Margery Jones WOLF

1933 - 2017

WOLF, Margery Jones Born in Santa Rosa on September 9, 1933, Margery died of acute respiratory failure in Kaiser Hospital on April 14, 2017 in the presence of her family. As a young girl she lived on Humboldt Street with her parents (Alvie and Alvia [Makee] Jones) before they moved to a five-acre homestead on Brush Creek Road. Margery graduated at age 16 from Santa Rosa High School and received her A.A. degree from Santa Rosa Junior College in 1952. Enrolled at San Francisco State during 1952-53, she left to marry Arthur Wolf and moved with him to Ithaca, New York where he completed his B.A. at Cornell University. When Arthur entered graduate school in Anthropology at Cornell in 1955 Margery began work as a Research Assistant to the social psychologist, William Lambert, coding ethnographic material as a part of The Six-Cultures Project. Recognizing her keen intellect and her curiosity, Lambert, anthropologists Robert J. Smith and Lauriston Sharp, and other professors mentored Margery teaching her social science research methods and treating her as a junior colleague. From 1956-57 Margery worked for Lambert and others as a Research Assistant at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The Wolfs lived in Taiwan for two years while Arthur conducted fieldwork in Taipei and nearby rural villages before returning to Ithaca in 1960. Arthur completed his Ph.D. in 1964 and joined the Cornell faculty. Based on her experiences in Taiwan, Margery wrote her first and best known book, "The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Farm Family", published in 1968. That book, which is still in print, established Margery as a China scholar with a particular focus on women and the family and it became the touchstone for her unusual and extraordinarily successful academic career. Margery continued her scholarly writing after Arthur moved to the Stanford University faculty in 1968, and published "Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan" in 1972 and "Women in Chinese Society" in 1975. Margery was also a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College at Oxford University in England in 1975. In 1980-81 Margery carried out ethnographic fieldwork sponsored by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in the People's Republic of China immediately after China reopened to Western scholars. During a subsequent fellowship she wrote her 1985 book, "Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China". At Stanford Margery was also a Fellow at the Center for Research on Women and was very actively engaged in second-wave feminism. With her first marriage in process of divorce in 1984, Margery accepted a position as a Visiting Associate Professor at Duke University in North Carolina. She was hired in 1985 by the University of Iowa as a Full Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Women's Studies Program where she remained until her retirement in the spring of 2001. While in Iowa, she married Mac Marshall, another anthropologist on the Iowa faculty. In 1992 her widely taught volume, "A Thrice Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility" appeared. Following her retirement Margery returned to Santa Rosa where she published two novels: "The Orchards" (set in Sonoma County) and "What the Water Buffalo Wrought" (set in Taiwan and Sonoma County). Upon learning of her demise friends and former students have described Margery as "a force of nature, larger than life, strong and whole"; as an "extraordinary scholar, activist, thinker, writer, and mentor"; as someone who "had this perfect balance of thoughtful reticence, acerbic wit, and joyful engagement"; and "besides being a brilliant adventurous scholar she was a gentle, generous soul who could be fierce when appropriate, tender when needed, and always present and fair". Margery is survived by her husband, Mac Marshall of Santa Rosa, her step-son, Kelsey Marshall, grandson, Elliot Marshall, and daughter-in-law, Stacy Marshall all of Poulsbo, Washington, and her sisters-in-law, Lei Ann Marshall of Highland Park, Illinois, Gail Jenkin of Carlsbad, California, and Connie Tyson of Lake Oswego, Oregon.