"WHAT a rather uncanny feeling it gives one to be at the end of
an epoch," Mary Simkhovitch wrote Parsons in 1940, anticipating
the fortieth anniversary of Greenwich House. The previous Novem-
ber she and Parsons had attended the fiftieth anniversary of Barnard
College. But neither had come to the end of her active life. Simkho-
vitch published her biography in 1938, looking back, at the age of
seventy-one, over the years when she and Parsons were building
their experimental institutions and families. But she did not retire
from the directorship of Greenwich House until 1946, and she con-
tinued as vice-chairman of the New York City Housing Authority
until her death in 1951. In May 1940, Parsons was sixty-five years
old and had just returned from a field trip to Ecuador. Before she
left on that trip, she was elected first vice-president of the Ameri-
can Anthropological Association--in effect the president-elect for
1941. ¹

When Parsons returned to New York in 1940, it seemed in many
ways the end of an era. Marie Howe, Heterodoxy founder and
leading spirit, had died in 1934 while Parsons was in Chapala;
and she was not back in time to attend the memorial held in Alice
Duer Miller's home, where her old friends and associates Vira
Whitehouse, Floyd Dell, James Weldon Johnson, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, and Mary Ware Dennett were among those who paid trib-
ute to the feminist pioneer. Inviting Parsons to speak in 1937, Mary
Knoblauch noted that Heterodoxy's last speaker had been Elizabeth
Gurley Flynn, "who has been absent also, much too long." Parsons
began to attend that long-lived discussion group again; but, like
much else, Heterodoxy received its deathblow with the onset of war
in the early 1940s. ²

Clarence Day, crippled by the arthritic disease that had tormented
him for many years, died in 1935, just as he was finding happiness
in what his friends saw as a "miraculous" marriage and fatherhood.

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