Alone in the 1950s: Anne Parsons and the Feminine Mystique

An overview of the life of Anne Parsons, the daughter of Talcott Parsons, who committed suicide at age 33, in 1964. She was a psychoanalytic anthropologist who studied mental illness among southern Italians & Italian immigrants to the US. A book of her essays was published posthumously under the title Belief, Magic and Anomie: Essays in Psychsocial Anthropology, (New York: Free Press, 1969). It suggested that the cultural constraints on women in the 1950s combined with her personal biography created an untenable situation for her. Her life illuminates the decade of the 1950s, in which she lived her 20s, & provides a living example of the intersection of personality & culture. Being a single professional woman, a critical intellectual engaged in interdisciplinary work, & a woman uncomfortable with postwar feminine norms, Parsons did not conform & suffered because of it. She was a prisoner in a culture in which she could not thrive. The essay is based on Anne Parsons's letters & autobiographical writings. AA