Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

Women of Oklahoma, 1890-1920. By Linda Williams Reese. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. xviii, 366 pp. Cloth, $28.95, isbn 0-8061-2955-7. Paper, $18.95, isbn 0-8061-2999-9.)

With Women of Oklahoma, 1890-1920, the Oklahoma historian Linda Williams Reese has produced an excellent study of Oklahoma women's history in those three decades. Taking as her starting point the land rushes that followed the opening of the Indian Territory to non-Indian settlement and tracing the story through the incorporation of Oklahoma into the rest of the western United States, Reese illuminates the intertwined lives of white, Native American, and African American women in the state. Reese argues that during the period, when national ideologies about race and gender exerted especially powerful influence, Oklahoma became a "laboratory of cross-cultural contacts" that demanded that women (as well as men) "make an immediate and complex adjustment of these ideologies to fit the conditions of life" in Oklahoma. 1

The study draws its evidence from an impressive array of documentary sources, including photographs, letters, diaries, autobiographies, poetry, newspaper accounts, local histories, census materials, manuscript collections, and oral history interviews, from archives in Oklahoma and Kansas. Reese's study utilizes this rich and complex body of documentation to tell an engaging, anecdote-driven story of women meeting, working together, and competing with one another in the midst of massive cultural and social change. . . .

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