Shaping public space/enunciating gender

A Multiracial Historiography of the Women's West, 1995-2ooo

EDITOR'S NOTE

Vicki Ruiz contributed the following bibliography and her comments to the Women's West Conference at Washington State University held in the summer Of 2000. As her title suggests, all the books on the list deal with the interconnected issues of gender, race, and class in the U.S. West. The sheer volume of work that has been published since 1995 is remarkable. Equally remarkable is its variety, considered in several different aspects. First are the subjects themselves: Many books cover people, issues, or events never before studied. Even those that discuss "old" topics like mining towns do it in new ways. The second major source of variety is the way in which individual authors combine the categories of race, class, and gender in ways best suited to their own studies.

Far from being a fad, the bibliography of gender in the U.S. West that follows complicates categories of analysis, challenges cherished assumptions, and creates ethereal and tangible communities. As the following list reveals, western women's history has journeyed far beyond the stage of reacting against the hegemony of a U.S. women's history rooted in the lives of eastern elites and/ or western narratives predicated, at least in part, on the imagery of media cowboys and unlimited opportunity. Over the course of two decades, the uniracial model of U.S. women's history has lost its prevalence, and the "new" western history, which confronted the doxa of the wild frontier, is no longer "new." What has emerged during the 199os, especially during the years covered in this bibliography, is a dazzling fluorescence of scholarship on the "Women's West."

Through the frameworks of cultural studies, gender studies, queer theory, and global feminism (to name a few), through meticulous archival work and nuanced interviews, and through creatively historicized evidence, we can begin to discern how women across class, race, sexuality, ethnicity, region, and religion lived their lives within the shadows of structural forces, material and psychic, that influenced their day-to-day decision making. Western women's history has traveled quite a distance from Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives, an anthology coedited by Lillian Schlissel, Janice Monk, and me. Based on a 1984 conference and published four years later, Western Women represented an early and valiant (well, I still like to think so) attempt at a multivatent, diverse women's history. In my mind, the collection simply forecast the exciting, engaging scholarship listed below and the works to come. This bibliography chronicles neither a rebirth nor a culmination, but marks an audacious moment. The "Women's West" has truly come into her own as a field of historical inquiry and as a community of scholars.

Adelante!

Vicki L. Ruiz

MONOGRAPHS

Anderson, Karen. Changing Woman: History of Racial Ethnic Women in Modern America. New York. Oxford University Press, 1996.

Aptheker, Bettina. The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. New York: International Publishers, 1975.

Calof, Rachel. Rachel Calof's Story. Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995.

Child, Brenda J. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-194o. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Espiritfi, Yen Le. Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 1997.

Facio, Elisa. Understanding Older Chicanas. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 1996.

Gonzalez, Deena J. Refusing the Favor. Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, i82oi88o. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge mA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Gullett, Gayle. Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 18oo -igm Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Haas, Lisbeth. Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Horne, Esther Burnett and Sally McBeth. Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Hurtado, Albert L. Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Jacobs, Margaret D. Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Jameson, Elizabeth. All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.

Lemke-Santangelo, Gretchen. Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

Menjivar, Cecilia. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.