Marguerite Johnson is a professor of Classics at The University of Newcastle, Australia, and a mentor through the AWAWS Academic Mentoring Program. She received her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at The University of Newcastle in 1988, where she won the university medal. She then earned her PhD in 1997, completing a thesis on Catullus’ Lesbia and her early Greek models. Now, Marguerite is an established feminist scholar, whose work unearths and examines the lived experiences of ancient women, and the representation of women in ancient texts. She has published extensively on gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and is currently working on a revised edition of Routledge’s Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society and Literature. She also brings this knowledge into the classroom, as she teaches a range of undergraduate courses, including ‘Gender and Sexuality in Antiquity’ and ‘Women and Children in the Ancient World.’ I am honoured to be one of Marguerite’s PhD students, and am greatly inspired by our countless conversations about her research and the value of feminist scholarship. For this blog post, I had the pleasure of interviewing Marguerite, to find out more about her experiences as a student, and the academics who inspired her. 

As an undergraduate in the mid-1980s, I can’t remember one instance where women were mentioned in any of my Ancient History or Modern History classes. In third year English, I vividly remember a class on D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, delivered by a casual member of staff – a woman – and she discussed women, and also set an essay question on the sisters in the novel. It was quite a memorable event and, of course, I wrote the essay. In my Honours year, all went silent again. It wasn’t until I pursued the topic for my PhD that a I began a self-taught course of my own. 

Like other scholars I’ve met, my own inspiration was a beloved high school teacher – a brilliant and neverendingly energetic woman by the name of Elizabeth Tyack. She could recall dates like no one else. She attended The University of Newcastle as a mature-age student and her dedication to teaching was infectious.
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My intense interest in people’s private lives and their intimate histories is a major reason for my focus on socio-cultural history. But the real motivation for learning more in these fields was because I was so curious about topics that were simply not covered in high school or university – the lives of slaves, the day-to-day activities of women, children’s play and, basically, people’s lived realities. As a student, slaves were just casually mentioned in passing and I was always left wondering about their life expectancies, what happened when they were ill or injured, and other features of their lives. As a teenager who lived with severe scoliosis and spent much of my senior high school in and out of hospital, I also wondered what happened to people with spinal conditions, life-threatening illnesses, impacted wisdom teeth, and other such conditions that can, in some parts of the world today, be treated with success. Perhaps I’m just endlessly curious or a stickybeak.

Most definitely the feminist Classicists from the United States whose research changed the discipline forever in the late-1980s and 1990s. These women opened up the ancient world for me, and answered so many of the questions I had been asking myself and my teachers for years. Scholars like Marilyn Skinner (one of my PhD examiners), Amy Richlin (fearless and smart), Judith Hallett (egalitarian and prolific), and Page duBois (a justice-seeker and individual) challenged the traditions of Classics but never at the expense of outstanding intellectualism. All of these women, all of whom I have had the honour of meeting over the years, also taught me how to be a good feminist as well as a good scholar. In particular, Marilyn Skinner must be credited with making a major contribution to the scholar I am now – she was exacting, relentless and set an incredibly high standard. I also value academic kindness, and there are several scholars who show this naturally – Greg Nagy, Lea Beness, Tom Hillard, Frances Muecke, John  Davidson, and James Uden. 

 I work in two main areas: cultural or ‘lived’ history, and here I focus on sexual histories as well as histories of magical belief and practice – both are underpinned by my first love, which is ancient literature; and histories of Classical Reception, particularly the reception of Sappho, as well as cultural importations of the Classical Tradition in early colonial Australia. Feminism informs my life organically, and so it informs most aspects of my research. My interest in women’s lives is inherently underpinned by a feminist research agenda, and I think that speaking about it, teaching it, and writing it are all acts of feminist scholarship. I am particularly struck by voicelessness – a fascination and perhaps an underlying theme of my work – which has been with me since I read Greek mythology as a child. This theme is usually in the back of my mind when I write about women.I work in two main areas: cultural or ‘lived’ history, and here I focus on sexual histories as well as histories of magical belief and practice – both are underpinned by my first love, which is ancient literature; and histories of Classical Reception, particularly the reception of Sappho, as well as cultural importations of the Classical Tradition in early colonial Australia. Feminism informs my life organically, and so it informs most aspects of my research. My interest in women’s lives is inherently underpinned by a feminist research agenda, and I think that speaking about it, teaching it, and writing it are all acts of feminist scholarship. I am particularly struck by voicelessness – a fascination and perhaps an underlying theme of my work – which has been with me since I read Greek mythology as a child. This theme is usually in the back of my mind when I write about women.

