it will lead to.'' When she was 32 (and
married to a Congressman) she published a book, ''The Family'' (1906), which
argued for candid sexual education, trial marriage and premarital sexual
exploration. ''Radical,'' The New York Herald exclaimed, and it and the rest of the
popular press proceeded to deplore ''the morality of the barnyard.'' She landed
eventually in anthropology, a natural home for intellectual social rebels, and
became one of its founding mothers.

Anthropology was unusually important to public debate in the early 20th century.
Against the prevailing enthusiasm for eugenics and for a social evolutionary
theory that now seems frankly racist, anthropologists argued that culture, not
biology, determined human experience. Parsons had already begun to use
ethnography to try to effect social change. Her wittiest book, ''The Old-Fashioned
Woman'' (1912), treats New York's elite society ethnographically, noting that
''woman'' was an outmoded category kept alive only by the elders' bizarre rituals.
But she didn't view culture the way other anthropologists (Franz Boas, Alfred
Kroeber) were beginning to see it, as something so powerful as to be
''superorganic'' and essentially benign. For her there was a fundamental tension
between social expectation and personal fulfillment. Her approach, further
developed by Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, ultimately became one of the

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Working Woman https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/29/review...

discipline's dominant concerns.

In August 1915, Parsons set out for her first field trip to the Zuni, then a nine-
hour drive south from Gallup, N.M. She stayed two weeks (she still produced
nine articles) but returned soon, to begin a life that seems enviably romantic now:
frequent trips to live in and around pueblos; occasional trips to the Bahamas and
elsewhere to collect folklore; periods in New York full of teaching, scholarship,
family and friends. ''Zuni is even more beautiful than usual,'' she wrote to her
husband in 1918 -- ''yellow blooms and marvelous sunsets.'' She became an
important benefactor, underwriting research positions and fieldwork. She was
greatly admired in the profession, and was elected the first woman president of
the American Anthropological Association in 1941, the year she died.

What I found most fascinating is the grace with which she lived by her principles.
Desley Deacon, an associate professor of American studies at the University of
Texas, Austin, describes this as ''inventing modern life.'' Parsons took lovers,
often for long periods, and abandoned them if they interfered with her work. She
hated convention for its own sake, and she seems to have had a decent sense of
humor about the occasional resulting chaos. Many male anthropologists had a
hard time categorizing her; there are charming exchanges between Parsons and
Kroeber in which the exasperated Parsons points out that she wants a collaborator
and Kroeber clearly has different goals.

In ''Elsie Clews Parsons,'' Deacon is perhaps too scrupulously cautious in not

expanding beyond archival facts, but she creates nonetheless a nuanced portrait
of this vivid woman. It is an honor to realize that she is an ancestor of my tribe.

Tanya Luhrmann is an anthropologist at the University of California, San Diego.

Her most recent book is ''The Good Parsi.''

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