Women and Museums is the first comprehensive directory of museums for, by, and about women. With useful cross-reference guides and an accessible format this unique resource provides essential information about these institutions, including interpretive themes, the historical significance of their collections, their cultural and social relevance to women, along with programming events and facility information. This volume is an important multi-functional reference for museum professionals and students, local historians, historic preservationists or anyone interested in quick and easy ways of finding information on America's women-related museums.

The wagon trains to California greatly decreased in 1851 as reports of deadly cholera on the trail the year before and strikeouts in gold prospecting became known. Those who did go west--about 2,160 men and 1,440 women--tended toward Oregon's rich Willamette Valley because of a new federal land law that awarded a husband and wife a full section.

Volume 3 of "Covered Wagon Women" contains the diaries and letters of six Oregon-bound women, as well as the journal of an English Mormon woman who described her experience all the way from Liverpool to Salt Lake City. The words of these pioneer women convey their exhilaration, courage, exhaustion, and terror in traveling so far into the unknown.

"Chicana Leadership: The "Frontiers" Reader" breaks the stereotypes of Mexican American women and shows how these women shape their lives and communities. This collection looks beyond the frequently held perception of Chicanas as passive and submissive and instead examines their roles as dynamic community leaders, activists, and scholars.

"Chicana Leadership" features fifteen essays from the notable women's journal Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies that demonstrate the strength and diversity of Chicanas as well as their continuing struggle to have their voices heard. Noted scholars discuss issues ranging from the feminist prototype La Malinche to Chicana writers and national ideology, from gender and identity to ideas of culture and romance, and from tokenism to the diversity within the Chicana community. The essays provide an introduction to an evolving understanding of this diverse community of women and how they interact among themselves, with their community, and with the world around them.

In this new and enlarged edition the editors have built on an already strong collection with four new accounts. Colorado pioneer Augusta Tabor gives a sense of the heady days as Leadville became a major mining center. Abigail Duniway describes the challenges of life for women in the Pacific Northwest. Effie Wiltbank’s short selection is a reminiscence of her grandmother’s “receet” for washing clothes, a chore that epitomizes the practical skill, determination, and common sense required of so many Western women. Apolinaria Lorenzana offers a rare glimpse of the operations of the mission system while illuminating the perils of living with the acquisitive Americans.

A major goal of the New Western History is to chronicle the vast diversity of western experience. In this pathbreaking anthology, coeditors Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage-who brought us "The Women's West in 1987"-meet that challenge by bringing together twenty-nine essays that present women of all races as actors in their own lives and in the history of the American West and locate them in a framework that connects gender, race, and class.

In mythic sagas of the American West, the wide western range offered boundless opportunity to a limited cast of white men. Buffalo roamed, deer and antelope played, and women's voices were never heard. Writing the Range allows us to hear many long-silenced women: Spanish-Mexican settlers and American Indians on New Spain's northern frontiers; Chinese, Basque, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Slavic, and Irish immigrants; film stars Dolores del Rio and Lupe Velez; Navajos and African Americans who moved to western cities during World War II; and the activist Mothers of East Los Angeles, who organized to resist environmental dangers to their community.

A valuable introduction to the rapidly changing field of western history, Writing the Range explains clearly how race, class, and culture are constructed and connected. The first section examines issues raised by more than a decade of multicultural western women's histories; following are six chronological sections spanning four centures. Each section offers a short introduction connecting is essays and placing them in analytic and historical perspective. Clearly written and accessible, Writing the Range makes a major contribution in ethnic history, women's history, and interpretations of the American West.

The American West looms large in popular imagination-a place where men were rugged and independent, violent and courageous. In this mythic West all the men were white, and the women were largely absent. The few female actors played supporting roles around the edges of the drama. Molded by the Victorian Cult of True Womanhood, they were passive, dependent, reluctant, and out of place. Men ""won"" the West. Women, against their better judgement, followed them to this ""newly discovered"" place and tried to re-create the amenities of the urban East.Or so the myth goes. The Women's West challenges this picture as racist, sexist, and romantic and rejects the customary emphasis of traditional western history on the nineteenth-century frontier, discovered and defined by Anglo men. In its place The Women's West begins the construction of a new western history as complex and varied as the people who lived it. This collection of twenty-one articles creates a multidimensional portrait of western women. The pioneer women presented here were actors in their own lives, not passive participants in their husbands' ventures. They were hardy seekers who came west, sometimes alone, in search of jobs, freedom, or land to homestead. They were political activists who worked tirelessly to win the right to vote and to hold political office. They adapted in practical ways to their own and their families' economic and personal needs in a new environment.

Phoebe Judson was a young bride in 1853 when she and her husband crossed the plains from Ohio to the Puget Sound area of Washington Territory. She was ninety-five when this book was first published in 1925. The years between were spent in "a pioneer's search for an ideal home" and in living there, when it was finally found at the head of the Nooksack River, almost on the Canadian border. Phoebe Judson's account of the journey west is based on daily diary entries detailing her fear, excitement, and exhaustion. At the end of the trail, the Judsons encountered hardships aplenty, causing them to abandon a farm and business in Olympia before their arrival in the Nooksack Valley. During the Indian Wars they holed up in a fort at Claquato. In time, Phoebe overcame her fear of the Indians, learned the Chinook language, and won their friendship. All this is told in vivid detail by a woman of great dignity and charm whom readers will long remember. In a foreword, Susan Armitage, professor of history at Washington State University, calls "A Pioneer's Search for an Ideal Home" a "classic pioneering account," important for its woman's point of view.