As an undergraduate, Classics and Ancient History was male-dominated. I was mostly taught by men, but I was also taught by Dr Rhona Beare – an extraordinary woman, most definitely an individual, and one of the most brilliant minds I’ve encountered. While women are now well-represented in the field, there is the occasional mansplaining situation (but less so as I grow older). I think young female scholars still face problems associated with stereotyping and objectification, which is unacceptable and needs to be countered on every occasion. I also think that social and institutional snobbery is still very much alive and well – not only in Classics but across the academic arena per se. It’s tedious and offensive to be judged on the basis of what school you attended, or what university you attended. So much of this is a matter of time and place and space – all socio-economic factors. You can write a PhD in a chicken-pen in the middle of nowhere – intelligence isn’t class-bound or financially-determined – it’s so subversively egalitarian.

Women’s history is vital – it reminds us of the little we once had, and how far we’ve come – well, how far some of us most fortunate women have come. It also reminds us of what still needs to be done for both women and girls in the journey towards complete equality and freedom on a global scale.

Locating women’s roles and contributions within historical archives is complicated, especially when women are not listed as authors and instead identified as ‘wives’, ‘assistants’, and/or ‘indigenous guides’. To date, the Pacific Matildas project has identified 50 Pacific Matildas, their careers spanning three centuries (e.g., Rose de Freycinet c. 1817 and Janet Davison 2019). In contrast, archaeopedia.com lists only nine 'women archaeologists'. Here we shine the spotlight on Susan Davis.

Upon completing her studies, Susanna became the first woman to hold a museum position (Assistant Ethnologist) at the Dominion Museum, Wellington (Figure 2) and her appointment led to further involvement in a number of archaeological projects and site surveys across NZ. ​In 1957, Susanna became the first woman (and sole-author) to publish on North Island NZ archaeology, the publication detailing Maori occupation in the Castlepoint area (Davis 1957). The research is thorough and detailed and her archaeological expertise evident in the quality of her illustrations (Figure 3).

Susanna’s passion for archaeological fieldwork meant she spent nearly every weekend of 1959 excavating NZ archaeological sites (Davis 1959) and, in June 1959, as part of the Dominion Museum archaeological site exploration party, she travelled to Palliser Bay to conduct excavations. After this initial work in the area, Palliser Bay became a foci of systematic archaeological research, resulting in a three-year archaeological program in the late 60s culminating in the completion of two PhD theses (H.M. Leach 1976; B.F. Leach 1976) and the seminal publication of Prehistoric Man in Palliser Bay (Leach and Leach 1979). Worth noting here is that Helen May Leach is identified as a Pacific Matilda in her own right.

​​From 1956 to 1960, Susanna appears in several newspaper articles for The Evening Post. One such article contains a striking image of herself and the secretary of the Historic Places Trust, Mr John Pascoe, at the aforementioned Paremata Barracks (Figure 4). One can just make out the trowel in Susanna’s hand by her side. There is something to be said here about archaeology in reality vs imagined archaeology and its presentation to the general public. This particular scene was constructed for photographic purposes and Susanna played a crucial role, at a critical time period, in normalising the place of women in the field and subverting public perceptions. 

​In 1960, Susanna returned to the UK (Duff 1960), her departure from NZ announced in The Evening Post (Figure 5). Upon her return, Susanna worked on the excavation of the celebrated deserted medieval village at Wharram Percy, Yorkshire under the directorship of John Hurst and catalogued New Zealand artefacts at the British Museum before taking up a curatorial appointment at the Saffron Walden Museum (SWM), Essex. During her appointment at the SWM, Susanna curated the excellent multi-disciplinary collections of archaeology, natural history, and ethnography held by the museum and continued to write up various aspects of her NZ archaeological research (e.g., Davis 1962, 1963) while keeping a hand in Pacific ethnographic collections (Cranstone 1963: 48). 

​In mid-1963, Susanna left the SWM to take a curatorial position at Guildhall Museum. She then moved to London Museum where she curated exhibitions drawing on the museum’s collections of historic jigsaws and the suffragist movement. During this time, she joined the Suffragettes Fellowship, lending her voice to advocate for women’s rights (Figure 6).
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Leaving the London Museum in 1968, Susanna travelled to the USA to work on Plimoth Plantation, Massachusetts, where she took part in the famous re-creation of the 17th century settlement founded by the Pilgrim Fathers. Her work involved researching and commissioning accurate copies of appropriate period furniture and soft furnishings, as well as correct costume for the living history interpreters in the houses.

After her second return to the UK, Susanna held curatorial positions at a number of well-known museums, Bewdley Museum in Worcestershire (1974 to 1982), Cider Museum in Heresford (1982 to 1985), and Ayscoughfee Hall at Spalding, Lincolnshire (1985 to 1995), before retiring in 1995 to Wales where she resides today.

