BOOK REVIEW [(Sample review from FEMINIST COLLECTIONS, vol.18, no.4 (Summer 1997)], a special issue on women in the U.S. West and Midwest

Multiple Voices: Rewriting the West

by Mary Neth

Anne M. Butler and Ona Siporin, UNCOMMON COMMON WOMEN: ORDINARY LIVES OF THE WEST. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996. 138p. bibl. photogs. $34.95, ISBN 0-87421-209-x; pap., $21.95, ISBN 0-87421-210-3.

Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, eds., WRITING THE RANGE: RACE, CLASS AND CULTURE IN THE WOMEN'S WEST. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. 625p. bibl. $45.00, ISBN 0-8061-2929-8; pap., $21.95, ISBN 0-8061-2952-2.

In Uncommon Common Women, Anne Butler and Ona Siporin's purpose is to "lure our audiences toward a larger and deeper knowledge of western women, to a perception of the race, class, and gender forces that shaped their lives" (p.3). Although the intended audience is not the same, Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage's edited collection, Writing the Range, has a similar goal. Each book seeks to extend our understanding of the diversity of western women and charts new ground. Butler and Siporin's book is a work of public history, experimenting with the narrative forms of the historian and the storyteller to create an accessible introduction to the ways individual lives of ordinary women connect to the history of the region. Jameson and Armitage have collected the most current research on racial ethnic women in the West to make it widely available to scholars, thus taking an important step toward making western U.S. history inclusive and truly multicultural.

Uncommon Common Women had its origin in a collaboration between historian Butler and storyteller Siporin for public presentations. They decided to translate this oral experiment in history and storytelling to the written page and added a third element, the visual, with photographs. The book blends historical background with stories of individual women. Arranged topically, there are sections on prairie women, immigrant women, women of the schoolhouse, women criminals, and women at forts and in cities. Each chapter alternates historical background, "stories" analyzed by the historian to illustrate larger trends or to explode myths about western women, and "stories" created by the storyteller imagining the interior perspectives of historical women. In most cases, the three work together well.

One effective example is the chapter on Women of the Criminal World. The chapter begins with an overview of the ways women ran afoul of the law from "drunk and disorderly conduct" to "violent felonies." Next the popular myth of the beautiful "dance hall girl" is peeled away to look at the realities of prostitution. Many prostitutes began at the ages of twelve or thirteen, were married to men who expected the wages of prostitution to supplement family income, made little money because men did not want to pay them well and because overhead, such as paying off officials, was high, and died at young ages because of the violence and health risks that accompanied the job. The story that follows tells of the long, elaborate dreams of Manuela for affection, comfort, safety, and fulfilling work, punctuated by a repeated chorus of violence: "The guard slapped her hard across the face. He was pouring beer over her. `Bitch,' He spat the word at her. `When I'm pokin' a woman, I want her to pay attention.' He was one of the mean ones" (p.97). The chapter concludes with the story of conditions in western prisons where female prisoners, most often women of color, were beaten, sexually abused, and endured harsh physical labor and poor health conditions. The text is complemented with photographs of prostitutes and prisoners, placing specific, very human faces alongside the stories of pain, death, and survival.

The book is on shakiest ground when it moves from the context of particular lives to more general historical descriptions. Sometimes these descriptions are too general. For example, the historical background on prairie women focuses on the weather and the sod house - worthy topics, but so vaguely described that those familiar with the landscape or the many fictional, autobiographical, and diary accounts of it by women will find it simplistic. Sometimes materials appear in odd contexts. For example, the book places political organizations under the section on "women in the schoolhouse," while women in the Populist party are, rather inappropriately, included under "immigrant women." Although the authors intend for the photographs to be a third part of their experimental interweaving of narratives, and the photographs selected are wonderful, they are neither identified in the text nor numbered to correspond to the identifications in the appendix.

Sometimes unusual juxtapositions do add new layers to our understanding of a particular experience. For example, the discussion of teachers in pioneer schools is followed by the story of a former teacher who lived on Antelope Island. The story beautifully unfolds as to how this woman learned about the landscape and "taught" its wonders to her children:

She gave them the curlews, the forty fresh springs on the island, the Farmington Canyon rocks
(2.7 billion years old); she gave them the bobcats, and the muledeer, the willits [sic], eared
grebs [sic], and all the owls: long- and short-eared, barn owls, great horned owls swooping low
over their heads, covering the land with their shadow.... Alice showed them the stuff to make their
own stories. (pp.76-77)

Despite the book's limitations, stories like these are entertaining and vivid and should indeed "lure" a general reader to travel deeper into the history of ordinary women in the West.

