Review Essay: Texas Women’s History in 2021

Abstract

Review Essay: Texas Women’s History in 2021 Rebecca Sharpless (bio) Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives. Edited by Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie Cole, and Rebecca Sharpless. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. 526. Illustrations, notes, index.) Women in Texas History. By Angela Boswell. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. 345. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights. By Gabriela González. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 261. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American, Civil Rights Activist, Texas Feminist. By Cynthia Orozco. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. 254. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In February 2009, one hundred historians gathered in Fort Worth at TCU to talk about the state of Texas women’s history and how it related to American history and southern history. Elizabeth Hayes Turner, the author of several influential books and articles on Texas women’s history, wanted the state to be included in a book series on southern women at the University of Georgia Press, and the gathering was intended to brainstorm topics for the book. Historians Juliana Barr, Laura Edwards, and Marjorie Spruill traveled to Texas to facilitate the conversations, setting Texas women into wider regional contexts and historiography. How far has Texas women’s history come in the years since the Fort Worth meeting? As the program for the 2021 Texas State Historical Association meeting reveals, it has moved forward significantly in some areas and barely budged in others. In that recent online gathering, eleven [End Page 301] sessions covered aspects of Texas women’s lives, from traditional topics on women’s suffrage and club activism, to queer women’s experiences in print culture and public spaces. Black women, Latinas, and White women all appeared as topics. As always, the conference presentations represented projects that are still in development and may not be available in print for a long time. But they clearly showed that Texas women’s history is going into increasingly diverse, theoretically sophisticated territory. Perhaps the most important theory informing women’s history is intersectionality, which has made its way, surely and definitely, into studies of Texas. Intersectionality, a concept first formulated by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, reminds us that human beings are the products of numerous factors, or, as some writers say, social fault lines.1 Women are not just White or female or Hispanic or working class. Any discussion of women’s experience, in Texas and elsewhere, must consider a multiplicity of influences. In addition to its original emphases on race, ethnicity, and gender, the concept of intersectionality has expanded to include sexuality. The experience of lesbians must now be a part of Texas women’s history. Straight women can no longer be the default mode, just as White women cannot be. Conference papers are one thing, of course, and published books—the results of years of effort on the part of the authors—are quite another. This essay looks at four books published since 2015, examining them for the ways in which theory, particularly intersectionality, informs scholarship on Texas women. The books differ in structure: one is an anthology of essays by individual authors, one is a synthesis of the expansive history of Texas women, and two are scholarly monographs focused on Latina activists in South Texas. But all four are scholarly productions, written by professional historians with graduate training in history, often women’s history—not lay historians or journalists—and they are deeply researched and documented. Taken as a group, these four works reveal much about the state of Texas women’s history. Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives and Women in Texas History are both synthetic works, covering long spans of time, the geography of the entire state, and the experiences of countless women. As such, they have both strengths and weaknesses. They exist only because the authors stand on the shoulders of several decades of work in the field of Texas women’s history.2 [End Page 302] The result of the 2009 Fort Worth conference was Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, edited by Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie...