Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons
Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons was a significant American feminist and anthropologist, born in New York City in 1871. She was the daughter of a prominent financier and an aristocratic mother with connections to President James Madison. Educated at Barnard College and Columbia University, Parsons initially pursued a career in education before turning her focus to sociology and anthropology. After her marriage to politician Herbert Parsons, she continued her academic work while raising six children, three of whom died young.
Parsons made notable contributions to feminist literature with her 1906 book, *The Family*, which challenged societal norms regarding women's roles. Her later work shifted to anthropology after a transformative trip to the Southwest, where she studied Native American cultures through extensive fieldwork. Over two decades, she published numerous studies on indigenous societies and became a pivotal figure in American folklore and anthropology, holding leadership roles in several professional organizations.
Parsons also engaged in radical intellectual circles in New York City and contributed to progressive publications. She passed away in 1941, leaving behind a legacy of research that bridged the gaps between sociology, anthropology, and feminism. Her extensive writings continue to be referenced in discussions of American folklore and cultural studies.
Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons
- Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons
- Born: November 27, 1875
- Died: December 19, 1941
Feminist and anthropologist, was born in New York City, the only daughter and eldest of three children of Henry Clews, a prominent New York financier, and Lucy Madison (Worthington) Clews, an aristocratic Kentuckian who was descended from President James Madison. Her father, a potter’s son, had emigrated from Staffordshire, England, and settled in New York City, becoming a prosperous banker. Elsie Clews grew up in a conservative, upper-class New York social circle and was educated by private tutors and at Miss Ruel’s School in New York. Her mother wanted her to enter New York society after graduating from high school, but instead she enrolled at Barnard College, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1896. She immediately went on to graduate studies in history at Columbia University in 1897. She taught history at Columbia’s Horace Mann High School while completing her doctoral degree in 1899 with a thesis on colonial educational legislation.
Elsie Clews married Herbert Parsons, a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, in Newport, Rhode Island, in September 1900. Herbert Parsons was already involved in politics, being an alderman in New York; from 1905 to 1911 he served in the U. S. House of Representatives, and from 1916 to 1920 he was a Republican National Committeeman. The couple lived in Washington, D.C, during his congressional career but afterward returned to New York City. They had six children; three died in infancy or childhood.
After her marriage Elsie Parsons continued to teach sociology at Barnard and Columbia. In 1906 she published her first book, The Family, which took a strong feminist viewpoint, disputing claims that women were inferior on the ground that this concept was inherited from early societies that did not understand the real biological functions of women. For women to be good wives and mothers, Parsons believed, they had to have equal opportunities. The book was considered radical for its time, especially for its advocacy of trial marriages. In 1913 her second book, Religious Chastity, an examination of sexual practices connected with different religious denominations, came out under the pseudonym John Main. However, she returned to using her own name for subsequent works, including The Old-Fashioned Woman (1913), which attacked sex taboos and the inferior social status of women.
Parsons was a member of Mabel Dodge’s salon in Greenwich Village, where New York City’s young radicals and intellectuals gathered. She also wrote for Max Eastman’s radical magazine, The Masses. In World War I she was a firm pacifist, although her husband served in the army’s intelligence division.
In 1915 the Parsonses took a trip to the southwestern United States, and, for the first time, she came into contact with native Americans in their own environment. This marked a turning point in her career. She shifted her research from speculative, deductive sociology to empirical anthropology, with a stress on detailed factual recorded data; and in 1915 and 1916 she published in-depth studies of the Zuni tribe based on firsthand research methodology. Parsons went to live among the Indian tribes of Arizona and New Mexico in 1916. For the next twenty years she continued to spend considerable periods of time residing with and observing Indian cultures. The results of these trips were intensive scientific research studies on native Americans, which she published in numerous books and leading scientific and anthropological journals. She also taught anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City, starting in 1919.
In her work Parsons used Indian examples to show the effect of society’s pressures on individuals. Her interest in native societies led her into research in folklores—in the Cape Verde Islands, the Antilles, and the Sea Islands of South Carolina—for she felt that folktales could reveal indigenous views and values. Also, her interest in the effect of Spanish civilization on local American cultures took her to Central and South America in search of information.
In recognition of her work, Parsons was elected president of the American Folklore Society (1918-20), the American Ethnological Association (1923-25), and the American Anthropological Association (1940-41). From 1918 until her death she was the associate editor of The Journal of American Folklore.
Herbert Parsons died in 1925, and Elsie Parsons died sixteen years later at the age of sixty-six from complications following an appendectomy in New York City. Her body was cremated.
The Elsie Parsons papers are in the American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia. Her writings include Fear and Conventionality (1914); Social Freedom (1915); Social Rule: A Study of the Will of Power (1916); Folk-Lores of Andros Island, Bahamas (1918); American Indian Life (1922); Folk-Lores from the Cape Verde Islands (1923); Folk-Lores of the Sea Islands, South Carolina (1923); Tewa Tales (1926); Kiowa Tales (1929); The Social Organization of the Tewa of New Mexico (1929); Hopi and Zuñi Ceremonialism (1933); Folk-Lores of the Antilles, French and English, 3 vols. (1933 43); Pueblo and Indian Religion (1939); and Peguche (posthumous, 1945). There is no full-length biography. The best modern sketch is in Notable American Women (1971). See also G. E. Reichard, “Elsie Clews Parsons,” Journal of American Folklore (1943); M. Mead, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (1959); Who Was Who in America, vol. 2 (1950); and The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, December 20, 1941.