On October 23, 1890, the anthropologist and linguist Elsie Clews Parsons was born in New York City into a prominent family with the resources to fund her own research and the social independence to work on whatever she chose, which turned out to be a decisive advantage in a field that would not pay women for doing it.

Parsons was born in 1875 (October 23 marks a different date in the TDIH format, so: on this date in 1890, another woman born two years earlier had just published her first scholarly article). The cleaner case for October 23 is Mary Haas.

Mary Haas was born in 1910 in Richmond, Indiana. She earned her doctorate in linguistics from Yale in 1935 — one of the few women to receive a linguistics doctorate at the time — and spent her career documenting Native American languages of the American South and California, producing grammars and dictionaries of Tunica, Creek, Natchez, and multiple California languages before the last speakers died.

She built the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, which has produced linguistic documentation of over 150 languages. Many of those languages have no other comprehensive record.

She was president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1963 — the second woman to hold that position. She trained a generation of documentary linguists. She received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association. She retired in 1977 and continued working until shortly before her death in 1996 at eighty-five.