Chris P. Rosenfeld, 83; Author, Performer Focused on History

Chris Prouty Rosenfeld, 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, has died. She was 83.

Rosenfeld died Tuesday of injuries suffered in a fall at her home in Washington, D.C.

The creative Rosenfeld’s masterwork was “Empress Taytu and Menilek II: Ethiopia 1883-1910,” a biography of the little-known Taytu, considered the most powerful woman in Africa at the beginning of the 20th century.

With her late husband, Eugene, Rosenfeld also wrote “The Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia and Eritrea” and “A Chronology of Menilek II: 1844-1913.”

In Washington, from the late 1970s into the 1980s, Rosenfeld 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 who was the first woman to run for president and campaigned twice -- in 1884 and 1888.

The former Chris Prouty, born in El Monte 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 her aunt, Mabel Gilchrist Montgomery, a Pasadena elementary school teacher who whetted her appetite for adventure.

Rosenfeld became the president of women students at Pasadena Junior College (now Pasadena City College) and, as she told The 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 student body president.

She moved to Washington to work for the Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization and, a year later, married Eugene Rosenfeld, who made his career in the Office of War Information and its successor, the U.S. Information Agency.

Following her husband to London, India, Tanzania and Ethiopia, with sojourns in Washington between foreign postings, Rosenfeld 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.”

She moved to Tanzania in 1964, and helped organize Saba Saba Day observances celebrating the 1954 founding of the Tanganyika African National Union.

In Ethiopia in 1965, Rosenfeld 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 speak at a Caltech seminar on African studies.

So 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.

Rosenfeld 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, Rosenfeld 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.”

In San Diego to speak at her niece’s school, for example, she emerged from a gas station restroom to discover that the cashier, an Ankara-born Turk, liked history.

She sold him a copy of the book she never left home without.

Rosenfeld, who also contributed articles to the New York Times Magazine, was a trustee of the District of Columbia Public Library and headed its library foundation.

Widowed in 1999, Rosenfeld is survived by four children, Megan, Eric, Steven and Peter; one sister; and five grandchildren