President

Institutional context

The Society for American Archaeology is the principal scholarly organisation of professional archaeologists working in the Americas, founded in 1934. The President of the SAA is the senior officer of the institution. From 1934 through 1968 every SAA President was male.

Career path

Hannah Marie Wormington (1914–1994) earned a BA in anthropology from the University of Denver in 1935, a master's from Radcliffe College in 1950, and a PhD in anthropology from Radcliffe (Harvard) in 1954. She joined the Denver Museum of Natural History in 1937 as Curator of Archaeology and held that position for forty-one years until 1968, becoming widely recognised as one of the foremost authorities on Paleo-Indian archaeology in the Americas.

She served as Vice President of the SAA twice — 1950–1951 and 1955–1956 — before her election to the Presidency.

Appointment

She was elected President of the Society for American Archaeology in 1968, becoming the first woman to lead the organisation in its 34-year history at the time.

Tenure

Two years (the standard SAA presidential term). Cynthia Irwin-Williams subsequently became the SAA's second woman President in 1977–1979. The interval between Wormington (first) and Irwin-Williams (second) was nine years.

Cluster context

Wormington's 1968 appointment is the dataset's first US scientific-society first-woman event, and one of the dataset's earliest first-woman events of any category — three years after Margaret Thompson's 1965 appointment as the first woman President of the Archaeological Institute of America. The two events together establish that scientific societies in archaeology / anthropology had first-woman presidents a full decade before Margaret Thatcher's 1979 election in the United Kingdom.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Hannah Marie Wormington
• Wikipedia — Society for American Archaeology