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Women of the West
by Virginia Scharff
Professor of History and Director
of the Center for the Southwest,
University of New Mexico
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| From album of prominent Mormons from Salt Lake City, 1860 (GLC 04264) |
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Women are like water to Western history. Both have flowed
through the terrain we have come to call the West, long
before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part
of an expanding United States. Both have been represented
as scarce commodities in a region where masculinity and
aridity have appeared, quite simply, as natural. But just
as the West could not have developed without water, the
region never could have flourished without important contributions
from the women who lived there.
From the Paleolithic period to the present, women have
made essential contributions to the claiming of Western
places as homes to families and communities. They have
gathered, grown, and processed the vegetables and animals
that fed and clothed their families, have constructed
and maintained dwellings, and have taken part in the rituals
and creative activities that nurture the connections of
kinship, spirit, and trade. Once you start looking for
it, women’s history is, in fact, everywhere in the
West. When we examine petroglyphs and potsherds, fragments
of archaeological remains at ancient pueblos in New Mexico,
we might envision women at work: planting and hoeing corn,
harvesting and grinding, cooking meals, storing what isn’t
consumed, and communicating the world they see around
them. Now imagine the strip malls and superstores and
fast-food franchises of Seattle, Sacramento, St. Louis,
or San Antonio. Would such a landscape even be possible
without wives and mothers piloting automobiles and wielding
cell phones, strategizing and navigating their way through
an American day? Picture a Wal-Mart or a Wendy’s,
and see where today’s Western women gather the necessities
of life in the contemporary West of car-culture suburbs.
From the fields to the franchises, women have worked to
sustain their households in the midst of a wider terrain.
And at the same time, gendered ideas about the ways humans
make and claim homes have shaped social worlds, public
life, and political decisions, throughout the history
and across the spaces of the American West. The diverse
peoples who have occupied the West have, of course, held
a variety of ideas about what roles women and men ought
to play in social life, and how gender ought to organize
social power. Sometimes those ideas lay at the very heart
of larger events.
Take, for example, the epic struggle for control of the
continent in the nineteenth century. Out on the Great
Plains, clan-based societies of indigenous people practiced
polygamy and migrated from summer to winter camps in search
of grass and game. Cheyenne and Arapaho women, working
alongside their mothers, daughters, sisters, and sister
wives, butchered bison and other large game, and tanned
the hides, sewed the parfleche bags and tipis, and set
up and packed up the camps that marked the seasons and
cycles of nomadic life. American trappers and traders
who moved out onto the Plains in the first half of the
nineteenth century often sought to garner influence among
Indian peoples by marrying influential Indian women. The
women, in turn, stood to gain access to new goods and
power by wedding the Americans. For a time, a fluid, culturally
hybrid society developed around places like Bent’s
Fort on the Santa Fe Trail, in what is now southern Colorado.
There, the trader William Bent and his Cheyenne wife,
Owl Woman, anchored a far-flung and remarkably diverse
social and economic network. Through the gates of Bent’s
Fort flowed Bent’s fellow traders and trappers (including
Spanish and Mexican men and women), Owl Woman’s
Cheyenne kin and compatriots, Ute and Arapahoe and Pueblo
people, and transients of all kinds, heading in every
direction.
Bent’s Fort was also a staging ground for American
conquest of the Southwest, a process as much social as
military. The U.S. government had little use for the mixed
and mobile society of the Southwest frontier. Instead,
the nation pursued a policy expressly designed to promote
white occupation of the continent; the spread of monogamous,
male-headed, sedentary agrarian households; and a landscape
of fixed fields and sturdy buildings in which (mostly
white) women would labor for the good of their families.
In 1862, Congress enshrined that vision of domestic order
in one of the most influential laws in American history,
the Homestead Act. This famed piece of legislation has
long been celebrated as a hallmark of the dream of liberty
and economic self-sufficiency for all Americans, but it
was both more and less than that. The Homestead Act represented
an attempt to settle one kind of family and un-settle
others, to replace footloose frontiersmen (not to mention
diverse Indian and Hispano families) with sober and industrious
white husbands, wives, and children. Holding out the promise
of free land, the government sought to supplant what many
Americans saw as the reckless, restless West with order,
predictability, and permanence. In the West of the Homestead
Act, Americans would settle down, and women and men would
know their places.
