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But Those Upon Whose Title Page There Would Stand “A Fighter Against His Age.” PREFACE If you want biographies, do not desire those which bear the legend, “Herr So-and-so and his age,” but those upon whose title page there would stand “a fighter against his age.” -Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations ELSIE Clews Parsons was “a carrier of culture rather than its freight.” Born in 1874 in the wake of the American Civil War, she helped create modernism-a new way of thinking about the world that has given the twentieth century its distinctive character-and she applied it, not to art or literature, but to life itself. Eric Hobs- bawm, in his magisterial overview, concludes that the major revolu- tion of the twentieth century-the one that has, in his words, brought millions of people out of the Middle Ages-is the revolu- tion in social relations. Elsie Clews Parsons-feminist, anthropolo- gist, public intellectual-was a leader in this revolution, using the new cultural anthropology to “kill” nineteenth-century ideas of classification and hierarchy, and to establish new twentieth-century standards of sexual plasticity and cultural tolerance. In a new world that stressed secularism, empiricism, honesty, pluralism in thought and social relationships, and a fluid and constantly evolving self, the “new woman” was, in Parsons’s words, “the woman not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable.” And a vital culture was one that could, like the Southwestern Pueblos she studied, “keep definite cultural patterns in mobile combination.” The assertion of sexual plasticity and cultural mobility was part of the modernist project to repudiate history, to deconstruct estab- lished theoretical systems and their related concepts and classifica- tions, and to demolish existing systems of values. Central to this “transvaluation of values” was the feminist destruction of the nineteenth-century concepts of “woman” and “family,” and the creation of new, pragmatic relationships and moralities based on experience and experiment. Closely associated with this feminist xii I Preface project was a dismantling of hierarchical racial classifications and the assertion of the value and interrelatedness of all cultures. The life of Elsie Clews Parsons exemplifies this movement from nineteenth-century to modernist thought and practice. Born into the New York elite in 1874, she gained a doctorate from Columbia University in 1899 in the face of considerable family opposition. She married Republican politician Herbert Parsons in 1900 in what she considered an “experimental” relationship, and over the next few years, she helped establish Greenwich House settlement and taught sociology at Barnard College through two pregnancies. Between 1905 and 1917, as she painfully worked out a modernist combination of family and work, Parsons wrote extensively in a distinctive, spare, witty style on sex roles, sexual morality, and the family. Using ethnographic data to devastating effect, she detonated the concepts of “woman,” “progress,” “civilized,” and “moral” that were basic to nineteenth-century systems of thought. But she was more interested in inventing the future than in destroying the past. If the modern condition was to be orphaned, widowed, and deracinated, as her mother’s family were by the Civil War, Parsons’s modernist project was to reconstitute social relationships in a man- ner that was appropriate to the twentieth century-to make each precious relationship count; to ensure that no person or group was excluded by virtue of race, sex, age, or national boundaries from the circle of possible social contacts; and to assure all groups entry to new forms of social organization, such as the invisible college of professional work. She argued persuasively, therefore, for a new, flexible morality based on sincerity and privacy that included trial marriage, divorce by mutual consent, access to reliable contracep- tion, independence and elasticity within relationships, and an in- creased emphasis on obligations to children rather than to sexual partners. In 1906, Parsons was denounced from the pulpits for her endorse- ment of trial marriage. But from 1912 she found a receptive audi- ence among young intellectuals, especially the women and men who were beginning to call themselves “feminists,” and the mainly immi- grant students of anthropologist Franz Boas, who were energetically reconstructing anthropology along modernist scientific lines. Mod- ern cultural anthropology, with its skepticism of nineteenth-century systems of thought, its emphasis on the flexibility and relativity of all cultures, and the importance it placed on careful, and often arduous, PREFACE I xiii fieldwork, provided Parsons with the perfect vehicle for becoming the archetypal modern professional woman-physically and intel- lectually adventurous, independent, many-sided, mobile, adaptable. From 1915, when the youngest of her four children entered school, anthropology became the center of her intellectual and collegial life, and in the process, she undertook extended periods of fieldwork in the American Southwest, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Elsie