| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Her Act and Deed: Women's Lives in a Rural Southern County, 1837–1873. By Angela Boswell. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. xii, 190 pp. $29.95, ISBN 1-58544-128-7.)

Angela Boswell's concise study of women in one of the oldest counties in Texas, one with Anglo, African American, and German residents, underscores the transplantation of conventional gender roles to the southwestern frontier. Based on a meticulous analysis of extant court records and public documents in Colorado County from 1837 to 1873, Boswell's book examines the "ideal, law and reality" of southern women's lives (p. 6). Although the county some seventy miles west of present-day Houston had a large German presence, it remained essentially southern in nature, and its women's lives reflected that.

On the frontier women's labor proved essential for success at farming. As a result frontier women might share men's roles at home and sometimes in public. One widow who carried her late husband's shot bag, hunting knife, and gun was perceived as a lunatic by her own relatives for assuming the male role. Society and the courts often made exceptions for women in these conditions, but, as Boswell finds, "most women tried to maintain standard gender roles" (p. 12).

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