Despite the influence of gendered ideas on social life
and even federal policy, the West offered women unprecedented
opportunities to do what so many men did: to reinvent
themselves. Even the Homestead Act provided for single
women to claim land of their own, and thousands of women
did just that. Others answered the desperate need for
teachers in the West, and set out, all alone, to keep
school in far-flung communities. Victorian women who took
up farming or ranching or teaching in places far from
their homes stretched the boundaries of their lives. But
at the same time, they could claim, with justification,
that they were simply fulfilling woman’s natural
duty to domesticate and civilize wild country.
Other women traversed the vastness of Western spaces with
desires distinctly at odds with those of Victorian gentility.
Thousands migrated to boomtowns where miners and railroad
workers craved lodging, food, and diversion, including
sex. We should not romanticize the lives of the laundresses,
waitresses, prostitutes, dance-hall girls, and other women
who worked their way across the self-proclaimed Wild West.
The most infamous of these, Calamity Jane, had a genius
for inventing and embroidering her own legend as a cross-dressing,
bull-whacking Western hero. But she was also a woman who
had been an abandoned and abused child, and she was often
obliged to earn a hard living as a prostitute. By the
end of her life, she had become a miserable, pitiful drunk,
an object of ridicule, and a charity case.
But somehow, the legend of Calamity Jane lives on. And
not every woman with a dream came to a bad end. For thousands
of enterprising females, the Wild West afforded the opportunity
to make some money, and even to claim unprecedented legal
rights. In 1856, Biddy Mason, who had traveled to Utah
and then to southern California as the slave of a Mormon
convert, sued for and won freedom for herself and her
daughters. For decades, Mason’s home would be a
center for the African American community of Los Angeles.
African American entrepreneur and abolitionist Mary Ellen
Pleasant followed the Gold Rush to San Francisco, where,
like Mason, she continued to prosper and to work for freedom
and civil rights for her people.
Who could have predicted that in 1869, the chaotic Territory
of Wyoming, the harsh and windy home to Northern Cheyennes
and Arapahoes, Shoshones and Crows, Utes, and even some
Lakotas, would see railroad workers, prospectors, and
gold miners come to sweat out their livelihoods, drink
up their wages, and elect a territorial legislature that
gave women the right to vote for the very first time in
American history? And who would have imagined that by
1900, only four states of the Union -- Wyoming, Utah,
Colorado, and Idaho -- would have enfranchised women?
Notably, all four states were in the West. Indeed, prior
to 1920, when American women won the right to vote with
the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, nearly all the states that allowed women
to vote were west of the Mississippi.
In fact, the success of women’s suffrage in the
West was no accident. Partly in the effort to “settle”
the American empire by attracting more white women to
the West, Western territorial and state legislatures enacted
measures that led the way in numerous areas of women’s
rights, from women’s suffrage, to equal pay, to
child custody and divorce laws. And when it came to women
actually holding political office and wielding political
power, the West was far in the vanguard of the nation.
The first woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives
(Montana’s Jeannette Rankin), the first women governors
of states (Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming and Miriam Ferguson
of Texas), and the first woman mayor of a major city
(Seattle’s Bertha Knight Landes) all hailed from
the West. Of the thirty-four women who have served in
the U.S. Senate, twenty-two have represented states west
of the Mississippi. Today, the states of California and
Washington are represented in the U.S. Senate by all-female
delegations.
In the American West today, women run cities, corporations,
and day care centers. They work in sweatshops, clean other
people’s houses, train for military duty, and fight
wildfires. They play tennis and drive minivans and do
laundry and shop for school supplies. Some of them get
arrested. Some of them make the arrests. Some sit on judges’
benches and some sit in the U. S. Congress. Wherever you
go, there they are. In ways often unacknowledged, with
consequences often unanticipated, in measure large and
small, women in the American West have made, and continue
to make, Western history and the history of the nation.
| For a list
of books and websites about the lives, legacies,
and contributions of women living in the West,
visit our Additional
Resources Page |
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