Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning the American West

Introduction

Introduction Shirley A. Leckie and Nancy J. Parezo Master Narratives of the American West The writings of the American West have long dealt with masculine ideals . In narratives of the Euro-American westward movement, Brigitte Georgi-Findlay observes, “Women were assigned to the margins of a cultural plot in which gender played a significant role.” This occurred, she adds, because “westward expansion has been encoded as a male activity, and the American West has served as a generating force and a proving ground for the definition of American manhood.”1 Susan Armitage noted in 1987, in “Through Women’s Eyes: A New View of the West,” that the American West has long been a veritable “Hisland,” and recent scholars have not disagreed. Until the 1970s, when historians began retrieving neglected works by female authors to reinsert women into the historical record of the West, Euro-American women, when they drew notice, played stereotyped roles such as the “genteel civilizer” or “oppressed drudge.”2 Indian women were portrayed as beasts of burden, downtrodden “squaws,” or princesses, and Hispanas or Mexicanas as “fiery senoritas.”3 If this bipolar portrayal prevailed for women as subjects in studies of the West, one finds that the works of early women scholars also received less attention than those of men. Two major historiographical studies published in 1991—Writing Western History: Essays on Major Western Historians, edited by Richard W. Etulain, and Gerald D. Nash’s Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890–1990—gave women historians before the 1970s little more than passing attention. Neither Annie Heloise Abel nor Angie Debo, important figures in this work, was examined in either volume. Nash mentioned Nebraska historian Mari Sandoz as one who “uncovered the native lore of the Great Plains,” but the trivializing word “lore” downgraded her contribution; she needed to be mentioned, but she was not doing “real” history.4 2 Leckie and Parezo From these two historiographical works one readily concludes that in the first seven decades of the twentieth century no female historian contributed important ideas to the historical debates concerning the American West. R. David Edmunds’s 1995 bibliographic essay on American Indian history for the centennial of the American Historical Review treated women scholars more fairly and presents quite an extensive list of proli fic and influential contemporary women scholars. Edmunds referred to Angie Debo, Mari Sandoz, and Mary Young as contributors to the field before 1960 but failed to note Annie Heloise Abel.5 Again, one is left believing that women added little to historical understanding and interpretation in the early decades of the twentieth century. Or, if women were writing, which they were, male scholars were ignoring their work, as frivolous, quaint, or unimportant. This marginalization of women as both subjects and scholars continued well into the twentieth century. Historians of the West, following in Frederick Jackson Turner’s footsteps, chose topics and themes that celebrated a male saga of conquest, expansion, and extraction of the region’s resources.6 Popular textbooks by Frederic Paxson, Ray Allen Billington, and Thomas D. Clark narrated the progression of male traders, trappers, soldiers, miners, cowboys, and farmers moving into “open uninhabited wilderness” or “free land” beyond Euro-American settlement. Here, according to Turner’s 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” older institutions, originating in Europe, broke down and were rebuilt in a uniquely American fashion on every new frontier. The existence of an expanse of “free land” set the United States apart from other nations, Turner and his followers maintained, and provided the context within which democracy and individualism emerged as predominant American traits and cultural values.7 As for the Native peoples who lived on the “free land,” the Turnerians saw them as expendable, evolutionarily backward barriers to settlement. By 1900 these historians considered American Indians properly corralled and isolated on reservations where they were being taught “to walk the white’s man’s road,” that is, were in the process of being assimilated into the larger society.8 Either way, Turnerians viewed American Indi- introduction 3 ans as “disappearing” people, historically unimportant except as a foil to glorify American militaristic and technological supremacy. Nineteenth-century anthropologists who were unilinear evolutionists reinforced Turnerian historians. These anthropologists also assumed that American Indians would disappear in the onslaught of an invincible, advancing, and “enlightened American civilization.” Indians, by definition “savages” and “barbarians” or people living...