Our research shows that after moving back to the UK from NZ, Susanna’s publication output decreases, which is reflective of her shift in focus from archaeological sciences and research to an alternative career pathway focussing in museums. While Susanna’s time as a professional archaeologist in NZ might be considered brief, there is no doubt of the lasting impact her research has had in the development of the archaeological discipline in the Pacific region.

​I am greatly indebted to Susanna Davies who has generously shared her life story with me as part of this research. I also thank Stephen Price who has been a wonderful liaison between Susanna and myself and incredibly patient with our correspondence. This research is funded by an Australian Research Council DECRA Grant (DE200100597) and ethics approval has been granted by the Human Ethics Office at the University of Western Australia (2020/ET000338).

​Archaeology is as diverse as the many people who work within it. This was nowhere more clear – even to me as a naive first year student – than at Sydney University in 1965. As the first archaeologist to appear before students there was little chance that even the most conventional young man could maintain an inappropriately gendered view of what an archaeologist should be like. There was then little integration of the various components of the introductory Archaeology course, each part of which reflected the personality as much as the subject matter of the lecturers: Alexander Cambitoglou’s formal recitations of Classical art, polished structures that required virtuoso performances on four projectors by a succession of stressed technicians, responding instantly to his thumping pointer; Vincent Megaw’s narratives that might begin at one end of the Danube and meander, with often bewildering asides, to finish up thousands of years later at the other; and, then  – what immediately captured my interest  – Judy Birmingham’s lectures on Near Eastern prehistory, which exposed a whole new universe of information and ideas, and the challenges of making sense of excavated evidence to tell stories about the past. It was Judy’s excited fascination and enthusiasm for archaeology and how to do it that drew me into the subject and set me on a lifetime path of research and teaching – indeed the first essay I wrote for her in 1965 was on the ways in which archaeologists could use pottery, a subject that I have continued to tilt at for more than fifty years! Whether any of these later attempts deserve more than the fairly average mark she gave me for that first paper is another matter.

From these initial classes through to post-graduate study Judy introduced me and my fellow students to the masochistic joys of research, of continual questioning and of all facets of archaeology, and always with her characteristic energetic engagement with ideas. This included early exposure to the developing challenges of the New Archaeology in the late 1960s: challenges at odds with the very traditional approaches of other archaeologists, especially some in her own department. But theory had to be matched by practice, for Judy saw that it was essential for students to gain experience in the field in order not only to develop skills, but also to understand the nature of the archaeological record and its potential, even if this had to be done against departmental policy.

Of course the multiple demands of excavation are not for everyone, but from my first exposure I found them both exciting and challenging. I was fortunate enough to spend many months of 1967 working with archaeologists of the calibre of Jack Golson (in New Zealand) and Ron Lampert (at Burrill Lake in NSW) and on several sites in Israel.

This article is presented with many thanks to David Frankel and the Australian Archaeological Instititue at Athens, who intially published the piece to celebrate International Women's Day, 2021.

Jessie Webb was the first woman to teach Ancient History at the University of Melbourne. She became the benefactor of one of the largest travelling scholarships for students in Ancient History and Archaeology at the University.

Webb was born on 31 July 1880 near Tumut, New South Wales, with her mother passing shortly after and her father dying in an accident when she was nine years old. She then moved with her aunt, Jean Lauder Watson, to Melbourne where she lived for the rest of her life. Jessie was among the second generation of women to graduate from the University of Melbourne, and she continued working there for the rest of her life. She joined the staff at the University of Melbourne in 1908, becoming a senior lecturer in 1923. She functioned as acting professor three times before her death in 1944.

Throughout her time at the University, Jessie had an enormous impact on developing the Classics and Archaeology Collection at the University. While teaching at the University of Melbourne, Jessie made two research trips abroad, travelling through Africa to Europe and the eastern Mediterranean; she explored sites that she had spent a lifetime teaching, places that inspired her. These visits 1922–1923, and then again in 1936, proved a catalyst for building the teaching collection and provided a significant amount of story-telling material for students and public lectures. After her first trip, she persuaded the University to contribute 20 to 25 pounds a year to purchase 'representative Greek and Roman coins' to become part of a teaching collection. The collection now comprises 745 coins. 

During both her student years and as a staff member, Jessie was highly involved in university social life and was a member of the Princess Ida Club, the Historical Society, and the Dramatic Society. In 1910, Jessie was a foundation member of the Catalyst or the 'Cats'; then in 1912 of the Lyceum Club. Both Webb and her fellow members tended to write rhymes about meetings and themselves: ​

Jessie's main interest was ancient history, specifically that of Ancient Greece, and then in later years, Mesopotamia. During her first study leave, she visited Greece, but to get there, she took a rather unorthodox approach. In 1922-23, when she was 41 years old, she travelled alongside Dr Georgina Sweet, a fellow member of the Cats and Lyceum clubs, on a journey from Cape Town to Cairo, an adventurous feat by two well-educated professional women (O’Callaghan 2013). 

