My First Two Jobs, in Heaven and in Purgatory
I was sixteen. My father had pointed out that it was legal for me to work for pay in adult jobs. I should get a summer job. At his insistence, I had taken a year-long course in business typing in high school; now I could put it to use.
Where would I like to work? My ideal place would be the Anthropology department of the American Museum of Natural History I so loved. We lived in a suburb, my dad commuted into the city and I could, too. I typed a letter to the Department Head, saying I could type 40 words a minute, did they need a typist for the summer months? My mother seemed impressed by my properly typed business letter and was about to give me a postage stamp for it when my father stopped her, saying it would be a waste of a stamp; the Museum would not hire a girl like me. Mother took a deep breath and said, uncharacteristically bold, “We can spare three cents!”
A few days later, a letter replied, yes, they were hiring a typist for two months. I should come in for an interview. It went well. Dr. Harry Shapiro, the department chair, smiled, listened to me tell my hope of becoming an archaeologist like his curators, had me type a couple pages at one of the secretaries’ desks, approved it, and told me to come in Monday morning at 9. Come into that sanctum!
I was to type up catalogs that were the only records of accessions of thousands of artifacts collected for the Museum over the past half-century. Up until then, Shapiro’s requests for funds to pay for typing the records had not been granted. The catalogs, folio-size with sturdy black covers, were kept with the collections from major regions such as “Pacific.” Entries were handwritten in ink, mostly by the collectors, and most were legible. If one was not clear, I went to the appropriate curator to get accurate spelling. Mead’s entries in the Pacific volume required many trips up her tower staircase to distinguish the vowels in Polynesian names. There were to be four carbon copies of each typed page, so that copies could be retained with the collections and also in department storage.
It took six weeks for me to type all the catalogs. Then, for the remaining two weeks, and the next summer as temp assistant, I helped curators. Proofread a report with James Ford, whose Mississippi accent confused his spellings, and helped him unpack and sort the seal-oil infused materials from Point Barrow that left us stinking. Logged in Junius Bird’s Huaca Prieta specimens of early twined fabric scraps, for which Bird introduced me to the craft of twining fabric, the dominant mode throughout the Americas for thousands of years. Did some typing while one of the two department secretaries took her vacation. An atmosphere of cordial collegiality (except for Mead, who was collegial with those who accepted and respected her, and reciprocated the coldness of the misogynist curators downstairs on the main corridor) convinced me that Anthropology was an ideal community of intelligent, friendly, hands-on scientists.
Then I was eighteen. Out of high school, enrolled as a commuter to Barnard College. I found an archaeological field school that did not charge a fee, even provided room and board, at Angel Mounds in southern Indiana, on the Ohio River. I applied, was readily accepted, learned my craft in its two months. That left some weeks before school began. Temp typing back home, the standard $25 per week, would earn me what I needed for commuting and school expenses. The temp agency sent me to the Nestlé Company branch office in White Plains, near my home.
Truly, the weeks at Nestlé were purgatory. I typed in the large office for filing orders and returns for four Nestlé products, Nescafe and Hot Chocolate, each in two sizes. Each order was typed onto a set of paper plus eleven carbons. A few minutes sufficed for typing the short orders, then we pulled off the paper and top carbon and discarded the ten additional carbons into wastebaskets. A youth emptied the baskets. A woman took the papers to file in cabinets. We had an hour lunch break and an afternoon short break, each to be taken in the upstairs cafeteria where only Nestlé products were served, and they had to be paid for. Not for me, with good food and ice cream on the street: out I went. For such disobedience I could be fired, but no one noticed except the ladies in my office. They were horrified.
Those six ladies personified all I feared to be: single, middle-aged day laborers scared to be seen as slack or willful. Each in her turn took her two weeks, and I sat at her typewriter. Somehow, they worked each day the full day, while I was usually done with the day’s pile by two o’clock. Couldn’t just go home, no, day ended at five. I asked the filing woman whether I could assist her. She frowned, explained that the orders must be filed alphabetically. I said I could do that. She seemed still unpersuaded until I described how much alphabetization is involved in college work that I did. Then I spent the remainders of the days filing the sheets for the rather small number of wholesalers who ordered through this branch office.
Meanwhile, as the six ladies in two rows typed, the boss, a man, sat behind a large desk facing them. He had a very few papers on his desk, along with a beautiful red-headed woman who wore tight-fitting dresses. She sat across on the desk, legs raised, his hand under her skirt. For an hour or so each day, she chatted on his phone with, it was said, her mother. They spoke Czech. That was all she did. No one made any comment.
Came mid-September, school was starting. I told the boss I would not be back, and said good-bye to the ladies. They urged me to stay, the pay was steady, I could do the work, it was clean white-collar. What more could I want? They sincerely appreciated the jobs. Oddly, they were only politely friendly to one another, at least in the office. Not at all like the Museum staff. Walking down the stairs into the late-afternoon sunshine that last day, I felt the oppression of Big Capitalism, the blighted lives in the tomblike office buildings. I never buy any Nestlé products.
What then? From a Barnard Anthropology major and field experiences each summer, I got a summer job in the Museum of the Plains Indian on the Blackfeet Reservation, married the young man who was conducting an archaeological survey of the Reservation for the Museum, and we each completed our Ph.D. at Harvard. We collaborated on archaeological fieldwork, and I had my own projects as well. There was a lot of misogyny, including all us academic women being underpaid and seldom funded for project directors. Anthropology was not, and is not, that simple, happy collegiality and good will I loved in the American Museum. Still, compared to jobs conventionally offered to women, it is Heaven.
Alice Kehoe is a postcolonial and feminist anthropological archaeologist who has worked primarily among American First Nations in the U.S.-Canadian Northern Plains. She has published books on North American First Nations histories from deeptime to present, as well as on archaeology, and general anthropology and archaeology textbooks. See her website alicekehoe.com and memoir Girl Archaeologist (University of Nebraska Press).
