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Reviews
Women and Gender in the American West
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Edited by Mary Ann Irwin and James F. Brooks
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University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2004. Notes. 437 pages. $22.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Lillian Schlissel
Brooklyn College, The City University of New York
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| In 1980, the Pacific Historical Review published "The Gentle Tamers Revisited: New Approaches to the History of Women in the American West," the landmark essay by Joan Jensen and Darlis Miller. A decade later, in 1990, the Coalition for Western Women's History established the Jensen-Miller Prize to be awarded annually to an essay on the history of women in the North American West, Mexico, Canada, Alaska and Hawaii. The original Jensen-Miller essay and the thirteen prize essays chosen between 1990 and 2002 are gathered in Women and Gender in the American West, edited by Mary Ann Irwin and James Brooks. Each essay is a stunning achievement. Each one, chosen by prize committees, is scholarship at the highest level. Anyone remotely interested in the field needs this book for its reach into what has proliferated into "a mountain of scholarship" and for the annotations, which are excellent (p. 4). |
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Scholars entering what was, in 1980, a new field of research quickly expanded the history of western women to include Chicanas, African Americans, Asian Americans, Mormons, dilettantes, and tourists. Peggy Pascoe and Carol Madsen broke new ground with studies of the legal codes governing interracial and polygamous marriages. Jean Barman and Lynn Hudson wrote on issues of sexuality among Native and African American women. Irene Ledesma wrote about the long efforts of Mexican women in Texas to establish fair labor practices for themselves. James Brooks wrote about captive women — Indian and non-Indian — who were accomplished linguist-interpreters and go-betweens. Catherine Cavanaugh considered the ways in which racial identities and stereotypical images determined the property rights of Métis and Anglo women in western Canada. |
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Concepts of race and gender both defined and confined the rights of all women in the West. Susan Lee Johnson and Antonia Casteneda described the persistence of assumptions about a woman's "sphere." In "Gender, Race, Raza," Amy Kaminsky studied how those attitudes retained their force across time, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. Laura Jane Moore wrote of Navajo arts and the tourist industry. Margaret Jacobs offered insights into the interracial marriages of Elaine Eastman and Mabel Dodge Luhan. |
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I searched for an unifying view by which to bring together so large a display of scholarship. In every way, it seemed that language itself was the constant agency of cultural hierarchy. Ever since the days of discovery and settlement, when the land was described as "virgin," the West has been a place where conquest and possession have played extraordinarily significant roles in justifying land settlement and cultural dominance. English as it was encoded into law carried the images and attitudes by which western women found their lives bounded. English was the imperial language that established what James Brooks called the "structural constraints" (p. 168). |
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Irene Ledesma wrote about the efforts of Mexican women to protect themselves as workers. Texas newspapers called those women shiftless and childlike. Ledesma countered with excerpts from Spanish language newspapers that defended the women — "nuestras mujeres estan dando un ejemplo de character, energia, y solidaridad racial." The words are simple — the women were "muy dignamente representada en las sociedades" — but placing those words in a scholarly essay was a political act (p. 141). |
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Delphine Red Shirt in her recent book, Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood (1998), wrote in Sioux dialect "Mi cate el ci yu ha," — in my heart I have put you. Spanish or Sioux, the excerpts by Ledesma and Red Shirt are meant to affirm that English is only one of the languages available to the historian. I read in a recent newspaper that the pop singer Gruff Rhys (Griff Reese) has cut a cd in Welsh. The reviewer explains that "pwdin wy" [literally, "egg pudding"] is a term of affection, but it is also Rhys's small resistance to English, the refusal of an artist to let others define who he or she may be. |
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Amy Kaminsky quotes Antonia de Nebrija in a 1492 dedication of a Spanish grammar book to Queen Isabella: "Language has always been the companion of empire." If we intend to discover the histories of women of the West, we many need some fluency with texts as they were written. It is not only gender and race we many want to rethink, but the languages in which we do our thinking. |
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