Stevenson, Matilda Coxe, 1850-1915

Matilda Coxe Stevenson (May 12, 1849 – June 24, 1915), who also wrote under the name Tilly E. Stevenson, was the first woman ever employed as an anthropologist in the U.S. She was also the first female anthropologist to study the Native Americans of New Mexico. She pioneered the use of photography in ethnology.

An American ethnologist, geologist, explorer, and activist, Stevenson was a supporter of women in science, She helped to establish the Women's Anthropological Society in Washington DC.

The first woman hired by the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) to research southwestern Indigenous people, she published multiple monographs and one long text on the Zuni people. Her work was supported by some of her male colleagues at the time and was seen as a contemporary by some of her fellow ethnologists or anthropologists. However, she faced barriers as a woman scientist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in order to compete, she defied societal expectation which pushed some to regard her as stubborn and aggressive.