ABSTRACT
Gladys Reichard was one of the most important women to study native American languages in the first half of the twentieth century.1 A student of Franz Boas at Columbia University in the early 1920s and then a teacher of linguistics and anthropology at Barnard College for her entire career, Reichard published grammars for three distinct languages: the northern California language Wiyot (Reichard 1925), Coeur d’Alene, a Salish language of Idaho (Reichard 1938), and, in the Southwest, Navajo (Reichard 1951). At the time her Navaho Grammar appeared, no other woman had yet published such an extensive body of linguistic studies on Native American languages, although a younger contemporary, Mary R.Haas (1910-1996), would eventually surpass Reichard in intellectual and institutional fame and influence. (For a bibliography of Reichard’s work, see Smith 1956; for Haas, see Dil 1978 and Parks 1997.)
As the contributions of women to the discipline of anthropology were reviewed in the final decades of the twentieth century (e.g., Babcock & Parezo 1988, Parezo 1993a), Reichard’s work on Navajo culture-weaving and religion as well as language-became the focus of several important studies (Lyon 1989, Lamphere 1993 [1992]), but there is no full scale biography encompassing all of her linguistic research or exploring her earlier work, contexts and influences, and her relationships as they affected her linguistic studies and her academic and intellectual reception and reputation.
