Women and the Texas Revolution

Scheer, Mary L.

Women and the Texas Revolution

Edited by Mary L. Scheer

Publication Year: 2012

While there is wide scholarship on the Texas Revolution, there is no comparable volume on the role of women during that conflict. Most of the many works on the Texas Revolution include women briefly in the narrative, such as Emily Austin, Suzanna Dickinson, and Emily Morgan West (the Yellow Rose), but not as principal participants. Women and the Texas Revolution explores these women in much more depth, in addition to covering the women and children who fled Santa Anna’s troops in the Runaway Scrape, and examining the roles and issues facing Native American, Black, and Hispanic women of the time. Like the American Revolution, women’s experiences in the Texas Revolution varied tremendously by class, religion, race, and region. While the majority of immigrants into Texas in the 1820s and 1830s were men, many were women who accompanied their husbands and families or, in some instances, braved the dangers and the hardships of the frontier alone. Black, Hispanic, and Native American women were also present in Mexican Texas. Whether Mexican loyalist or Texas patriot, elite planter or subsistence farm wife, slaveholder or slave, Anglo or black, women helped settle the Texas frontier and experienced the uncertainty, hardships, successes, and sorrows of the Texas Revolution. By placing women at the center of the Texas Revolution, this volume reframes the historical narrative and asks different questions: What were the social relations between the sexes at the time of the Texas Revolution? Did women participate in the war effort? Did the events of 1836 affect Anglo, black, Hispanic, and Native American women differently? What changes occurred in women’s lives as a result of the revolution? Did the revolution liberate women to any degree from their traditional domestic sphere and threaten the established patriarchy? In brief, was the Texas Revolution “revolutionary” for women?

Women and the Texas Revolution

Cover

Frontmatter

Title Page, Copyright page, Dedication

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Continuity, Change, and Removal: Native Women and the Texas Revolution

2. Tejanas: Hispanic Women on the Losing Side of the Texas Revolution

3. “Joys and Sorrows of Those Dear Old Times”: Anglo-American Women during the Era of the Texas Revolution

4. Traveling the Wrong Way Down Freedom’s Trail: Black Women and the Texas Revolution

5. Two Silver Pesos and a Blanket: The Texas Revolution and the Non-Combatant Women Who Survived the Battle of the Alamo

6. “Up Buck! Up Ball! Do Your Duty!”: Women and the Runaway Scrape

7. “To the Devil with your Glorious History!”: Women and the Battle of San Jacinto

8. Women and the Texas Revolution in History and Memory

Contributors

Index

Research Areas

Recommend

Subject Headings

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