Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 by Nina Baym (review)

In her many valuable studies—notably her scholarly work on nineteenth-century women—Nina Baym's central project has been to recover all manner of creative women's works that speak for the breadth of women's experiences. In her new book we again have her rigorous and refreshing insights into books by women, this time focusing on the American West from l833 to l927, a period notable not only for the opening and so-called closing of the western frontier but also for creating enduring assumptions about the western experience and women's roles, attitudes, and creative gifts.

The scope of the research project itself is impressive. Baym surveys some 640 books by women, many of whom are unknown to all but the specialized reader. Certainly the "greats" are there—for example, Willa Cather, whom Baym says she chose to cap the period because of her great western book, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Most of the authors, however, whether living in the West or writing about it from another region, are little-known women sharing a common impulse to make the West liveable for all—a kind of domesticating source Baym quips, in the popular imagination, would have confirmed the cowboy's need to light out to another territory. However, their works problematize the simplistic notion that women were antithetical to the West's existence or meaning. Rather, as Baym shows, they were diverse agents in the overall settling of western territories and as such were a part of Manifest Destiny, which itself was a domesticating force. Baym suggests women were interested primarily in economy—in making a better life, necessitating in part the itinerant American impulse. Moreover, their literary activities constitute public work, as Baym explores women writers' engagement of politics (for example, enfranchisement) and the extent of their influence (for example, their appeal largely to a female readership).

Necessarily descriptive rather than deeply analytical, Baym's project emerged from three major interests: how authors depicted women making lives for themselves in the West; how they chose to represent the West; and how each author represented herself (critic? advocate?). Baym reminds us that these authors were unaware that the West was supposedly a topic reserved for men or that the only authentic rendering should center on men and perhaps violence. In memoirs, novels, short story collections, histories, biographies, reportage, descriptive sketches, textbooks, poetry volumes, didactic or amusing juvenilia, political and social polemics, and travel books, these 340 writers reflect consistently on women's interpolation of a sense of place. Thus, Baym organizes her study through the nine subregions of the West—Texas and Oklahoma, the Pacific Northwest, Upper California and Nevada, Utah, Colorado, the Great Plains, the High Plains, Southern California and Nevada, and the Southwest—and concludes with a chapter, "On the Trail, On the Road," which focuses on "road books," which are interested more in the journey than the destination. The sections progress chronologically, following the Anglo-American pattern of settlement.

Baym addresses the contributions of women of color, even hoping for a counter-narrative to the pervasive "Anglo" experience (largely composed of women descended from English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh forebearers). She discovered only nineteen authors among the 340, and these seem to have accepted the historical reality of Anglo dominance, seeking to "place themselves advantageously within it rather than write against it" (p. 4). However, the works do reflect strong ethnic ties and experiences—for example, Sui Sin Far, who wrote about Chinese merchant class immigrants, and Native American women, who identify with their specific tribes. Significantly, three of the five African American authors, according to Baym, "revised Manifest Destiny to make it culminate in the full citizenship of black people" (p. 4). This area would appear to be worthy of greater analysis for the subtexts that often exist in such works, such as the methods women use to subvert conventional hegemonies.

Not surprisingly, Baym discovered that the...