Chris Prouty Rosen?eld, at 83; was a writer and historian

LOS ANGELES -- Chris Prouty Rosenfield, a globe-trotting housewife and mother who channeled passions for feminism, history, and theater into writing books and acting out the lives of personages in the National Portrait Gallery, died Feb. 8 of injuries suffered in a fall at her home in Washington, D.C. She was 83.

Ms. Rosenfield's masterwork was "Empress Taytu and Menelik II: Ethiopia 1883-1910," a biography of the little-known Taytu, considered the most powerful woman in Africa as the 19th century turned into the 20th.

Ms. Rosenfield also wrote, with her late husband, Eugene, "The Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia and Eritrea" and "A Chronology of Menilek II: 1844-1913."

In Washington from the late 1970s into the 1980s, Ms. Rosenfield made a different name for herself by standing in front of a selected portrait at the National Portrait Gallery and describing, with theatrical gestures, the person's life story.

Her favorite subjects included strong women, such as Belva Ann Lockwood, a lawyer ahead of her time and the first woman to run for president -- in both 1884 and 1888.

The former Chris Prouty, born in El Monte, Calif., and orphaned by age 4, learned independent thinking and the confidence that a woman can do anything at the knee of the woman who raised her. That was Mabel Gilchrist Montgomery, her late maiden aunt, an elementary school teacher who whetted her appetite for adventure.

The young girl became the president of women students at Pasadena Junior College (now Pasadena City College) in Pasadena, Calif., and, as she told the Los Angeles Times in 1987, "a big number in the drama department." She upped the ante at Antioch College in Ohio, where she completed a bachelor's degree in 1943, by getting elected as the first woman president of the student body.

On graduation she moved to Washington to work for the Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization, and a year later married Eugene Rosenfield, who made his career in the Office of War Information and its successor, the US Information Agency.

Following her husband to London, India, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, with sojourns in Washington between foreign postings, Ms. Rosenfield reared their four children and pursued her passions.

In India she embraced local theater and directed the first production there of theater in the round, the wartime play "The Hasty Heart." In Tanzania she helped organize Saba Saba Day observances of the 1954 founding of the Tanganyika African National Union.

Suddenly posted to Ethiopia in 1965, she delved into history -- somewhat in self-defense.

"I woke up one morning in Ethiopia, and I didn't know where I was," she told the Times in 1987 when she was in Pasadena to address a California Institute of Technology seminar on African studies. She enrolled in a modern history course at Addis Ababa University and soon became intrigued with Taytu.

"You can count on the fingers of one hand the books written about African women," she told the Times.

Ms. Rosenfield spent 20 years researching the subject she originally saw as a term paper, and finally self-published the book in 1986.

Writing humorously about the experience for The Washington Post in 1994, Ms. Rosenfield described how she became her own agent, publisher, publicist, and accountant, leaving only the editing to her husband.

"I can now report that I have made money -- $1,350, to be precise -- which in the publishing business makes me a brilliant success," she wrote. "I have been guided by a couple of rock-solid rules: No. 1: Never give away free copies, except to my blood relatives and one to our sweet-tempered postman at Christmas . . . No. 2: Never pass up an opportunity to make a sale."

Ms. Rosenfield, who also contributed articles to The New York Times Magazine, was a trustee of the Washington, D.C., Public Library and served as chairwoman of its library foundation.

Her husband died in 1999.

Ms. Rosenfield leaves four children, Megan, Eric, Steven, and Peter; one sister, and five grandchildren.