WRIGHT, Mary Clabaugh

Born 25 September 1917, Tuscaloosa, Alabama; died 18 June 1970, Guilford, Connecticut

Daughter of Samuel F. and Mary Duncan Clabaugh; married Arthur Wright, 1940; children: two

Mary Clabaugh Wright grew up in Alabama. She studied European history at Vassar College (she graduated summa cum laude) and then at Radcliffe, but early in her graduate career she turned to the study of Chinese history. Her husband was also involved in Chinese studies. Together they spent most of World War II in an internment camp in Shantung. After their release in 1945, they decided to stay in Peking for a while. Wright assisted the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace as a researcher. She was resourceful in searching book markets and government agencies throughout the country; it is through her efforts that the Hoover Institute became the center of documents and research material on the Chinese revolution. She became the curator of the institute's Chinese collection in Palo Alto when she returned to the U S. in 1947.

During the next 10 years she received her Ph.D. at Radcliffe, became the mother of two boys, and was recognized as a major historian. In the 1950s, she defended victims of the McCarthy hysteria, particularly China scholar Owen Lattimore. In 1959, she became the first tenured woman faculty member at Yale University.

Wright's classic work, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The Tung-chih Restoration, 1862-1874 (1957, reprinted 1967) analyzes the late Ch'ing dynasty. It describes the imperial effort to rebuild China's social, cultural, and economic base, which were being threatened by internal rebellion as well as by foreign ideas and values. The book points out in what areas the restoration of the Confucian order was a partial success; more importantly, it analyzes the reasons why the movement ultimately was doomed to fail. The reformers are portrayed as extraordinarily great men who fought a hopeless battle against changing times.

Believing that "there is no way in which an effective modern state can be grafted onto a Confucian society," Wright shows the policies of Chiang Kai-shek in more modern times in a new light. She explains in the final chapter how the attitudes and policies of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang after 1927 were influenced by the conservative restorationists of the Tung Chih period. In adopting the Restoration as a model for his own government, Chiang Kai-shek fatefully affected the outcome of the Nationalist-Communist struggle. The Kuomintang did not meet the needs and share the values of the new age, and, like the Restoration, was doomed to fail.

The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism has often been acclaimed as a work of prime historical scholarship. The author is applauded for having studied a period in Chinese history often been neglected because of the lack of sources in Western languages. Wright was able to use Chinese sources and to relate the ideas and events of this era through the eyes of the Chinese.

In 1965, Wright organized a research conference on the Chinese Revolution of 1911, with 22 participants from six countries. She edited the collection of their papers, China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900-1913 (1968, 1973), which has been recognized as one of the best works on 20th-century China. Martin Wilburn of Columbia University described her 60-page introduction as a "masterful historical synthesis." She discusses the unprecedented intellectual ferment and rapid social and institutional changes occurring in China during the first decade of the 20th century. She vividly portrays the anti-Imperialist nationalism arising in a determined effort to save China from foreign domination, and she points out that the quest for rapid modernization and the belligerent assertions of sovereignty displayed by the People's Republic of China in the 1950s had close parallels 40 years earlier.

Bibliography:

A Memorial Service for Mary Clabaugh Wright (1917-1970) (1970). Fairbank, J. K., China Perceived (1974). Feuerwerker, A., Approaches to Modern Chinese History (1967).

Other references:

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Nov. 1969). Choice (Sept. 1969). Journal of American Studies (Nov. 1970). NYTBR (23 Nov. 1969). SR (15 March 1969). TLS (5 June 1969). VQR (Spring 1969).

—PATRICIA LANGHALS NEILS