Guide to the Margaret Park Redfield Papers 1916-1975


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Table of Contents

• Descriptive Summary
• Information on Use
• Access
• Citation
• Biographical Note
• Scope Note
• Related Resources
• Subject Headings
• INVENTORY
• Series I: Correspondence
• Series II: Publications on China
• Series III: Other Writings and Memorabilia

Descriptive Summary

Information on Use

Access

The collection is open for research.

Citation

When quoting material from this collection the preferred citation is:

Redfield, Margaret Park. Papers, [Box #, Folder #], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

Biographical Note

Margaret Lucy Park, daughter of Clara Cahill and Robert Ezra Park, was born December 6, 1898 in Lansing, Michigan. She grew up in Wollaston, Massachusetts, where the Park family lived while Robert Park worked as an assistant to Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. After graduation from high school in Quincy, Massachusetts, and a year of study at Wellesley College, she transferred to the College of the University of Chicago. In 1920, she received her PhB in anthropology and married Robert Redfield, a classmate and son of a Chicago lawyer. The Redfield family eventually grew to include four children: Lisa (b. 1924), Robert III (b. 1926, d. 1938), Joanna (b. 1930), and James (b. 1935).

Margaret Park Redfield's anthropological writings were based on field work conducted with her husband in the Mexican towns of Tepoztlan, Dzitas, and Chan Kom. She also accompanied Robert Redfield on a trip to China in 1948-1949, during which she renewed her acquaintance with Fei Hsiao-tung, a noted Chinese sociologist and anthropologist who had studied with her father and whose work she edited for publication in the United States. Following the death of Robert Redfield in 1958, Mrs. Redfield compiled two volumes of her husband's papers for the University of Chicago Press, Human Nature and the Study of Society (1962) and The Social Uses of Social Science (1963). She died February 6, 1977.

Scope Note

The papers of Margaret Park Redfield, anthropologist and wife of Robert Redfield, consist of 1.75 linear feet of material. It includes personal correspondence with family and friends, correspondence related to the publication of Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist and China's Gentry, and miscellaneous professional writings.

The papers have been arranged into three series: Correspondence, Publications on China, and Other Writings and Memorabilia. The correspondence series is largely personal in nature but also includes significant information on the careers of Robert E. Park and Robert Redfield. This series also includes exchanges with Winifred Raushenbush. Series II, Publications on China, includes correspondence, drafts, photography, contracts regarding her two works, Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan and China's Gentry: Essays in Rural-Urban Relations. Series III, Writings and Memorabilia, contains a group of her anthropological writings.

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Subject Headings

• Redfield, Margaret Park
• Redfield, Robert
• Park, Robert Ezra
• Raushenbush, Winifred
• Fei, Xiaotong
• University of Chicago. Dept. of Anthropology
• Anthropology
• Anthropologists

INVENTORY

Though largely personal in nature, the correspondence of Margaret Park Redfield contains significant information on the careers of Robert E. Park and Robert Redfield. In addition to letters from Park describing his experiences in Europe and the Pacific Northwest, this series includes a lengthy exchange with Winifred Raushenbush concerning the argument and factual details of Raushenbush's study, Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist (1979). Robert Redfield's letters to his wife are an important supplement to the professional material in the Redfield Papers; typically, as in his group of reports from Chan Kom, Yucatan, discussions of family matters are mingled with revealing accounts of his work in the field. Mrs. Redfield's replies have been made part of the Robert Redfield Papers Addenda.

Mrs. Redfield edited two works by Fei Hsiao-tung, Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan (1945) and China's Gentry: Essays in Rural-Urban Relations (1953). Although both books received favorable reviews in the United States, a British edition of China's Gentry issued by Cambridge University Press provoked controversy when Cedric Dover charged that the Redfields had unwittingly exacerbated cold war tensions by publishing a work that its author had, under the influence of Mao-Tse-tung, repudiated. The Redfields defended themselves on the grounds that their translation had been dictated by Fei and published in the West at Fei's express instructions (1:2, 3:12).

This series contains a miscellaneous group of Margaret Park Redfield's anthropological writings. A more complete selection can be found in the following folders of the Robert Redfield Papers: Box 27 Folder 6 A Child is Born in Tepoztlan The Farmer's Tools The Folk Literature of a Yucatan Town Notes on the Cookery of Tepoztlan [annotated draft] Box 44 Folder 1 to Box 45 Folder 7 Ethnographic material collected by Robert Redfield, Margaret Park Redfield, and Alfonso Villa Rojas Box 48 Folder 3 Life History of Antonia Box 62 Folder 7 Disease and Its Treatment in Dzitas, Yucatan [written with Robert Redfield] Box 64 Folder 6 Correspondence concerning the publication of Human Nature and the Study of Society Box 82 Folder 1 Secular Social Attitudes Developed in Connection with the Maize Complex [student paper]