Gender (Other Keyword)
101-125 (168 Records)
The intimacy of guest artifacts like toiletries, cosmetics, and corset hooks from an early twentieth century privy deposit are compared with the contemporary assemblage recovered from the yard of the male caretaker of a women’s retreat located on the shores of Lake George, New York. Founded in 1903, Wiawaka Holiday House provided affordable vacations for "Girl Guests" (single women who worked in the garment factories around nearby Albany) free from the potentially corrupting presence of men....
Material Masculinities: Archaeology of a World War II Italian Prisoner of War Camp (2016)
Camp Monticello, a World War II prisoner of war camp located in rural Arkansas, housed 3,000 Italian enlisted men, officers, and generals. As a military institution and a homosocial space, Camp Monticello provides a lens into the social construction of masculinity and the intersections of class, gender, and cultural difference in the 1940s. This paper will deconstruct heteronormative white maleness and explore the ways that gendered and cultural identities were both maintained and performed...
Materializing Transformations In Western Ideologies Of Mothering (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Women’s Work: Archaeology and Mothering" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Western gender ideology transformed the morally superior childrearer from fathers to mothers over the 18th century because by 1690 women already formed 75% of church congregations as men were pulled out of churches by the conflicting overly-competitive values of capitalism, which promoted the biblical sins of usury, price gouging and...
Men do Art and Women do Craft, but Both can do Archaeology: Gender and Civilian Internment on the Isle of Man (2015)
The British interned both men and women on the Isle of Man during World War 2. The men were housed in camps in Douglas, Ramsay and Peel, and the women (and later, married couples) were in a large camp comprising both Port Erin and Port St Mary. Each camp developed its own sub-culture, but gender stereotypes amongst both staff and internees created different expectations. Famous artists produced important, innovative works in the men's camps, where newspapers were also regularly published., but...
Message(s) in a Jar: Mason Jars, Archaeological Narratives, and Contemporary Fascinations (2015)
Mason jars, as workhorses of home food preservation beginning in the late nineteenth-century, have functioned both as indicators of social and economic status within archaeological contexts and currently as objects of fascination in the DIY marketplace. This paper parses out the various discourses within which mason jars have been placed historically and contemporarily by their users, promoters, and archaeologists, and seeks to understand how gender, race, class, and nostalgia continue to inform...
Mollusk Foraging and Gendered Labor in Seventeenth-Century Guam, Mariana Islands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological investigation of gendered labor in traditional households in the Mariana Islands is still in a nascent stage of development. Archaeological field school excavations by the University of Guam Micronesian Area Research Center and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa yielded a rich assemblage of...
Mother Earth, Father Sky, Figurative Art and Reproduction at Cahokia and in the Mississippian World (2016)
In the Cahokian world the sounds and sights of night would have brought stories: the moon, morning star and evening star; human origins. Origin stories generally abound with sex, (mother earth, father sky) but our analyses are oddly devoid of sex. Yet Mississippian figurative art plays with the seen and unseen of sex as it hints at how cosmic principles, sex, and gender were entangled and tied to night and reproduction. By focusing on reproductive themes, but not sex, archaeologists have not...
My Collegial Interactions With Mary Beaudry (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "“Historical Archaeology with Canon on the Side, Please”: In Honor of Mary C. Beaudry (1950-2020)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Mary Beaudry was hired at Boston University in 1980, shortly after I was hired at University of Massachusetts/Boston in 1978. We became friendly colleagues, shared drives to conferences and worked together in several professional capacities, including as founding members of the...
The Names We Know: Labor and Prestige in Archaeological Publishing (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1985, Joan Gero published an article in *American Antiquity* arguing that archaeologists conform in their professional roles to stereotypical American gender roles: publicly visible, dominant men collect and publish data and passive, publicly invisible women do the “archaeological housework.” This...
Nathan Harrison: A Case Study in African American Masculinity (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The expected societal roles of African American men in the past have been discussed across a variety of fields, including masculinity studies, ethnic studies, and Black feminist studies. Included in the literature are discrepancies about the influence of the dominant white hegemonic masculinity and its role in creating an ideal...
No Fresh Water Except That Furnished by the Rains: Cisterns in Key West, Florida (2013)
Nineteenth-century Key West was one of Florida's largest cities, an important port, an administrative center, and a host to U.S. Naval and Army bases. Yet the island lacked natural fresh water sources, necessitating the use of cisterns to capture rainwater. Recent exavation of three examples provided opportunities to examine cistern construction, adequacy, and water consumption. Water use also had implications with respect to gender and class during the 19th century. Water chiefly related to...
No Longer "Playin’ the Lady": Examining Black Women’s Consumption at the Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead (2017)
Archaeological studies of race and consumption have linked black consumer behavior to the negotiation of social and economic exclusion. While these studies have highlighted blacks’ efforts to define themselves after slavery, they have overlooked black women and how they used consumer goods to aspire towards gendered notions of racial uplift and respectability. This paper examines the Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead, a historic freedman’s site in Travis County, Texas, to describe the nature...
