Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In recognition of the 101st anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, we celebrate other female firsts, specifically those of pioneering women in American archaeology and beyond. Although they gained the right to vote in 1920, women were not yet regularly allowed to participate on their own merit in American archaeology, with few exceptions. It wasn’t until the mid-1920s that women were able to train beside men in graduate schools or field schools. During the 1930s the numbers of women doing fieldwork and completing MAs greatly increased, and during the 1940s and 1950s women had more access to earning PhDs. Despite these gains across the decades, women continued to experience lower pay grades, limitations on degrees obtained, and relegation to specific research niches. We focus on our predecessors who broke such barriers. These women, whether they were the first female PhDs in anthropology programs or female archaeologists of color, forged a path for others while also creating waves. Importantly, breaking barriers is not an artifact of the past; female archaeologists today, and certainly female archaeologists of color, continue to make strides in the field and achieve their own female firsts in the discipline.