Mary Leakey - Infinite Women

Born: 6 February 1913, United Kingdom
Died: 9 December 1996
Country most active: Tanzania
Also known as: Mary Douglas Nicol

The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.

Paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey spent much of her marriage letting her husband Louis publicly take credit for the work they did together. “Although Louis grabbed the headlines, it was his second wife, Mary, an archaeologist, who made many of the actual finds associated with the Leakey name,” Roger Lewin wrote in Smithsonian Magazine. “Until later in their relationship, when their marital ties all but snapped for both personal and professional reasons, she let her husband bask in the limelight while she conducted her beloved fieldwork.” Although Mary was later recognised as “the woman who found our ancestors,” during their marriage it was Louis who would “lecture, raise money and speculate at news conferences about the significance of his wife’s discoveries, often leaving the impression that he, personally had made the finds,” Bart Barnes wrote for the Washington Post. It probably contributed to their dynamic that Mary was not college-educated; they met when she was in her early 20s while he was a highly regarded Cambridge University professor 10 years her senior (and a married one at that; he left his wife for the young illustrator). As their marriage began to fall apart, she asserted herself more, taking credit for her work and accepting accolades. In addition to her contributions to our understanding of the origins of humans, Mary also discovered 15 new species and a genus over the course of her career.