Now You See Her, Now You Don’t: Female Gender and Its Contexts at Teotihuacan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the confounding issue of female-gendered images at Teotihuacan. Figures clad in female-gendered clothing appear within Teotihuacan’s most prominent and luxurious arts. Some of the largest sculptures and most precious stone figures are female, and these sculptural images were recovered from highly symbolic, civic spaces. Similarly,...
"Our Girls" in "the White City:" Race, Place, Gender, and Chicago's Red Summer of 1919 (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The second decade of the 20th century saw a Great Migration of African Americans to cities like Chicago. The city’s existing African American community expressed concern for the welfare of “our girls” in a strange, potentially dangerous, new place, and worked to ease their transition to a new way of life. This...
Out of site, Out of Mind: Women's Hidden Labor and the Making of Modern American Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Sins of Our Ancestors (and of Ourselves): Confronting Archaeological Legacies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While some work has been done over the past few decades to uncover the roles of female archaeologists who supported their husband's careers with little acknowledgment, less work has been done to explore the diversity of forgotten women's labor that helped support American archaeology since the late 19th...
Parenting in the Past: Investigations into the Spaces, Places, and Traces of Parenting in the Archaeological Record (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper seeks to bring together the existing literature and extend its theoretical and methodological implications for an archaeology of parenting, particularly in the times/places where contemporary written records do not exist. While parenting and childhood may be more readily visible to researchers and the public in periods where written records...
Pib Naah y la Partería: Birth Rituals and Midwifery at Río Amarillo, Copan, Honduras (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores evidence of women’s ritual practice at Río Amarillo, a site located 20 km from the Classic period center of Copan. While the ritual activities of royal women are largely hidden from view in Copan’s Acropolis, excavations at the site of Río Amarillo and in the groups surrounding it uncovered two contexts that were particularly...
Pictograph Handprint Analysis in Southern California--Stature and Gender Projections (2015)
Pictograph hand impressions (n=288) from 42 rock art loci in southern California were analyzed to infer the physical stature and gender of the most likely Native American participants against contemporary assertions of regional rock art style and function. The analytical underpinnings were as follows: anthropometric data of Mission Indians (Boas 1895); ethnographic accounts of young adolescent female participation (e.g., Oxendine 1980:39) and the statistical difference in female adult stature...
A Piedmont Plantation (2013)
In Virginia, the majority of excavataions at early eighteenth-century plantations have been concentrated in the Tidewater region. Recently, however, more archaeologists are turning their focus inland toward the Piedmont. Established in 1723 by President James Madison's grandparents, Ambrose and Frances, Mount Pleasant is one of these early Piedmont plantations. For much of its occupation it was managed by a woman; Ambrose Madison died shortly after moving to Mount Pleasant, leaving his wife in...
Playgrounds as Domestic Reform (2013)
Playgrounds contributed to several domestic reform movements. Community mothering in playgrounds formed part of social settlements, the public cooperative housekeeping movement, and the municipal housekeeping movement. Playgrounds were also part of the public health reform movement and the Cult of Real Womanhood that promoted exercise to strengthen the working class and to address the perception of women’s sickliness in the Cult of Invalidism. In the City Beautiful movement playgrounds and...
Playing with Gender: Considerations of Intersecting Identities Expressed through Childhood Materials at Fort Davis, Texas (2016)
Too often, children are made invisible in the archaeological record. However, as a site of experimentation and play where multiple interrelated subjectivities are in constant negotiation, childhood is the foundation for identity construction. Using an assemblages of children’s toys and personal items from 19th and 20th century Fort Davis, Texas , we posit that childhood is a reflection of larger social dynamics. Employing the materials of daily life, we will focus on how children’s negotiations...
Pleasure or All Customers?: Disrupting Heteronormative Perceptions of Nineteenth-century Prostitution (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Studies of nineteenth-century prostitution have always been tied in some manner to discussions of gender. In sites of organized prostitution, the narrative has been that women commoditized their sexuality and men purchased it from them. This subversion of nineteenth-century sexual norms has led to...
Plymouth Memory Capsule: A 19th-Century Tale of Woe? (2017)
While searching for remnants of 17th-Century Plymouth, Massachusetts, a collection of organic materials and Victorian-era artifacts of personal adornment—all associated with a female—were uncovered in during excavations associated with Project 400 carried out by the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston. This unexpected cache provides a rare glimpse into the town of Plymouth’s rich history. This memory capsule filled with domestic items including a...
Poverty, Motherhood, and Childhood in 19th-Century San Francisco (2015)
Popular images of the maritime industry in places like San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Cove often focus on men — whether working on docks or ships, or on land at iron works and carpenter’s shops. Less visible in the historical record of these spaces are the women and children also living, and often working, along the waterfront. Historical research on the neighborhood that bordered Yerba Buena Cove in the late-19th-century suggests that most residences were occupied by families, rather than by...
Race, Gender, and Consumerism in Nineteenth Century Virginia (2017)
This paper uses historical and archaeological evidence to consider which consumer goods were available to enslaved men and women in nineteenth century Virginia. At the scale of local markets and stores, supply and variable adherence to laws constrained which goods were available to slaves who were able to purchase and trade for them. By comparing purchases of enslaved African Americans with purchases of whites at the same store, I assess which goods were accessible to each group. I use...