Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-Century American West (review)

That Frontiers of Femininity focuses on women is the source of its claim to be "A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-Century West." The study relocates, from the disciplinary perspective of historical geography, familiar discussions of British women travelers to a new venue: the American West. It also includes chapters on Euro-American journalists and an Omaha businesswoman.

Drawing upon extensive archival and published sources, Karen Morin investigates the records of travelers in Mexico and the Great Plains, naturalists in California, and visitors to mines, mountains, and Native communities. Her subject is the ways in which "women's gender identities were produced 'in place'" in the West (p. 2). "Within the context of nineteenth-century American continental expansionism," Morin explores themes prominent in scholarship about "the Englishwoman abroad," including her "complicity with, but also resistance to, European colonialism and imperialism" and "intersections between nineteenth-century western feminism and colonialism" (p. 3). Building upon ideas set forth by scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt, Alison Blunt, and Sara Mills, she considers not only the ways in which "a set of discourses, about Victorian gender relations and imperial geographies . . . combined to influence these women's writings as they moved through touristic and other spaces in North America," but also the difference that being in the American West made to the deployment of the same.

Frontiers of Femininity is comprised of Morin's previously published essays bookended by a new introduction and afterword. Acknowledging that the essays have been "only slightly revised" (p. 15), Morin states that her "intention for bringing them out in the present form is, hopefully, to reach a broad, interdisciplinary audience of scholars beyond those who read geography journals" (p. ix). This she has succeeded in doing, but her choice to reprint past work more or less "as is" makes for some structural problems. There is considerable overlap across chapters, especially in discussions of the secondary literature. Pratt and Mills, for example, are repeatedly cited and not fully indexed. Beyond just eliminating repetition, more editing and reshaping also would have made larger arguments easier to trace across the book. To consider one instance, while the chapter on naturalists (coauthored with Jeanne Kay Guelke) is absorbing in its own right, it only briefly comments on how the West featured in those women's engagement with aesthetic and imperial ideologies; location appears incidental. Some chapters are stronger than others and it is not always clear how the emphatic claims with which they commence are confirmed by the readings that follow, which can be more descriptive than analytic.

The first chapter examines fourteen train travelers' reactions to the Great Plains. As Morin promises, it "locates some of the social and cultural influences that combined to shape the women's varying responses" and demonstrates that "some responded emotionally, others aesthetically, others focusing empirically on natural history, and still others with an eye to future economic development" (p. 15). Subsections discuss their representation of train interiors, engagement with a "discourse of complaint," and iteration of western travel tropes such as seeing the plains as oceanic or sublime (p. 31). While much of the material is interesting, it is left to the reader to determine how these responses constitute a negotiation of feminist and imperial ideologies or make for a production of identities "in place." That Morin consigns to a later chapter these same travelers' observations about Native Americans reflects the study's problems of organization. It also makes for a missed opportunity; the author could have devised a more complex argument by showing how these writers' representations of western landscapes and native peoples link up, as surely they must.

Her chapter "Trains through the Plains" introduces a common pattern in the study: glossing various "discourses" and then showing how the texts under consideration reflect them. The chapter about Native Americans thus cites "colonial discourse" (p. 143), discourses of "racial cleanliness" and "scientific racism...