​​​After seven months of rail and ferry travel, Jessie went on to Greece. Jessie spent her leave at the prestigious British School of Archaeology in Athens, travelling to Crete from the mainland to further her research. While there, she met Arthur Evans, and later students recall her stories about him as "Screamingly funny!" (Ridley 1994, 165). At the end of this trip, she was nominated as the alternate delegate to the League of Nations assembly in Geneva where she discovered the plight of Armenian genocide survivors, returning to Australia to raise funds to support refugees.

Upon returning to Australia and subsequent 'lady of the hour' public lectures, Jessie highlighted the need for more female archaeologists and often commented on women's different statuses in different countries and universities. Her recommendation to both Australian and international counterparts was the promotion of mentorship; for educated women to watch for talented students within their fields and to give them all possible help. Jessie was a firm proponent of humanism and was noted for her support of disadvantaged students and women abroad.

Jessie travelled again in 1936, through France, Turkey, Germany and returning to Australia via Syria and Iraq. During this trip, Jessie explored the current excavation at Ur and was dazzled! The general excavation process and her meeting with Leonard Woolley left her with a sense of amazement at the scale of the history she studied. This experience and her sheer interest in 'modern' excavation techniques became a primary source for her to draw upon in her, often anecdotal, lectures. She would discuss the impact that excavation would have on historical interpretations and seemed to delight in the theoretical and scientific implications of excavation as a practice.

Jessie was a trailblazer. Her travels, which now read like an adventure novel to archaeologists and historians alike, portray her as a figure of intellectual vigour, and a woman of understated wit.

It is remarkable that upon her death she bequeathed £7128 to the University of Melbourne to endorse the study of ancient history and archaeology. The fund, originally intended to support her retirement, instead encourages students to spend a 'season' devoted to research in Greece. Jessie created this scholarship from her retirement funds to "assist a student to have the chance she herself never did, to study at the European institution she knew and remembered best, the BSA or equivalent" (Ridley 1994, 141). This remarkable opportunity has benefitted many students in their postgraduate study at the University of Melbourne. Such generosity made Jessie a fantastic teacher and endeared many to her during her time at the University.

It is a humbling experience to write about Jessie Webb and her life for AWAWS and even more so to chronicle some of her adventures and highlight her legacy. 

The authors also presented on this topic with their paper "Archaeology, Feminism and Adventure: Jessie Webb’s Legacy" as part of the AWAWS panel 'Women from Australasia in Mediterranean Studies: Past, Present and Future' at the Mediterranean Archaeology Australasian Research Community 2021 Meeting, 28 Jan 2021.

One of the most important supporters of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland was the late Mrs Betty Fletcher (née Robertson). Betty, a graduate of the University with First Class Honours in 1931, remained a supporter of the Classics at UQ throughout her life. In 1991, a travelling scholarship was set up in her name by the University’s Friends of Antiquity group in order to allow students of Classics and Ancient History at UQ to travel as part of their studies, an opportunity unavailable to Betty during her own studies due to the Great Depression. 

Elizabeth “Betty” Wilson Galloway Robertson was born in Struan, Perthshire, Scotland in November 1909. Her parents were Elizabeth Wilson Galloway (b. 1883, Ayrshire, Scotland; d. 1963, Brisbane, QLD Australia) and Hubert John Robertson, a Presbyterian minister (b. 1881, Cumberland, England; d. 1939, Murwillumbah, NSW, Australia). The family emigrated to Brisbane in 1913 along with some of Elizabeth’s family and Hubert served in various locum positions in Presbyterian churches throughout Queensland, before being fully ordained in 1918. He went on to be a leading figure in the Presbyterian Church in Queensland.

Betty was educated at Somerville House in South Brisbane and won form prizes for English, French, Latin and Greek in the Junior Exam (Grade 10) in 1925. In 1927, during her Senior year, Betty was both School and Athletics Captain and won prizes for athletics and leadership. The same year, Betty was one of only 20 recipients of an Open Scholarship to the University of Queensland for 1928. 

