Gladys Amanda Reichard (1893 - 1955)

Gladys Amanda Reichard (1893 - 1955)

Gladys Reichard was born in Bangor, Maine on July 17, 1893.  She obtained an AB degree at Swarthmore College in 1919, and took a PhD at Columbia University in New York in 1925. An elementary and high school teacher in her younger days, she went on to become one of America's most distinguished anthropologists and certainly one of the world's foremost authorities on the Navajo Indians.  From 1951 until her death on July 25, 1955, she was a professor of anthropology at Barnard College in New York.  The author of many books on the culture of the Navajo Indians and the natural sciences (she won the Morrison prize in natural sciences, awarded by the New York Academy of Sciences, in 1932), most authorities consider two of her books-Navajo Shepherd and Weaver and Spider Woman-outstanding examples of technical writing at its graphic best.