Significant Others: Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology

It Was No “Pink Tea”: Gender and American Anthropology, 1885–1903

IT WAS NO “PINK TEA” Gender and American Anthropology, 1885–1903 JOY ELIZABETH ROHDE On June 8, 1885, ten women convened in the home of Washington ethnologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson to inaugurate the Women’s Anthropological Society of America (WASA). They welcomed all women “clear in thought, logical in mental processes, exact in expression, and earnest in the search for truth” to contribute to anthropology and thereby enhance the status of women in science (Anon. n.d.:11). Envisioning their association as a child that would grow through careful maternal nurturing, the women waxed eloquent about the fecundity of their organization. One wrote, “to [Stevenson’s] energy, ability and fostering care are due its birth and larger growth.” With such care, the success of the Society and that of anthropology would only multiply. WASA would be “the minute seed from which a great forest will spring” (McGee 1889:240, 242). The organization, in the eyes of the women, would prove that they, as mothers and careful observers, were perfectly suited to cultivate scientific knowledge. Thirteen years later, they appeared to have accomplished their aspirations. In November 1898, the forty-nine WASA women were invited to join the influential Anthropological Society of Washington (ASW). Scholars have asserted that this move demonstrated male acceptance of women in the budding discipline. Nancy Oestreich Lurie, for example, claims that “the disbanding of [WASA] . . . was in itself a recognition of the universality of work carried out by the very first women anthropologists” (1999:58). The circumstances of the merger, however, suggest a different interpretation of the absorption of WASA into ASW. Rather than representing a victory for women anthropologists, it signaled the deterioration of a visible community of women contributing to Joy Elizabeth Rohde is a graduate student in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently studying anthropologists ’ roles as policy advisors and public intellectuals in postwar America. 261 the discipline. Notable individual women, such as Stevenson and Alice Cunningham Fletcher, continued to pursue anthropological research despite the demise of the women’s association. Meanwhile, their WASA peers disappeared from the historical record. By 1900, only a quarter of the WASA women remained ASW members and WASA itself had faded from Washington’s scientific landscape. This decline only intensified in the first decade of the twentieth century as male anthropologists struggled to redefine anthropology as a serious scientific career. The burgeoning participation of women in anthropology in the last quarter of the nineteenth century occurred in tandem with the reorientation of American anthropology around stricter standards of scientific practice. To assert the legitimacy of their pursuits, practitioners proffered a model of science as rigorous , rational, and impersonal. Philadelphia anthropologist Daniel Garrison Brinton explained that scientific truth “deals with the actual world about us, its objective realities and present activities, and does not relegate the inquirer to dusty precedents or the mouldy maxims of commentators. The only conditions which it enjoins are that the imperfections of the senses shall be corrected . . . and that their observations shall be interpreted by the laws of logical induction” (1895:3). So defined, anthropology was incompatible with Victorian femininity . Women were delicate, subjective, irrational, and emotional, and the woman scientist was thus a contradiction in terms; she was unnatural, defeminized. At most, a woman could be a dilettante, for her mental constitution instilled her with characteristics that would only contaminate her attempts at objective observation and reduce her conclusions to unreliable musings (Cott 1987:216– 27; Keller 1985:6–7; Parezo 1993a; Rossiter 1982:xv; Silverberg 1998). For women anthropologists, however, the Victorian construction of femininity and the conventional definition of objective science were not necessarily contradictory. Faced with the discord between femininity and science, women fashioned a variety of novel identities and career patterns based upon Victorian gender characteristics to attain status in the anthropological community. Fletcher adopted the Victorian rhetoric of feminine morality, sympathy, and maternity to create a niche for herself in ethnological investigation. Stevenson rejected outright many of the sex-based restrictions upon scientific study, but retained Victorian gendered rhetoric when it proved a boon for her fieldwork. Others—most notably Zelia Nuttall and Phoebe Apperson Hearst—remained content on the fringes of the anthropological community, but mobilized their financial resources and social connections to create niches of institutional influence for themselves within the science. Within anthropological institutions, however, the ideal of scientific rigor intersected with Victorian femininity to constrain women’s participation. Although the rhetoric of...