Some Famous Women in the West
Zitkala Sa, Sioux Indian and activist
Kasebier, Gertrude. Photograph of Zitkala Sa, Sioux Indian and activist. ca 1898. PG.69.236.103. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_1006125
Zitkala-Ša, also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was a prominent Native American writer, musician, and activist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota, she experienced the tensions between her Native American heritage and the dominant white American culture. Zitkala-Ša's writings, including her acclaimed autobiographical works such as American Indian Stories and her advocacy for Native American rights, shed light on the complexities of Native identity and the challenges faced by Indigenous peoples in assimilating into mainstream society while preserving their cultural heritage. Her legacy as a writer and activist continues to inspire and educate people about the history and struggles of Native Americans in the United States.
American Indian Stories (1921) is remarkable for being perhaps the first literary work by a Native American woman created without the mediation of a non-Native interpreter, or collaborator. Zitkala-Ša vividly articulates her disillusionment with the harshness of Indian boarding schools and the corruption of government institutions ostensibly established to help Native peoples. At the same time, Zitkala-Ša's collection of autobiographical essays and short stories charts the progression of the authors estrangement from her Dakota people that her colonial education inevitably fostered. Much more than an indictment against U.S. attempts at Native deculturation, American Indian Stories portrays one Dakota woman's efforts to resist the restrictions she felt in both reservation life and Euro-American assimilation.
Polly Bemis in her wedding dress, 1894, Idaho.
Polly Bemis, originally from China, was sold into slavery and trafficked to the United States in the 19th century. Eventually, she ended up in Idaho, where she became known as Polly Bemis after marrying Charlie Bemis. Polly's story is one of resilience and survival in the face of adversity, as she overcame the hardships of her early life to become a beloved and respected member of the community in the rugged frontier of Idaho. Her life has been immortalized in various books, films, and folklore, celebrating her strength, courage, and enduring spirit in the face of extraordinary challenges.
Sarah Winnemucca
Materialscientist via Wikicommons
Sarah Winnemucca, born Thocmentony ("Shell Flower") in 1844, was a significant figure in the history of the American West, particularly in the advocacy for Native American rights and cultural preservation. She was a member of the Northern Paiute tribe, born into a family with a legacy of leadership and diplomacy. Winnemucca's life was marked by her efforts to bridge the gap between Native American communities and the expanding white settlers in the West.
She served as an interpreter, educator, and advocate, working tirelessly to improve the lives of Native Americans amidst the turbulent changes brought about by colonization and westward expansion. Winnemucca is perhaps best known for her autobiography, "Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims," published in 1883. This groundbreaking work provided valuable insights into the experiences and struggles of Native Americans during a critical period in American history.
Throughout her life, Sarah Winnemucca fought against injustices faced by Native peoples, including advocating for land rights, educational opportunities, and fair treatment by the government. Her legacy as a Native American leader, activist, and author continues to inspire and inform discussions on Indigenous rights and representation in the United States.
Fox Hastings grappling with a bull in the rodeo
Doubleday Photo. Photograph of Fox Hastings grappling with a bull in the rodeo. ca 1910. PC152-15-40. Elizabeth West Postcard Collection, 1887-1955. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
http://id.lib.harvard.edu/images/olvgroup12506/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:5144345/catalog
Born in California in 1882, Eloise "Fox" Hastings became a well-known rodeo star making her name in bronc and trick riding (which she did for the Irwin Brother's Wild West Show) and in 1924 she was the first woman to compete in bulldogging at the Houston Stock Show. She became known as the "only lady bulldogger in the world,"
Women in the West
The history of women in the American West is a tale of resilience, agency, and often overlooked contributions that have shaped the region's identity. From the Indigenous women who cultivated land and preserved cultural traditions long before European colonization, to the pioneers who braved the arduous journey westward during the 19th century, women have played integral roles in the development and transformation of the American West. Their stories encompass a diverse range of experiences, from homesteading on the frontier and participating in suffrage movements to challenging gender norms and advocating for social change. Despite facing systemic sexism, limited legal rights, and cultural constraints, women in the American West have continuously asserted their presence and forged paths of empowerment, leaving an indelible mark on the region's history and shaping its ongoing evolution.
