Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell Linda English Women in Texas History. By Angela Boswell. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 345. $37.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-707-1.) Angela Boswell’s Women in Texas History is a narrative account of Texas history told through the experiences of women, spanning from the prehistoric period to Senator Wendy Davis’s marathon filibuster for reproductive rights on the floor of the Texas legislature in 2013. Throughout the book, Boswell’s gendered focus intersects with racial, ethnic, and class categories of analysis, providing an ambitious and highly inclusive examination of the state’s history. [End Page 130] On this approach, Boswell notes that “this book pays special attention to the differences in the lived experiences of Native Americans, Tejanas, African Americans, Anglos, Germans, and Asians. Other categories that shape women’s identity, such as class, religion, political ideology, and sexuality are also explored” (pp. xii–xiii). Recasting a state’s narrative history through the lens of sex and gender is not entirely new (see Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California [Albuquerque, 1999]); however, Boswell tackles the entirety of Texas history, shifting the focus away from overly familiar characters and events from the state’s past. Downsizing male-centered topics, like the Texas Revolution, the Texas Rangers, and the oilmen behind the Spindletop oil strike, to mere paragraphs or even sentences allows more room for Boswell to highlight less-covered historical terrain. For example, she details the intricacies of frontier farm life, from soddies to captivity threats, detailing the types of work women conducted inside and outside the household. She contrasts plantation elite women’s responsibilities with those of yeoman farmers’ wives and, further still, with the work of black slave women. In the early chapters, the rigors of the Texas landscape are ubiquitous. As the book progresses, Boswell spends a great deal of time tracing women’s activism in all its forms—from more muted church activities to marches and protests—beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing to the present day. In developing her narrative, Boswell relies on existing scholarship, which, she acknowledges, leads to uneven coverage of some periods and persons. For example, there are ample studies of southern women’s experiences during the Civil War (especially plantation mistresses’), but there is much less scholarship on the frontier perspectives of Native American women, especially regarding life-jarring events like warfare and dislocation. In contrast, Boswell ably draws on the extensive publications on women’s activism during the Progressive era (focusing on clubwomen, suffragists, and heritage preservationists) to provide an in-depth examination of both well-known and unknown female activists. In terms of presentation, the author winnows broader discussions of women’s experiences, both regionally and nationally, to very specific Texas examples, seamlessly weaving her narrative from the macro to the micro level. In addressing family reunification during Reconstruction, for instance, Boswell includes the touching story of Lou Turner, a young black girl “who did not know her mother” and resisted being reunified by authorities with her (p. 100). In another example, Boswell narrows a general discussion of the post–World War II pressures put on women to leave their well-paying factory jobs to Anne L. Baker, a machinist from Waco, who remembered “men implicitly or explicitly asking her what she was doing there: ‘You are taking a man’s job’” (p. 208). The inclusion of these on-point quotations from Texas women transforms Boswell’s survey text into something very special. The last chapter, “Taking Charge: Women to the End of the Twentieth Century,” focuses on the impact of the feminist movement in Texas and its ensuing backlash; Boswell also examines new opportunities for women in the workplace and politics, including the groundbreaking campaigns of Barbara Jordan and Ann Richards. [End Page 131] Ultimately, Angela Boswell’s synthesis of women in Texas history is expansive, rich, and thoroughly refreshing. Linda English University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association