Matilda Coxe Stevenson

Born in Texas in 1849, Matilda Coxe Stevenson became one of the first prominent women in American anthropology. She worked with the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology and is widely noted as the first woman employed by the U.S. government as an anthropologist.

She carried out extensive fieldwork in the Southwest, especially among the Zuni, and published detailed studies of religion, ritual, and daily life. She also wrote under the name Tilly E. Stevenson, and her work helped preserve a rich record of Native communities at a time when very few women were able to build public careers in science.

Stevenson's legacy is both important and complicated: she was a trailblazer in anthropology, and her writings remain historically valuable, while also belonging to an era when outsiders often interpreted Indigenous cultures through their own assumptions. She died in 1915, but she is still remembered as a groundbreaker in the study of the peoples of the American Southwest.