​At this time, the University of Queensland was located at the Old Government House site, now occupied by the Queensland University of Technology. Here Betty studied under John Lundie Michie the first professor of Classics in Queensland, and continued to excel. She graduated in 1931 with First Class Honours in Classics and the Woolcock Prize in Greek, and in 1932 with Second Class Honours in Philosophy. Because of her academic excellence, Betty was awarded a travelling scholarship to visit the University of Oxford, with passage to be provided by the P&O company. However, due to the Great Depression the offer of passage was withdrawn and she was unable to take up the opportunity. Instead, she became Classics Mistress at her alma mater, Somerville House, where she taught Latin, Greek and Ancient History. The outgoing Classics Mistress had been forced to resign as she was to be married and Betty held the post only until her own marriage to Owen Fletcher in 1935. Since 1902 it had been a requirement for female teachers to resign when they married in Queensland, a restriction which was only partially lifted in 1940 and not fully removed until 1969. The loss to Classical education in Queensland of a woman so obviously gifted was very great. 

Despite being forced to give up her career, Betty continued to be heavily involved in the Classics through her philanthropic pursuits. She endowed many school prizes in languages and Ancient History and was a member of the State Council of the Christian Movement, National Council of Women, and the Women’s Graduate Association, of which she became president in 1952.

​In 1967 the University of Queensland’s Alumni Association was formed and both Betty and Owen became active members. They were recognised for their contributions to the organisation with the granting of honorary life membership in 1988. Betty’s contributions were focused around her old discipline of Classics and Ancient History. She supported the Alumni Archaeological Scholarship, which provides funds for a student to travel and participate in an overseas excavation such as the University of Sydney’s Pella excavation, and in 1988 she became the inaugural patron of the new Friends of Antiquity group. Prior to this time, Betty had already established herself as a generous donor to the University’s Antiquities Museum. Donations of funds between 1980 and 1989 allowed the Museum to purchase a number of important artefacts: 

• In 1980, a gold stater of Alexander the Great dating to 336–323 BC
• In 1984, an Urartian bronze fibula dating to 800–600 BC
• In 1986, a marble Attic Loutrophoros fragment, inscribed for “Phanodemos, the son of Paramonos, of the Deme of Aithalidai” on the occasion of the University of Queensland's 75th Anniversary; and
• In 1989, two Macedonian tetradrachms, one of Philip II, dating to 359–348 B, and the other of Philip V, dating to 221–179 BC, to mark her 80th birthday.

Betty’s legacy at UQ continues with the Betty Fletcher Memorial Travelling Scholarship, founded by the Friends of Antiquity and Owen Fletcher in 1992. Fundraising efforts towards the scholarship began in 1990, with a series of events hosted by the Friends of Antiquity. The aim of the scholarship is to allow a student of Classics and Ancient History at the University to “travel for academic purposes in Greece, Italy, Asia Minor or any other place that was part of the civilisations of Rome or Ancient Greece, for a period of not less than 4 weeks.” To date, the scholarship has enabled 27 students (including the author) to spend time travelling overseas for the purpose of their studies. The reasoning behind a travelling scholarship was because of Betty’s missed opportunity to undertake this kind of overseas travel herself in the 1930s. In fact, it was not until 1963 that Betty travelled outside Australia for a six-month tour, visiting Thailand, Israel, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom. Stories of the impact the scholarship has had on many of its recipients were shared in a 2017 exhibition curated by the RD Milns Antiquities Museum.

In 2019, the Friends of Antiquity established a second Betty Fletcher scholarship with a donation of $50,000, matched by the University, to support students studying Classics and Ancient History who are experiencing financial hardship. In 2020, the donation of $120,000 from the Alumni Friends of the University of Queensland secured the future of the Travelling Scholarship in perpetuity. A bronze portrait medallion of Betty by Dr Rhyl Hinwood, AM, mounted on Helidon freestone, is housed in the RD Milns Antiquities Museum and a copy was donated by Owen Fletcher to Somerville House. An inscription accompanying the medallion, composed by Prof. R.D. Milns, provides a fitting tribute:

Thanks to Mrs Lyn Milns and Ms Jaime Cubit for providing access to archival documents and research assistance in developing the exhibition on which this blog is based. 

As archaeologists, we are trained to be aware that in archaeological deposits ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. It is time for us to apply such a mindset to our understanding of the discipline’s history and confront what historians of minorities have long identified as ‘historical silences’, both in archival materials and official histories (Allen 1986; Trouillot 1995). Just as the AWAWS Project is willing to address this issue in regards to the legacy of women in ancient world studies in Australia and New Zealand, a new ARC funded DECRA research project aims at telling the stories of the first Pacific archaeologists who also happened to be women. 

