Margery Wolf

Margery Wolf (born Jones, September 9, 1933 – April 14, 2017) was an American anthropologist, writer, scholar, and feminist activist. She published numerous ethnographic works that brought her attention in China and the U.S and played a formative role in anthropology.

Her first work, Women and the family in rural Taiwan, was published in 1972 and examined the ways in which rural Taiwanese women manipulate men and other women in pursuit of their personal goals. Her 1986 book The Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China explored the extent to which revolutionary communist China fulfilled the end of women's secondary role in legal, political, social and economic life. A Tale Thrice Told: Feminism, Postmodernism and Ethnographic Responsibility, which dates from 1992, was Wolf's response to the methodological issues raised by feminist and postmodernist critics of traditional ethnography.

Biography[]

Margery Wolf was born in Santa Rosa, California, on September 9, 1933. As a child, she lived on Humboldt Street with her parents (Alvie Jones and Alvia Makee) before moving to a two-acre farm on Brush Creek Road.

Margery Wolf graduated from Santa Rosa High School at age 16 and graduated from Santa Rosa Junior College in 1952. She was registered in the state of San Francisco from 1952–53, where she married Arthur Wolf, with whom she moved to Ithaca, New York. Settling in New York State, she completed her art degree at Cornell University. In 1955, Margery Wolf began working as a research assistant to social psychologist William Lambert, coding ethnographic material as part of the cross-cultural Six Cultures project, which conducted field-based research on the upbringing and development of children on a variety of issues.^[1][2]

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