Sara Yorke Stevenson

Childhood and early life Sara Yorke Stevenson's parents were Edward Yorke (December 20, 1798 – 1868) and Sarah Hanna Yorke, who married in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1834 and who moved to Paris during the 1840s. They both came from established families: her mother's family owned a large cotton plantation and her father was a cotton broker. France Sara Letitia Yorke was born in the Rue de Courcelles in Paris on February 19, 1847. Sara's parents moved back to the States when she was only ten, leaving their daughters to attend boarding school in France. She lived in Paris from 1858 through 1862 under the guardianship of M. Achille Jubinal, who inspired Stevenson's early interest in archaeology and Egyptology. During this time she met the Duke of Morny, half-brother of Napoleon and prominent figure in the French Intervention in Mexico, a conflict with which she would soon become profoundly familiar. In 1862, Sara departed France for Mexico by sea, about which she wrote: There were only forty passengers on board, and, comparatively speaking, little of the animation that usually precedes the outgoing of an ocean steamer. I found without difficulty the French banker and his Mexican wife who had kindly consented to chaperon me during my lonely journey; and I soon discovered that she and I were the only women passengers on board. Mexico In 1862 the Yorke family moved to Tacubaya, a suburb of Mexico City, following the murder of Sara's brother Ogden. In Mexico she attended many social gatherings of the newly appointed Empress of Mexico Charlotte of Belgium and her husband Maximilian. Stevenson's first-hand account of the Second Mexican Empire, ''Maximilian in Mexico: A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 (New York, 1899),'' gave great insight into the inner workings of court life during that time. C.M. Mayo commented on this book was the "most lucid, informed, and balanced...of all the English language memoirs of the Second Empire/French Intervention. Sara Yorke Stevenson and her mother, Sarah Hanna Yorke, appear in Mayo's novel The Last Prince of the American Empire. United States In 1867, the Yorke family relocated to Vermont. Sara's father died only a year later, in 1868, and soon afterwards, at the age of twenty-one, Sara Yorke moved to Philadelphia to live with two of her uncles and an aunt on the Yorke side of her family. Cornelius Stevenson was born in Philadelphia on January 14, 1842, the only son of Adam May and Anna Smith (Philips) Stevenson. He served as a private in the First Troop, Philadelphia City Cavalry during the Civil War. == Professional and civic life ==

Civic societies Stevenson played a leading role in several local civic societies (aka civil societies, or groups of community of citizens often linked by collective interests and activities) including serving as the founder and first president of the Equal Franchise Society of Philadelphia, co-founder and two-term president of the Civic Club of Philadelphia (a group of women who advocated for civic reform and improvement), the president of the Acorn Club for 25 years, president of the Contemporary Club, and chair of the French War Relief Committee of the Emergency Aid of Pennsylvania. She also served on the Women's Centennial Committee of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, which created an exhibition known as the Women's Pavilion that showcased "for the first time, at an international exposition, the intimate bonds, shared values, and material achievements of women" and was hailed as a milestone in the women's movement of the 19th century. The Furness-Mitchell Coterie Stevenson was part of a group of internationally known Philadelphia elite scholars, known as the Furness-Mitchell Coterie, who were a driving force in many areas, especially anthropology, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The group included musicians, physicians, writers, scholars, anthropologists, and educators and was "unusual in its acceptance of accomplished women as intellectual equals".With regard to her active role in the women's rights movement, Stevenson said the following: "The days of useless martyrdom are over, also those of heroic sacrifice where it is not needed. What we need to do today is not to slaughter men and parties who do not happen to think as we do … but to educate them, teach them to see, to know, to love, to feel, to grow." ==Career==

Anthropology and egyptology In the 1880s anthropology was still emerging as an established academic discipline, and universities were beginning to develop and formalize their anthropology departments. Stevenson became involved in Egyptological pursuits through her membership in the American branch of the Egypt Exploration Fund, which was founded in 1882 by Amelia Edwards. "Anthropological Work in America", an article in the July 1892 issue of Popular Science Monthly, declared that Stevenson "is perhaps [America's] only lady Egyptologist. Her lectures in Egyptian subjects have made a sensation." She mentored with Frederick Ward Putnam, who had just established Harvard's anthropology department, along with Franz Boas, Zelia Nuttall, and Alice Fletcher. Stevenson's interests were very wide and ranged from cultural diffusion to cultural evolution. In 1892 Putnam supported Stevenson's appointment to the Jury of Awards for Ethnology during the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. A special act had to be passed to allow a woman to serve this position; Stevenson was elected vice president of the jury. In 1894 Stevenson was the first woman to speak at the Peabody Museum on "Egypt at the Dawn of History". She was president of the Oriental Club of Philadelphia, the Contemporary Club, president and secretary Pennsylvania Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America, and was founder and officer of the University Archaeological Association, the American Folk-Lore Society, and the American Exploration Society. She was also a member of the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia and in 1895 was one of the first two women admitted to the American Philosophical Society. Stevenson also joined the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1884 and was nominated a Fellow in 1895. and her pseudonym paid homage to Peggy Shippen, a Philadelphian and a prominent figure during the Revolutionary War who was married to Benedict Arnold. Education and museum studies Following her departure from the Penn Museum in 1905, Stevenson developed one of the first college-level courses in training museum professionals in the United States, which she taught from 1908 until her death in 1921, at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, later known as The University of the Arts (Philadelphia). Her lectures covered topics ranging from "The Modern Museum and its Functions" to "The Diseases of Objects and Remedies." She also became a curator in the museum now known as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. ==Scholarly publications==

• "On Certain Symbols used in the Decoration of some Potsherds from Daphnae and Naukratis, now in the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania," Proceedings of the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia for 1890–91, 1892. • "The Tomb of King Amenhotep," Papers on Egyptian Archaeology, 1892. • "Mr. Petrie's Discoveries at Tel el-Amarna," Science Vol. 19; Nos. 480–482, 510. • "An Ancient Egyptian Rite Illustrating a Phase of Primitive Thought," International Congress of Anthropology, Memoirs, Chicago, 1894, 298–311. • "Some Sculptures from Koptos in Philadelphia," American Journal of Archaeology 10 (1895), 347–351. • "The Feather and the Wing in Early Mythology," Oriental Studies of the Oriental Club of Philadelphia, 1894, 202–241. • "On the Remains of Foreigners Discovered in Egypt by Mr. W.M. Flinders Petrie, 1895, now in the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. XXXV. • ''Maximilian in Mexico: A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention.'' New York, 1899. • Egypt and Western Asia in Antiquity by Ferdinand Justi, Morris Jastrow Jr., and Sara Y. Stevenson, Philadelphia, 1905. ==References==