Born into a wealthy and socially prominent New York family in 1874, Elsie Clews showed an early determination to be free of the constraints of her social position. She entered the newly founded Barnard College, from which she graduated in 1896. She continued her studies at Columbia University, receiving her Master of Arts in 1897 and a Ph.D. in 1899 in Sociology. Her doctoral dissertation, The Educational Legislation and Administration of the Colonies, was published as her first book.
She taught sociology at Barnard College as a Hartley House Fellow from 1899 to 1902 and as a Lecturer from 1902 to 1905. Except for teaching in 1919 at the opening session of the New School for Social Research, which she helped found, she did no formal teaching after 1905, though she guided and financed the fieldwork of dozens of young anthropologists. Her financial independence permitted her to devote her energies almost entirely to research and writing. In 1900, when she was not quite twenty-six, she married Herbert Parsons. They had four children who survived infancy: Elsie ("Lissa," 1901), John Edward (1903), Herbert (1909), and Henry McIlvaine (1911).
Though she was a prolific writer who published books and articles on a wide range of topics, everything Elsie did, from her first publication in 1898 to her death in 1941, stemmed from her concern for the ways the expression of an individual's personality is affected by the conventions of society. Even her strong advocacy of pacifism during World War I derived in many ways from that concern. Her career had two stages. The period between 1909 and 1915 was the watershed which divided her life. It was during these years that she gradually abandoned her work in sociology to work as an anthropologist and folklorist.
The distinguished University of California at Berkeley anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, succinctly described how her career had its beginning. "Her society had encroached on her," he wrote after her death; "she studied the science of society the better to fight back against society." Book after book in her early sociological studies was concerned with the free expression of personality in the face of the constraints of convention: The Family (1906), Religious Chastity (1913, published under the pseudonym "John Main" to protect her husband's political career), The Old Fashioned Woman (1913), Fear and Conventionality (1914), Social Freedom (1915), and Social Rule (1916).
Though these early sociological works, unlike her later anthropological writings, are not recognized as having made a permanent contribution to science, their merits were appreciated by no less discerning a critic than H. L. Mencken. "I know of no other work," he said, " which offers a better array of observations upon that powerful complex of assumptions, prejudices, instinctive reactions, racial emotions and unbreakable vices of mind which enters so massively into the daily thinking of all of us."
Despite the attention her early books received in the press, they did not sell well, as correspondence with her publisher reveals. Even The Family, as of January 31, 1918, had sold only 3,904 copies. Old Fashioned Woman had sold 1,193, Fear and Conventionality 690, Social Freedom 427, and Social Rule 281. She was obliged to underwrite the publication of Social Freedom and Social Rule. When she submitted the manuscript of Social Freedom, Mr. Putnam asked for a subsidy, saying the book was likely to appeal neither to scholars nor the general reader.
Elsie remained concerned with the interrelations between personality and cultural forms in the second anthropological stage of her career, which began when she was about forty years old. She came to recognize that psychological and philosophical generalizations were not enough and that rigorous empirical study of the multiplicity of historical factors was necessary. She devoted the rest of her life to fieldwork in the belief that it would ultimately illuminate her own society as well as the other cultures she so meticulously investigated. She never abandoned the moral ideals she so fervently defended in her early books she simply could no longer see much point in engaging in propaganda. She remained an iconoclast to the end, but became a more quiet one. She became convinced that, in the long run, her scientific work would promote her ideals more effectively.
Her achievements as an anthropologist were widely recognized by her colleagues. She was President of the American Folklore Society in 1919-20 and served as Associate Editor of its journal from 1918 until her death. She served as Treasurer (1916-22) and President (1923-25) of the American Ethnological Society. Most significant, in 1940 she was the first woman elected President of the American Anthropological Association.
Her first interest as an anthropologist was in the Pueblo Indian culture of the American Southwest, a culture that demanded even more conformity than her own. After twenty -five years of research and the publication of numerous articles and monographs, her investigation culminated in the massive two volumes of Pueblo Indian Religion, originally published in 1939 and recently reissued in paperback by the University of Chicago Press. Franz Boas, one of the founders of modern anthropology described these volumes as containing "a summary of practically all we know about Pueblo religion and an indispensable source book for every student of Indian life."
Elsie's fascination with Spanish influences and her desire to study cultures still very much alive and functioning (not moribund as she thought the Pueblo Indian culture was) led her to do extensive fieldwork in Mexico. The book that resulted, Mitla, Town of the Souls (1936), is usually considered to be her greatest contribution along with Pueblo Indian Religion.
She looked on folklore as a source for understanding cultural diffusion. Though Elsie always thought of herself as someone who tired easily, her productivity as a folklorist has understandably led more recent folklorists to consider her "indefatigable." Obviously what Elsie lacked in physical energy she more than made up for in strength of will and capacity for carefully organized effort. Folk-Lore of the Antilles, French and English (3 vols., 1933-43) is considered outstanding in its field. In Negro folklore her contributions were so extensive as to lead Melvile Herskovits to describe them, after her death, as "the bulk of the available material in this field: they are so important that no significant work can be done in the future without using them as a base."
Parsons, Elsie Clews. A Woman's Quest for Science: A Portriat of Anthropologist.
Written by: Students in an Introduction to Anthropology Class, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota