author
Sara Yorke Stevenson
1847–1921
A pioneering Egyptologist and early museum builder, she helped shape the University of Pennsylvania Museum while also pushing for women’s rights in Philadelphia. Her life joined scholarship, public leadership, and reform in a way that still feels strikingly modern.
1 Audiobook
Maximilian in Mexico: A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867
by Sara Yorke Stevenson
About the author
Born in Paris in 1847 to American parents, Sara Yorke Stevenson became one of the leading American Egyptologists of her day. She helped found the Archaeological Association of the University of Pennsylvania, which grew into the Penn Museum, and later served as the museum's first curator of its Egyptian and Mediterranean section.
Her career included several notable firsts. She was the first woman to lecture at Harvard's Peabody Museum, served on the Jury of Awards for Ethnology at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and in 1894 became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She also wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, bringing archaeology and public life to a broader audience.
Stevenson was not only a scholar but also an active civic reformer and suffragist. She helped lead organizations including the Equal Franchise Society and the Civic Club of Philadelphia, showing the same energy in public advocacy that she brought to archaeology. She died in 1921, remembered as a key figure in both American museum history and the movement for women's rights.