Resilience and Empowerment: 100 Years of Archaeological Mothers in the Field

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Gender in Archaeology over the Last 30+ Years" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While much has been written recently highlighting pioneering women’s contributions to archaeology, there has not been a systematic study of their roles as mothers and how they navigated their personal lives in a male-dominated field. In this paper I contextualize the role of motherhood in archaeology from an historical perspective, highlighting documents and biographical accounts of British and American women archaeologists from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Through a close read of dozens of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs, I explore how women and mothers wrote about and navigated the intersections of their personal and private lives, and how mothering affected their professional work. These mothering accounts are viewed through a matricentric feminist theoretical lens that seeks to contest, challenge, and counter the patriarchal oppressive institution of motherhood and seeks to imagine and implement a maternal identity and practice that is empowering to mothers (after Andrea O-Reilley). These important, overlooked historical accounts from the field serve as a context for current experiences of motherhood and archaeology and can help normalize motherhood in an empowering, meaningful way that can push the field to be more inclusive and supportive of the needs of mothers and parents.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Gender in Archaeology over the Last 30+ Years   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38772.0