The Joan Jensen-Darlis Miller Prize recognizes outstanding scholarship on gender and women's history in the West. The winning essays are collected here for the first time in one volume.

This is the first major collection to remap the American West though the intersectional lens of gender and sexuality, especially in relation to race and Indigeneity. Organized through several interrelated key concepts, The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West addresses gender and sexuality from and across diverse and divergent methodologies. Comprising 34 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into four parts: Genealogies Bodies Movements Lands The volume features leading and newer scholars whose essays connect interdisciplinary fields including Indigenous Studies, Latinx and Asian American Studies, Western American Studies, and Queer, Feminist, and Gender Studies. Through innovative methodologies and reclaimed archives of knowledge, contributors model fresh frameworks for thinking about relations of power and place, gender and genre, settler colonization and decolonial resistance. Even as they reckon with the ongoing gendered and racialized violence at the core of the American West, contributors forge new lexicons for imagining alternative Western futures. This pathbreaking collection will be invaluable to scholars and students studying the origins, myths, histories, and legacies of the American West. This is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Gender and Sexuality Studies, Literary Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Latinx Studies.

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.

As her family traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852, Mary Ellen Todd taught herself to crack the ox whip. Though gender roles often blurred on the trail, families quickly tried to re-establish separate roles for men and women once they had staked their claims. For Mary Ellen Todd, who found a “secret joy in having the power to set things moving,” this meant trading in the ox whip for the more feminine butter churn. In Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier, Cynthia Culver Prescott expertly explores the shifting gender roles and ideologies that countless Anglo-American settlers struggled with in Oregon’s Willamette Valley between 1845 and 1900. Drawing on traditional social history sources as well as divorce records, married women’s property records, period photographs, and material culture, Prescott reveals that Oregon settlers pursued a moving target of middle-class identity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Prescott traces long-term ideological changes, arguing that favorable farming conditions enabled Oregon families to progress from accepting flexible frontier roles to participating in a national consumer culture in only one generation. As settlers’ children came of age, participation in this new culture of consumption and refined leisure became the marker of the middle class. Middle-class culture shifted from the first generation’s emphasis on genteel behavior to a newer genteel consumption. This absorbing volume reveals the shifting boundaries of traditional women’s spheres, the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, and the second generation’s struggle to balance their parents’ ideology with a changing national sense of class consciousness.

The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.

In Winthrop, Washington, a small Methow Valley community that has reinvented itself as a western theme town, women who function as trail guides, wranglers, horse trainers, packers, and ranchers work in an environment where gender stereotypes must be carefully preserved for the sake of the tourist-based economy. Yet these women often subvert and undermine these traditional images with humor. How these wrangling women accomplish this challenging balancing act is a fascinating study of women's manipulation of language and gender stereotypes in the modern West. For eleven years, Kristin McAndrews conducted interviews with Winthrop's horsewomen, collecting stories about their lives as workers and as members of their community and families. For all these women, professional success depends on courage, ingenuity, a sense of humor, and a facility with language--as well as on an ability to perform within the traditional gender stereotypes evoked by their town's "Wild West" image. In particular, McAndrews examines the ways her interviewees employ language to subvert gender conventions, using humor in their storytelling. She demonstrates that while traditional gender stereotypes endure to a degree in the culture of the American West, many women who live and work in this community have found successful, nonthreatening ways to achieve professional and personal objectives and to create individual and independent identities as women and as workers. Wrangling Women is an engrossing, spurring commentary on the way women use humor in their storytelling and in their working relationships with men, and on what this humor reveals about issues of gender in the American West.

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