Eighty-six year old Alice Beck Kehoe tells the saga of a female archaeologist who began a calling in a field with few women and lots of sexism, and who persisted and built a distinguished career as the world and the profession changed and became more accepting of women, who are now a powerful presence.
Kehoe is a professor of anthropology emerita at Marquette University and the author or editor of twenty books. She has spent most of her career researching the ethnology and archaeology of the Canadian and American Great Plains. She recounts struggling through a male-dominated Radcliffe/Harvard to earn a Ph.D. while caring for a husband and a growing family. In the mid-1960s, there was a shortage of academic archaeologists, and Kehoe launched her career at the University of Nebraska, and then Marquette University in Milwaukee. They were good jobs, and she built a distinguished career, but by the time she retired, Kehoe figured she had earned thirty percent less than her male colleagues.
Much of her work took place on the Blackfoot reservation in western Montana, where she focused on the tribe and their ancestors. The resulting books and articles became an outstanding contribution to ethnographic and archaeological study, but funding for research was hard to come by.
This highly-personal memoir is charming, funny, and a bit heartbreaking. It tells a fascinating story of the trials and travails of a female scholar in a time of acute discrimination against women. It took three generations of young women persisting like Kehoe to move the profession toward equality.
Kehoe has seen archaeology grow and change over sixty years—both technically and politically. While women in positions of prestige and influence were rare in the 1960s, today they are common. Kehoe’s story documents what it took to move the profession in that direction. It is an inspiration to all.
