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

3. Women Entering the Field during the “Roaring Twenties”

95 CHAPTER THREE Women Entering the Field during the “Roaring Twenties” A significant change in involvement and opportunities occurred after the mid-1920s, with the beginning of regular training of women alongside men, both in graduate schools, such as at Harvard University, and in field schools, such as sponsored by the University of New Mexico. From the beginning of the anthropology program at Harvard College in 1890, Frederic W. Putnam and his staff offered a limited range of duplicate but separate courses for women from Radcliffe College, but this teaching was restricted to undergraduate courses. Starting in 1925, Radcliffestudentswereadmittedtostudiesatthegraduatelevelalongside men at the Peabody Museum. The number of Radcliffe women rapidly rose to 20–25 percent of total graduate students in anthropology. This paralleled the growth of graduate studies in anthropology during this decade, which increased by a factor of two to three times. Hence 25 to 30 graduate students enrolled in anthropology each year. Still, for the first women of Radcliffe who sought to avail themselves of this opportunity, although there was a significant improvement in their access to instruction, taking courses in anthropology was no easy matter. Doris Stone (1980:20) recollected that as an undergraduate, “In the 1920s, I was required to obtain permission from the president of Harvard to attend classes at the Peabody Museum, and with that permission came the warning that if my deportment was not entirely proper, my association with that austere building would be ended.” While this situation may hardly seem like progress, one has to remember 96 | Women Entering the Field that the anthropology staff had previously taught women in separate sections in Radcliffe buildings. Thus the ability of women to actually take classes with men at the Peabody was a significant policy shift. For the first time, women had potential access to all anthropology classes, graduate and undergraduate. However, even when institutions like Harvard University began teaching women, there was still a de facto two-tier class system in place. For most of the women interested in archaeology, graduate education at Harvard appeared to have effectively ended at the master’s level (as it also did at the University of New Mexico and other schools). Prospective women graduate students were more intensely challenged by the faculty at the Peabody regarding their future plans. According to Ruth Otis Sawtell Wallis: “Her professors, E. A. Hooton and A. M. Tozzer, asserted that most young women in graduate work abandoned it if they married. They added, however, if she had serious intentions to study, they would help her in every way” (Collins 1979:85). Doris Zemurray Stone (1980:20–21) recalled: “I was advised against studying for a PHD. Women simply weren’t encouraged to go that far, particularly in anthropology. . . . And eventually, when I returned to the Peabody Museum for a visit in the 1940s, one of my former professors, who also thought little good came from educating females because they soon grew up and were married, invited me to speak at a weekly tea gathering at his home.” However, both Doris Stone and Ruth Wallis made it clear that once they made the difficult choice to pursue advanced degrees, the faculty was extremely supportive. The late 1920s also marked the time when women began to be a regular component of the archaeological field school crews at the University of New Mexico. It is difficult to ascertain how many of the women listed by Edgar Hewett as attending his field schools there were involved in excavations. One of the women, Winifred Reiter, told Frances Joan Mathien that Hewett was under considerable pressure to demonstrate the success of his program, and thus he padded his class list, including members of his managing board, teachers from public schools who neededtoupdatetheirworktomaintaintheirteachingcertificates,friends Women Entering the Field | 97 of the Hewett family, associates on vacations, donors to the School of American Research, and so on (Mathien 1992:108–9). In addition, the women who were part of the field school did not always get a chance to become involved in archaeology. However, of the 18 women listed as participating in each of the University of New Mexico field schools in 1927 and 1928 (Anonymous 1927, 1928), for example, at least half a dozen of this number from each year show up in the discussions below as actively engaged in fieldwork and making contributions to field archaeology. Women also began being admitted to other field schools...