A New Day in the Study of Western Women’s Experience: Who’ll Follow?

E s s a y R e v i e w April Gomik. PULLING MOON. 1983. Oil on canvas. 76"x80". Courtesy of the artist. W o r k s R e v i e w e d Laegreid, Renée, M. Riding Pretty: Rodeo Royalty in the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 275 pages, $29.95. Lawrence, Deborah. Writing the Trail: Five Women’s Frontier Narratives. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. 157 pages, $29.95. Massey, Sara R., ed. Texas Women on the Cattle Trails. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. 326 pages, $29.95. McAndrews, Kristin M. Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2006. 175 pages, $34.95. A N e w D a y in t h e S t u d y o f W e s t e r n W o m e n ’s E x p e r i e n c e : W h o ’l l F o l l o w ? S u s a n H . S w e t n a m These are heady times for those of us who study western women’s experience. So much strong critical work on western women writers has appeared that it is now fair to say that we have a canon, including not just long-studied writers (Willa Cather, Mary Austin, Jean Stafford) but also contemporary ones (Terry Tempest Williams, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marilyn Robinson). And that canon continues to expand. Eight years after Krista Comer’s Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Womens Writing (1999), it is common to see work on ethnically diverse and urban western women writers and on women writers who are postmodern in their sensibilities and experi­ mental in their techniques (Sandra Cisneros, Karen Tei Yamashita). The time is clearly past, too, when women’s journals, diaries, and let­ ters were not considered fit subjects for analysis or publication. Recent books include fine editions of/meditations on individual women’s work (Jennifer Sinor’s The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray’s Diary [2002], Mary Clearman Blew’s Imogene Welch: Western Rural Schoolteacher [2004]); along with anthologies that (as a matter of course) place such work alongside more “literary” texts (Catherine J. Lavender and Lillian Schlissel’s The Western Women’s Reader [2000]); and critical studies which theorize these genres (Janet Floyd’s Writing the Pioneer Woman [2002]). Just about every journal in western historical studies has recently published a special issue devoted to women in the West, including Journal of the West's “Women and Politics in the American West” (Summer 2003), Pacific Northwest Quarterly’s “Women’s History” (Spring 2005) and Western Historical Quarterly’s “Gender and Women’s History in the West” (Winter 2005). Papers on western women’s experi­ ence dominated the October 2006 Western Literature Association meet­ ing in Boise. Thirteen sections at that conference addressed the work of women writers and/or women’s topics, while only four were about exclusively male western texts/experiences. Papers that named a western woman writer or subject in their titles outnumbered papers that named We s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e 42.2 (Su m m e r 2007): 189-96. 1 9 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 7 male writers by a four to three margin. University presses, too, have heard the message that western studies must address women’s experience . Nebraska’s website now contains more than eighty books under the heading “Women in the West,” which doesn’t include extensive offerings on Willa Cather and Mildred Walker. On Oklahoma’s list, books about women in the West now outnumber that venerable bastion of western studies, “Outlaws and Lawmen.” There’s much work yet to be done, certainly. Many western women’s texts remain little-known outside their immediate region (or even within it); many facets of western...