If you want biographies, do not desire those which bear the legend, "Herr So-and-so and his age," but those upon whose title page there would stand "a fighter against his age." -- Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

ELSIE Clews Parsons was "a carrier of culture rather than its
freight." Born in 1874 in the wake of the American Civil War, she
helped create modernism--a new way of thinking about the world
that has given the twentieth century its distinctive character--and
she applied it, not to art or literature, but to life itself. Eric Hobs-
bawm, in his magisterial overview, concludes that the major revolu-
tion of the twentieth century--the one that has, in his words,
brought millions of people out of the Middle Ages--is the revolu-
tion in social relations. Elsie Clews Parsons--feminist, anthropolo-
gist, public intellectual--was a leader in this revolution, using the
new-cultural anthropology to "kill" nineteenth-century ideas of
classification and hierarchy, and to establish new twentieth-century
standards of sexual plasticity and cultural tolerance. In a new world
that stressed secularism, empiricism, honesty, pluralism in thought
and social relationships, and a fluid and constantly evolving self,
the "new woman" was, in Parsons's words, "the woman not yet
classified, perhaps not classifiable." And a vital culture was one that
could, like the Southwestern Pueblos she studied, "keep definite
cultural patterns in mobile combination."

The assertion of sexual plasticity and cultural mobility was part
of the modernist project to repudiate history, to deconstruct estab-
lished theoretical systems and their related concepts and classifica-
tions, and to demolish existing systems of values. Central to this
"transvaluation of values" was the feminist destruction of the
nineteenth-century concepts of "woman" and "family," and the
creation of new, pragmatic relationships and moralities based on
experience and experiment. Closely associated with this feminist

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