A Woman of Integrity: Kathleen Gough's "Career" in Canada, 1967-90

Abstract

In 1988, Dr. Kathleen Gough, Honorary Research Associate at the University of British Columbia, was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada. While such recognition was overdue, given Gough's anomalous position in the Canadian scientific community, her election to the conservative, male - dominated Royal Society was nonetheless remarkable. Like many women anthropologists before her, Gough was an independent scholar who was reasonably well funded and highly regarded, but who functioned outside the academic establishment. Although she began her Canadian career as an academic at Simon Fraser University, conflicts with the administration there resulted in her dismissal in 1969, and she never again held a permanent position at any university.(f.2) It is my misfortune never to have met Kathleen Gough. Had I pursued graduate work in anthropology at McGill, the program into which I was accepted in 1969, our paths would have crossed at scientific meetings. An unexpected pregnancy delayed my graduate studies, however, and I soon realized the difficulties of conducting field work while trying to be a wife and mother. A decade later when I entered graduate school, I chose the history and sociology of science instead of anthropology, and studied the professionalization of ornithology. In this science, as in anthropology - archaeology and astronomy, a relatively high number of women have made important scientific contributions. Most of them functioned outside the institutional framework of these disciplines, as amateurs, honorary research associates and/or collaborators or assistants to their husbands. Trying to ascertain why these productive women scientists were so rarely included in textbooks and reference books, and why so few even had paid positions, soon turned me into a feminist historian of science. Since Kathleen Gough spent half of her professional life in this country, I wish to cast a feminist perspective on her Canadian career. This will lead to a better understanding of her professional experiences and raise some general questions about women's careers. Born in 1925 in a small Yorkshire village, living in a household without modern conveniences such as electricity, Kathleen Gough passionately loved the green countryside. Her love of learning and the financial aid provided by scholarships enabled Gough, by her late teens, to make an important transition from a simple village life to the sophisticated intellectual environment at Cambridge. There she read English and anthropology and received an informal education from socialist students from Asia, Africa and the West Indies. At an impressionable age, she learned about different cultures. Life at Cambridge University was poles apart from her village home, and the revolutionary ideas of her new Indian and African friends prepared the ground for her lifelong interest in South Asia, kinship, colonialism - imperialism and the new anthropology. As a university student, Kathleen received a number of scholarships and may have encountered no discrimination. After all, by the time she was ready to do graduate work, women could obtain Ph.Ds. at Cambridge.(f.3) There was also the precedent of woman anthropologists, such as Lucy Mair, Audrey Richards and Monica Wilson doing important field work, alone, with women or with their husbands. After Kathleen married fellow student Eric Miller in 1947, the two conducted graduate field research in Southwest India, for which both were granted Ph.D.s in 1950. Then, as a newly fledged professional, Gough found herself to be the other whose concerns and feelings were regarded as secondary to those of a man. Her first major encounter with ingrained sexist attitudes towards married women academics occurred in 1950 at Oxford University, where she and her husband sought employment. Nearly forty years later, she recalled a classic interview with Professor E. E. Evans - Pritchard: He warned me that if my husband obtained a university appointment I could not have one because of nepotism rules. …