Gendering Conquest

Gendering Conquest Brigitte Georgi-Findlay. The Frontiers of Women's Writing: Women's Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. xx + 349 pp. ISBN 0-8165-1596-4 (cl); 0-81651597 -2 (pb). Susan M. Yohn. A Contest of Faiths: Missionary Women and Pluralism in the American Southwest. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. xi + 226 pp. ISBN 0-8014-2964-1 (cl); 0-8014-8273-9 (pb). Polly Welts Kaufman. National Parks and the Woman's Voice. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. xvi + 305 pp. ISBN 0-82631706 -5. Susan Armitage For nearly a decade, the formerly staid and parochial field of western U.S. history has been rocked by controversies over the New Western history. The book that started the fight, Patricia Nelson Limerick's Legacy of Conquest, argued that the customary term "frontier" should be replaced by the concept of conquest.1 This amounted to a fundamental shift in focus from an inevitable and desirable Euro-American expansion into empty territory (Manifest Destiny) to conflicts, first for territory and later for legitimacy, in the lands west of the Mississippi River. The traditional Euro-American protagonists were now joined by American Indians, Spanish Mexicans, Asians, African Americans, and a large assortment of peoples of ethnic European origins. AU these diverse peoples now had claims on the West. Naturally, this transformation in thinking about the West from the fabled land of white freedom and opportunity to a multicultural battlefield has been a hard pill for some historians to swaUow. Most of the past decade has been occupied by their slow process of digestion, accompanied at times by loud sounds of choking and gagging. Although this shift in perspective is a major achievement, in both Limerick's original formulation and most subsequent writing, conquest has been viewed as pretty much an all-male affair. Once again, western women and their historians find themselves on the margins, freated as observers, not as historical actors. The three books discussed in this essay seek to end that marginalization, for each in its own way considers conquest from a gendered perspective. More specifically, each text considers an aspect of the relationship between domesticity and conquest, and in so doing takes a big step © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. 3 (Autumn) 1997 Review Essay: Susan Armitage 187 beyond earlier feminist scholarship. The most influential early studies, Annette Kolody's The Land Before Her and Glenda Riley's Women and Indians on the Frontier, both hoped to find in female domesticity—Kolodny's gardens, RUey's friendliness toward Indians—an alternative to rough and violent male conquest. Although both Kolodny and Riley found that women were more implicated in male dreams of conquest than they had expected, both authors stressed the difference between male and female versions rather than their simUarities.2 Now, thanks to postmodernism, the three authors in this review are able to have both difference and compUcity . Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, in The Frontiers of Women's Writing, tackles the subject head-on by asserting that "the ideal of domesticity, read in the context of empire-building, functions as an instrument for imposing cultural and social control and order upon the "disorderly" classes of the West" (29-30). Susan M. Yohn's A Contest of Faiths argues that AngloProtestant missionary women in New Mexico initially saw their domestic efforts to educate and convert Hispano-Catholics as part of a larger effort to "Americanize" foreigners within the nation's boundaries, but over time moved away from domesticity into new roles as social workers and cultural mediators. Polly Kaufman, in National Parks and the Woman's Voice, documents the changing role of women in the National Park Service, a key institution in the nation's control over the natural landscape. Here, for a long time, domesticity was absolutely literal: as one woman put it, "The best way to get into the Park Service is to marry a ranger" (87). Taken first individually, and then together, these three books add significantly to our understanding of relationships between domesticity and conquest. Brigitte Georgi-Findlay's sweeping study of women's narratives is placed within a global theoretical...