Franz Boas by Zumwalt Rosemary Lévy;

Author:Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy; [Zumwalt, Rosemary Levy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO006000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical, BIO019000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Educators, SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

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Boas fostered an atmosphere of collegiality and cooperation among his students, an atmosphere that was felicitous for the preponderance of women students. This collegiality was conveyed in Ruth Bunzel’s letter to Boas while she was studying in Chicago in which she made reference to the weekly gatherings in New York: “Please remember me to the various members of the New York clan. I miss the Thursday gatherings.” In 1927, as she was traveling to her fieldwork site in Arizona, Ruth Benedict wrote Boas about “the gang,” as they called themselves: “Gladys writes gleefully about being back. Ruth Bunzel is crossing the continent with me. Margaret Mead writes there’s a lifetime’s work in the museums of Germany in the Pacific area alone; her little vacation looks terribly small to her. And isn’t it good that Melville Herskovits has the Northwestern job? Gene Weltfish is taking hold nobly on the Folklore job.” Boas conveyed this same camaraderie in his letter to his daughter Helene: “Did I tell you that I am working with Erna [Gunther] and Miss [Gladys] Reichard and [Leslie] Spier with a Portuguese Negro [C. Kamba Simango] from East Africa. It is very interesting to work, for once, on something not American.”114

Boas continued with his research and social justice work for many years. He wrote Helene that he had “several PhD candidates, also MA. A language course in Barnard, the Jewish children, organization of the European book exchange, a Negro from Southeast Africa [Simango] whom I am pumping and my Kwakiutl is not quite finished.” With the intellectual influence and patronage of Parsons, Boas and many of his students moved the geographical focus for fieldwork to the Southwest. For Boas this shift, too, was a continuation of earlier interests, and Parsons was the spark and the financial impetus to make this happen. With her accustomed generosity, Parsons, who was doing fieldwork at Jemez pueblo, wrote Boas, who was at Laguna Pueblo with Goldfrank: “I have plenty of cash here and I could send you a postal money order.”115

The challenges Boas had faced in advocating for his women students carried over into the 1930s. Edmund E. Day, director of the Division of the Social Sciences of the Rockefeller Foundation, wrote Boas in 1932:

May I raise one question? Of the eight students who are to be aided financially under the grant, seven are women. My impression is that women workers in the field of anthropology have had serious difficulty in securing satisfactory posts after completion of their periods of training. In so far as this is the case, there would seem to be some question regarding the wisdom of assisting more women to go on with this type of work. . . . I should be glad to have your comment on this point giving some indication of the factors which have led to so slight an allocation of our fund in support of the work of more advanced male students, of whom I doubt not you have a considerable number.

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