Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell (review)

In the early 1980s, organizers of the Texas Women’s History Project made the first significant effort to address the scope of women’s experiences and activities in Texas over time, uncovering neglected resources and creating a traveling exhibit, Texas Women: A Celebration of History. They and others were pushing the boundaries of United States and Texas history, in large part with a recognition that the dominant historical narratives focusing on male political, military, and economic activities were inadequate in fully illuminating an era and the lives in it.

In the ensuing decades, dedicated researchers have unearthed materials for and carefully interpreted many aspects of women’s experience in Texas. Intensive efforts to honor, incorporate, and share with diverse audiences this growing body of work began in 2006 with the founding of the Ruthe Winegarten Foundation for Texas Women’s History, the sponsor of the series of which Women in Texas History is a part. Subsequently, two broad-based books in particular helped identify and define the field: Texas Through Women’s Eyes: The Twentieth-Century Experience (University of Texas Press, 2010) by Judith N. McArthur and Harold L. Smith, and Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives (University of Georgia Press, 2015) edited by Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie Cole, and Rebecca Sharpless. The Texas State Historical Association itself is in the midst of an initiative to do the same in its Handbook of Texas Women.

Boswell builds on such efforts with the first extended scholarly examination of Texas women’s history, from tens of thousands of years ago to the present. As anyone who has sought to bring order to a massive array of historical events and realities can attest, organizing the material and drawing together as many threads as possible offer daunting challenges. Additional difficulties arise from the unevenness of the historical record and previous research as well as the need to balance the general with the specific.

Boswell deals thoughtfully and effectively with these issues. Her organization relies on the ways in which women affected or were affected by “developments and events that occurred in the state” (xii), and this means that “technological innovation or patterns of migration” could have more significance than “war or politics” (xii). She makes use of the areas of greatest women’s history research and the subjects that have received the most attention, but she is also sensitive to stories that have not been as accessible or obvious, especially when place, race, class, and gender have obscured women’s lives. Ultimately, she chooses to focus as much as possible on “how unremarkable women coped with daily life, acted as agents in their own lives, and participated in the historical changes that shaped women’s future opportunities” (xii).

In the matter of combining a necessary general approach with a human dimension through specific examples, the narrative flows smoothly; Boswell is especially good at incorporating apt quotations. Occasionally the author has is an understandable but unfortunate tendency to overgeneralize, as when she says of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, “Texas women finally had their right to vote guaranteed, and they could proceed to use it—after registering and paying a poll tax” (152). Despite the addendum and an earlier acknowledgment that African American voting rights were being undermined, this glosses over a situation still fraught with difficulty for African American women and many Tejanas. By the same token, the statement that “all white women lost their superior social status as a result of the ending of slavery” (95) seems very difficult to reconcile with the realities of Reconstruction and all that followed.

Such statements do not undermine the value of the book. Boswell does many things exceedingly well in limning the landscape of women’s lives in Texas, particularly in charting the ways in which diverse individual women and groups have sought, often against daunting odds, to build strong and healthy communities and expand the rights and opportunities of the disenfranchised. Further, she provides...