Valerie Sherer Mathes, Professor Emerita of City College of San Francisco. Among the books she has authored or edited are Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy and The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson.

“This biography of Amelia Stone Quinton distills Valerie Sherer Mathes’s mastery of the subject into a story of one of the foremost activists in the Indian reform movement. Mathes both places Quinton’s work in its historical context and remains critical of the WNIA and its assumptions and goals.”—Thomas John Lappas, author of In League against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933“Valerie Sherer Mathes reveals Quinton to be a master organizer, publicist, investor, and political strategist who spent years at the helm of a highly influential national women’s association. Quinton was by turns driven, flawed, uncompromising, and sympathetic. Mathes’s detailed depiction paints Quinton as a paragon of the middle-class Protestant idealism of her time, as forward-thinking as she was culturally entrenched—in other words, Mathes gives her the fully human treatment due an exceptional woman in U.S. history.”—Jane Simonsen, author of Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860–1920“In her latest offering, Valerie Sherer Mathes builds on an already impressive body of work on the reform efforts aimed at American Indians beginning in the lane nineteenth century. In Amelia Stone Quinton and the Women’s National Indian Association, Mathes rescues a voice known to few outside the circle of dedicated students of the American Indians. Mathes reveals the work of Amelia Stone Quinton and the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), and sheds new light on the efforts of Christian women to both “civilize” the Indigenous peoples of the naton and to help them assimilate in “white” culture. It is a fine line to walk for a biographer – focusing on the good intention of her subject while also acknowledging that said subject sometimes landed on the wrong side of history. It is something that Mathes does exceptionally well.”—South Dakota History

Valerie Sherer Mathes, Professor Emerita of City College of San Francisco. Among the books she has authored or edited are Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy and The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson.

“This biography of Amelia Stone Quinton distills Valerie Sherer Mathes’s mastery of the subject into a story of one of the foremost activists in the Indian reform movement. Mathes both places Quinton’s work in its historical context and remains critical of the WNIA and its assumptions and goals.”—Thomas John Lappas, author of In League against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933“Valerie Sherer Mathes reveals Quinton to be a master organizer, publicist, investor, and political strategist who spent years at the helm of a highly influential national women’s association. Quinton was by turns driven, flawed, uncompromising, and sympathetic. Mathes’s detailed depiction paints Quinton as a paragon of the middle-class Protestant idealism of her time, as forward-thinking as she was culturally entrenched—in other words, Mathes gives her the fully human treatment due an exceptional woman in U.S. history.”—Jane Simonsen, author of Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860–1920“In her latest offering, Valerie Sherer Mathes builds on an already impressive body of work on the reform efforts aimed at American Indians beginning in the lane nineteenth century. In Amelia Stone Quinton and the Women’s National Indian Association, Mathes rescues a voice known to few outside the circle of dedicated students of the American Indians. Mathes reveals the work of Amelia Stone Quinton and the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), and sheds new light on the efforts of Christian women to both “civilize” the Indigenous peoples of the naton and to help them assimilate in “white” culture. It is a fine line to walk for a biographer – focusing on the good intention of her subject while also acknowledging that said subject sometimes landed on the wrong side of history. It is something that Mathes does exceptionally well.”—South Dakota History

Valerie Sherer Mathes, Professor Emerita of City College of San Francisco. Among the books she has authored or edited are Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy and The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson.

“This biography of Amelia Stone Quinton distills Valerie Sherer Mathes’s mastery of the subject into a story of one of the foremost activists in the Indian reform movement. Mathes both places Quinton’s work in its historical context and remains critical of the WNIA and its assumptions and goals.”—Thomas John Lappas, author of In League against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933“Valerie Sherer Mathes reveals Quinton to be a master organizer, publicist, investor, and political strategist who spent years at the helm of a highly influential national women’s association. Quinton was by turns driven, flawed, uncompromising, and sympathetic. Mathes’s detailed depiction paints Quinton as a paragon of the middle-class Protestant idealism of her time, as forward-thinking as she was culturally entrenched—in other words, Mathes gives her the fully human treatment due an exceptional woman in U.S. history.”—Jane Simonsen, author of Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860–1920“In her latest offering, Valerie Sherer Mathes builds on an already impressive body of work on the reform efforts aimed at American Indians beginning in the lane nineteenth century. In Amelia Stone Quinton and the Women’s National Indian Association, Mathes rescues a voice known to few outside the circle of dedicated students of the American Indians. Mathes reveals the work of Amelia Stone Quinton and the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), and sheds new light on the efforts of Christian women to both “civilize” the Indigenous peoples of the naton and to help them assimilate in “white” culture. It is a fine line to walk for a biographer – focusing on the good intention of her subject while also acknowledging that said subject sometimes landed on the wrong side of history. It is something that Mathes does exceptionally well.”—South Dakota History