Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Sue Armitage Most of the articles in this special issue were prepared for the Fifth Women's West Conference. Women's West conferences have been held periodically since the first meeting in Sun Valley in 1983 (Park City, Utah, in 1984; San Francisco in 1987; Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1992; Pullman, Washington, in 2000). Sponsored by the network called the Coalition for Western Women's History, the conferences remain the only meetings devoted exclusively to the history of women in the U.S. West. Just exactly what that phrase means has changed considerably over the years, and every conference has perforce given careful attention to current issues in western women's history. That was certainly the case at the most recent conference, which was the first to be held since the New Western History has come to dominate the larger field, and since ethnic studies in the West as elsewhere has moved strongly in the direction of cultural studies. These new influences were reflected in the conference theme: "Gender, Race, Class, and Region in the North American West" and will be evident in many of the articles you will read in this issue. The first four papers address the current state of western women's history. Albert Hurtado, a social historian, begins by explaining how he came to realize the importance of women's history to his research in Indian history. He goes on to consider some of the implications of gendered and raced history and—daringly for a historian—speculates about future developments. Katherine Morrissey shows us how cultural theory reshapes older historical formulations of region. She uses a particularly striking example of the intersection of gender and "race" in her analysis of the representation of "Miss Spokane," a young white woman in Indian dress who featured prominently in turn-of-the-twentieth-century booster literature. In "Sexuality in Western Women's History" Nan Alamilla Boyd describes her own research on San Francisco's gay and lesbian communities beginning in the early twentieth century. This interest in sexuality and subjectivity in the U.S. West is very recent. The work of [End Page vii] Boyd and others is important because of its new perspective on older western topics (all those cowboys, you know) and also because it makes the case for the significance of regional differences in the developing national field of gay, lesbian, and queer history. Vicki Ruiz brought to the conference a stunning bibliography of works of multiracial, gendered studies that have been published since 1995. The list is long, varied, and very exciting. The implicit question in all four of these articles is whether these new approaches can be incorporated into the larger western history. Perhaps the larger question is whether they should be. Evidence and opinions on that topic are not yet very clear: There is no sign of wholesale welcome to new approaches, but new approaches in graduate studies are slowly but surely changing the terrain. The next seven papers require a bit more background information. To focus the conference theme on region, I invited a number of historians with interests in Pacific Northwest women's history to form a subgroup to explore what a gendered and raced Pacific Northwest history might look like. We met in March 2000 for a day of discussion and then reconvened at the conference in July to present our own perspectives. Because I acted as the convenor of the group, this section unabashedly begins with my own article, "From the Inside Out: Rewriting Regional History," in which some of the problems with region and regional histories are examined, followed by an outline sketch drawn from our group conversation of what some of the principles of a new regional history might be. Next Karen Blair, the region's bibliographer of women's history, describes existing source materials, thereby revealing, as she says, the "staggering amount of scholarly investigation" that has not yet been done. In another mode entirely, Jeanne Eder shared female-based Indian stories from the Pacific Northwest that could be the basis for a new approach to writing about the Native peoples of the region. Next Laurie Mercier shows how we might rework race, class, and gender...