Elsie Clews Parsons was born on November 27th, 1875 and raised into her prestigious family in New York City. Her family assumed her to live a high-status life of conventional ness, but Elsie's personality had a slight fire of independence burning underneath and so she decided instead, to go against her parents wishes and to attend college.
In 1896 she received a Bachelors Degree from Barnard College and then earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at Columbia University in 1899. Elsie made her mark as a Feminist and Sociologist. In 1902 she taught courses in the Sociology Department at Barnard College and followed by teaching graduate courses on the roles of family and sex at Columbia. She met many different types of people and continued her vigorous learning and research patterns. Her passions and work also extended out to pacifism and anthropology.
Elsie became a bit of an outspoken "radicalist," herself. For a woman of her time, she was unprecedented. She created a big controversy with her first publication The Family, in 1906. Her feminist ideas at the time seemed a threat to society and so she was condemned from the pulpit and immorally accused on the pages of the newspaper.
Parsons continued later with ethnographic work in 1910 on Native American tribes of the American Southwest including the Hopi and Pueblo tribes until 1941 when she passed away.
Parsons has many accomplishments to her name which include: President of the American Folklore Society, the American Ethnological Society, and the first woman elected to the American Anthropological Association. She also served as the Associate Editor for The Journal of American Folklore. Parsons was truly a revolutionary for her time. She was against WWI and died before she could give her planned statement castigating the use of anthropology for racist means.
Throughout her work her main concerns dealt with the effect society had upon one's individualism. Parsons interest in anthropology did not come about until the second half of her life; thus, her anthropological studies came much later than her works of the sociological nature.
Although Elsie Parsons faced the very women she wrote so often about each day, she remained a family woman, devoted to her husband Herbert Parsons and their four children. Elsie never backed from her beliefs She was some-what of a hero for women and the social movement of the sexes; a true pillar of American society, she was extremely influential in the way many people viewed society and it’s constraints of human expression.
Some of her works include:
- Religious Chastity, 1913
-The Old-Fashioned Woman, 1913
- Fear and Conventionality, 1914
- Pueblo Indian Religion, 1939
-Tewa Tales, 1926
Elsie Clews Parsons, http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/women/elsie/Elsieclews.html (April, 2006)
Elsie Clews Parsons, The Journal of a Feminist, http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/parsons.html (April, 2006)
Written by: Holly Schwichtenberg, 2006