Contingent Maps: Rethinking Western Women's History and the North American West by Susan E. Gray and Gayle Gullett

Abstract

Reviews  historical societies and other interested parties began to interpret and mark the site. Today’s greater South Pass region still encompasses visible emigrant trail ruts, emigrant markers, and the geopolitical boundaries that resulted from emigration.Like all such cultural geographies ,“South Pass is a history-haunted place” where, as quoted by archaeologist Terry Del Bene, “you can stand in 2006 and 1846 at the same time” (p. 293–294). South Pass contains extensive primary source material that tells the story of the peoples of the emigrant trail, which, coupled with its readability and expansive time frames, will make it useful in an undergraduate setting . This book should be on the reading list of any scholar of western United States history, particularly those interested in the history of the emigrant trails. Laura Woodworth-Ney Idaho State University CONTINGENT MAPS: RETHINKING WESTERN WOMEN’S HISTORY AND THE NORTH AMERICAN WEST edited by Susan E. Gray and Gayle Gullett The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2014. Photographs, notes, index. 312 pages. $40.00 paper. Contingent Maps is a wide-ranging collection of ten essays on women and gender set primarily in the twentieth-century West. The editors organize these diverse offerings using a framework inspired by feminist geography and centering on three themes. Part I, “Identities and Place,” opens with a chapter on the social role of menstrual lodges among Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest Plateau, followed by another on the function of dress in blurring gender and racial boundaries in turnof -the-century San Francisco. The next essay discusses sites in interwar Hollywood where women “players” in the movie industry challenged “heteronormativity,” and the section closes with a chapter about the reaction to Chicanas who spoke pachucho slang in 1940s Los Angeles (p.81).Part II,“Colonized Places,” features articles exploring how constructions of gender shaped the “Californio racial fantasy ”of a pastoral early California; how Navajo women artisans were incorporated into the tourist economy of early-twentieth-century Albuquerque; and how the employment of young Indian women as housemaids in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1930s may be seen as a “domestic frontier” (p. 160, 201). Finally, Part III,“Networks and Place,” begins with a chapter focusing on competing definitions of masculinity that fueled the Bisbee Deportation incident of 1917 in Arizona, then concludes with two essays on more recent history — the background and status of Chicanas and Latinas among union organizers in the Los Angeles garment industry of the 1990s,and the struggle for “cultural rights” by progressive artists and activists in late-twentieth-century San Antonio (p. 288). Each of these essays provides valuable insights onto the “infinite variety of social relations”to be found in theWest,according to the editors (p. 11). Yolanda Venegas’ s chapter, for example,illuminates the cultural politics of the Spanish heritage movement in California with a provocative and nuanced reading of the classic novel Ramona.Margaret D.Jacobs’s contribution on American Indian servants neatly illustrates the notion of the “domestic frontier” as a “contact zone” involving the disparate agendas of young Native women, Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, and white women employers (p. 201). Such examples could be multiplied, because each contribution may stand on its own — in fact, each did originally, the editors indicate, because each was published separately in the pages of  OHQ vol. 116, no. 1 Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies between 2001 and 2007. It is up to editors Susan Gray and Gayle Gullett to show readers how these diverse essays “cohere topically, spatially, and temporally ,” despite the fact that they were chosen “more for their quality than because they address a particular theme related to gender, place, and the American West” (p. 13). Gray and Gullett attempt to supply that coherence with their introductions,and readers will have to decide how successful they were. They wish to add “place” to the analytical categories for understanding the North American West, alongside“gender,sexuality,class,colonialism, and race” (p. 10). But readers might note that six of the ten essays on the North American West are about California, and five of these six focus on either Los Angeles or San Francisco — spatial coherence indeed...