Clews Parsons brought to anthropology a determination to use its methods to educate the public to accept and welcome sexual and cultural diversity. She used her wealth to support cultural an- thropology when its association with “queer foreigners” during the Americanization mania of the First World War threatened its col- lapse; and she encouraged innovation and diversity in the discipline by attracting and supporting radical young graduate students- many of them women. She used her social position and her hard- won self-assurance to break the sexual taboos against unmarried men and women working together in the field. And she used her notoriety as a clever and outspoken member of the intellectual avant-garde to combat “Nordic nonsense” about racial purity, and to illustrate from her own work on the Pueblos of the American Southwest and the townspeople of Mitla, Mexico, the vigor created by a “tangle and fusion” of cultures. Her contributions to the disci- pline were recognized in 1941 when she became president of the American Anthropological Association-the first woman to be elected to that position. Elsie Clews Parsons was a true “modern” in that she put her ideas into practice in her own life, testing the new relationships and mo- ralities she advocated. Her “experimental life,” which included mar- riage, children, lovers, and friends, adventurous and arduous travel, and professional commitment and distinction, demonstrated to an interested public the practical working out of modernism by one of its pioneering theorists. Appropriately for someone born the same year as the first Impressionist exhibition, Parsons’s life can be com- pared to a modernist work of art, composed of a number of separate elements that merge in different ways and frustrate any attempt by the viewer to impose an order or a category. We could say also that her life followed the canons of modernist science, the object of continual inquiry and experimentation. Parsons’s life is richly documented in her extensive personal and professional papers and in the memoirs, fiction, and private papers xiv I Preface of her friends and colleagues. In particular, her difficult and enig- matic relationship with her husband, Herbert Parsons, is docu- mented in almost daily letters during their frequent separations; many of her field trips with the artist, photographer, and architect Grant LaFarge are detailed in his unpublished writing; and her mod- ernist approach to work and love is unsparingly dissected by Robert Herrick in a series of best-selling stories and novels based on their relationship. In addition, Parsons herself, like any good modernist, used her own experience as data for her intellectual work, some- times incorporating illustrations from life, sometimes reworking sit- uations and events in fictional form. Again, as a modernist, she was keenly aware of the difference the teller makes to the story, and she developed from childhood a spare, precise style in which every word was carefully chosen and placed. Parsons and her modernist friends and associates were, by definition, deliberately and articulately self- conscious. I have tried to present their distinctive voices and perspec- tives as much as possible, presenting multiple narratives where they are available, not presenting any one of them as truth. But the story in this book is, in the end, my own, very personal selection and reconstruction, and in that telling, perhaps reveals as much about me, a late-twentieth-century woman, as it does about Elsie Clews Parsons. Parsons fought to assure women entry into the unseen but crucial networks of professional scholarship. Working on this book has demonstrated how important that virtual fellowship is in the essen- tially lonely life of the writer-scholar. I began the research for the book in 1988, three years after I moved to the United States in midlife and midcareer. The generous welcome and support I re- ceived from Joan Scott, Theda Skocpol, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Mary Jo Deegan, Shulamit Reinharz, Barbara Laslett, Dorothy Ross, Bar- rie Thorne, George Wolf, Christine Williams, and Emily Cutrer sus- tained me through my difficult years as a “stranger.” Joan, Kathryn, Shulamit, George, Christine, and Emily all read the manuscript, Emily bringing her sharp sense of style and her encyclopedic knowl- edge of American culture to a long early version as well as a slimmed-down (but still lengthy) second draft. Since then I have been extraordinarily lucky in having the manuscript assessed by an ideal readership-Richard Adams, Robert Crunden, Ellen Fitz- patrick, William Goetzmann, Terence Halliday, Helen Horowitz, Louise Lamphere, Rosalind Rosenberg, Mark Smith, Catharine PREFACE I xv Stimpson, Pauline Strong, and Kamala Visweswaran. Apen Ruiz and Mauricio Tenorio Trillo also saved me from embarrassment by correcting my Spanish (and, incidentally, Elsie’s). John Higley drew on his formidable editing skills and a great deal of his time to help me cut the original long manuscript to something close to publish- able. And Jean Gottlieb used her adroit scalpel to bring it to its current length without sacrificing anything essential.
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