Men are usually the heroes of Western stories, but women also played a crucial role in developing the American frontier, and their stories have rarely been told.
This anthology of biographical essays on women promises new insight into gender in the 19C American West. The women featured include Asian Americans, African-Americans and Native American women, as well as their white counterparts. The original essays offer observations about gender and sexual violence, the subordinate status of women of color, their perseverance and influence in changing that status, a look at the gendered religious legacy that shaped Western Catholicism, and women in the urban and rural, industrial and agricultural West.

From Custer and Geronimo to John Wayne and the Marlboro Man, American notions of masculinity have been deeply interwoven with our ideas about the West. But there's more to the relationship between manhood and the frontier than a simple tale of cowboys and Indians, ruggedness and civilization. In Across the Great Divide some of our leading historians look to both the history of masculinity in the West and to the ways that this experience has been represented in movies, popular music, dimestore novels, and folklore. Intriguing, provocative, and important, Across the Great Divide makes us rethink easy assumptions about the nature of American masculinity.

From Custer and Geronimo to John Wayne and the Marlboro Man, American notions of masculinity have been deeply interwoven with our ideas about the West. But there's more to the relationship between manhood and the frontier than a simple tale of cowboys and Indians, ruggedness and civilization. In Across the Great Divide some of our leading historians look to both the history of masculinity in the West and to the ways that this experience has been represented in movies, popular music, dimestore novels, and folklore. Ramon Gutierrez (When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away) describes the culture of machismo in early New Mexico; Susan Lee Johnson (Roaring Camp) takes on social life in Gold Rush boom towns; and other contributors introduce us to cross-dressing cowboys, cuckolded husbands hell-bent on revenge, and convicted outlaws walking to the gallows, among other characters. Intriguing, provocative, and important, Across the Great Divide makes us rethink easy assumptions about the nature of American masculinity.

This book presents vivid and compelling biographical essays on the struggles and achievements of multicultural women from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and California in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taken together, these stories bring to life the complex and contradictory nature of gender, race and culture in the American West. Included in this collection are essays on: an African-American entrepreneur; a northern Paiute activist; an Ursuline nun; a Chinese homesteader; and a Chippewa-Creek basketball player. Highly entertaining, the essays are conceptually sophisticated yet clearly written, and are complemented by historic photographs and illustrations. Combined, these features ensure this exceptional book has great appeal for a broad general audience as well as for serious scholars of women's history and American studies.

At the start of this haunting memoir, Ruth McLaughlin returns to the site of her childhood home in rural eastern Montana. In place of her family's house, she finds only rubble and a blackened chimney. A fire has taken the old farmstead and with it ninety-seven years of hard-luck memories. Amidst the ruins, a lone tree survives, reminding her of her family's stubborn will to survive despite hardships that included droughts, hunger, and mental illness.

"Bound Like Grass "is McLaughlin's account of her own -- and her family's -- struggle to survive on their isolated wheat and cattle farm. With acute observation, she explores her roots as a descendant of Swedish American grandparents who settled in Montana at the turn of the twentieth century with high ambitions, and of parents who barely managed to eke out a living on their own neighboring farm.

In unvarnished prose, McLaughlin reveals the costs of homesteading on such unforgiving land, including emotional impoverishment and a necessary thrift bordering on deprivation. Yet in this bleak world, poverty also inspired ingenuity. Ruth learned to self-administer a fashionable razor haircut, ignoring slashes to her hands; her brother taught himself to repair junk cars until at last he built one to carry him far away. Ruth also longs for a richer, brighter life, but when she finally departs, she finds herself an alien in a modern world of relative abundance. While leaving behind a life of hardship and hard luck, she remains bound -- like the long, intertwining roots of prairie grass -- to the land and to the memories that tie her to it.

Sweetwater County lies in southwestern Wyoming, and has stood as a significant symbolic geography for the "new Western Woman's" history. As the county in which Elinore Pruitt Stewart (Letters of a Woman Homesteader, Nebraska 1990) said she proved up her homestead in 1913, it is a fitting locale for the study of western gender relations. The Important Things of Life examines women's work and family lives in Sweetwater County in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1880's discovery of coal caused a population boom, attracting immigrants from numerous ethnic groups. At the same time, liberalized homestead law drew sheep and cattle ranchers. Dee Garceau demonstrates how survival on the ranching and mining frontier heightened the value of group cooperation in ways that bred conservative attitudes toward gender. Augmented by reminiscences and oral histories, Garceau traces the adaptations that broadened women's work roles and increased their domestic authority. Hers is a compelling portrait of the American West as a laboratory of gender role change, in which migration, relocation, and new settlement underscored the development of new social identities. Dee Garceau is an assistant professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis Tennessee.