[3] Every other year, the American Ethnological Society awards the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for the best graduate student essay, in her honor.

On September 1, 1900, in Newport, Rhode Island,[9] she married future three-term progressive Republican congressman Herbert Parsons, an associate and political ally of President Teddy Roosevelt.

[10] When her husband was a member of Congress, she published two then-controversial books under the pseudonym John Main.

[4] She believed that folklore was a key to understanding a culture and that anthropology could be a vehicle for social change.

She was a proponent of trial marriages, divorce by mutual consent and access to reliable contraception, which she wrote about in her book The Family (1906).