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Matilda Coxe Stevenson (née Evans) (May 12, 1849 – June 24, 1915), who also wrote under the name Tilly E. Stevenson, was an American ethnologist, 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 (a lawyer) 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 (1840-1888), 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 (BAE) was created, Matilda Stevenson was appointed "volunteer coadjutor [sic] in ethnology" and she went with James on his BAE expeditions to the Southwest. (Need to find citation for this quote or change it)

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." However, she did not limit herself solely to women and children. While the particular essay The Religious Life of the Zuni Child concerns itself with with initiation rights of boys in a certain Zuni ceremony, she did not limit herself to women, family life, nor children, what she did was bring Zuni children into anthropology and made them matter.

In 1885, Stevenson helped to found the Women's Anthropological Society of America (WASA) in Washington DC. She was elected by her fellow members as the first President of the Women's Anthropological Society of America. Although in the beginning many of the members of WASA were not active scientists, many of them were the wives of senators and other politicians at the time. However, notably later many other women important to the fields of science joined WASA, including Anita Newcomb McGee and Maria Mitchell. The WASA held importance to many of these women, as men had a variety of professional organizations, however women were mostly barred for entry to them. "A membership in an organization of like-minded women reinforced their identity as professionals and serious scholars."

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 organiz e 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 Tewa Native Americans. During that time, in 1907, Matilda Stevenson purchased a ranch (Ton'yo) near San Ildefonso, which became her base for fieldwork. Stevenson died in Maryland on June 24, 1915.