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In case you hadn’t noticed, the Association of Senior Anthropologists (ASA) is being overtaken—at least in a figurative sense. Several women who all got our doctorates from Bryn Mawr College (BMC) are increasingly active in the Association, including the Board. I have had the honor of being ASA’s secretary for the past six years. Soon Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi, another BMC graduate, will take over, ably supported by Bryn Mawrter Maria Cattell, who becomes ASA president at the same time. Though I didn’t meet them while at Bryn Mawr, I’ve enjoyed getting to know them as senior anthropologists and realize how much we have in common. We were at BMC at different times, had different advisers, and carried out ethnographic research in very different parts of the world. What we shared, however, was a validating graduate experience which was particularly rare for young women half a century ago, including (as Alice Kehoe’s recent memoir vividly illustrated) in our discipline. Here I’d like to share just how important that experience remains for me personally as well as professionally. I suspect the others would be happy to add their own impressions.
It was 1970 when I started graduate work after undergraduate training at London University (Bedford College). There I specialized in medieval, particularly Byzantine, history, obviously attracted to other times and places though this only became clear to me after graduation in 1965. Then, through the auspices of Voluntary Service Overseas, I took my first ever plane ride, to Sudan to become an English teacher at Wad Medani Girls School, 150 miles south of Khartoum on the Blue Nile. A Muslim boarding school for girls, it was one of only five in the then-largest country in Africa, attracting students from a wide area who had passed the tough entrance examination. My duties included daily literature and language lessons to the two junior level classes, as well as an array of extracurricular activities: dramatic society, tennis and volleyball lessons, organized visits to the British Council library, and boarding house supervision. Lessons were held six days a week and on Friday, our day of rest, I was often invited home to meet the students’ mothers and sisters. I loved every minute of it, and when a visiting examiner remarked how I reminded him of an anthropologist, I found my vocation. I also realized, from the paucity of publications about women in this region, that I had found my ethnographic home. Indeed I have spent much of my career living in different parts of Sudan, researching and writing about ordinary women’s lives. Equally important, this is where many of my closest friends (some going back to 1965) still live.
Formal training in anthropology came a few years later. By 1970, married and living in southeast Pennsylvania, I was ready to begin graduate school. I learned there were two possibilities in the area: University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr. From their catalogs I was not surprised to learn that Penn had no women faculty in the anthropology department—typical at that time—but found Bryn Mawr had two, both full professors. After coming to the decision about graduate work via a male-dominated undergraduate training and hands-on experience in the segregated society of northern Sudan, I had no hesitation: Bryn Mawr was clearly the place to go.
It more than fulfilled my expectations. Frederica de Laguna and Jane Goodale were formidable mentors for all their students, but particularly for women. Early on I remember Jane saying: “We’ve a lot to do. Over half the world is female and we hardly know anything about them!” Jane was just celebrating the publication of Tiwi Wives (1971), and the notion that women might hold their own distinctive understandings of how their culture worked was heady stuff for female anthropology students in 1970, who knew things were not so different in their own societies. Jane’s understanding of women’s lives indeed extended to our own society. When I found myself expecting my first child at the start of my third year of course work, I told her I should probably drop out. “Why?” she asked crisply. “Are you planning to get sick? Women all over the world get pregnant all the time, and just keep on going.” I kept on going, did not get sick, and together Jane and Freddy were enormously supportive as I prepared for final examinations and my defense, in the month before the baby arrived.
Most important for me personally was the influence of Frederica de Laguna, who became my adviser sometime during my first year. For all students, Freddy was an inspiration: an encyclopedic fund of knowledge whose acclaimed Under Mount Saint Elias (1972) was published around this time, accomplished mystery novelist as well as ethnographer, and first female president of the AAA. Less of an overt feminist than Jane, Freddy was nonetheless sympathetic to the traditional biases against women in anthropology, ready to make small and major contributions to our success. With her help, I found support for dissertation field research, for finding a fulltime teaching position, for a delay in completing my thesis (after the birth of my second child), and for understanding as I rushed to complete my dissertation before she retired. She could also be a tough taskmistress. Can I ever forget how, as I prepared for prelims and asked her what was my main area of weakness, she retorted: “Well, you just don’t know very much!” Years later I was visiting her at her retirement home in Haverford and over a martini or two at dinner, she complained what a tough mentor Boas had been. I replied that she too could be demanding and reminded her of this exchange. She clapped her hand to her mouth and said, “That’s Boas! Straight Boas!” before denying she had said any such thing.
