A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941 by John M. Rhea (review)

About forty years ago, an elderly member of the University of Washington history faculty asked students on the first day of their western history seminar to identify their research interests. One other woman and myself answered Native American history. The professor quickly dismissed the field as "sentimental" and of interest primarily to females. I was insulted and stunned. First, which women did he have in mind? I could think of only two (Angie Debo and Marilyn Young) in an arena otherwise dominated by men. Plus neither of them struck me as particularly "sentimental." Of course, I did not challenge him. But neither did I ever forget the patronizing attitude. Only now, after reading John M. Rhea's book on women and American Indian history, do I have some understanding of the source of this professor's narrow-minded and antiquated point of view.

Rhea's analysis of women who wrote about Native Americans offers a century-long overview of the literature and scholarship that tracks the power relations not only between Native Americans and white people but also between men and women and pre-professional and professional historians. He casts a wide net in identifying women in the field, beginning with nineteenth-century evangelicals and women's rights advocates who turned to Indian affairs as a place where they could exercise social and political influence. Advocacy in the antiremoval campaign and, after the Civil War, in education, assimilation, and allotment policies led to Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor (Boston, 1881) and Alice Cunningham Fletcher's various works—books that remain well known, admittedly only among historians and primarily for their impact on public policy. Jackson and Fletcher grounded their books in documents and public records, a practice eventually embraced by male scholars. Yet their commitment to racial theories about culture and their association with forced acculturation policies, which gradually lost favor, led to their eventual dismissal "as biased or 'sentimental' by professional historians" (p. 50).

The academic professionalization of history further eroded women'sscholarly and political status. Men controlled universities, and although some accepted women graduate students, they ensured that all doors to university academic employment remained closed to women upon graduation. Women's colleges, high schools, state historical societies, or museums, they argued, were the only suitable places for women. Further, Frederick Jackson Turner'simpact on the field focused scholarly attention on the supposedly inevitable progress of the Euro-American frontier. Indians were a relatively inconsequential topic. Women, then, opportunistically turned to Native American history precisely because "it was the only subject not claimed by their male colleagues" (p. 106).

Rhea provides a meaty discussion of the handful of women professionally trained in the first decades of the twentieth century, including Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phelps Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel. He also highlights several indigenous scholars—Rachel Caroline Eaton, Anna Lazola Lewis, and Muriel Hazel Wright—who urged others to incorporate indigenous perspectives into their work. The volume concludes with the indomitable Angie Debo, the best known of them all. These women, he argues, embraced the field as a way to participate in the profession, to strive for scholarly visibility, and to challenge gender prejudice in the academy. They did not share the pre-professional women's goal of national prestige and political power. Nor did they always agree with, or get along with, one another.

Historiography is, unfortunately, something of a hard sell to the general reader. This book will be of greatest interest to historians, particularly specialists in Native American and gender studies. I wish my former professor was still around to read it. Perhaps he would recognize his own implication in a system that restricted people's access to scholarly endeavors based on gender and then undermined their efforts to carve out a place for themselves within the profession. Happily, over the last forty years...