Matilda Coxe Stevenson , who also wrote under the name Tilly E. Stevenson, was an Americanethnologist, geologist, and explorer.
Early Life and Education
Matilda Coxe Evans was born in San Augustine, Texas, the third child out of four to Maria Matilda Coxe Evans from New Jersey and Alexander Hamilton Evans from Virginia. Her parents moved from Washington D.C. to newly annexed Texas sometime between 1846 and 1847. The family then moved between Texas, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania throughout Matilda's early years. Her education varied, as well, given the gender expectations and restrictions for middle-class white women at the time. Her formal education most likely began with governesses from private schools, then transitioned to academies and seminaries for women where the goal was to prepare their students to become wives and mothers. However, Coxe Evans was able to also study science, mathematics, history, geography, and other subjects because of the developed curriculum in Philadelphia schools. She attended Miss Anabel's English, French, and German School, originally located at 1350 Pine Street in Philadelphia. When she returned to Washington, she continued her studies under her father and William M. Mew, a chemist at the Army Medical Museum, since most colleges and universities were only open to men. Still, Coxe Evans desired to expand her opportunities beyond the household and hoped to become a mineralogist. Her plans altered when she met James Stevenson, a geologist and ethnologist with the US Geological Survey of the Territories.
Career
Evans married James Stevenson on April 18,1872 before he left for another expedition under Ferdinand V. Hayden to conduct geological surveys in Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. By 1879, when the Bureau of American Ethnology was created, Matilda Stevenson was appointed "volunteer coadjutor in ethnology" and she went with James on his BAE expeditions to the Southwest. She spent 13 years in explorations of the Rocky Mountain region with her husband. In the 1880s, the Stevensons "formed the first husband-wife team in anthropology." Matilda Coxe Stevenson's contributions often focused on women and family life, for which she "quickly developed a reputation as a vigorous and devoted scientist." In 1885, Matilda Coxe Stevenson became the first President of the Women's Anthropological Society of America. After her husband's death in 1888, she was hired by John Wesley Powell as the first woman employed by Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, initially to organize his notes and later taking on a bigger role and leading her own research. From 1890 to 1907, Stevenson did substantial individual fieldwork exploring the cave, cliff, and mesa ruins of the Zuni who resided in the Zuni River Valley in western New Mexico. She then studied all the rest of the Pueblo tribes of that state. From 1904 to 1910, she embarked on a special comparative study of the Zia, Jemez, San Juan, Cochiti, Nambe, Picarus, Tesuque, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Taos and TewaNative Americans. During that time, in 1907, Matilda Stevenson purchased a ranch near San Ildefonso, which became her base for fieldwork. Stevenson died in Maryland on June 24, 1915.
