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Old Yale

Steel magnolia

Mary Clabaugh Wright shattered a glass ceiling as the first tenured woman on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

By Mark Alden Branch ’86 | Mar/Apr 2026

Mark Alden Branch ’86 is executive editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine.

Mary Clabaugh Wright may have been born and raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but as her friend and faculty colleague George Wilson Pierson ’26 once said, you did not want to mistake her for a docile “Miss Magnolia from the South.” Wright, a historian of modern China who became the first woman appointed to a tenured position on Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, proved her toughness again and again: in the classroom, in the political arena, and even in an internment camp in China during World War II.

The New York Times and the Yale Daily News reported on the appointment of Wright and her husband Arthur Wright to the history faculty in 1959, but neither mentioned the glass ceiling she had broken. (Women had served for decades as tenured faculty in the School of Nursing and the education department, but not on the faculty that teaches in Yale College and the Graduate School.) The big news was that both Wrights were experts on China, recruited from Stanford to fill a gap in the history department at a time when the postwar international order demanded greater understanding of the world beyond American borders. 

Mary Clabaugh began attracting notice as a student of the world while she was still an undergraduate at Vassar in 1937. As a delegate to the Model League of Nations—a forerunner of the Model United Nations—she represented the Soviet Union and was elected president of the body. Diplomat James G. McDonald, who spoke at the assembly, was impressed; the Vassar Miscellany News reported that “the ability that she showed in conducting the sessions inspired a dissertation by Mr. McDonald on the rise of women to intellectual equality with the male of the species.”

After graduating in 1938, Clabaugh went to Radcliffe for graduate school. Under the tutelage of the China scholar John King Fairbank, she decided to focus her historical research on China because it had not been picked over by scholars as much as Europe or the Americas. “You could take a whole century and just plunge in,” she later told the Yale Daily News. Fairbank later described her and journalist Theodore H. White as the brightest students he ever had. 

Her choice of specialty also helped her find a life partner when she met Arthur Wright, who was a graduate student in Chinese history at Harvard. Mary and Arthur were married in 1940 and immediately set off for Kyoto and Beijing to do research for their dissertations—a risky move with the threat of war on the horizon. They were in Beijing when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, and were unable to leave the country. They were kept under surveillance until March 1943, when they and other citizens of Allied countries were rounded up by the Japanese and put in the Weixang internment camp.

For the rest of the war, the Wrights’ families in America worked frantically to get them repatriated, but to no avail. Captives at Weixang were not mistreated; the Japanese authorities allowed the prisoners to govern themselves in a kind of commune. “Our handful of stupid executives and guards knows it could never run this place, so they leave it to us,” she wrote in a letter home. The Wrights were separated from their books and research materials for more than two years; still, Mary managed to find a way to educate herself, persuading some of the Russian prisoners to teach her their language.

When the camp was liberated in 1945, you might imagine the Wrights would have wanted nothing more than to go home. But the opportunity to make up for lost time on their dissertations and see the progress of the Communist revolution was irresistible: They traveled in China for two more years and met Communist leader Mao Zedong. Mary also collected publications for a Chinese collection at Stanford, where the two would land as faculty members in 1947.

While at Stanford, Mary completed her Radcliffe PhD, wrote a well-regarded book (The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism), bore two sons, and earned tenure. She also spoke out on political issues, defending her fellow Asia scholar Owen Lattimore when he was targeted by Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

When the Wrights were lured to Yale, undergraduates thought a course with the “lady professor” would surely be a gut. But as Pierson later recounted, she proved a tough grader. “Within a year or two hers was a privileged course,” he said. “Students cut or slighted their other courses to work for Mary Wright. They respected and loved her for what she demanded of them and for what she then gave.” Among her most devoted students was Jonathan Spence ’65PhD, who himself went on to become a Sterling Professor at Yale and a leading historian of China.

As the politics of the 1960s heated up, Mary spoke out frequently, especially on issues regarding Asia. She advocated US recognition of the People’s Republic of China and denounced the war in Vietnam, participating in the first nationwide “teach-in” on the war in Washington, DC, in 1965.

All this activity did not come without a cost. In a letter to family members in February 1966, Arthur wrote that Mary had been admitted to Silver Hill Hospital for “rest and a complete break from the tyranny of her habitual routine.” In December of the same year, he told family that she had been hospitalized at the Institute for Living in Hartford, where she was being treated for “deep depression.” She did not return to teaching until the spring of 1968. “Because the multiplicity of her talents was so great, she was pulled in many directions,” Spence later said at her memorial service. “Because the tensions generated by her fierce energy were so great, and the pressures she sensed so immediate, she lived under great strain.”

In 1969, Mary was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. She died in June 1970 at the age of 52, too young to have the impact as a teacher and scholar she might have had. But the students she did have did not forget the experience. One of them, Rick Fabian ’65, went on to be an Episcopal priest and a collector of Chinese art. In a condolence message to Arthur in 1970, he wrote, “She took academic life for real, and everyone knew it—so we began to take academic life for real, too.” 

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