author
Matilda Coxe Stevenson
1850–1915
A pioneering American ethnologist, she helped open the door for women in anthropology and became known for her close studies of Zuni and other Pueblo communities in the American Southwest. Her writing combines careful observation with a strong sense of place, ritual, and daily life.
2 Audiobooks
The Religious Life of the Zuñi Child
by Matilda Coxe Stevenson
The Sia (1894 N 11 / 1889-1890 (pages 3-158))
by Matilda Coxe Stevenson
About the author
Born in Texas in 1849 and raised largely in Washington, D.C., she later married explorer and ethnologist James Stevenson and joined field expeditions in the Rocky Mountain and Southwest regions. She went on to build her own career at the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, where she is widely noted as the first woman employed by the U.S. government as an anthropologist.
Her most important work grew out of years of research among Zuni and other Pueblo peoples in New Mexico. She wrote in detail about religion, ceremony, domestic life, and material culture, and she was also an early user of photography in ethnological work.
Matilda Coxe Stevenson died in 1915. Although some aspects of her work reflect the attitudes of her era, she remains an important figure in the history of American anthropology and in the early documentation of Indigenous life in the Southwest.