Virginia Scharff

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Virginia Scharff | Going Public with Western Women's History | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.4 | The History Cooperative

Going Public with Western Women's History

The author argues that museums offer wonderful opportunites for academic historians to reach a wider public, and to develop new rhetorical and intellectual tools.

BACK IN THE FALL OF 1993, I was sitting in my office at the University of New Mexico wondering how I'd ever get all my work done. Any commitment, it seems, turns all too quickly into over-commitment.

The phone rang. The person on the line introduced herself at Patricia Trenton and explained that she was curating an exhibit on western women painters, 1890–1945, for the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, in Los Angeles, California. I'd heard of Gene Autry, of course, but the connection between the singing-cowboy-turned-baseball-team-owner and women with paintbrushes in their hands was, let us say, not immediately obvious to me. I probably made some noise that indicated as much to Patricia Trenton.

"We're very excited about this exhibit," she assured me. "We've already recruited some of the best historians of women's art to write essays about the painters in each subregion of the West. We're looking for a historian of western women to write a general overview essay for the exhibition catalogue."

I protested that I knew very little about women painters in the West.

"You know how to look things up, don't you?" asked Pat Trenton.

I kind of liked that. But I was swamped. "You'd have to pay me a lot," I said.

"How much?" she asked.

I named a figure I considered prohibitive, really astronomical.

"We were planning to offer you more than twice that much," she said.

I allowed as how I might fit it in. "How'd you get my name?" I inquired.

She had to admit, I wasn't her first choice. She'd contacted one of the most prominent historians of western women, who'd said she was too busy to do the essay. Trenton asked her to recommend somebody else. "Do you want a scholar or a popularizer?" the prominent historian had asked.

I could see what was coming.

Pat Trenton said she'd told the historian that she wanted somebody who knew western women's history, but the person had to be able to write for a wide public. So, she guessed, a popularizer, if it came to that.

I laughed. I probably wasn't as insulted as I should have been.

Writing the introductory essay to Trenton's award-winning Independent Spirits: Women Painters in the American West, 1890–1945 (Berkeley, 1995), introduced me to the visual abundance of women's painting in the West, from the indomitable delicacy of Estelle Ishigo's watercolors at the Heart Mountain relocation camp, to Vanessa Helder's monumental vision of Grand Coulee Dam, to the luminous mystery of Agnes Pelton's fantasies. I began to imagine that I could, and should, write sentences that people would want to read. I abandoned what Renato Rosaldo calls the "distanced, normalizing narrative" of social science, and listened for my own literary voice. The story I was telling wasn't simple. It teemed with complexity and contradiction and the sheer range and unpredictability of women's creativity. I wasn't going to dumb things down; I was just going to try to say them better. I gave in and became a "popularizer," and it changed my life.

. . .

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