Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning the American West (Nonfiction)

At the turn of the last century, when women could hardly achieve advanced degrees much less become professors, 10 prolific female scholars changed the face of historical and anthropological study. They focused on the voices of indigenous people, and their dedicated work triggered interdisciplinary offshoots such as ethnohistory, narrative ethnography, kinship ethnography and medical anthropology, now the norm in cultural research. This anthology of short biographies examines the lives of Ruth Underhill, Mari Sandoz, Zitkala-Sa and others who studied various native cultures from the inside and challenged the uncritical celebration of Western expansion.