Sara Yorke Stevenson

Sara Yorke Stevenson (February 19, 1847 – November 14, 1921) was a prominent American archaeologist.

Well-connected in the cultural elite of Philadelphia, Stevenson joined many learned societies, and was believed to be America’s only woman Egyptologist. She is best remembered as a founder of the Penn Museum (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology). As a female rights activist, she established the Equal Franchise Society of Pennsylvania.

Sara’s parents were Edward (d. 1868) and Sarah Hanna Yorke, Louisiana citizens 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.

Sara’s parents moved back to the States when she was only ten, leaving their daughters to attend boarding school in France. She stayed in Paris from 1858 through 1862 attending school, after which she joined her family in Mexico, where they had moved because of some investments of her father's. In Mexico she attended many social gatherings of the newly appointed Empress of Mexico Charlotte of Belgium and her husband Maximilian. Her first-hand account of the Second Mexican Empire gave great insight into the inner workings of court life during that time. In 1867 the family relocated to Vermont following some violence in Mexico. Stevenson's father died only a year later and not long after that she moved to Philadelphia to live with two Yorke uncles and an aunt.

Sara married Cornelius Stevenson, a Philadelphia lawyer, on June 30, 1870. They had one child, William Yorke Stevenson (1878-1922).

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, writers, scholars, anthropologists, and educators. Because of her involvement in the group Stevenson was able to enjoy privileges that would not have been possible without her involvement in the coterie.

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