Wright, Mary Clabaugh (1917–1970)
Wright, Mary Clabaugh (1917–1970)
American scholar of Chinese history who was the first woman to be named a full professor at Yale University. Born Mary Oliver Clabaugh on September 25, 1917, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; died from lung cancer on June 18, 1970, in Guilford, Connecticut; second of five children of Samuel Francis Clabaugh (a newspaper publisher) and Mary Bacon (Duncan) Clabaugh; attended Ramsay High School in Birmingham, Alabama; graduated from Vassar College, 1937; Radcliffe College, Ph.D., 1951; married Arthur Frederick Wright (1913–1976, a scholar of Chinese history), on July 6, 1940; children: two sons, Charles Duncan (b. 1950) and Jonathan Arthur (b. 1952).
Published several academic works, including The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T'ung-chih Restoration 1862–1874 (1957), and China and Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913 (1968); founded the Society for Ch'ing Studies; created journal for this society, Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i; established prominent collection of Chinese resources for the Hoover Library; became associate professor of history, Yale University (1959), later became a full professor, the first woman in such a position at Yale; worked on the Joint Committee on Contemporary China.
Mary Clabaugh Wright was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1917, the second of five children of Samuel Francis Clabaugh and Mary Duncan Clabaugh . Both parents had graduated from the University of Alabama and both had deep Alabama roots. Her father, a prosperous businessman, published the Tuscaloosa News, and was later involved with the insurance industry in Birmingham.
Wright enjoyed an active childhood and particularly liked swimming, tennis, and horseback riding. In high school she served as president of the student body and was a member of the National Honor Society. Earning a scholarship, she attended Vassar College where she became president of the student political union. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar and entered graduate school at Radcliffe College to study European history. Her scholarly interests soon turned to China, a country she had visited in 1934.
At age 21, she met Arthur Frederick Wright, an advanced graduate student at Harvard who was studying China and Japan. Arthur had already earned a degree from Stanford University in 1935 and had studied Chinese Buddhism at Oxford. The couple married in 1940, in Washington, D.C., and soon left for Kyoto, Japan, where both had been granted fellowships to pursue studies toward their doctorates.
After a year in Kyoto, the couple planned to spend an additional year in Beijing (Peking), China. Although both China and Japan were precarious locations for American citizens during the early 1940s, the Wrights continued to pursue their resident studies. With the Japanese occupying or indirectly controlling many portions of China, including Beijing, deteriorating relations between the United States and Japan intensified, finally dissolving into war with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Nevertheless, the couple chose to remain in Beijing studying Chinese history and culture. They lived in relative academic freedom until March 24, 1943, when all citizens of nations at war with Japan were gathered and sent to a detention camp at Wei-hsien, in the Shantung province of China. They remained in the camp in oppressive conditions for more than two years until the war ended and they were released.
Returning to Beijing, the Wrights found themselves in the middle in a revolution in which Communist forces under Mao Zedong seemed to be gaining control of China. It was during this time that the Hoover Library hired the couple to amass contemporary materials for a collection pertaining to the Chinese revolution. Traveling around China in American military planes, the Wrights gained access to a great many records and historical resources, including an audience with Mao in October 1946.
Upon returning to the United States in April 1947, Arthur completed his dissertation and received his doctorate from Harvard. Soon thereafter, he was hired as an assistant professor of history at Stanford University. Moving with him to Palo Alto, California, Mary became the China curator at the Hoover Library. She also received her doctorate from Radcliffe in 1951, between the birth of their two sons. Her dissertation was finally published in 1957 as The Last Stand ofChinese Conservatism: The T'ung-chih Restoration 1862–1874.
In the years preceding the publication of her book, Mary had lectured at Stanford and was promoted to assistant and then to associate professor at the Hoover Library. She built a unique and extensive collection of Chinese materials and also sponsored several bibliographic studies on such topics as the overseas Chinese, the Chinese Red Army, and the student movement. In 1959, the Wrights took positions in the history department at Yale University, he as a professor and she as an associate professor. She later became the first woman to be named a full professor at Yale. Their presence at the university, in addition to its established strength in Chinese language and literature, instantly made Yale a highly respected center of Chinese studies.
The Wrights returned to Asia on their first sabbatical in 1953 and 1954 and again with their two sons in 1962 and 1963. During her career at Yale, Mary published influential collections and studies on modern Chinese history, including China and Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913, in 1968. She also founded the Society for Ch'ing Studies, created a journal of the society, Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i, and worked with a development agency, the Joint Committee on Contemporary China. In addition to receiving several honorary degrees, she became the first woman trustee of Wesleyan University. The rigorous combination of academic and family life led to nervous exhaustion in 1965. Although she returned to the bustle of academics, she developed incurable lung cancer in 1969. After ordering her affairs and visiting friends and family, Mary Clabaugh Wright died on June 18, 1970, at age 52. She was buried in Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut.
sources:
Contemporary Authors. Vol. 109. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1983.
Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980.