Books
Women and Warriors of the Plains by ISBN: 0878424172In 1906 teenage bride Julia Tuell arrived at Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation with her schoolmaster husband. Seven years later the Tuells moved to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and lived among the Sioux (pr
Etta Place by ISBN: 1493047388Publication Date: 2021-06-23The mystery began simply enough with her identity. Who was she? As a young woman, she took the name, "Place," from the maiden name of the mother of her lover, Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid), and combined it with several first names, including "Mrs. Ethel Place." The Pinkertons knew her as "Ethel," "Ethal," "Eva," and "Rita" before finally settling on "Etta" for their wanted posters. After Sundance introduced her to Robert Parker (Butch Cassidy), the three joined the rest of their Wild Bunch gang and set off on a spree of bank, stagecoach, and train robberies. With the law hot on their heels, they rode up to Robber's Roost in southwestern Utah where they laid low until word reached local authorities of their whereabouts. On the run again, Place accompanied Longabaugh to New York City where they purchased a lapel watch and stickpin at Tiffany's before pausing to pose for the famed DeYoung portrait at a Union Square photo studio on Broadway. On February 20, 1901, she sailed with Butch and Sundance, posing as Etta's fictional brother "James Ryan," aboard the British ship, Herminius, for Buenos Aires. Settling there with the two outlaws on a ranch they purchased jointly near Cholila in the Chubut Province of west-central Argentina, they were granted 15,000 acres of adjacent land to develop, 2,500 of which belonged to Place, who had the distinction of being the first woman in Argentina to own real estate there.Thus began the next phase of her outlaw life. On December 19, 1904, Place, Longabaugh, Parker, and an unknown male robbed the Banco de la Nacion in Villa Mercedes, four hundred miles west of Buenos Aires. Pursued by armed federales, they crossed the Pampas and the Andes and returned to Chile, but Place had grown tired of life on the run and deeply lamented the loss of their ranch and the promise of stability it had held for her. In June 1906, Longabaugh accompanied her from Valparaiso, Chile, to San Francisco, where she sought medical aid and kissed him goodbye for the last time before he returned to South America and infamy. As for Etta Place, her mystery had only begun. And it would continue for another forty-six years before finally being resolved.
Westward the Women by ISBN: 1943328080Publication Date: 2016-03-15WESTWARD THE WOMEN is a book about women of every kind and sort, from nuns to prostitutes, who participated in the greatest American adventure--pioneering across the continent. Not only does the material represent half-forgotten history--which the author garnered from attics, libraries, state historical museums, and the reminiscences of Far Western Old-timers--but it is unique in presenting the woman's side of the story in this major American experience.With dramatic clarity the author of FARTHEST REACH has written the intimate and human stories of certain outstanding personalities among these pioneer women; the Maine blue-stocking pursuing her studies of botany and taxidermy in frontier solitude; the gentle nuns from Belgium teaching needlework and litanies to "children of the forest"; the little ex-milliner who performed the first autopsy by a woman; the suffragette who established a newspaper for Western women and rode plushy river boats and the dusty roads preaching her gospel of Equal Rights; hurdy-gurdy girls from Idaho boomtowns; and many another martyr, heroine, diarist, gun moll, missionary, feminist, and mother in this turbulent era of pioneering.
Women and Indians on the Frontier by ISBN: 0826307809Publication Date: 1984-10-01Pioneer women going west carried distinct images of themselves and of American Indians. Their views reflected stereotypes pervading the popular literature and journalism of the nineteenth century: women were weak and defenseless, their westward trek was a noble mission, and American Indians were savages. But as a result of their frontier experience, many women changed or discarded their earlier opinions. This book is the first account of how and why pioneer women altered their self-images and their views of American Indians. In Women and Indians on the Frontier, Riley substantially revises the conventional melodramatic picture of pioneer women cowering when confronted with Indians. Frontier life required women to be self-reliant, independent, and hardy: as they learned to adapt, frontierswomen also learned to reexamine stereotypes in the light of experience. Interestingly, Riley explains, while pioneer women frequently changed their beliefs about Indians, they did not often revise their attitudes toward Mormon or Mexican women following contact with them. Frontierswomen also differed from men, whose unfavorable impression of Indians seldom changed. Riley's work is an important addition to Western history, women's studies, and American Indian studies. She examines in detail images and myths of both women and Indians, using examples from history, literature, and film, complemented by period photographs and illustrations. Her comparative account will interest a variety of scholars concerned with cultures in conflict and transition.
Those Magnificent Cowgirls by ISBN: 0913701009Publication Date: 1984-09-01
Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement by ISBN: 0806126191Publication Date: 1994-04-15During the last half of the nineteenth century, thousands of men went west in search of gold, land, or adventure-leaving their wives to handle family, farm, and business affairs on their own. The experiences of these westering men have long been a part of the lore of the American frontier, but the stories of their wives have rarely been told. Ten years of research into public and private documents-including letters of couples separated during the westward movement-has enabled Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith to tell the forgotten stories of "women in waiting." Though these wives were left more or less in limbo by the departure of their adventuring husbands, they were hardly women in waiting in any other sense. Children had to be fed, clothed, housed, and educated; farms and businesses had to be managed; creditors had to be paid or pacified and, in some cases, hard-earned butter-and-egg money had to be sent west in response to letters from broke and disillusioned husbands. This raises some unsettling questions: How does the idea of an "allowance" from home square with our long-standing image of the frontiersman as rugged individualist? To what extent was the westward movement supported by the paid and unpaid labor of women back east? And how do we measure the heroics of husbands out west against the heroics of wives back home?
