Mary C. Wright

Mary Clabaugh Wright (born Mary Oliver Clabaugh; ; 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 was subsequently the first woman to be appointed to a full professorship there.

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.

Biography 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. She was responsible for founding the Society for Ch'ing Studies and its journal, Ch'ing-Shih Wen-T'i.

She died at home in Guilford, Connecticut, of lung cancer, aged 52, on June 18, 1970. She and Arthur had two sons, Charles Duncan Wright (born 1950) and Jonathan Arthur Wright (born 1952).

Legacy The historian Paul A. Cohen in his Discovering History in China notes that Wright, Teng Ssu-yu, Albert Feuerwerker, and Joseph R. Levenson, all students of Fairbank in the decade following the war, were leaders in promoting the paradigm embodied in "China's Response to the West." He praises but critiques Wright's study of the Tongzhi Restoration, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism (1957). He quotes Wright that "the Restoration failed because the requirements of modernization ran counter to the requirements of Confucian stability," then questions the "viability of the very terms" in which Wright's argument is set.

Selected works