Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories ed. by Martha Kohl

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories ed. by Martha Kohl Victoria Lamont Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories. Edited by Martha Kohl. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2016. xi + 319 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $19.95 paper. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the passage of Montana women’s suffrage, the Montana State Historical society published the blog Women’s History Matters over the course of 2014, a series of short essays that collectively convey the diversity of Montana women’s history in all its surprising and delightful messiness. Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories is an anthology of these essays. Readers looking for broad narratives of Montana women’s history should look elsewhere; this collection deliberately resists master narratives through its emphasis on specificity and diversity, signaled in the first two essays, which feature, respectively, Indigenous women warriors and ethnic women’s groups. Indigenous Montana women figure prominently in the collection as activists, witnesses to forced removal from tribal land, practitioners of Indigenous art forms, and professionals in white-dominated occupations such as nursing and journalism. Despite the racism they faced as residents of small-town Montana, black women like healthcare worker Rose Gordon and pioneer Mary Fields not only survived but left lasting marks on their communities. Black women in Montana also worked collectively to advocate black civil rights and support their local black communities. Women on the extreme margins of Montana society, like Chinese immigrant Mrs. Wo Hop, are harder to recover. We know Mrs. Who Hop only from the legal papers she had to carry with her at all times to prove she was in the country legally. Such documents are powerful reminders of just how much of women’s experience is lost to history because their lives were not deemed worthy of remark save by the authorities who sought to control their movements. Records of the Montana Territorial Prison speak cryptically of prostitutes, domestic abuse victims, women with disabilities, and others whose existence would have gone unnoticed by historians were it not for their encounters with the prison system. There are, of course, essays that address more familiar sites of western women’s history: the involvement of predominantly white middle-class women in pursuits such as health care, education, social work, temperance, and midwifery and their presence in traditionally [End Page 243] masculine spaces like rodeos, ranches, and popular novels. Serving as counterpoints to these traditional historical subjects are eclectic figures like new age mystic Elizabeth Clare Prophet, bootlegger Josephine Doody, and poultry specialist Harriette Cushman. Not all the women treated in the volume are the celebrated kind. Essays on women’s involvement in the KKK and eugenics movement are sobering correctives to the celebrity model of women’s history. The essays are all well documented and accessibly written, making this both an interesting read for the nonspecialist and a reliable teaching and reference resource for scholars. Some readers may find the organization frustrating—it jumps around thematically and chronologically in ways that may obscure larger historical patterns. As an attempt to unsettle the “Schoolmarm and Madam” stereotype of western women’s history, though, the collection works admirably. Victoria Lamont Department of English University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln