Men are usually the heroes of Western stories, but women also played a crucial role in developing the American frontier, and their stories have rarely been told. This anthology of biographical essays on women promises new insight into gender in the 19C American West. The women featured include Asian Americans, African-Americans and Native American women, as well as their white counterparts. The original essays offer observations about gender and sexual violence, the subordinate status of women of color, their perseverance and influence in changing that status, a look at the gendered religious legacy that shaped Western Catholicism, and women in the urban and rural, industrial and agricultural West.

Profiles more than 150 women artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the American West, offers fifteen interpretive essays, and includes nearly three hundred reproductions of their works.

A rich compendium of Western art by women, this book also contains essays which examine the many economic, social, and political forces that have shaped the art over years of pivotal change. The women profiled played an important role in gaining the acceptance of women as men's peers in artistic communities. Their independent spirit resonates in studios and galleries throughout the country today. Photos.

This encyclopedia is a biographical dictionary of some 1,000 women artists of the American West. The product of a twenty-year, coast-to-coast research project by authors Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, it offers accurate, concise introductions to women painters, graphic artists, and sculptors, all of whom achieved recognition as depictors of Western subjects between the 1840s and 1980. Their styles range from representationalism to early modernism, while their works depict everything from bold landscapes and scenes of intensive action to studies of Native Americans, pioneers, ranchers, farmers, wildlife, and flora. Each entry in the encyclopedia features the salient facts of the artist's life and career, with attention to her work with Western subject matter. Many of the entries also contain a selected list of the artist's exhibitions, current locations of her work in public collections, pertinent references, and a black-and-white example of her work. An overview of the history of women in western art complements the biographical entries.

Features portraits of female ranchers and cowgirls who live in the American West, and anecdotes about their daily lives and thoughts about the disappearance of their lifestyle.

Told in a unique first-person creative nonfiction narrative, Women Artists of the West profiles five important women artists who lived, worked, and created in the early years of the twentieth century—Georgia O'Keeffe, Maria Martinez, Dorothea Lange, Laura Gilpin, Mary-Russell Colton.