Taking Land, Breaking Land: Women Colonizing the American West and Kenya (review)

Despite the expectations that might be raised by the verb in Glenda Riley’s subtitle, this comparative history of women in the western United States and Kenya is not fully theorized as an examination of colonialism or colonial history. Riley’s comparative term is “frontier” rather than colonialism or imperialism as she carefully explains in her introduction. She is thus applying a concept derived from her own research in the American West to an African comparison rather than systematically using a model derived from the history of colonialism. Her subtitle also points to her immersion in women’s history rather than gender and, in this case, delivers on that promise by providing a close and detailed examination of women’s activities in both frontier societies. Riley is to be applauded for moving beyond her own familiar area of research to delve into Kenyan history, but the reliance upon terminology from one historiography results in an uneven analysis that not unsurprisingly stresses the similarities in women’s experiences.

Notwithstanding these theoretical issues, Riley’s book interestingly describes women’s activities in two types of European settler societies in a comparative focus on frontier as process, place, philosophy, and product. The odd term, “philosophy,” refers to what most scholars of colonialism call discourse or ideology. Here Riley describes “manifest destiny” in one case and imperialism in the other as shaping women’s decisions to emigrate to the frontiers in the western United States and Africa. The common sense of racial superiority and the notion of “uplift” comprised what Riley described as the “genteel conceit.” The discussion of process describes women’s journeys to the western and Kenyan frontiers including a discussion of women of color, non-Europeans, and the response of indigenous women. Riley’s analysis of place focuses on the frontier environment in which European women assumed a “civilizing” function through consumption, institution-building, and encounters with the indigenous inhabitants. She describes the political processes that resulted in the creation of racial, gender, and class relationships in each frontier society. Concluding with a discussion of the product, the frontier society, Riley addresses the gaps between women’s intentions and the crude, violent, and divided societies they had helped to create.

As reflected in each chapter’s lengthy description of women’s lives in the two kinds of frontier societies and the relatively brief conclusions comparing their experiences, Riley has written parallel histories rather than a fully-developed comparative analysis. Her claims of multiple resemblances and of the social construction of gender and race as staying “largely the same over a one-hundred-year period” are less than convincing as a result (293). Assuming similarity by the use of a concept like frontier, Riley has indeed found it but her readers are less likely to reach the same conclusion Likewise her argument that race, gender, and “to a lesser degree social class” influenced the way women behaved more than did location, the indigenous people, or the time period is not persuasive. The experience of Africans, who could reclaim their country, and American Indians, who could not, certainly suggests that women’s experiences, particularly if indigenous women are fully taken into consideration, was by no means the same.

Ultimately, it seems clear that Riley has taken up a challenge that she has not been able to meet. The claims of similarities between American settlers and English migrants to Kenya do not appear to rest on a systematic investigation of their cultural backgrounds, class relationships, or gender patterns. Similarly, the cultures of indigenous peoples are homogenized ignoring the vast differences between American Indian tribes and what must be complex tribal cultures in Kenya. Ethnic differences between American pioneers are also neglected as may also be the case in Kenya where Britain is assumed to have a monolithic culture. Providing a lesson in the difficulties of comparative history, Riley’s book is certainly useful both for its contributions and its flaws. It should encourage...