The participation of women in photography goes back to the very origins of the process. Several of the earliest female photographers, most of whom were from Britain or France, were married to male pioneers or had close relationships with their families.
Although not as prominent as the males in the field of photography, there has always been women involved.
Landscapes and Street Photography -
Sarah Ladd (1860–1927) began taking landscape photographs in Oregon at the end of the 19th century. Her images of the Columbia River which she developed in a darkroom on a houseboat were exhibited in 2008 at the Portland Art Museum.
British-born Evelyn Cameron (1868–1928) took an extensive series of remarkably clear images of Montana and its people at the end of the 19th century. Rediscovered in the 1970s, they were published in book form as Photographing Montana 1894–1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron.
Laura Gilpin (1891–1979), mentored by Gertrude Käsebier, is remembered for her images of native Americans and Southwestern landscapes, especially those taken in the 1930s.
Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) is best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City from 1929 to 1938. Much of the work was created under the Federal Art Project; a selection was first published in book form in 1939 as Changing New York. It has provided a historical chronicle of many now-destroyed buildings and neighbourhoods of Manhattan.
Photojournalism and Documentary -
Canadian-born Jessie Tarbox (1870–1942) is credited with being America's earliest female photojournalist, photographing the Massachusetts state prison for the Boston Post in 1899. She was then hired by The Buffalo Inquirer and The Courier in 1902.
Harriet Chalmers Adams (1875–1937) was an explorer whose expedition photographs were published in National Geographic. She served as a correspondent for Harper's Magazine in Europe during World War I, the only female journalist permitted to visit the trenches.
Another war correspondent based in France during World War I was Helen Johns Kirtland (1890–1979) where she worked for Leslie's Weekly.
Margaret Bourke-White (1906–1971) was the first foreigner to photograph Soviet industry as well as the first female war correspondent and the first woman photographer to work for Life.
During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) was employed by the Resettlement Administration to photograph displaced farm families and migrant workers. Distributed free to newspapers, her images became icons of the times.
The novelist Eudora Welty also photographed families affected by the Great Depression, especially in rural Mississippi, producing a remarkable body of work. In the early 1930s, Marvin Breckinridge Patterson (1905–2002) published her world travel photographs in Vogue, National Geographic, Look, Life, Town & Country, and Harper's Bazaar.
Marion Carpenter (1920–2002) was the first female national press photographer and the first woman to cover the White House.
The majority of the photographers listed here, I have never heard of, which makes you wonder why? Before researching I didn't know there were any female war photographers of the time, although most people have heard of people like Robert Capa etc. I think that women in the field in the 1900's were not as publicised as men, which can reflect the gender equality of the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_photography (Date Accessed 09/03/15)
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