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Gender and Women's History in the West
In the summer of 2004 our editorial staff issued a call for article submissions on topics related to women and gender in the North American West. We are pleased to present the results of that search in an issue that celebrates and spurs the field in innovative directions and encourages a new generation of scholarship. It is a fitting way to commemorate Anne Butler's outstanding work in expanding the publishing opportunities for historians of women in the West.
The Way We Were, The Way We Are, And The Way Ahead
ANNE M. BUTLER
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IN 1972, THREE YEARS AFTER it entered the scholarly arena as the flagship journal for the history of the American West, the Western Historical Quarterly published its first article with the word "women" in the title. Only a few months earlier, at the annual meeting of the Western History Association, the distinguished scholar of Wyoming, T. A. Larson, had presented the essay, "Dolls, Drudges, and Vassals: Pioneer Women in the West," as his presidential address to a banquet audience comprised in the main of male attendees: professional historians, military buffs, and frontier aficionados.1 Larson's piece, delineating the circumstances by which the suffrage movement prevailed in the West, delved almost as deeply into the attitudes of nineteenth-century white, middle-class men as it did into those of their local female activists. Its content steeped in a somewhat "manly" aura, the article remained the single example of anything remotely connected to women's history in the WHQ for the next four years.2 |
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Despite this rather inauspicious beginning, the Western Historical Quarterly, since the 1970s, has served as an intellectual barometer by which to measure the place and power of western women's history. Accordingly, the journal illuminates the patterns of women's history in the past, captures its current landscapes, and suggests the scholarly trajectories of the future. |
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In the mid-1970s, two women scholars upended the paradigm of an exclusively masculine West that generated equally exclusive masculine scholarship. In her 1976 WHQ article, "Mexican Women in San Antonio, 1830–1860: The Assimilation Process," Jane Dysart centered on political and economic issues essential to the multifaceted, multiracial female world of the American West. Dysart drew back the scholarly curtains that shrouded the cultural diversity of western womanhood and pointed to the uncharted academic territory ahead—one where the rhythms, the hues, the very lexicon of gender history were destined to assume new forms and stimulate fresh debates.3 |
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Those forms and debates of western history initially confronted an entrenched regional canon. In the 1970s, even as the United States pulsated with the energy of civil rights and women's liberation, the West of the nation continued to cherish its formulaic nineteenth-century frontier images and clung to a reliable cast of characters drawn in the main from Anglo societies. Glenda Riley questioned the wisdom of holding to these shopworn images by dismantling conventional notions about frontier women, nearly always associated with Anglo/European communities. In her 1977 WHQ article, "Images of the Frontierswoman: Iowa as a Case Study," Riley warned that, as attention turned toward women pioneers, researchers should avoid depicting their subjects as merely super opposites to male heroes of the West.4 Riley concluded that stereotypes could not and would not be unraveled until scholars pursued the long-neglected historical record of women. |
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