
A Field of Their Own
Autor: John M. Rhea
Número de Páginas: 446One hundred and forty years before Gerda Lerner established women’s history as a specialized field in 1972, a small group of women began to claim American Indian history as their own domain. A Field of Their Own examines nine key figures in American Indian scholarship to reveal how women came to be identified with Indian history and why they eventually claimed it as their own field. From Helen Hunt Jackson to Angie Debo, the magnitude of their research, the reach of their scholarship, the popularity of their publications, and their close identification with Indian scholarship makes their invisibility as pioneering founders of this specialized field all the more intriguing. Reclaiming this lost history, John M. Rhea looks at the cultural processes through which women were connected to Indian history and traces the genesis of their interest to the nineteenth-century push for women’s rights. In the early 1830s evangelical preachers and women’s rights proponents linked American Indians to white women’s religious and social interests. Later, pre-professional women ethnologists would claim Indians as a special political cause. Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1881 publication, A Century...