Don’t Make Me Go to Town: Ranchwomen of the Texas Hill Country by Rhonda Lashley Lopez, and: Working the Land: The Stories of Ranch and Farm Women in the Modern American West by Sandra K. Schackel (review)

For those who enjoy their oral history “pure,” disappointment will ensue upon reading either Rhonda Lashley Lopez’s Don’t Make Me Go to Town or Sandra K. Schackel’s Working the Land. While each of the works is eminently enjoyable, neither includes the scholarly apparatus that oral historians have come to expect in their pursuits. Each of the authors makes note of the fact that her interviews have been significantly edited before publication. As Lopez observes, she had initially intended to “let them [the ranchwomen] speak for themselves” but was dissuaded from doing so by a colleague who encouraged her not to be “uncharitable” and render the women’s words into a more articulate, grammatically standard prose (xi). In the process, the exact words and phrasing of the narrators is lost, as is the ordering of the interviews. Initially commenced as a journalism project in 1993, the disposition of the actual tapes and transcripts is not made clear. Nor is it clear why Lopez generally includes the mothers and/or daughters of the ranchwomen she interviews. They do not provide longitude to the labor but rather serve in some way to humanize the rancher, offer up recipes, and discuss religious faith.

Sandra Schackel provides a variant form of exploring the lives and work of women on the nation’s modern-day western farms and ranches. Still, for the professional oral historian, or even the deeply entrenched amateur, a few problems rise to the fore regarding method. As with Lopez’s labor, the disposition of the interviews is not revealed. Schackel has, however, provided a helpful listing of the questions posed to her narrators. The level of editorial license is not revealed in this work either, although it is clear that the narrators’ words have been selected with care to fit within the larger themes of Schackel’s work.

Schackel’s Working the Land is a more formal labor than is that of Lopez, providing a framework for the narrators, arguing a specific point or two per chapter, and clearly articulating her sense of a vanishing tribe: the smaller-scaled farmers and ranchers of the West, oriented towards their families’ well-being and deeply rooted in the past. Accordingly, Schackel provides cogent selective commentary from her narrators on such subjects as gender roles on the modern agricultural landscape, the increasing need for wage work to maintain the viability of a farm or ranch, agrarian activism by the women of the West, and issues of conservation and urbanization.

Lopez, who is also the photographer of her lavishly illustrated work, hints at many of the same issues, but rather than divide her work by thematic tracks, with recurring roles, her narrators speak but once, albeit on a variety of topics. Often the topics touched upon by individual narrators could be fit within the chapters delineated by Schackel. Although not uniformly addressing all the issues raised by Schackel, Lopez’s women of the Texas hill country question the role of conservationists unfamiliar with the ways of rural living, the need for better understanding from the federal government with regard to taxes, price supports and urban incursions, as well as the methods by which family ranchers seek to sustain themselves at a time when prices swing wildly, mother nature can prove generous or tight-fisted with rainfall, and fewer sons and daughters choose to follow in their parents’ boot steps.

And while there are flaws in both volumes in consideration of oral history method and practice, both works are worthy of our...