Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell Sara Egge Women in Texas History. By Angela Boswell. Foreword by Nancy Baker Jones and Cynthia J. Beeman. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. vii + 334 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $37.00, cloth. Angela Boswell offers the first comprehensive narrative of Texas women's history with Women in Texas History. Her primary aim is to challenge the myth of Texas history that omits women and their experiences in favor of independence fighters, cowboys, and oil tycoons. Boswell synthesizes a large number of secondary sources to cover hundreds of years of history, focusing on four guidelines to frame the analysis. First, she concentrates on Texas specifically, eschewing a regional focus. Second, she selects topics relevant to women's history, which allows her to revise the standard periodization. Third, she places her work into the field of women's history, using it to examine the ordinary ways women shaped their own lives and the lives of others. Finally, she strives to include as many women as possible and their racial, ethnic, religious, class, political, and sexual identities. Boswell covers a lot of ground in ten chapters. From the Native American, Mexican, and Spanish women who created a racially and culturally diverse borderlands in chapter 1 to the activities and consequences of the 1960s and 1970s feminist movement in Texas in chapter 10, the book examines a wide range of women's experiences. Chapter 2 traces the influence of southern women in the Texas borderlands in the early nineteenth century while chapter 5 investigates how Native American, white, and Tejana women shaped West Texas and its ranching industry during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters 6 and 7 delve into the period between the 1870s and the 1920s, assessing women's activisms and women's work cultures, respectively. Within chapters, Boswell often bounces among identity groups to tell the story. For example, when examining women's activism from the 1870s to the 1920s in chapter 6, Boswell engages with religious groups, the Farmers' Alliance, white women's clubs, African American women's clubs, Tejana women's organizations, heritage societies, and suffrage associations. She ends with a brief discussion of post-suffrage activism and the rise of the New Woman. This approach allows for easy comparison while giving an expansive and inclusive assessment of women's activism of the time. But each group receives a short assessment, and the overall narrative is sometimes lost amid the subheadings. Women in Texas History serves as an important [End Page 115] model for writing the history of a Great Plains state. It contributes a broad narrative that describes often overlooked historical contexts and serves as a helpful general reference for Texas history. Sara Egge Department of History Centre College Copyright © 2020 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln