Uses selections from diaries, public records, letters, interviews, and fiction to describe the experiences of women in the West, including Indians, servants, waitresses, prostitutes, and farmers

More than 140 period photographs and excerpts from letters, diaries, books, and journals provide insight into daily life in the American West for women in the nineteenth century. Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Reprint.

The storybook history of the American West is a male-dominated narrative of drifters, dreamers, hucksters, and heroes—a tale that relegates women, assuming they appear at all, to the distant background. Home Lands: How Women Made the West upends this view to remember the West as a place of homes and habitations brought into being by the women who lived there. Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken consider history’s long span as they explore the ways in which women encountered and transformed three different archetypal Western landscapes: the Rio Arriba of northern New Mexico, the Front Range of Colorado, and the Puget Sound waterscape. This beautiful book, companion volume to the Autry National Center’s pathbreaking exhibit, is a brilliant aggregate of women’s history, the history of the American West, and studies in material culture. While linking each of these places’ peoples to one another over hundreds, even thousands, of years, Home Lands vividly reimagines the West as a setting in which home has been created out of differing notions of dwelling and family and differing concepts of property, community, and history. Copub: Autry National Center of the American West

A riveting history of the American West told for the first time through the pioneering women who used the challenges of migration and settlement as opportunities to advocate for their rights, and transformed the country in the process Between 1840 and 1910, hundreds of thousands of men and women traveled deep into the underdeveloped American West, lured by the prospect of adventure and opportunity, and galvanized by the spirit of Manifest Destiny. Alongside this rapid expansion of the United States, a second, overlapping social shift was taking place: survival in a settler society busy building itself from scratch required two equally hardworking partners, compelling women to compromise eastern sensibilities and take on some of the same responsibilities as their husbands. At a time when women had very few legal or economic--much less political--rights, these women soon proved they were just as essential as men to westward expansion. Their efforts to attain equality by acting as men's equals paid off, and well before the Nineteenth Amendment, they became the first American women to vote. During the mid-nineteenth century, the fight for women's suffrage was radical indeed. But as the traditional domestic model of womanhood shifted to one that included public service, the women of the West were becoming not only coproviders for their families but also town mothers who established schools, churches, and philanthropies. At a time of few economic opportunities elsewhere, they claimed their own homesteads and graduated from new, free coeducational colleges that provided career alternatives to marriage. In 1869, the men of the Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote--partly to persuade more of them to move west--but with this victory in hand, western suffragists fought relentlessly until the rest of the region followed suit. By 1914 most western women could vote--a right still denied to women in every eastern state. In New Women in the Old West, Winifred Gallagher brings to life the riveting history of the little-known women--the White, Black, and Asian settlers, and the Native Americans and Hispanics they displaced--who played monumental roles in one of America's most transformative periods. Like western history in general, the record of women's crucial place at the intersection of settlement and suffrage has long been overlooked. Drawing on an extraordinary collection of research, Gallagher weaves together the striking legacy of the persistent individuals who not only created homes on weather-wracked prairies and built communities in muddy mining camps, but also played a vital, unrecognized role in the women's rights movement and forever redefined the "American woman."

Volume 3 has some references to homosexuality and lesbianism in the index. -- dm.

This engaging narrative synthesizes more than 20 years of historical writing on the history of women in the American West. Twenty years after many Western historians first turned their attention toward women, Women in the American West synthesizes the development of women's history in the region, introduces readers to current thinking on the real experiences of Western women, and explores their influence on the course of expansion and development since the 19th century. Women in the American West offers vivid portrayals of women as pioneers, prostitutes, teachers, disguised soldiers, nurses, entrepreneurs, immigrants, and ordinary citizens caught up in extraordinary times. Organized chronologically, each chapter emphasizes important themes central to gender and women's history, including women's mobility, women at home, wage labor, immigration, marriage, political participation, and involvement in wars at home and abroad. With this revealing volume, readers will see that women had a far more profound effect on the course of history in the Western United States than is commonly thought.

In 1856, in an opera house in Roseville, Illinois, Susan B. Anthony called for the supporters of woman suffrage to stand. The only person to rise was eight-year-old Emma Smith. And she continued to take a stand for the rest of her life. As a leader in the suffrage movement, Emma Smith DeVoe stumped across the country organizing for the cause, raising money, and helping make the West central to achieving the vote for women. DeVoe used her feminine style to great advantage in the campaign for the vote. Rather than promoting public rallies, she encouraged women to put their energies toward influencing the votes of their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Known as the still-hunt strategy, this approach was highly successful and helped win the vote for women in Washington State in 1910. Winning the West for Women demonstrates the importance of the West in the national suffrage movement. It reveals the central role played by the National Council of Women Voters, whose members were predominantly western women, in securing the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Winning the West for Women also tells a larger story of dissension and discord within the suffrage movement. Though ladylike in her courtship of male support for the cause, DeVoe often clashed with other activists who disagreed with her tactics or doubted her commitment to the movement. This fascinating biography describes the real experiences of women and their relationships as they struggled to win the right to vote. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPLnFiZBHug