Eve Clews Parsons, Inventing Modem Life. By Desley Deacon. Women in Culture and Society Series. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 520, photographs, illustrations, maps, index. $29.95 cloth) Desley Deacon has written an encompassing and provocative biography of Elsie Clews Parsons. her Elsie Clews Parsons, Inventing Modem Life, Deacon has a twofold goal: to chart the course of Parsons's life, and to show how Parsons and others wrested modernism from the stultifying grasp of the Victorian age. Deacon's work is richly illustrated with photographs of Parsons, her family, friends, and colleagues, as well as with copies of handwritten correspondence (for example, Clarence Day's letter with his ink-dr-awn self-portrait), and illustrations from Parsons's books. More than just side illustrations, these photographs trace in image the progression of Parsons's life. author is to be commended for locating such a range of illustrations. With an impressive grasp of the issues of modernism, Deacon shows how Parsons fits both socially and intellectually into a whirling web of people, ideas, social forces, and institutions. As Deacon expresses it, Perry Anderson has suggested that modernism flowered in the space between the still useable past, an indeterminate technical present, and a profoundly ambiguous future. Mach's critical positivism captured the uncertainties and possibilities of this space; and it was there that feminism emerged, grasping the fragility of the self and turning it into a source of emancipation, in a sort of politics of the self' (132). a particularly fine example of this approach, Deacon, in Chapter 16, A Modernist Death, deftly follows the lives and deaths and interests of so many people crucial to Parsons's life. Here one reads of Clarence Day and Mabel Luhan, of Parsons's children, and of Robert Herrick. Alfred Kroeber is here, and Robert Lowie, Duncan Strong, Franz Boas, and Rosita Lema of Peguche, Ecuador. It is not just that they are written about, it is that their lives are woven into the tapestry of Parsons's life. Along with the strength of Deacon's approach, there is a problem as well. While Deacon has a good focus on Parsons as a modernist and a feminist, she overlooks the ambiguities in Parsons's perspective. For example, she lauds Parsons for her feminism and for her support of professional women. Yet nowhere is there recognition of the more complex issue-Parsons's feminism and, by her admission, her prejudice against her own sex. This was no small matter for Parsons: she ran up against her prejudice against frequently and she wrote about it in her articles and her books. For instance, Deacon refers to Parsons's discussion of the tagger-on spouse problem' (138), but she does not discuss this, as Parsons does, in terms of imposing one's wife on one's friends, for the title of this piece, as cited in the endnotes, is Must We Have Her? another example, Deacon notes that Parsons never saw [suffrage] as the major issue for women (115), but she fails to link this to Parsons's reluctance about suffrage for women. Parsons opined that women's to run other people's lives for would extend to a desire to control the personal life and moral conduct of politicians. For Parsons, women's suffrage was The Lesser Evil, as was detailed by her article in Harper's (26 Feb. 1916, 215). And as a last example, Deacon writes, In the early 1920s, 'her gang' was joined by ... the she helped move from secretarial positions in Boas's office into fieldwork (107-08). These were Esther Schiff Goldfrank and Ruth Bunzel, but it was Franz Boas, and not Parsons, who encouraged them to give up secretarial work for anthropology. Boas championed their cause and, through spirited correspondence, convinced Parsons to fund their research in the Southwest. Parsons worried that the young Esther Schiff might get in the way of real fieldwork, and that Bunzel accompanying Ruth Benedict to Zuni would be a distraction, for as she wrote, two together waste each other's time. …