My Story

I was born in Casper, Wyoming in 1951. My father, Walter Gray Davis, was born in 1907 and grew up in East Texas; and my mother, Robbie Elizabeth Peyton, arrived in the world in Northern Louisiana that same year. My fathers’ parents had land, about 120 acres, that they farmed for a living; they were dirt poor during his childhood. He sold goods in various country stores from early teenager-hood to supplement the family income he made it through the Great Depression selling White King soap to hotels, driving his truck with the company logo all over Texas and northern Mexico, and wow did he have some stories to tell about staying in saloons in those border towns! He learned to stay out of bar fights that didn’t concern him by always sitting in a corner, where he could pull the table around him for protection if a fight broke out. So he taught me always to sit with my back to the wall so I could see trouble coming, and to this day I get nervous if I can’t see the room. His favorite saying, which I had engraved on his tombstone, was “Never let the sun rise tomorrow on what you can do today” and I try to live up to that.

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“My mother grew up first in the tiny town of Keatchie, Louisiana, but soon was sent to school in Texarkana because she was considered too smart for that little country school.”
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Robbie’s Mother

Robbie’s Mother

She graduated from high school at the age of 15, then from business school, and went to work at the age of 17 as a secretary, first in Shreveport and later in San Antonio, Texas. There my parents met and maried one year later, in 1936. She and Daddy both had high aspirations for their lives, so when Amerada Oil, the company my mother worked for, had an opening in California for an enterprising land man (oil scout), she recommended my dad and he was hired.

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Baby Robbie

And so I was born in Casper—the miracle child who finally arrived after my mother had had several miscarriages while living in California. The California doctors had insisted that she spend her pregnancies in bed, because of her extreme nausea and weakness, but she lost those babies, so when the country doctor in Casper, Fred Haigler, told her to just ignore all that and “Rise above it” she took his advice and went out as much as always (he told her to run to the bathroom and throw up if she had to, then to wash her face and go right back to the party!). I was born by what we now call “scheduled cesarean.”

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Baby Robbie
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Mom, Dad, and Robbie, age 7

Mom, Dad, and Robbie, age 7

After that, her life mantra became “Rise above it!” —those words have stood me well many a time. I almost put them on her tombstone, but could only imagine how funny that would look to a passerby. So instead I put on her tombstone what she asked me to before she died: “She was a slave to beauty, in all of its forms, for all of her life.”

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Cowgirl Robbie

We moved to San Antonio, Texas where my parents had friends and family when I was 8; my parents were tired of the long cold winters and my dad felt by then that he could manage his business from afar. What a massive change for a small-town girl!

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Cowgirl Robbie
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Robbie, age 16, at the Alamo

Robbie, age 16, at the Alamo

I got into Wellesley through early admission, but only spent one year there as I became engaged to and maried Russell Johnson, who was in college at UT Austin, so I joined him there and completed my BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Texas. The UT Plan II program was perfect for me—it took away the bewilderment of finding myself at such a huge university, gave me a home where my advisors always knew me by name, and opportunities to take a wide variety of

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Robbie and Russell Johnson

For the law course, my student partner and I studied why the townspeople and even the Sheriff allowed the Chicken Ranch to exist (it had to do with their Bohemian and Slovakian heritage, which was much more accepting of such institutions than WASPy types tend to be). For the folklore course, we spent hours listening to the Madam, Edna Milton, tell jokes and folktales, and studying how she maintained verbal control of the girls, their customers, and the general environment through folklore and storytelling. I wrote my master’s thesis about her, and later an

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Robbie and Russell Johnson

My Dissertation and First Book

By the time I had to pick a dissertation topic (I had thought it would be shamanism), I had married Robert Floyd, an Austin architect, and we had given birth to a baby girl, Peyton. What I had planned and hoped would be a natural birth in the hospital turned into a highly traumatic cesarean, leaving me full of questions about why hospital birth is the way it is—so technological and interventionist. I began asking other women about their birth experiences, got fascinated, and went on to interview 100 women about their experiences of pregnancy and birth, which first was my dissertation and then, after various articles and years of work, became my first book, Birth as an American Rite of Passage (1992). As I struggled with each page in one of the greatest labors of love of my life, I had no idea whether anyone would even read it. So I was stunned and overjoyed when, shortly after it came out, it was given a glowing review by Sarah Ruddick in the Sunday New York Times Book Review and many other places, and it went on to be widely used for teaching in anthropology, women’s studies, sociology, American studies, and midwifery education courses, and to be called a “classic in the field.” Much to my ongoing delight, a famous anthropologist, Charles Leslie, wrote an overview of medical anthropology in which he called my book “a mountain in the landscape” of the field. Wow!

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Teaching

I have taught both general and specialized forms of cultural anthropology for over 20 years, at various universities. I love teaching and working with students, which I continue to do as advisor for independent study projects, dissertation committee member, or external examiner. For the present I am retired from teaching more than the occasional course from time to time, but I am still open to that “perfect job”—the one that might be waiting for me somewhere at a wonderful university or small college, with interested and committed students, congenial faculty members, and the opportunity to teach a wide range of courses, from introductory to advanced. Should that job ever materialize, I will commit my life to doing it well. In the meantime, I am fulfilled and busy with writing and traveling to conduct research and to give talks all over the world.

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A Personal Note

Since September 12, 2000 I have had to cope with the death by car accident of my daughter, Peyton Elizabeth Floyd. Although I have lost to untimely death my parents, various relatives, and some of my dearest friends, I find that none of this compares to experiencing the death of a child. I have recorded something of what that has been like in an article “Windows in Space/Time: A Personal Retrospective on Birth and Death” (available here) and eventually hope to write a book, Grieving and Grace: A Deep Description, which will tell hard truths about what it is really like to lose a child. I also offer on this website a short primer called “The Art of Grieving Gracefully” for those in need of some advice about the grieving process.

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