Women and Gender in the American West

Women and Gender in the American West PDF

Author: Mary Ann Irwin

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780826335999

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The Joan Jensen-Darlis Miller Prize recognizes outstanding scholarship on gender and women's history in the West. The winning essays are collected here for the first time in one volume.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West

The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West PDF

Author: Susan Bernardin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-06-19

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13: 1351174266

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This is the first major collection to remap the American West though the intersectional lens of gender and sexuality, especially in relation to race and Indigeneity. Organized through several interrelated key concepts, The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West addresses gender and sexuality from and across diverse and divergent methodologies. Comprising 34 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into four parts: Genealogies Bodies Movements Lands The volume features leading and newer scholars whose essays connect interdisciplinary fields including Indigenous Studies, Latinx and Asian American Studies, Western American Studies, and Queer, Feminist, and Gender Studies. Through innovative methodologies and reclaimed archives of knowledge, contributors model fresh frameworks for thinking about relations of power and place, gender and genre, settler colonization and decolonial resistance. Even as they reckon with the ongoing gendered and racialized violence at the core of the American West, contributors forge new lexicons for imagining alternative Western futures. This pathbreaking collection will be invaluable to scholars and students studying the origins, myths, histories, and legacies of the American West. This is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Gender and Sexuality Studies, Literary Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Latinx Studies.

Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier PDF

Author: Cynthia Culver Prescott

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2022-05-10

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0816549451

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As her family traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852, Mary Ellen Todd taught herself to crack the ox whip. Though gender roles often blurred on the trail, families quickly tried to re-establish separate roles for men and women once they had staked their claims. For Mary Ellen Todd, who found a “secret joy in having the power to set things moving,” this meant trading in the ox whip for the more feminine butter churn. In Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier, Cynthia Culver Prescott expertly explores the shifting gender roles and ideologies that countless Anglo-American settlers struggled with in Oregon’s Willamette Valley between 1845 and 1900. Drawing on traditional social history sources as well as divorce records, married women’s property records, period photographs, and material culture, Prescott reveals that Oregon settlers pursued a moving target of middle-class identity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Prescott traces long-term ideological changes, arguing that favorable farming conditions enabled Oregon families to progress from accepting flexible frontier roles to participating in a national consumer culture in only one generation. As settlers’ children came of age, participation in this new culture of consumption and refined leisure became the marker of the middle class. Middle-class culture shifted from the first generation’s emphasis on genteel behavior to a newer genteel consumption. This absorbing volume reveals the shifting boundaries of traditional women’s spheres, the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, and the second generation’s struggle to balance their parents’ ideology with a changing national sense of class consciousness.

Portraits of Women in the American West

Portraits of Women in the American West PDF

Author: Dee Garceau-Hagen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1136076107

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Men are usually the heroes of Western stories, but women also played a crucial role in developing the American frontier, and their stories have rarely been told. This anthology of biographical essays on women promises new insight into gender in the 19C American West. The women featured include Asian Americans, African-Americans and Native American women, as well as their white counterparts. The original essays offer observations about gender and sexual violence, the subordinate status of women of color, their perseverance and influence in changing that status, a look at the gendered religious legacy that shaped Western Catholicism, and women in the urban and rural, industrial and agricultural West.

The Gendered West

The Gendered West PDF

Author: Gordon Morris Bakken

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1135694265

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First Published in 2001. This anthology of western history articles emphasizes the New Western History that emerged in the 1980s and adds to it a heavy dose of legal history, a field frequently ignored or misunderstood by the New Western historians. From first contact, American Indians knew that Europeans did not understand the gendered nature of America. Confusion regarding the role of women within tribes and bands continued from first contact well into the late nineteenth century. The journal articles that follow give readers a true sense of the gendered West. Racial and ethnic heritage played a role in female experience whether Hispanic, Japanese or Irish. Women's work was part western history, but women did not confine themselves to plow handles or brothels. Women were very much a part of most occupations or in the process of breaking down barriers of access. They worked in the fields for wages as well as for family welfare and prosperity. Women demanded access to the professions whether teaching or law, accounting or medicine. The process of eliminating barriers varied in time and space, but the struggle was constant. Yet the story of women in polygamous Utah or Idaho was different and an integral part of the fabric of western history. Because of their beliefs and practices these women suffered at the hands of the federal government and persevered.

