Title Elsie Clews Parsons : inventing modern life / Desley Deacon

Published Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press, ©1997

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Description 1 online resource (xvi, 520 pages) : illustrations, maps Series Women in culture and society Women in culture and society. Contents Looking forward -- We secessionists ... -- Trans-national America -- All serene Summary 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 Bibliography "Bibliography of Elsie Clews Parsons, 1896-1962": pages 485-499 Includes bibliographical references (pages 393-483) and index Notes Print version record Subject Parsons, Elsie Worthington Clews, 1874-1941. SUBJECT Parsons, Elsie Worthington Clews, 1874-1941 fast Subject Women Indianists -- United States -- Biography Women anthropologists -- United States -- Biography Women social scientists -- United States -- Biography Feminists -- United States -- Biography Feminism -- United States -- History Sex role -- United States -- History BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Social Scientists & Psychologists. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Regional Studies. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- General. Feminism Feminists Intellectual life Race relations Sex role Social conditions Women anthropologists Women Indianists Women social scientists SUBJECT United States -- Intellectual life -- 20th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140367 United States -- Race relations. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140494 United States -- Social conditions. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140511 Subject United States Genre/Form Biographies History Biographies. Biographies. Form Electronic book ISBN 0226139077 9780226139074 0226139093 9780226139098

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