ABSTRACT
Benedict appears to have resented Reichard and to have belittled her and her work (Modell 1983:167). The rivalry between them for professional recognition went on for many years, extending into the 1940s when Benedict was removed from the editorship of the Journal of American Folklore and Reichard was installed as interim editor in her place (Caffrey 1989:279-281). Reichard’s reputation was, of course, affected by this relationship, but it had no direct bearing on her work on language. Benedict was not a linguist and never pretended to be. Indeed, only one other woman from the 1920s Columbia group ever conducted any extended linguistic work, Ruth Leah Bunzel. Primarily a cultural anthropologist, Bunzel worked at Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, beginning in 1924 when she shared a house there with Benedict (see Fawcett & McLuhan 1988 for a biographical sketch). Her work focused on Pueblo pottery, but she also recorded ceremonial texts under a grant from Elsie Clews Parsons and eventually wrote a grammar of the Zuni language based on material she collected on two trips in 1926-1928 (Bunzel 1933: 394). Bunzel joined the Linguistic Society of America, holding membership from 1928 to 1934, during which time she worked on her Zuni grammar, published in the same volume of Boas’s Handbook of American Indian Languages as Reichard’s Coeur d’Alene (Bunzel 1933). Although the two women crossed paths, no real friendship between them emerges in their writings or correspondence.