New Women in the Old West

New Women in the Old West PDF

Author: Winifred Gallagher

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2022-07-19

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0735223270

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A riveting and previously untold history of the American West, as seen by the pioneering women who advocated for their rights amidst challenges of migration and settlement, and transformed the country in the process Between 1840 and 1910, hundreds of thousands of men and women traveled deep into the underdeveloped American West, lured by adventure, opportunity, and the spirit of Manifest Destiny. These settlers soon realized that survival in a new society required women to compromise eastern sensibilities and take on some of their husbands’ responsibilities. At a time when women had very few legal or economic--much less political--rights, these women soon proved just as essential as men to westward expansion. During the mid-nineteenth century, the traditional domestic model of womanhood shifted to include public service, with the women of the West becoming town mothers who established schools, churches, and philanthropies, while also coproviding for their families. They claimed their own homesteads and graduated from new, free coeducational colleges that provided career alternatives to marriage. In 1869, the men of the Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote--partly to persuade more of them to move west--but with this victory in hand, western suffragists fought relentlessly until the rest of the region followed suit. By 1914 western women became the first American women to vote--a right still denied to women in every eastern state. In New Women in the Old West, Winifred Gallagher brings to life the riveting history of the little-known women--the White, Black, and Asian settlers, and the Native Americans and Hispanics they displaced--who played monumental roles in one of America's most transformative periods. Drawing on an extraordinary collection of research, Gallagher weaves together the striking legacy of the persistent individuals who not only created homes on weather-wracked prairies, but also played a vital, unrecognized role in the women's rights movement and forever redefined the "American woman."

Making Home Work

Making Home Work PDF

Author: Jane E. Simonsen

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2006-12-08

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0807877263

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During the westward expansion of America, white middle-class ideals of home and domestic work were used to measure differences between white and Native American women. Yet the vision of America as "home" was more than a metaphor for women's stake in the process of conquest--it took deliberate work to create and uphold. Treating white and indigenous women's struggles as part of the same history, Jane E. Simonsen argues that as both cultural workers and domestic laborers insisted upon the value of their work to "civilization," they exposed the inequalities integral to both the nation and the household. Simonsen illuminates discussions about the value of women's work through analysis of texts and images created by writers, women's rights activists, reformers, anthropologists, photographers, field matrons, and Native American women. She argues that women such as Caroline Soule, Alice Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, Anna Dawson Wilde, and Angel DeCora called upon the rhetoric of sentimental domesticity, ethnographic science, public display, and indigenous knowledge as they sought to make the gendered and racial order of the nation visible through homes and the work performed in them. Focusing on the range of materials through which domesticity was produced in the West, Simonsen integrates new voices into the study of domesticity's imperial manifestations.

Men as Women, Women as Men

Men as Women, Women as Men PDF

Author: Sabine Lang

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 0292777957

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As contemporary Native and non-Native Americans explore various forms of "gender bending" and gay and lesbian identities, interest has grown in "berdaches," the womanly men and manly women who existed in many Native American tribal cultures. Yet attempts to find current role models in these historical figures sometimes distort and oversimplify the historical realities. This book provides an objective, comprehensive study of Native American women-men and men-women across many tribal cultures and an extended time span. Sabine Lang explores such topics as their religious and secular roles; the relation of the roles of women-men and men-women to the roles of women and men in their respective societies; the ways in which gender-role change was carried out, legitimized, and explained in Native American cultures; the widely differing attitudes toward women-men and men-women in tribal cultures; and the role of these figures in Native mythology. Lang's findings challenge the apparent gender equality of the "berdache" institution, as well as the supposed universality of concepts such as homosexuality.

Wrangling Women

Wrangling Women PDF

Author: Kristin M. McAndrews

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13:

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In Winthrop, Washington, a small Methow Valley community that has reinvented itself as a western theme town, women who function as trail guides, wranglers, horse trainers, packers, and ranchers work in an environment where gender stereotypes must be carefully preserved for the sake of the tourist-based economy. Yet these women often subvert and undermine these traditional images with humor. How these wrangling women accomplish this challenging balancing act is a fascinating study of women's manipulation of language and gender stereotypes in the modern West. For eleven years, Kristin McAndrews conducted interviews with Winthrop's horsewomen, collecting stories about their lives as workers and as members of their community and families. For all these women, professional success depends on courage, ingenuity, a sense of humor, and a facility with language--as well as on an ability to perform within the traditional gender stereotypes evoked by their town's "Wild West" image. In particular, McAndrews examines the ways her interviewees employ language to subvert gender conventions, using humor in their storytelling. She demonstrates that while traditional gender stereotypes endure to a degree in the culture of the American West, many women who live and work in this community have found successful, nonthreatening ways to achieve professional and personal objectives and to create individual and independent identities as women and as workers. Wrangling Women is an engrossing, spurring commentary on the way women use humor in their storytelling and in their working relationships with men, and on what this humor reveals about issues of gender in the American West.

Home Lands

Home Lands PDF

Author: Virginia Scharff

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2010-05-18

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0520262190

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The storybook history of the American West is a male-dominated narrative of drifters, dreamers, hucksters, and heroes—a tale that relegates women, assuming they appear at all, to the distant background. Home Lands: How Women Made the West upends this view to remember the West as a place of homes and habitations brought into being by the women who lived there. Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken consider history’s long span as they explore the ways in which women encountered and transformed three different archetypal Western landscapes: the Rio Arriba of northern New Mexico, the Front Range of Colorado, and the Puget Sound waterscape. This beautiful book, companion volume to the Autry National Center’s pathbreaking exhibit, is a brilliant aggregate of women’s history, the history of the American West, and studies in material culture. While linking each of these places’ peoples to one another over hundreds, even thousands, of years, Home Lands vividly reimagines the West as a setting in which home has been created out of differing notions of dwelling and family and differing concepts of property, community, and history. Copub: Autry National Center of the American West