Out of site, Out of Mind: Women's Hidden Labor and the Making of Modern American Archaeology

Summary

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 century. Institutions such as Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology benefited from countless female clerks, stenographers, secretaries, librarians, and other staff. At Harvard University, many archaeology graduate students who had young children benefited from an informal economy of female caregivers that lived on campus as well. Although different in many ways, the 21st century has seen a stark increase in non-tenure track faculty, who account for over 70% of faculty in American universities, or 1.3 million out of 1.8 million professors. Of these 1.3 million professors, it is estimated that between 51% to 61% of contingent faculty are women, who feel the effects of uncertain futures in Higher Education all too well.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Sins of Our Ancestors (and of Ourselves): Confronting Archaeological Legacies

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26326