Mary C. Wright
| Mary C. Wright | |
|---|---|
| Born | Mary Oliver Clabaugh September 25, 1917 Tuscaloosa, Alabama, US |
| Died | June 18, 1970 (aged 52) Guilford, Connecticut, US |
| Citizenship | American |
| Fields | History |
| Institutions | Yale University |
| Notable students | Sherman Cochran, Mark Selden, Jonathan Spence |
| Known for | Study of late Qing dynasty and early 20th century China |
Mary Clabaugh Wright (born Mary Oliver Clabaugh; Chinese name 芮瑪麗 Ruì Mǎlì; September 25, 1917 – June 18, 1970) was an American sinologist and historian who specialized in the study of late Qing dynasty and early twentieth century China. She was the first woman to gain tenure in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University, and subsequently the first woman to be appointed a full professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale.
Wright's influential 1957 monograph The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism argued that the mid-19th century T'ung Chih (Tongzhi) Restoration failed because "the requirements of modernization ran counter to the requirements of Confucian stability."
She was married to historian Arthur F. Wright.
Wright was born Mary Oliver Clabaugh on September 25, 1917, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She attended Ramsay High School in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1934 she received a scholarship to Vassar College at Poughkeepsie, New York. After graduating in 1938, she went to Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study European history, but she was attracted by John K. Fairbank to investigate modern Chinese history instead. Fairbank recalled that when he first met her, “she seemed “at first glance tall, smooth and beautiful, a bit shy, with a soft southern accent (born in Tusaloosa),” but “at second glance not so smooth as sharp, a summa from Vassar, tremendously quick and a ferocious worker, racing to keep up with her imagination.” She received her Master of Arts in 1939.
On July 6, 1940 she married Arthur F. Wright, who was a graduate student studying Chinese and Japanese history at Harvard University, and the two of them immediately went to Asia to carry out research for their PhDs. For the first year they stayed in Kyoto, Japan, and then in June 1941 they moved to Beijing, China. The pair were caught in China as a result of World War II, and in March 1943 they were interned in the Weixian Internment Camp in Shandong (modern Weifang city). He coaxed fire from dirty coal in the boiler room; she did the hospital laundry. She took advantage of the opportunity to learn Russian. They remained until liberated by American paratroopers in October 1945.
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