Matilda Coxe Stevenson by Morgane Pichard
Matilda Coxe Stevenson (1849-1915)
Matilda Coxe Stevenson was an American ethnologist, geologist and explorer in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She was born in San Augustine, Texas as Matilda Evans and grew up in Washington, D.C. She went to school in Philadelphia and later married James Stevenson in 1872. James Stevenson was a geologist who worked as an executive officer of the U.S. Geological Survey. She became interested in his work and joined him on an expedition to New Mexico to study the Zuni tribe for the America Bureau of Ethnology.
She began her career by focusing on women and children of various tribes including the Zuni tribe and the Hopi of Oraibi, Arizona Hopi. Her status as a female ethnologist was very beneficial as she was able to collect information that male ethnographers may not have been privy to. However, her focus on women and children may not have been by choice, because her status as a woman in the field limited what topics she was allowed to pursue. Her research on Zuni women specifically challenged many prevailing Victorian notions, specifically that women in such “primitive” societies had degrading lives. Instead, Although it is depressing that it took white feminism to show the reality of Indigenous women, Stevenson was able to prove that they lived with honor and respect. Stevenson was also far ahead of her time in terms of sex and gender research. Not only did she conclude that sex and gender were not synonymous, but also she wrote of and thus ackowledged the third-gendered spirit Ilhamana We’wha.