Women and Gender in the American West

Introduction

 T HE thirteen articles in this book mark the development of the field of western women’s history between  and . In , the Pacific Historical Review published our article “The GentleTamers Revisited:New Approaches to the History ofWomen in the AmericanWest.”As the authors, we were pleased that the essay won an award for the best article published on the history of theWest in . But what followed the publication was even more important to us. The publication of this article, and its award, marked a growing concern among historians about how they would acknowledge and explain the role of women in that part of the country called the American West.Western history as taught in the academy had its own long lineage of excluding women; women’s history was a new field demanding a place for those who had been excluded. Three years after publication of the article,in ,a group of western historians formed the Coalition for Western Women’s History (CWWH).In ,the CWWH established the Jensen-Miller Prize to encourage publishing historical research in this field.It is awarded annually for the “outstanding article on the history of women in the North AmericanWest,” and includes Mexico, Canada,Alaska, and Hawai’i.To encourage a widening stream of research the CWWH in  also established the Irene Ledesma Prize in memory of Irene Ledesma, Introduction Joan M. Jensen and Darlis A. Miller  Introduction winner of the  Jensen-Miller Prize, whose article is included here and who died two years later.That prize is for graduate student research in western women’s history. At the annual meetings of the Western HistoryAssociation,the CWWH hosts afternoon workshops and earlybird breakfasts where scholars share current research on western women.The CWWH also publishes newsletters for scholars in the field. The thirteen Jensen-Miller prize essays in this book were chosen by prize committees of almost a hundred scholars who read and discussed each year the articles published on the history of western women.The articles are exemplary, but form only a part of the work which has resulted from the increasing interest in western women’s history since . Between  and , six conferences brought together scholars to share current research on western women.These conferences have taken place at SunValley,Idaho;Tucson,Arizona;Park City, Utah; San Francisco, California; Lincoln, Nebraska; Pullman, Washington; and Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The conferences have inspired a number of important anthologies, including two edited by Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, The Women’s West () and Writing the Range ();and one collaboration by Lillian Schlissel,Vicki Ruiz, and Janice Monk, WesternWomen:Their Land,Their Lives (). We invite readers to use the essays published here as an introduction to the emerging historical world of the women’s West.Through them,one can glimpse the agency,the variety,the vitality of the women we now see peopling the West.They introduce a group of thoughtful, creative, and disciplined authors who have committed themselves to telling the stories of these western women. These articles are part of an ongoing discussion about how to write the history of western women and what methodologies and theories to employ in that project.That discussion had already begun when we wrote our critical survey of the literature about western women in“The Gentle Tamers Revisited”over twenty-five years ago.At that time, the work was fragmentary and disconnected and failed to evoke a sense of the overall complexity, diversity, and importance of the lives of western women.There were many articles, but no framework from which to consider women’s western history as a whole.Most earlier literature had described women from an Anglo-American perspective, assuming  Introduction Anglo-American women shared a common culture while using derogatory language in discussing women of other cultures or omitting them entirely. Dee Brown’s book, The Gentle Tamers, originally published in , was still being reprinted and used as an introduction to women of the American West. We organized published works that touched on women’s experiences in theWest,and began a search for more inclusive modes of studying them.We suggested a few ways to look at women that might allow historians to work cross-culturally and to incorporate some of the insights from the new field of women’s history, most of which was still confined to women in the eastern part of the United States. Our practical motivation in writing“The GentleTamers Revisited”was...