Ogle, GeneConti, FabrizioAnderson, Clare Marie2024-06-142024-05-292024-06-142022Anderson, Clare Marie. "A Genealogy of the Study of Gender in Prehistory: From the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century to the Latter Half of the Twentieth Century". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2022.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14490/34.2Thesis (B.A. in History, Minor in Humanistic Studies)--John Cabot University, Fall 2022.This thesis seeks to examine the evolution of the study of gender prehistory from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the latter half of the twentieth century. The first chapter discusses the development of the late nineteenth century myth of matriarchal prehistory. The matriarchal thesis was cradled comfortably within evolutionism, however wielded most strongly over time by socialists. The second chapter explores the internal theoretical shifts in academia and the external cultural and societal shifts which discredited the matriarchal myth and pushed the study of prehistory to the wayside during the first half of the twentieth century. The third chapter strives to explain the impact of the second-wave feminist movement on gender prehistory in relation to the androcentric scholarship from the past century and a half. Androcentrism permeated the scholarship on gender prehistory for much of its existence, however in the latter half of the twentieth century, feminist scholars emphasized the biological and cultural contributions of prehistoric women to human evolution. Gender prehistory remained a highly speculative study because it was limited by a lack of substantial evidence. In this regard, gender prehistory has been especially biased as some scholars have projected onto the relatively unknown remote past their desired human origin stories which reflect their desired futures. Hence, the leading interpretations of gender prehistory have changed drastically from their origins in the middle of the nineteenth century to the debate between androcentric and feminist scholars in the second half of the twentieth century because of internal academic shifts and external cultural and societal shifts, the discovery of new anthropological, archeological, ethnographic, and biological data, and projections onto prehistory which lead to the “discovery” of “findings” which affirmed the biases of some scholars.iv, 39 pagesenAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Prehistoric peoplesSocial archaeologyThesis