Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons (1875–1941)

Elsie Clews Parsons was born in New York City to Henry Clews, a wealthy New York banker, and his wife Lucy Madison Worthington. She attended private schools and, after graduating from Barnard College in 1896, earned MA and PhD degrees in sociology from Columbia University. In 1900, she married Herbert Parsons, an attorney and associate of President Teddy Roosevelt, with whom she would have four children. Elsie resigned her position as a lecturer in sociology at Barnard when her husband was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1905, and accompanied him to Washington, DC. There she published her first book, The Family (1906), a sociology textbook that became controversial, and a bestseller, for its extended discussion of trial marriage. She published her next two books, Religious Chastity (1913) and The Old Fashioned Woman (1913), under the pseudonym John Main, as her husband was still in Congress. She resumed using her own name with Fear and Conventionality (1914). In 1915, while on a trip to the Southwest, Elsie met anthropologists Franz Boas and Pliny E. Goddard, who interested her in their research work among Native Americans. After some further study, she embarked on a 25-year career of field research and writing that established her as a leading authority on the Pueblo and other native peoples of North America, South America, and Mexico. She was the author of such highly acclaimed and influential books as the two-volume Pueblo Indian Religion (1939), Mitla: Town of the Souls (1936), and Peguche, Canton of Otavalo (1945). She also wrote a number of works on West Indian and African American folklore. She was the first woman to be elected president of the American Anthropological Association. Elsie's writings and her lifestyle challenged the conventional gender roles of her era and helped spark the feminist movement.