| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Western Women's Lives: Continuity and Change in the Twentieth Century. Ed. by Sandra K. Schackel. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. 440 pp. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8263-2245-X.)
Sandra K. Schackel brings together sixteen articles that ask new questions about the lives and experiences of western women. Research on the twentieth-century West is fairly late because the region has only recently gained credibility as a field and because of the growth of the field of women's history since the 1970s. Schackel further observes that the "field and parameters of western history" were defined when the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared "the frontier closed" in 1893 (p. 2). By building on the scholarship of Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, the authors and the multidisciplinary composition of this work have reopened said frontier by moving beyond the traditional stories about western women and instead focusing on the "differences and continuities in western women's lives" (p. 1). They do this by organizing their work around five major themes: politics and power, women and mobility, staying on the land, uncovering women's voices, and reshaping cultural images and ideas.	1
As a more inclusive study on the West than many of its predecessors, this collection of articles goes beyond examinations of race, class, gender, and ethnicity to explore western women's experiences over several generations. The first section provides a theoretical base buttressing western women's history with scholarly and professional underpinnings. Quite astutely, the authors provide an alternative theoretical framework allowing minority and ethnic women to speak for themselves.	. . .

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