Homelands: How Women Made the West (review)

It seems that western women's history has been trapped by domesticity. Thanks to the images of Ma Ingalls and all those other fictional mothers, we have come to imagine western women always in the house, away from the "real" action—and much of women's history has seemed to confirm this image. The first widely used concept in western women's history, the Cult of True Womanhood, awkwardly transported the domestic ideal for middle-class urban and eastern women to the West. The influential work of Annette Kolodny extended the term, but only to the garden fence. Glenda Riley used domesticity so widely as the common denominator for western women that race, class, and region dwindled in significance. Later uses of domesticity, as in Brigitte Georgi-Findlay's The Frontiers of Women's Writing (1996) were again imported, this time from international feminist scholars trying to crack the masculine bias in the study of British imperialism.

As this quick survey suggests, it is high time for western women to break the restraints, a task that Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken undertake with gusto, literally redefining the word home to mean the entire process of occupying, claiming, and defending land. In one interpretation, this is simply Patricia Limerick's contest for property and profit dressed up in gender terms. But in another sense, the redefinition moves women to the center of western history, for Scharff and Brucken are certainly right to say that, seen through this lens, the story of the West, is "a story of women creating and claiming home places" (1). Their insight feels absolutely true; the problem is what to do with it. Scharff and Brucken suggest a solution as radical as their redefinition: scrapping the framework of linear national history and envisaging a history of varied, often unconnected homeplaces stretching far back to before European conquest and extending forward into the present. To illustrate what this might mean, they offer three essays on the history of women's creation of homeplaces in three very different environments: northern New Mexico, Denver and the Rocky Mountain Front Range, and Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. The three histories are briskly undertaken, with a clear focus on women of many ethnicities adapting to new environments and shaping them—active, creative women, not the passive or trivial stereotypes of "old" western history. Each of the three sections has its own thematic emphasis: in northern New Mexico, the convergence of cultures; in Colorado, the interaction of women and transportation; in Puget Sound, women and water.

This is an intriguing thesis, but Homelands does not explore it as fully as it deserves. This beautifully produced book is the companion volume to a woman-focused exhibit at the Autry National Museum in Los Angeles, so of necessity it is short and popular, and the exhibit, one assumes, can only offer a sketch of the larger argument. It left me interested, but asking, "What about culture? politics? economics?" and also, of course, "What does it mean to make the West, or for that matter, anywhere else?"