Matilda Coxe Stevenson, who also wrote under the name Tilly E. Stevenson, was an American ethnologist, geologist, explorer, and activist. She was a supporter of women in science, helping to establish the Women's Anthropological Society in Washington DC. Stevenson was also the first woman hired by the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) to research southwestern Indigenous people. In doing so, she published multiple monographs and one long text on the Zuni people. Her work was supported by some of her male colleagues at the time and was seen as a contemporary by some of her fellow ethnologists or anthropologists. However, she faced barriers as a woman scientist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in order to compete, she defied societal expectation which pushed some to regard her as stubborn and aggressive.
Matilda Joslyn Gage was an American writer and activist. She is mainly known for her contributions to women's suffrage in the United States but she also campaigned for Native American rights, abolitionism, and freethought. She is the eponym for the Matilda effect, which describes the tendency to deny women credit for scientific invention. She influenced her son-in-law L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Matilde Elena López was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, playwright and literary critic. Her most important works include “Masferrer, alto pensador de Centro América”, “Cartas a Grosa” and “La balada de Anastasio Aquino”.
Matilde Serao was an Italian journalist and novelist. She was the first woman called to edit an Italian newspaper, Il Corriere di Roma and later Il Giorno. Serao was also the co-founder and editor of the newspaper Il Mattino, and the author of several novels. She never won the Nobel Prize in Literature despite being nominated on six occasions.
