Texas Women and Ranching: On the Range, at the Rodeo, and in Their Communities ed. by Deborah M. Liles and Cecilia Gutierrez Venable

Abstract

Reviewed by: Texas Women and Ranching: On the Range, at the Rodeo, and in Their Communities ed. by Deborah M. Liles and Cecilia Gutierrez Venable Elyssa Ford Texas Women and Ranching: On the Range, at the Rodeo, and in Their Communities. Edited by Deborah M. Liles and Cecilia Gutierrez Venable. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. ix + 164 pp. Illustrations, map, table, contributors, index. $32.00, cloth. Texas Women and Ranching is an edited collection that came out of a series of conferences and academic conversations centered on the long role that women have played in the Texas ranching industry. The book brings together scholars and writers from various disciplines, but most are historians from Texas. The introduction explains that it has been difficult in Texas to overcome the continued focus on men, not women, in ranching histories. The masculine nature of much of Texas history is true, and this book does not stand alone in its endeavor. It joins other recent work by Sara Massey, Jane Clements Monday, Carmen Goldthwaite, and Rhonda Lashley Lopez. The nine chapters highlight different women, ranching regions, and times, from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It is a lot to accomplish, and the book would benefit from a thesis or themes to connect the chapters. The introduction divides the women into three categories—elite ranching women, women on smaller ranches, and rodeo women—while the title separates them differently: women on the range, at the rodeo, and in their communities. Despite these various divisions, most chapters examine women on the ranch. One chapter, Renee Laegreid's piece on Kathryn and Nancy Binford, mentions women in rodeo. A few, such as Jack Becker's chapter on Mattie B. Morris, highlight the roles these women held as ranchers within their communities. At times, nonranching community life comes to the fore. This is most prominent in the final chapter where Hollace Ava Weiner presents the life story of Frances Rosenthal Kallison. Kallison's story is a fascinating one of Jewish ranching in San Antonio, but the focus on her nonranching community involvement feels like a missed opportunity to place her experience into the broader context of Jewish ranching life. Most of the chapters are biographical in nature, and they tell us interesting stories about how these women came to own land and to ranch. The most successful are those that move beyond the narrative. In her piece on the fence-cutting wars, Brooke Wibracht effectively shows how two ranching women became active players in protecting their land. Sometimes they used their position as women but often they highlighted their rights as landowners, not women, in their public and private appeals for support. The beautiful cover art, provided by an inductee to the National Cowgirl Museum's Hall of Fame, and the short chapters make this book a quick, appealing read for those interested in women's history and western history. Elyssa Ford Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Northwest Missouri State University Copyright © 2021 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln