The condition of scholarship devoted to the history of women in photography is confounding. 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 unfamiliar names, with approaches and careers summarized in a sentence or two.