Western Association of Women Historians

PROMOTING THE INTERESTS OF WOMEN HISTORIANS

  • About
    • What is the WAWH?
    • Executive Board
      • Volunteers / Committee Members
      • Nominating Form
    • WAWH Networker News
    • WAWH History
      • Histories of the WAWH, 1969-2019
      • WAWH Presidents
    • Organizational ties
    • Constitution & Bylaws
  • Membership
  • Annual Conference
    • Conference FAQs
    • Future Conferences
    • Past Conference Archive
  • Awards
    • Founders’ Dissertation Fellowship
    • Peggy Renner Award for Teaching and Curricular Innovation
    • Mary Elizabeth “Betsy” Perry Graduate Student Digital Project Prize
    • Carol Gold Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize
    • Gita Chaudhuri Rural and Environmental History Prize
    • Judith Lee Ridge History Article Prize
    • Barbara “Penny” Kanner Primary Sources Publication Award
    • Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Monograph Prize
  • Resources
    • Funding, travel & research
    • Dissertation advice
    • Conferences
    • Professional development
    • Publishing
    • Teaching & learning
    • Jobs & careers
    • Family / life Issues
    • Everything else
  • News
    • Calendar & Deadlines
    • Professional opportunities
    • Calls for papers
    • Job opportunities
    • Networker archives
  • Donate
  • Contact
  • SHARP Grant 2022-2023
Home » New Book: A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830 – 1941

New Book: A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830 – 1941

November 2, 2015

FieldofTheirOwnOne 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, published by University of Oklahoma Press, 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 of Dishonor, and Alice Fletcher’s 1887 report, Indian Education and Civilization, foreshadowed the emerging history profession’s objective methodology and established a document-driven standard for later Indian histories.

By the twentieth century historians Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phelps Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel, in a bid to boost their professional status, established Indian history as a formal specialized field. However, enduring barriers continued to discourage American Indians from pursuing their own document-driven Indian histories. Cultural and academic walls crumbled in 1919 when Cherokee scholar Rachel Caroline Eaton earned a Ph.D. in American history. Eaton and later indigenous historians Anna L. Lewis and Muriel H. Wright would each play a crucial role in shaping Angie Debo’s 1940 indictment of European Settler colonialism, And Still the Waters Run.

Rhea’s wide-ranging approach to his subject goes beyond existing compensatory histories to illuminate the national consequences of women’s century-long hegemony over American Indian scholarship. In the process, his thoughtful study also chronicles indigenous women’s long and ultimately successful struggle to transform the way that historians portray American Indian peoples and their pasts.

John M. Rhea holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Oklahoma, Norman. He is the editor of the Great Plains Journal.

Filed Under: Member Publications Tagged With: A Field of Their Own, American Indians, Books, History, John Rhea, Women

  • JOIN
  • EXECUTIVE BOARD
  • ANNUAL CONFERENCE
  • FUND FOR THE FUTURE
  • CALENDAR & DEADLINES
  • NETWORKER NEWS

News

  • CFP – Food and Sovereignty
  • 2021 OAH Lerner-Scott Prize
  • CFP – Special issue of Southern Cultures: Built/Unbuilt
  • CFP – 2021 Rural Women’s Studies Triennial Conference

About the WAWH

Western Association of Women Historians logo

The Western Association of Women Historians was founded in 1969 to promote the interests of women historians both in academic settings and in the field of history generally. The WAWH is the largest of the regional women's historical associations in the United States. Although the majority of our members come from the Western United States, we have members from across the United States, Canada, and other countries and encourage people from any geographic area to join and participate in the organization. The WAWH … Read more

The Networker

Cover - Spring 2019 Networker

The WAWH publishes The Networker, a newsletter that serves as the primary means of communication between the board and the membership. Published quarterly (with Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter issues), it contains regular news of members, information about jobs, awards, calls for papers, and resources, reports by graduate … Read more

Explore

Copyright © 2023 WESTERN ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN HISTORIANS · site by doctorgeek · Log in