In, Out, and Beyond: Dislocation, Contamination and the Redemptive Power of Womanhood in California, In-doors and Out by Eliza W. Farnham, 185

Abstract

Eliza W. Farnham (1815-1864) was the first woman migrant to publish a book on California. Her 1856 account offers a unique insight into the early and essentially male phase of California’s settlement, as well as a complex narrative of personal adaptation to a new environment. Its vivid and at times humorous descriptions of agrarian life, embryonic political institutions, social relations and violence, are permeated with the spirit of Manifest Destiny. Yet, the deep originality of Eliza Farnham’s account lies in its gendered perspective, which combines traditional and radical views of the female sex and disrupts dialectics of public and private spheres. This partly autobiographical book blurs the frontiers between the “in” and the “out” and contains the seeds of the gynecocracy theories that the author subsequently expounded in a voluminous work aiming to demonstrate the absolute superiority of the female sex (Woman and her Era, 1864).