Desley Deacon. Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xvi + 520 pp. $29.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-226-13907-4.
Reviewed by Stacy A. Cordery
Published on H-Women (November, 1998)
Desley Deacon, associate professor of Ameri‐ on sex and marriage. Parsons was a moral mod‐ can Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, ernist. Criticizing conventional--which is to say, has written a fascinating biography of a complex, stereotypically Victorian--morality, she publicly little-known, and clearly infuential woman. Dea‐ experimented in her private life. As Deacon puts con's thesis is that Elsie Clews Parsons (1874-1941) it, Elsie Clews Parsons pioneered "a new, fexible presaged and "helped create modernism" through morality based on sincerity and privacy," evident her life and work (p. xi). Parsons earned a doctor‐ in her desire to enable women and men to enjoy ate in education from Columbia University in "trial marriage, divorce by mutual consent, access 1899, with minor felds in sociology, philosophy to reliable contraception, independence and elas‐ and statistics. From Columbia she took an abiding ticity within relationships, and an increased em‐ interest in ethnology and anthropology, and it was phasis on obligations to children rather than to by using the latter that she worked to "free herself sexual partners (p. xii)." Gender equality was at from the black hole' of outmoded and unneces‐ the core of her philosophy and her approach to sary age, sex, marital, and cultural classifcations, life, an approach facilitated by her wealth. and the psychoses' they brought with them (p. Parsons challenged the conceptual apparatus 128)." She was also an unconventional daughter, and fscal infrastructure of American anthropolo‐ wife, and mother; a social critic; an author of gy, with its reliance on evolutionary theory and its prodigious output; a feld researcher; a benefac‐ privileging of male researchers. She joined with a tor; an intellectual inspiration for other scholars; distinguished group of graduate students whose and a feminist. cultural relativism was remaking the feld, and, as The principal claim of Deacon's work is that support for anthropological research evaporated, Parsons was in the vanguard of New York intellec‐ backed research from her own resources. Her an‐ tuals whose lives and work showed American so‐ thropological feldwork in the American South‐ ciety the way out of nineteenth-century strictures west changed the way that Americans thought H-Net Reviews about the Pueblo while altering the methodology Southwest Society. Her academic papers and that other anthropologists applied to their feld books refected the catholicism of her tastes. The studies. Deacon claims that Parsons "blazed the bibliography of Parsons's works and their reviews trail for almost all of the new' developments in published here runs to fourteen pages. The topics the discipline: acculturation studies, biography include withering critiques of the U.S. aristocracy, and autobiography, ethnohistory, community especially women's roles in it; sexual and birth studies, and applied anthropology (p. 373)." taboos, and child rearing and parenthood in dif‐ The combination of self-confdence, courage, ferent cultures; feminism; pacifsm; ethnological and intelligence with which this life's work began methodology; American folktales; African-Ameri‐ started when Elsie Clews was a young girl. Born to can culture; and the status of anthropology, the American aristocracy, she had all of her mate‐ among a great many others. Parsons published rial desires satisfed, and grew up with a stubborn scores of notes in academic journals of the cul‐ streak that stood her well frst as she defed her tures she observed, among them Filipino, Zuni, mother and insisted on a full education, and later Pueblo, African-American, Bahamian and West as she entered her chosen felds--all of them domi‐ Indian, Hopi, Tewa, and Mexican. She was well- nated by men. Formally trained by Franklin Gid‐ known because of her writings on myriad topics dings and Nicholas Murray Butler, and infuenced both in her scholarly communities and by the strongly by Gabriel Tarde, Pliny Goddard, Franz public. As a social critic, Parsons wrote letters to Boas, and Alfred Kroeber, Parsons defed the cate‐ editors and sent in articles to magazines which gories, both personal and professional, that her would have been read by a broader spectrum of colleagues found comforting. She began her pub‐ Americans. It is even more curious, therefore, that lic career by attacking the social mores of her Parsons should be so little remembered today. own class, and opened, in The Old-Fashioned Although the author weaves a seamless tapes‐ Woman (1913) "that woman' was an outmoded try between Parsons's public and private lives, the category kept alive only by the bizarre rituals of book's chief fascination is with Parson's ability to the Elders," or the New York old-money elite. Par‐ juggle them. A fne example of a feminist biogra‐ sons supported birth control and wrote about the phy, Deacon pays special attention to the nexus of advantages of separating childbearing from mar‐ Parsons's private life and her persona as scholar riage. These and other radical sentiments jeopar‐ and anthropologist. Gender remains at the center dized the career of her husband, politician Her‐ of the book as it did in Parsons's own life. It isn't bert Parsons. Their marriage became a proving just her non-traditional relationships with men ground for Elsie Clews Parsons's ideas. Overcom‐ that make the book fascinating--Parsons had in‐ ing her jealousy when her husband had an extra‐ teresting relationships with almost everyone. She marital afair, Parsons herself took lovers, includ‐ was a coach and, by the end of his professional ing architect Grant LaFarge and author Robert life a mentor, to Franz Boas. Deacon cites Mabel Herrick, whose thinly veiled novels tattled an ide‐ Dodge Luhan, Mary Simkhovitch, Alice Duer alized version of their long-running relationship. Miller, and Katherine Dexter McCormick as exam‐ Parsons made her mark in many felds. At ples of women friends--all of whom led iconoclas‐ various times in her career she was president of tic lives in their own way. Fascinating people the American Folklore Society, the frst female crossed Parsons's path, like Charlotte Perkins president of the American Anthropological Associ‐ Gilman, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Diego Rivera, ation, a lifetime member of Heterodoxy, a writer Walter Lippmann, Crystal Eastman, Ruth Bunzel, for The New Republic, and the founder of the
2 H-Net Reviews and Margaret Mead. These, of course, make the dress past neglect of this fascinating feminist and book an even more compelling read. her self-consciously modern career. In her rejection of strict categories in her per‐ Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights re‐ sonal life and in her professional life, Parsons ne‐ served. This work may be copied for non-proft gotiated a path to the modern. "Sexual plasticity," educational use if proper credit is given to the au‐ "cultural tolerance," and the "new woman" were, thor and the list. For other permission, please con‐ if not invented by Parsons, certainly honed and tact [email protected]. applied in her own life and work (p. xi). Parsons left behind the condescension of preceding an‐ thropologists toward other cultures, today a hall‐ mark of modern cultural anthropology. Deacon argues persuasively for including Elsie Clews Par‐ sons in our history courses and texts. As a for‐ ward-thinking, radical-living career woman well ahead of her time Parsons deserves the attention of historians, quite apart from the infuence she had on the specialized felds of ethnology and an‐ thropology though, oddly, Deacon does not com‐ ment on whether or not Parsons's corpus is still read by graduate students or taken seriously by anthropologists today. Deacon has punctuated her book with extend‐ ed, but never arcane, discussions of sociology, eth‐ nology, and anthropology to illuminate Parsons's battles. Elsie Clews Parsons is well-written, logi‐ cally argued, and amply supported with examples and evidence. The research is impressively thor‐ ough. Deacon consulted a number of archival sources, newspapers, family papers, secondary sources, and the copious writings of Parsons her‐ self. The notes are extensive and helpful, although a general bibliography would have added a useful tool. The bibliography in the book is the chrono‐ logical list of Parsons's works mentioned above; it is not a standard bibliography of Deacon's sources. The book's length probably makes it un‐ suitable for most undergraduate classes, but it would certainly generate discussion in a graduate course in women's history. Anyone with an inter‐ est in historical anthropology and the origins of cultural relativism would enjoy the book, and ev‐ ery historian of U.S. women ought to read it to re‐
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Citation: Stacy A. Cordery. Review of Deacon, Desley. Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life. H- Women, H-Net Reviews. November, 1998.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2500
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