A Field of their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941 by John M. Rhea

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Field of their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941 by John M. Rhea Kathi Nehls A Field of their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941. By John M. Rhea. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pp. 312. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) John Rhea has written a welcome contribution to recent works such as Patricia Loughlin's Hidden Treasures of the American West: Muriel H. Wright, Angie Debo, and Alice Marriott (University of New Mexico Press, 2005) and Shirley Anne Leckie's and Nancy Parezo's Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) that look at the important, though often marginalized, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women academics and intellectuals in the American West. Rhea explores the professional activities of nine women historians of American Indian history between 1830 and 1941. He divides his discussion of women's indigenous histories into two distinct periods, sentimentalist (or pre-professional) and document-driven (or professional). He examines the shared connections between these two groups of women and argues that their professional work, unlike the work of their male counterparts, remained on the margins of the historical profession, thereby leaving the field of American Indian history largely the purview of women scholars. Rhea locates the rise of the post-Civil War professional class of "new women" in an intriguing discussion of the sentimentalist ideas and activism of early nineteenth-century female evangelists and transcendentalists whose influence, the author notes, pre-dated the Seneca Falls convention for women's equality. The remaining first half of the book—indeed [End Page 446] much of the narrative—is devoted to an analysis of Helen Hunt Jackson and Alice Fletcher, two early scholars of indigenous history, who benefitted from their predecessors' achievements but gained significantly more political clout in Washington because of the federal rather than state locus governing U.S.-Indian relations (18). Rhea makes the case that it was Jackson's and Fletcher's proximity to the federal Indian agency, through their humanitarian work, that fostered professional careers straddling the divide between sentimentalist and document-driven scholars of American Indian history (34). He demonstrates that while both Jackson's Century of Dishonor and Fletcher's Indian Education and Civilization gained significant attention, historians dismissed their work as sentimental and naïve. He lays much of the blame for why male historians discounted the women's work on the destabilization of late nineteenth-century racial ideas found in Jackson's and Fletcher's scholarship. He notes that such was not the case for pre-professional male historians such as Henry Adams, Francis Parkman, and others who were neither marginalized in the same way nor found their scholarship held to the standards that resulted in the dismissal of the women's work. The author turns his attention for the remainder of the book to women scholars of indigenous history in the early twentieth century, whose work was more document driven than experiential. He highlights the work of Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phillips Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel. This new class of professional women historians faced mounting barriers to matriculation at top universities or, owing to "institutional male chauvinism," were consigned to women's colleges or institutions outside of mainstream academia after completing their doctorates (135). Rhea builds on his thesis that American Indian history became a niche for women as Frederick Jackson Turner's ideas about American exceptionalism, and triumphalism more generally, increasingly influenced how historians framed histories that ignored the indigenous experience. The final chapters chronicle the experiences of the first group of indigenous women writing document-driven American Indian histories, such as Rachel Caroline Eaton and Anna Elizabeth Lewis as well as the better-known Muriel Wright and Angie Debo. Rhea pushes beyond the gender constraints faced by professional women scholars of indigenous history and underscores how broader debates over historical memory, as much as gender, served as an important context for their scholarship and the barriers they confronted. This book deserves the attention of scholars of western women's and indigenous women's history, but will also be of interest to historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial studies and...