The goal of Jameson and Armitage is to "make more materials available on the histories of racial ethnic women, so that we might imagine new ways to see the past" (p.14). That places this collection and the history of diverse women in the West at the planting stage; the seeds are being sewn so that more of us can tend them and all can reap their harvest at a later season. The array of materials in this collection shows us how many are toiling in the field of western women's history, but, as is usually true at this early stage, the quality of the articles is uneven and there is no conceptual framework clearly linking all of the work. Nevertheless, the book provides useful information and new approaches for scholars and teachers who hope to incorporate the lives of diverse women in their research and classrooms. The central theme of the collection is movement and migration and the cross-cultural contact that brought together groups with different ideas about - and social organizations of - gender. After a short section of historiography and theory, the book is organized chronologically with sections on the colonial frontiers of the Spanish, resistance to the conquest by the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century migrations, women organizing for empowerment, the role of popular culture in shaping identities, and migrations to urban areas in the period after World War II.

Other themes appear across the divides of this chronology. First is the collision of different gender systems as cultural groups met in the West. Ramona Ford sets the interpretive framework for this theme by taking apart the varying components of a culture's gender system - such as inheritance, kinship patterns, religious ideals, the division of labor and control of resources, and the flexibility of "gender" itself þ that assign women their status in that culture. Her article looks at diversity among Native American tribes as well as examining how Native American women's status was generally changed by European conquest. Vicki Ruiz looks more specifically at the process of cultural exchanges by studying the Houchen Settlement House in El Paso. Her complex analysis points out the mixed messages offered by the missionaries and the active sifting of ideas by the "clients." While the mission-sponsored settlement provided crucial social services for the Mexican community that were not supported by white El Paso, it also tried to Americanize and Protestantize them. Their programs offered contradictions such as recitals featuring European folk dances and costumes and the city's only bilingual kindergarten. Mexican women embraced the Settlement Houses's educational and health care services but rejected its romanticized view of the "benefits" of becoming "Americanized" because they, unlike the missionaries, understood how its promise was limited by race and class.

A second theme that cuts across chronological boundaries is the role of sexuality and gender in creating ideologies of "race" and problematizing ethnic identification. Peggy Pascoe shows that laws intended to limit "interracial" sex and marriage in the West illuminate how muddy, changing, and socially constructed concepts of "race" were. For example, at one point laws forbade whites to marry "Mongolians," a term used to lump together Chinese and Japanese (but it was under debate whether Filipinos fit into this category or the category of "Malays"). Other articles elucidate how the unbalanced sex ratio (far more men than women) of much of the colonial and frontier period shaped attitudes toward "interracial" marriage and battles over who would control women as sex partners. James Brooks analyzes female captivity and slavery in the Spanish Southwest and illustrates how captive women attempted to improve their conditions through the ties sex and children could create in their new communities. In contrast, Albert Hurtado emphasizes the risks non-European women faced in their sexual contacts with soldiers of the California missions and, later, prospectors of the California gold rush, and through the slave trade associated with the Trading Companies of the Plains. Meetings occurring in the context of conquest were fraught with violence and rape, economic exploitation, and disease. Many other articles explore how women of conquered peoples were oppressed by the new systems of racial difference that were introduced, yet attempted to resist these systems.

A final theme that runs throughout these articles is the possibility of cultural continuity and adaptation as well as the creation of new identities that were "in-between" or borrowed from different cultures to create new gender/ethnic identities. Irish women perpetuated a sense of Irish identity even in a mixed-ethnic mining community, a Japanese woman used a traditional form of Japanese poetry to express her understanding of her new country, and southern African American migrants to California used blues clubs to preserve a sense of place and culture. Women frequently crossed boundaries and created new gender identities. In the 1930s, Alice Dickerson Montemayor, of Irish and Mexican heritage, created a Chicana feminist voice within Laredo's League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Valerie Matsumoto explores how, in the 1920s and 1930s, Nisei (second-generation Japanese) women explored their own definitions of being "new women" and Japanese-American, which integrated new ideas of gender from United States' popular culture, compared their experiences with second-generation European ethnics, and still challenged racial discrimination and prejudice. While most of these articles explore mixing definitions of womanhood, some women sought to escape the barriers of gender or sexuality by passing as men. Those women who failed were arrested for violating laws that prohibited women from wearing men's clothing, though women who cross-dressed in the company of male lovers or relatives were more likely to escape punishment than those women who chose female sexual partners whether dressed as men or women.

The voices of the women in these stories and in the analyses of such talented scholars will truly "lure" readers into a deeper understanding of the complexities of gender and race and challenge the narratives of women's history that ignore the West and those of western history that ignore the diversity of these women who lived there.

[Mary Neth is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is the author of Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940 (Johns Hopkins University Press).]


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Mounted September 14, 1997