Women and Gender in the American West

‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’: The Significance of Gender in the History of the ‘American West’

 O F all the regions people have imagined within the boundaries of what is now the United States, no place has been so consistently identified with maleness—particularly white maleness—as the region imagined as theAmericanWest.There is something odd about attending to gender in such a historical place—a place where the dominant popular culture suggests that white women were civilizers, women of color were temptresses or drudges, and men of color were foils for the inevitable white male hero, who is, after all, the true subject of the history of the “American West.” Studying women there is like enlisting in the frontier regulars; when you do so, you commit yourself to a battle-ready stance that wearies all but the strongest of heart. Studying men there is like playing with fire; when you do so, you face the engulfing flames of western-history-as-usual, which naturalizes and universalizes white manhood as quickly as you can strike a match to a lodgepole pine. Jensen-Miller Prize 1993 ‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’: The Significance of Gender in the History of the ‘American West’ Susan Lee Johnson * Susan Lee Johnson,“‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’:The Significance of Gender in the History of the ‘American West’,” Western Historical Quarterly : (). © Western Historical Society Quarterly,Western HistoryAssociation.Reprinted by permission.  Susan Lee Johnson Yet these same perils mean that we can learn something new about gender from studying an imagined place like the American West—a place where customary gender relations were disrupted for many years by unusual sex ratios and a place around which cultural meanings have collected until it has become a sort of preserve for white masculinity. We can also learn something new about gender from studying a process like the conquest of the West, the consolidation of Anglo-American dominance, and the constant realignment of relations of domination in a multiracial and multiethnic social world. Conversely, if we attend relentlessly to racialized notions of gender,we are bound to learn something new about the West—itself not just the “American West,” which too often is shorthand for an Anglo-American West, but all of the regions people have imagined in the western half of the North American continent. I will not engage in all aspects of this larger project here but will take up those aspects that reflect my particular intellectual and political positioning.As a student, I came to western history first and women’s history and women’s studies second,and my training in these fields centered disproportionately onAnglo-American experience.I gained what limited knowledge I have of ethnic studies and feminist theory late and largely on my own in the formal sense, though informally, especially in ethnic studies, I have benefited from the training provided by patient and committed friends,colleagues,and students.In time these emphases congealed into a broader concern with questions of region, race, and gender.Ultimately,however,to engage in this larger project of mapping racialized notions of gender onto the field of western history, we will need a set of tools developed in a number of interconnected areas of inquiry: feminist theory, ethnic studies, women’s and labor history, lesbian and gay studies,postcolonial and minority discourse,cultural studies , and queer theory, to name a few. I will take on just a piece of that project here,drawing from my own background in the study of region, race, and gender, to ask some questions about the “subject” of the history of the “American West.” I see this, then, as a specific intervention in the rewriting of western history, one that is self-conscious of its historical and historiographical moment, rather than as the statement-ofthe -century implied by the essay’s subtitle, which commemorates, for  ‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’ better or worse, the centenary of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. In recent years,this“subject”has been jostled by the emergence of a small mountain of scholarship on women in theWest,indicating deep and active fault lines in the terrain of western history as a whole.Review essays by Joan Jensen and Darlis Miller in  and by Elizabeth Jameson in  surveyed that new terrain as it emerged,and special sections and issues of MontanaThe Magazine ofWestern History and the Pacific Historical Review have brought the issues and concerns of western women s history up to date in the s. Despite this outpouring of scholarship...