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Reviews
Western Women's Lives: Continuity and Change in the Twentieth Century
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Edited by Sandra K. Schackel
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University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2003. Photographs, bibliography. 443 pages, $22.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Rebecca J. Mead
Northern Michigan University, Marquette
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| This book draws needed attention to the experiences of women in the U.S. West in the twentieth century, noting correctly that so much "western" history has been focused very narrowly on the experiences of Euro-American settlers in the trans-Mississippi region between approximately 1840 and 1890. In the editor's introduction, Schackel describes elements that have limited interest in the twentieth-century West, including the stifling effect of Frederick Jackson Turner's masculine "frontier" thesis, the difficulties of defining "the West," the urbanization of the region, and the tendency of historians to employ a narrow, black/white dichotomy when discussing race relations. Thus, this book fits into the New Western History of the past several decades in its insistence on less celebratory and more nuanced attention to overlooked questions about the region. |
1
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For a general audience, this book will be informative, although the theoretical discussions in part 1 might intimidate a casual reader previously unfamiliar with these debates. For the scholarly reader, however, the collection is likely to prove disappointing for several reasons. The individual contributions vary in quality (a common problem in edited collections), the organizational structure is erratic, and attention to racial-ethnic populations is inconsistent. In addition, all the essays have already been published elsewhere, sometimes quite a while ago. The result is a collection with some very good essays representing exciting new work and others that are dated or derivative. In particular, one questions the wisdom of reprinting in toto as part 1 the three essays that initially appeared in the Pacific Historical Review in 1992. The issues addressed are still relevant, but more than a decade later readers would be better served by an original re-evaluation of how well subsequent research has rectified the identified weaknesses and advanced our analytical sophistication. |
2
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The book is full of information about western women's productive and reproductive work, but it is an articulated theme only in Karen Anderson's introductory essay. In fact, the collection often conflates the topic with other issues, as in part 2, entitled "Women and Mobility," even though the articles are mostly about work. Virginia Scharff's essay also emphasizes women's labor, connecting it to politics and other relations of power, but the only article that addresses overtly political issues is Dolores Delgado Bernal's piece on women's roles in the 1968 Los Angeles school protests. In between, Antonia Castañeda provides a characteristically energizing blast against the prevailing tendencies of historians to marginalize women of color and to retain Anglocentric theoretical models, but this collection is not likely to satisfy her call for "deconstructing, reconceptualizing, and reconstructing" these "structures of colonialism" (p. 57). |
3
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As Castañeda points out, some of the best work today is being done by women of color — some of whom have contributed to this book — but coverage of different racial-ethnic groups of women varies substantially. For example, there is only one piece dealing with African American women, as World War II industry workers, but it is derived largely from oral histories and the film The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, which is classic but hardly cutting-edge material. A similar piece is one of the few references to Chinese Americans. Latinas are well represented, but the only piece about Native American women discusses the southwestern tourist industry, where they appear largely as objects of Anglo-American colonization and exploitation. It is an interesting piece, but a better choice would show Native women more actively engaged as cultural defenders, mediators, and negotiators. Perhaps more than any other racial-ethnic group, Native Americans deserve contemporary visibility because they have resisted marginalization, and Native women have made vital contributions to that struggle. |
4
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Many of the essays utilize oral histories, a wonderful technique for recovering women's voices but one with weaknesses as well as strengths, as discussed by Emily Honig in her article on the Farah strikers and by Debra A. Castilllo, María Gómez, and Gudelia Rangel Delgado in their piece on Tijuana prostitutes. The essays that are conscious of the pitfalls as well as the advantages of this method are among the best. |
5
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The section on rural women, which reflects the editor's particular interests, illuminates the problems farm and ranch women are facing in the twentieth-century economy, but treating the topic with a whole section seems excessive when the majority of westerners have lived in urban areas since 1890. The poem by Carol Konek is lovely but seems out of place as the only literary work in a collection of scholarly articles. |
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In summary, this book contains some excellent material but is heavily oriented toward personal, social, and cultural history. These are all important, but politics, economics, and race relations do not receive much analytical attention. Without a firm grounding in the political economy, it is hard to contextualize women's individual agency and activism. General readers should enjoy the book, while historians of women in the U.S. West will find that there is still plenty of work to be done in this important area. |
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