Title: Elsie Clews Parsons
First published: 1997
Description: Elsie Clews Parsons was a relentlessly modern woman. A pioneering feminist, an eminent anthropologist, an ardent social critic, she challenged Americans to develop flexible and dynamic gender, family, and social arrangements that fit the new century. From 1912, when she incorporated ethnographic data on upper-class New York into a series of tersely ironic books and articles, Parsons brought to anthropology a passionate desire to educate the public to accept and welcome sexual and social diversity.

Desley Deacon's vibrant and richly detailed biography examines the powerful connections linking Parsons's intellectual commitments to her extraordinary life experience.

A wealth of correspondence and memoirs allows Deacon to vividly reconstruct Parsons's unconventional marriage, her intimate friendships, her ties to a burgeoning avant-garde, her wide-ranging travels, and her bitter attempts to escape the stifling conventions of New York's social elite - in short, all of her efforts to overcome gender biases in both academia and society. There is an immediacy to Parsons's struggles, a context to her modernism, and an urgency to her message.

Her remarkable intensity compelled her to redefine the social and sexual values of her day, to explore gender roles in other cultural settings, and to thoroughly detonate, through word and deed, entrenched nineteenth-century conceptions of women, civilization, and morality. In Elsie Clews Parsons, Deacon has fashioned a deeply insightful portrayal of an uncommon woman with the uncommon courage to radically reconstruct sexual identity, for herself and for the modern age.
Subjects: Biography, History, Race relations, Women social scientists, Intellectual life, Women anthropologists, Sex role, Feminism, Feminists, Social conditions, New York Times reviewed, Social scientists, biography, United states, intellectual life, United states, race relations, United states, social conditions, Women Indianists, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Social Scientists & Psychologists, SOCIAL SCIENCE, Regional Studies, Anthropology, General
Places: United States
People: Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons (1874-1941)
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: GN21.P37 D43 1997