Pacific Matildas: finding the women in the history of Pacific archaeology responds to the call made by historian of science Margaret Rossiter 25 years ago for “future scholars to write a more equitable and comprehensive history and sociology of science that not only does not leave all the ‘Matildas’ out, but calls attention to still more of them” (1993: 337). In this landmark paper, Rossiter described the historical process – coined ‘Matilda effect’ - through which female scientists were written out of history. The historiography of archaeology - itself a side-concern for the history of science - has classically produced narratives that are fundamentally gender-biased (Claassen 1994; Diaz-Andreu & Sorrensen 1998; Cohen & Joukowsky 2004). This is especially pertinent in relation to the relatively small community of Pacific archaeologists, long apparently dominated by male practitioners. Scratching below the surface of this representation, this project proposes to analyse the reasons for the perceived or factual absence of women in the development of the discipline, study the contextual factors that led to such a situation, determine the barriers faced by those women indeed engaged in the field and, by doing so, highlight their legacy, tell their stories.
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These themes emerged during the research I have been undertaking for the previous five years as part of the team working on the ‘Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific’ (CBAP ARC Laureate project led by Prof. Matthew Spriggs). As the very first consolidated and multilingual effort to investigate the historiography of archaeology in the region, highlighting the role of ‘hidden’ figures – namely indigenous collaborators and women engaged in the discipline – was part of our agenda. Yet, our experience clearly demonstrated the specific difficulties encountered in trying to ‘hear’ these hidden voices in the silences of the archives of Pacific archaeology. To overcome this, each of these topics needs to be examined on its own terms. For the women who were part of the development of archaeology in the Pacific to be included in the history of the discipline, explicit attention has to be given to the subject using a specific set of approaches and methods informed by gender studies and the feminist history of science, while integrating those used in the history of archaeology until now. 

​The history of women in (western) science as it is today stands at the confluence of two large movements of intellectual transformation, both starting around the 1960s: on the one hand, the development of analyses of scientific knowledge constructions that consider the importance of socio-historical and subjective contingencies; on the other hand, the influence of second-wave feminism prompting an exponential increase in research on women’s history. This intellectual context elicited foundational works in the 1980s researching the lives and legacies of women scientists.
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In particular, the first volume of Margaret Rossiter’s foundational Women Scientists in America (1982) not only demonstrated that many women had been active in American science since the 19th century despite not being represented in dominant historical narratives, but also that they developed specific strategies to overcome oppositional reactions and the segregated structuration of the scientific establishment. These observations hold true for the rest of the western world, with women scientists finding ways to advance knowledge and practice at least since antiquity (Watts 2007), including in the belatedly appearing disciplines of the social sciences (McDonald 2004; Carroy et al. 2005). Rossiter identified the gendered assumptions that tended to keep women out of science as a masculine field, writing that 19th century “women scientists were (…) caught between two almost exclusive stereotypes: as scientists they were atypical women; as women they were unusual scientists” (1982: xvi). This question has since been much examined by feminist historians of science (Watts 2007; Schiebinger 2014) and is certainly pertinent in regards to the first women who were interested in the emerging field of prehistory/archaeology in the Pacific: not only were they entering the masculine realm of science, but also those of fieldwork and the public sphere in exotic, mostly colonial spaces – not a woman’s place by any 19th century and early 20th century expectations. It must also be remembered that in most of the western world, sociocultural gendered norms were articulated with the legal subjugation of women, severely restricting their freedom and participation in public society until the 1960s in some of the European countries that played a role in the history of Pacific archaeology.

A number of women have already been identified as a result of my previous work with CBAP and will be researched during the Pacific Matildas project; for example, traveller and artist Adèle de Dombasle who documented archaeological sites in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia during the 1840s; Jeanne Leenhardt, an essential collaborator and network agent for both her husband Maurice Leenhardt and amateur archaeologist Marius Archambault in New Caledonia during the 1900s-1920s; Laura Thompson (the second person, after Ralph Linton, to earn a PhD in Pacific archaeology, in 1933)[1] who was especially active in Marianas’ archaeology around the mid-20th century; and Aurora Natua, a key indigenous network agent, material culture and oral tradition expert collaborator for the first professional archaeologists to work in French Polynesia throughout most of the second half of the 20th century (Dotte-Sarout et al. forthcoming).
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But I will not work alone on this project, and in addition to collaborative works with colleagues in Australia and elsewhere, postgraduate research projects are proposed within this DECRA. PhD candidate, Sylvie Brassard, has just started investigating the role, names, and legacies of the elusive group of women ‘volunteers’ working at the Musée de l’Homme during the emergence of the distinct school of French ‘archéologie océaniste’ in the mid-20th century. I am looking for interested postgraduate students to examine other topics, such as the particular dynamics that characterised the increasing engagement of women in New Zealand and Australian archaeology during the 20th century; the works and unusual careers of early women anthropologists sharing an interest in string figures;  those who became specialists in material culture studies; and indigenous ‘folklorist’ experts in oral traditions linked to archaeological history. Finally, Dr India Dilkes-Hall is working with me to develop a database compiling the women’s scientific written outputs that we aim to make accessible online at the end of the project, offering a wide exposure to the Pacific Matildas’ legacies.  We also want to use it as a tool to conduct citation rates analysis in the main and most enduring archaeology journals of the region to provide a comparable measure of research impact with their male colleagues and between themselves.

