Quick Facts
Biography
Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons (November 27, 1875 – December 19, 1941) was an American anthropologist, sociologist, folklorist, and feminist who studied Native American tribes—such as the Tewa and Hopi—in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. She helped found The New School. She was associate editor for The Journal of American Folklore (1918-1941), president of the American Folklore Society (1919-1920), president of the American Ethnological Society (1923-1925), and was elected the first female president of the American Anthropological Association (1941) right before her death.
She earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1896. She received her master’s degree (1897) and Ph.D. (1899) from Columbia University.
Every other year, the American Ethnological Society awards the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for the best graduate student essay, in her honor.
Biography
Parsons was the daughter of Henry Clews, a wealthy New York banker, and Lucy Madison Worthington. Her brother, Henry Clews, Jr. was an artist. On September 1, 1900, in Newport, Rhode Island, she married future three-term progressive Republican congressman Herbert Parsons, an associate and political ally of President Teddy Roosevelt. When her husband was a member of Congress, she published two then-controversial books under the pseudonym John Main.
Parsons became interested in anthropology in 1910. She believed that folklore was a key to understanding a culture and that anthropology could be a vehicle for social change.
Her work Pueblo Indian Religion is considered a classic; here she gathered all her previous extensive work and that of other authors. It is, however, marred by intrusive and deceptive research techniques.
She is, however, pointed to by current critical scholars as an archetypical example of an "Antimodern Feminist" thinker, known for their infatuation with Native American Indians that often manifested as a desire to preserve a "traditional" and "pure" Indian identity, irrespective of how Native Peoples themselves approached issues of modernization or cultural change. Grande (2004, p. 134) argues that her racist and objectivizing tendencies towards indigenous peoples of the Americas is evidenced, for example, by her willingness to change her name and appropriate a Hopi "identity" primarily to increase her access to research sites and participants (Jacobs 1999, p. 102).
Works
Early works of sociology
- The Family (1906)
- Religious Chastity (1913)
- The Old-Fashioned Woman (1913)
- Fear and Conventionality (1914)
- Social Freedom (1915)
- Social Rule (1916)
Anthropology
- The Social Organization of the Tewa of New Mexico (1929)
- Hopi and Zuni Ceremonialism (1933)
- Pueblo Indian Religion (1939)
Ethnographies
- Mitla: Town of the Souls (1936)
- Peguche (1945)
Research in folklore
- Folk-Lore from the Cape Verde Islands (1923)
- Folk-Lore of the Sea Islands, S.C. (1924)
- Folk-Lore of the Antilles, French and English (3v., 1933-1943)
Reprints
- Parsons, Elsie Clews (1996). Pueblo Indian Religion. 2 vols. Introductions by Ramon Gutierrez and Pauline Turner Strong. Bison Books reprint. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.