Women and Gender in the American West by Mary Ann Irwin, James F. Brooks

Abstract

Women and Gender in the American West Edited byMary Ann Irwin and JamesR Brooks University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2004. Notes. 437 pages. $22.95 paper. Reviewed by Lillian Schlissel Brooklyn College, The City University of New York In 1980, the Pacific Historical Review pub lished "The Gentle Tamers Revisited: New Approaches to theHistory ofWomen in the American West," the landmark essay by Joan Jensenand Darlis Miller. A decade later,in 1990, theCoalition for Western Women sHistory es tablished the Jensen-MillerPrize tobe awarded annually to an essay on the history ofwomen in theNorth American West, Mexico, Canada, Alaska and Hawaii. The original Jensen-Miller essay and the thirteenprize essays chosen be tween 1990 and 2002 are gathered in Women and Gender in the American West, edited byMary Ann Irwin and JamesBrooks. Each essay is a stunningachievement. Each one, chosen byprize committees, is scholarship at the highest level. Anyone remotely interested in the field needs thisbook for itsreach into what has proliferated into "a mountain of scholarship" and for the annotations, which are excellent (p. 4). Scholars entering what was, in 1980, a new field of research quickly expanded the history ofwestern women to includeChicanas, African Americans, Asian Americans, Mormons, dilet tantes, and tourists. Peggy Pascoe and Carol Madsen broke new groundwith studiesof the le gal codes governing interracialand polygamous marriages. Jean Barman and LynnHudson wrote on issues of sexualityamong Native andAfrican American women. Irene Ledesma wrote about the long effortsofMexican women in Texas to establish fair labor practices for themselves. James Brooks wrote about captive women ? In dian and non-Indian?who were accomplished linguist-interpreters and go-betweens. Catherine Cavanaugh considered theways in which racial identities and stereotypical images determined theproperty rightsofM?tis and Anglo women in western Canada. Concepts of race and gender both defined and confined the rights of all women in the West. Susan Lee JohnsonandAntonia Casteneda described thepersistence of assumptions about a woman's "sphere." In "Gender, Race, Raza," Amy Kaminsky studied how those attitudes retained theirforceacross time,from thefifteenthto the twentiethcenturies. Laura Jane Moore wrote of Navajo arts and the tourist industry. Margaret Jacobsoffered insights into the interracialmar riages of Elaine Eastman and Mabel Dodge Luhan. I searched foran unifyingview bywhich to bring together so largea display of scholarship. In everyway, it seemed that language itself was the constant agency of cultural hierarchy.Ever since thedays ofdiscovery and settlement, when the landwas described as "virgin,"the West has been a place where conquest and possession have played extraordinarily significantroles in justi fying land settlement and cultural dominance. English as itwas encoded into law carried the images and attitudes bywhich western women found theirlivesbounded. Englishwas the impe rial language thatestablishedwhat JamesBrooks called the "structural constraints" (p. 168). Irene Ledesma wrote about the efforts ofMexican women to protect themselves as workers. Texas newspapers called those women shiftlessand childlike. Ledesma countered with excerpts from Spanish language newspapers thatdefended thewomen ? ?Cnuestras mujeres est?n dando un ejemplo de character, energ?a,y solidaridad racial? The words are simple ? the women were umuy dignamente representada en 682 OHQ vol. 106, no. 4 las sociedades"? but placing thosewords in a scholarly essaywas a political act (p. 141). Delphine Red Shirt inher recentbook, Bead on anAnthill:A Lakota Childhood (1998),wrote in Sioux dialect "Mi cate el ciyu ha? ? inmy heart I have put you. Spanish or Sioux, the ex cerpts by Ledesma and Red Shirt aremeant to affirmthatEnglish isonly one of the languages available to the historian. I read in a recent newspaper thatthepop singerGruffRhys (Griff Reese) has cut a cd in Welsh. The reviewer ex plains thatupwdinwy" [literally, "eggpudding"] isa termof affection,but it isalso Rhys's small resistance to English, the refusalof an artist to letothers definewho he or shemay be. Amy Kaminsky quotes Antonia de Nebrija ina 1492dedication of a Spanish grammar book toQueen Isabella: "Language has always been the companion of empire." Ifwe intend to discover thehistories ofwomen of the West, we many need some fluencywith textsas they were written. It isnot only gender and racewe many want to rethink,but the languages inwhich we do our thinking. Bering: The Russian Discovery ofAmerica ByOrcutt Frost Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2004. Illustrations, maps...