Together, we want to ensure that the ‘Matildas’ of Pacific archaeology are not left out of its history.

[1] Although Margarete Schurig also completed her museum-based doctoral dissertation Die Südseetöpferei (Pacific Pottery) in 1930 in Leipzig, which remained the foremost text on the subject for at least the next thirty years.
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The two wives of Professor James RB ‘Jim’ Stewart were his equals in fieldwork and the recording of finds from the varied Australian excavations of Early and Middle Bronze Age Cyprus directed by Stewart between the late 1930s and Jim’s death in 1962. However, neither gained significant recognition for this work during their lifetime. Jim’s first wife, Eleanor Neal, co-excavated and co-published the first Australian-directed archaeological excavations in Cyprus at Vounous between 1937-8. This blog entry will explore the life of Eve Dray, Jim’s second wife, to help reassess her importance in Cypriot archaeological studies.

Dorothy Evelyn ‘Eve’ Dray (1914-2005) was born in London to Margery and Tom Dray, an English surveyor, who worked in various capacities in places such as Egypt, Belgium and eventually Cyprus, taking his wife and daughter with him.  Eve studied French and Mathematics at Royal Holloway College between 1933-37, but she discovered an interest in archaeology when she learnt pot mending and drawing with Mortimer Wheeler at the Institute of Archaeology in London. Her skills were soon recognised. Eve worked on Wheeler’s excavations at Maiden Castle in Dorset, serving in 1936 under site supervisor Joan du Plat Taylor who encouraged Eve to join her team in Cyprus.
 
Eve found that her work with the Cyprus Museum and her skills as an archaeological illustrator became highly valued on the island. One project she worked on was Vounous with the young Jim and Eleanor Stewart. Along with Joan and Sydney-born Margaret ‘Kim’ Collingridge, Eve was a participant in the excavations of tombs at Tsambres and Aphendrika (Dray and du Plat Taylor 1939). The adventures of the team were sensationally reported in the Australian media at the time: “Archaeologist mistaken for a spy” Sydney Morning Herald 15 December 1938.
 
In 1939 Tom Dray inherited a property and land at Tjikos in the north of Cyprus, assets that would be central to the rest of Eve’s life. The building came into his possession from William Scorseby Routledge, the widower of Katherine Routledge, the first female archaeologist to work in Polynesia. Eve would later assist in the tracking down of some of Routledge’s lost archaeological documents. The house at Tjikos over time became the base for much of Eve and Jim’s fieldwork on the island.

After the war, Eve was reacquainted with Jim during his 1947 visit to Cyprus in preparation for his new teaching position at The University of Sydney. The two travelled the island to scope opportunities for Jim’s proposed Australian Cyprus Expedition and became lovers. As Jim left for Australia, he hastily devised plans to get Eve to Sydney too. In the intervening months she acted as his ‘agent’ on the island, acquiring antiquities for the Nicholson Museum and his personal collection. In Sydney she would join the now-separated Stewart, taking up the position of Technical Assistant at the Nicholson Museum. After their marriage in 1952, Eve’s employment with the museum ceased and the two relocated to Jim’s inherited manor house ‘Mt Pleasant’ near Bathurst, where Eve worked meticulously mending and illustrating finds. ​

​The Stewarts conducted fieldwork campaigns in the 1950s in Cyprus on a series of Early and Middle Cypriot burials which were not on the ambitious scale that Jim had initially planned for his Australian fieldwork projects. By the time of the couple’s final excavations at Karmi in 1961, Jim was very ill, and he passed away in 1962. 

Eve’s personal reminiscences recorded in 1999 for the fourth conference on Cypriot Studies at La Trobe University have now been published (Stewart 2013) as have some of her letters (Powell 2013). She died in a nursing home in 2005. Her archives are held in the University of New England Heritage Centre.
​
Neither Eleanor nor Eve ever held an academic position, nor were their contributions to archaeology particularly celebrated during their lifetime beyond a general admiration for Eve’s determination to promote Jim’s legacy and complete his work. Thankfully, a greater acknowledgement of their respective contributions to Cypriot archaeology has finally begun. 

​Read The Mrs Stewarts. Part one - Eleanor Neal

​Two women, Eleanor Stewart (nee Neal) and Eve Stewart (nee Dray), had a profound impact upon the development of Cypriot archaeological studies in Australia, although their contribution has often been overlooked.  James R.B. “Jim” Stewart (1913-1962) is regarded as the founder of Cypriot archaeology in Australia and a major contributor towards an understanding of the Early Cypriot period. Within the past decade he has been the subject of an international conference and the Nicholson Museum exhibition Aphrodite’s Island.
 
Unfortunately, Eleanor and Eve, his two wives and archaeological partners, have not reached the same level of recognition for their pioneering efforts in Cypriot archaeology and in Eve’s case, keeping Jim’s legacy alive. However, the process of finally recognising this contribution has begun in recent years following the publication of a biography of James and Eve based upon Eve’s letters (Powell 2013) and a short summary of Eleanor’s life (Merrillees 2013).

Eleanor Mary Neal (1911-2002) was born in Somerset, England and worked for a time as a teacher. She met James Stewart through her elder brother who was at Cambridge where James read archaeology between 1931-1934. The pair worked on Sir Flinders Petrie’s final excavation season at Tell el-‘Ajjul in Dec 1933 - Jan 1934; it was the first fieldwork experience for both. Eve and Jim became engaged in April 1934 and married on 1 July 1935; using the Neal family home at Kingsdon in Somerset as their base until the outbreak of the Second World War. Although not formally trained as an archaeologist, by the time Jim took up a scholarship at the British School of Ankara in 1936, Eleanor had become a talented draftsperson, photographer and note-keeper.
 
They had first visited Cyprus in 1935 after a trip to Australia. Both fell in love with the island, and in 1937 returned to excavate a series of 85 tombs in the Early Bronze Age cemetery of Bellapis Vounous near Kyrenia. Eleanor not only worked in partnership with Jim during the excavations, but also on the recording and publication of finds and on an exhibition which was held at the Institute of Archaeology in Regent’s Park in 1939. Virginia Grace (The American School of Classical Studies, Athens) had visited the pair in the field and admired their ability to maintain complex catalogues of finds in their cat-filled workrooms in the medieval Abbey at Bellapais at the same time as digging (Powell 2013, 58).
 
Jim spent most of the war in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany; Eleanor with the Women’s Voluntary Services. At end of the war, the couple reunited in England and welcomed the birth of their only son in 1946. Shortly after, Jim took up a teaching role at the University of Sydney, moving to Sydney without his family. He returned to Cyprus alone in 1947 where he began an affair with Eve Dray and the marriage with Eleanor would soon end after she joined him in Sydney. As James wrote to Professor Einar Gjerstad in June 1947, “It looks as if Eleanor and I are going to break up our marriage—we have failed to adjust ourselves since the war, and it is no use continuing.  If it does come to a divorce this year, I shall marry Eve Dray, the girl who has been helping me with the drawings for Vounous and Lapithos.”
 
The final publication of the Vounous material appeared in 1950, co-authored by both Eleanor and Jim. It was her only writing on the archaeology of Cyprus but the contribution was significant. Jim made it clear the volume was a partnership: ‘the work is divided between us. My wife has been responsible for nearly all of the cataloguing of finds, and I have done the description of the graves’ (Stewart & Stewart, 1950: 10). However, because the work was published as E. and J.R. Stewart and the timing of its publication a decade after its main composition, many have erroneously assumed it was the work of Eve and not Eleanor. As Eve herself would later write (Merrillees 2013): ‘Eleanor might be given more credit; like me, she was the Junior Partner in Jim’s work: she did much of the Vounous cataloguing; many of the notes … are in her handwriting.’

After their divorce, Eleanor would remarry in 1952 but avoided archaeology completely. She married Sydney barrister Kenneth Jacobs who would eventually serve as a Justice in the High Court of Australia. From 1979 Lady Eleanor and Sir Kenneth Jacobs lived in the United Kingdom. Eleanor never revisited Cyprus although it is said that the she continued to have fond memories of the island (Merrillees 2013).

• Merrillees, R.S., ‘Eleanor Stewart remembered’, in: A.B. Knapp, J.M. Webb & A. McCarthy (eds), J.R.B. Stewart: an archaeological legacy (SIMA CXXXIX: Uppsala 2013), ix-xii
• Powell, J., Love’s Obsession: The Lives and Archaeology of Jim and Eve Stewart (Kent Town 2013)
• Stewart, E. & J. Stewart, Vounous 1937–38: Field-Report on the Excavations sponsored by the British School of Archaeology at Athens (Lund 1950)
• Stewart, J.R., ‘The Early Cypriote Bronze Age’, in: P. Dikaios & J.R. Stewart, The Swedish Cyprus Expedition Volume IV Part IA. The Stone Age and the Early Bronze Age in Cyprus, (Lund 1962), 205-401

 

Editorial note
​Unfortunately photographs of Eleanor are elusive both from her early life and long marriage to Sir Kenneth Jacobs KBE QC. No known images of Eleanor are currently in the public domain.