Women and Rhetoric between the Wars

12. Field Guides: Women Writing Anthropology

193 X 12 Field Guides: Women Writing Anthropology Risa Applegarth Anthropology has long been perceived as a “welcoming science” for women. Margaret Mead, the most famous anthropologist of the twentieth century, suggested in 1960 that it was anthropology’s status as a “new science” that made her discipline “kinder to women, to those who came from distant disciplines, to members of minority groups” (5). Certainly this perception has some basis in fact: when anthropology emerged as a field science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists’ attempts to construct a complete account of human history seemed to positively require women’s participation. Otis Mason, speaking to the Anthropological Society of Washington, a forerunner of the American Anthropological Association, asserted in 1882: “Who may be an anthropologist? Every man, woman and child that has sense and patience to observe, and that can honestly record the thing observed” (26). Two years later, Edward Tylor, founder of British social anthropology, also encouraged women’s involvement in anthropological research, proclaiming that “the man of the house . . . cannot do it all. If his wife sympathizes with his work, and is able to do it, really half of the work of investigation seems to me to fall to her” (550). As these statements suggest, the centrality of fieldwork meant that even women who lacked formal scientific training could draw upon their firsthand observations—often based on missionary work Risa Applegarth 194 or travel with a husband employed in colonial administration—to authorize their participation in this emerging science. Many nineteenthcentury women anthropologists, such as Alice Fletcher, Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Erminnie Smith, and Zelia Nuttall, were able to forge public identities as scientists, to secure funding for research travel, and to publish extensive and well-received scientific works (Visweswaran; Parezo; Lurie; Claassen). But the initial welcome afforded to women had paradoxical effects during the interwar period. Many more women practitioners and students entered the discipline in the 1910s and 1920s, drawn to anthropology in part by the success of earlier high-profile women like Fletcher and Stevenson as well as by the well-known willingness of Franz Boas at Columbia to admit and mentor women students (Rossiter 151-53). But the perception of anthropology as accessible to women and amateurs undermined anthropology’s still tenuous disciplinary status and unleashed fears of feminization that social scientists responded to with aggressively masculinized discursive practices and methodologies (63, 73). Thus women in anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s were required to grapple with an intensely professionalizing context if they wished to remain within rather than be written out of the discipline. (See Jordynn Jack’s chapter in this collection for an analysis of the contradictory messages received by women in the physical sciences.) In this chapter I describe some of the exigencies facing women anthropologists between the wars and analyze a range of rhetorical strategies women employed to resist their marginalization and to exert influence on their discipline. An astonishing number of women earned credentials, conducted research, served in professional organizations , and shaped their developing discipline during the 1920s and 1930s, including not only Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, the two most widely read anthropologists of the twentieth century, but also Elsie Clews Parsons, Gladys Reichard, Ella Cara Deloria, Ruth Underhill, Ruth Bunzel, Clara Lee Tanner, Zora Neale Hurston, Esther Schiff Goldfrank, Ann Axtell Morris, Erna Gunther, Hortense Powdermaker, and many others. Although the public arguments and scientific achievements of each of these women merit attention from scholars of rhetoric, in what follows I develop a concept of rhetorical community formation as a framework for understanding how women worked together to meet the exigencies of professionalization and to counteract their collective marginalization. After briefly describing Field Guides 195 the gendered implications of interwar professionalization, I offer two sets of analyses to clarify how community formation functions as a rhetorical strategy. First, I trace in the correspondence of many women anthropologists their efforts to actively shape a supportive and welcoming community for women. These documents suggest that women worked in the backstage of their professional lives to create networks analogous to the formalized professional networks that men were simultaneously developing—and often excluding women from. I then assess texts by archaeologist Ann Axtell Morris, whose two field autobiographies, Digging in Yucatan (1931) and Digging in the Southwest (1933), were enormously popular. Such popular texts certainly resulted in short-term rhetorical success for Morris, but their rhetorical significance...