The condition of scholarship devoted to the history of women in photography is con-
founding. Recent years have witnessed the posthumous inflation of the role of the
hobbyist Alice Austen into that of a pioneering documentarian while dozens of notable
senior figures — Marion Palfi, whose photographs of civil-rights activities in the South
served as early evidence of the need for protective legislation, to name one — received
scant attention from scholars. And, while Naomi Rosenblum’s synoptic History of
Women Photographers covers the subject through 1920 in a generally useful fashion,
once she reaches the 1920s, when the venues, forms, applications, and movements of
the medium expanded exponentially, she resorts to an increasingly terse listing of un-
familiar names, with approaches and careers summarized in a sentence or two.