History

[TW: Infertility]

Zelda Rhodes was born on 24 May 1842 in Baltimore, Maryland to noted American archaeologist Edward Rhodes and his wife Griselda, a Catalan-born mineralogist. That her birth took place on American soil was almost entirely coincidence; her father's work seldom kept him in one place for long, and a month later she might have been born in Greece. For the entirety of Zelda's childhood, she accompanied her parents to the far-flung locales where her father's archaeology expertise was needed. From the age of three, a tutor traveled with them rather than a governess or nanny, and Zelda, too, kept a keen eye on both of her parents — The particulars of their work, how they interacted with each other, and the way in which they were treated by others.

At the age of ten while with her family on an excavation in Mexico, Zelda was thrown and trampled by a startled mule. It took a day and a half to reach a medical facility with the staff and capability to do more than keep her barely stable. She spent three months on death's door, and in the end, the combination of her injuries and sepsis left her alive but unable to bear children. Already an academic at heart, the young Zelda took this as a sign that her life was meant for the pursuit of knowledge and self-realization.

In 1867 at 25, Zelda began a course of study at the brand-new Wheaton Female Seminary in Massachusetts, one of the first university-level programs available to women in the United States. She did not technically earn a "degree," but her studies were balanced and vigorous, and over the summer holidays, she would assist her father in London, where at the time he was in residency at the British Museum. It was here that she first met Jesús De Torres Y Pineda, her father's long-suffering apprentice. Their relationship even then was frequently contentious, as Zelda had begun to come into the attitude of sexual emancipation that would later define her (at least within certain private domains), and she teased him mercilessly in both the academic and romantic spheres. They never so much as kissed despite the undeniable tension strung between them, and after Zelda finished at Wheaton in 1871, she never saw him again.

After a few years of independent academic study, Zelda took a position as an assistant professor in the instruction of various humanities at Georgia Female College in Macon, Georgia (Later known as Wesleyan College). In 1845, frustrated with the lack of upward mobility for women in academia in particular, she took a position at the Charleston Museum in South Carolina as the registrar for collections, eventually promoted to assistant to the curator of archaeology in 1881. During this time she would also travel to give occasional lectures on the topics of history, archaeology, anthropology, and women's education to various cultural preservation and social organizations, primarily female-focused and/or run. In 1885, she seized an opportunity to travel to Egypt, where she split her time between excavations and helping to establish the country's first school for females, run by Copts. After a year in Egypt, yet another offer crossed her desk: Assistant curator of Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum in London, beginning in the Fall of 1855. A proper city full of diversity of thought and attitude would be, she imagined, both a balm and a stimulation after so many years in Charleston's conservative bosom. A place, perhaps, where she could pursue all of the subjects which interested her, from the academic to the bedroom.