Keller was raised in
Switzerland on a dairy farm, the sixth of 12 children. She grew up in poverty. In the one-room schoolhouse where she was educated, boys were given training in math and science while girls were taught cooking and cleaning, the skills they would need to be proper housewives. Her hunger for knowledge led her to read the textbooks assigned to her elder siblings, and she would prepare summaries of the material for her brothers and sisters. She attended a vocational school starting at age 14 and learned sewing. There she organized a protest against rules that required female students to wear skirts, as she rode her bicycle three miles each way to school and wanted to be able to protect herself from the cold. The female students won the right to wear pants from then on. After receiving her vocational certificate at age 17, she went to work for
Pierre Cardin, where she was paid the equivalent of 25 cents per hour to sew luxury gowns that would sell for as much as $1,000 for which she was paid $12. She traveled around the world, learning English and working in England, followed by travel to North Africa, Spain and Australia. She survived being shot in a bank robbery in Australia in 1965, despite awakening in a hospital intensive care unit to find a priest pressing her to confess, telling her that she was going to die. After ending up in
San Francisco in 1968, Keller was "freaked out" by the shots and tear gas launched at student protests; she chose to focus on education and took a
high school equivalency exam. In her undergraduate years, Keller initially studied anthropology, but feeling as it didn't fit her goal to travel, she decided to instead study geology and eventually paleontology. She received her undergraduate degree at
San Francisco State University and received a doctorate in geology and paleontology from
Stanford University in 1978. == Career ==