Cultural Negotiations: The Role of Women in the Founding of Americanist Archaeology

Concluding Remarks

251 Concluding Remarks This volume incorporates explicit research on the status of women in Americanist archaeology. Alison Wylie (2001:23) asks, “What difference has feminism made to archaeological research?” and responds that among other issues, there is an emerging subfield of gender archaeology, involving archaeological research on women and gender. Several of the problems of gender bias, she argues, are a consequence of intellectual dependence on unexamined stereotypes about the capacities and roles proper to women and men and hence a goal of gender archaeology ought to be countering the invisibility of women and distortions due to gender stereotypes (Wylie 2001:32, 38). That has been a principal goal of this volume. One pattern that I argue developed in career choices in Americanist archaeology for women was to select research topics and areas that men found onerous, often because these researches involved rather tedious analyses, such as the bioarchaeological fields of paleoethnobotany or zooarchaeology. While my own unscientific review of the lists of SAA members over the past 50 years indicates an increasing presence and perhaps even dominance of these fields by women, in general the women practitioners still find themselves rather invisible, as indicated by the 2010 review article by Mary Lucas Powell and a dozen of her fellow bioarchaeologists , entitled “Invisible Hands: Women in Bioarchaeology.” Another pattern that I identify emerging in the 1930s was the entry of women into fields such as textile analyses and other areas traditionally 252 | Concluding Remarks considered part of household arts. Because field archaeology focuses upon material remains, this is a critical area of analysis and one that as an archaeologist I find essential to my work. However, Margaret Rossiter, in her 1982 book Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, which covers anthropologists and archaeologists as well as astronomers, chemists, and other scientists, makes the point that while the development of women’s careers in science was paralleled by the growth of education for women beginning in the late nineteenth century, she feels that women lost ground in the 1930s, being diverted to areas such as home economics and library science. Ruth Watts makes a similar argument in Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History, which covers the period up to World War II: The complete reversal of women’s prominence in science education by the 1930s, indeed, can be traced to several factors: the male backlash against women’s “feminizing influence” on boys; discrimination and erection of barriers against women as the physical sciences grew in significance and became increasingly professionalized and promoted as “masculine”; a corresponding fall in women’s confidence that they could gain decent employment in science, even in teaching; and finally, alternative pathways in liberal arts, home economics, and commerce initiated by women themselves which helped the decline of female science and math enrollments. (Watts 2007:150) As I noted in chapter 4, one of the trajectories taken by women to create research niches in archaeology was to focus on a specialized area such as textile or ceramic analyses—household arts. And one of the options selected by several women after securing their MA degree in archaeology was to utilize the degree as credentials in obtaining a job in library science. Thus while the patterns defined for the women in Americanist archaeology of the 1930s do in fact show the propensity observed by Rossiter and Watts, such as the decline in employment opportunities and the rise of alternative pathways in household arts, business, and humanities, this was not perhaps as unfavorable for women in archaeology . A control of textiles, pottery, and other aspects of household arts Concluding Remarks | 253 are essential for archaeological research, and humanistic studies (such as ethnohistory) have been critical for the interpretations of archaeological evidence. Thus depending on whether one looks at these events from the eyes of an archaeologist or the eyes of, say, an engineer, these trends commented upon by Rossiter and Watts could be viewed in either a positive or negative light. As suggested by my reference to the volumes of Rossiter and Watts above, there is a good literature on women involved in scientific fieldwork other than archaeology. A few of the other volumes that are useful studies of women doing fieldwork in primatology, botany, geology, and other sciences include Marcia Bonta’s Women in the Field: America’s Pioneering Women Naturalists, Angela Creager et al.’s Feminism in Twentieth -Century Science, Technology...