Pioneer Women by ISBN: 0806130547Publication Date: 1998-04-15"If only one book about women in the West were available, this certainly would be an appropriate choice."--Westerners Bookshelf Pioneer Women provides a rare look at frontier life through the eyes of the pioneer women who settled the American West. Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith vividly describe the hardships such women endured journeying west and making homes and communities on the frontier. Their hopes and fears and, most of all, their courage in the face of adversity are revealed in excerpts from journals, letters, and oral histories. Illustrated with a fascinating collection of seldom-seen photographs, Pioneer Women reveals the faces as well as the voices of women who lived on the frontier. The authors portray a wide variety of women, from those who found liberty and confidence in undertaking "men's work" to those who felt burdened by the wind, the weather, and the struggle of frontier life.
Ladies of the Canyons by ISBN: 0816524947Publication Date: 2015-09-17Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world. Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them. Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston's Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe's art and literary colony. Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.
Covered Wagon Women by ISBN: 0803272944Publication Date: 1997-06-01Abigail Jane Scott was seventeen when she left Illinois with her family in the spring of 1852. Her record of the journey west is full of expressive detail: breakfasting in a snowstorm, walking behind the wagons to keep warm, tasting buffalo meat, trying to climb Independence Rock. She meets her future husband, Benjamin Duniway, at the end of the Oregon Trail and, in the years to come, finds fame as a writer and a leader of the suffrage movement in the Northwest. Her grandson, David Duniway, edited her trail diary for Covered Wagon Women. nbsp; This volume includes the equally vivid diaries of other women who rode the wagons in 1852. Polly Coon of Wisconsin recalls trading with the Indians. Martha Read, starting from Illinois, is particularly alert to the suffering of the animals, noting hundreds of dead cows and horses along the way. Cecilia Adams and Parthenia Blank, twin sisters from Illinois, jointly chronicle their once-in-a-lifetime experience.- Life Writings of Frontier WomenCall Number: Online - Free - HathiTrust Digital Library
Iron Women by ISBN: 9781493037759Publication Date: 2021-03-01When the last spike was hammered into the steel track of the Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah, Western Union lines sounded the glorious news of the railroad's completion from New York to San Francisco. For more than five years an estimated four thousand men mostly Irish working west from Omaha and Chinese working east from Sacramento, moved like a vast assembly line toward the end of the track. Editorials in newspapers and magazines praised the accomplishment and some boasted that the work that "was begun, carried on, and completed solely by men." The August edition of Godey's Lady's Book even reported "No woman had laid a rail and no woman had made a survey." Although the physical task of building the railroad had been achieved by men, women made significant and lasting contributions to the historic operation. However, the female connection with railroading dates as far back as 1838 when women were hired as registered nurses/stewardesses in passenger cars. Those ladies attended to the medical needs of travelers and also acted as hostesses of sorts helping passengers have a comfortable journey. Beyond nursing and service roles, however, women played a larger part in the actual creation of the rail lines than they have been given credit for. Miss E. F. Sawyer became the first female telegraph operator when she was hired by the Burlington Railroad in Montgomery, Illinois, in 1872. Eliza Murfey focused on the mechanics of the railroad, creating devices for improving the way bearings on a rail wheel attached to train cars responded to the axles. Murfey held sixteen patents for her 1870 invention. In 1879, another woman inventor named Mary Elizabeth Walton developed a system that deflected emissions from the smoke stacks on railroad locomotives. She was awarded two patents for her pollution reducing device. Their stories and many more are included in this illustrated volume celebrating women and the railroad.
Frontier Women by ISBN: 9780809016013Publication Date: 1998-02-28In this new edition of a classic work, Julie Roy Jeffrey maintains the essential core of her account of the extraordinarily diverse contributions women made to the development of the American frontier. Jeffrey has expanded her original analysis to include the often overlooked perspectives of Native American, Hispanic, Chinese, and African American women.
Portraits of Women in the American West by ISBN: 9780415948036Publication Date: 2005-10-01Men 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.
Brave Hearted by ISBN: 1954118171Publication Date: 2022-10-25*WINNER OF THE WOMEN WRITING THE WEST 2023 WILLA LITERARY AWARD* Brave Hearted is not just history, it is an incredibly intense page-turning experience. To read what these women endured is to be transported into another universe of courage, loss, pain, and occasionally victory. This book is a triumph."--Amanda Foreman "Absolutely compelling."--Christina Lamb, Sunday Times (UK) The dramatic, untold stories of the diverse array of women who helped transform the American West. Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boom towns; wives and mothers traveling two and a half thousand miles across the prairies in covered-wagon convoys, some of them so poor they walked the entire route; African-American women in search of freedom from slavery; Chinese sex-workers sold openly on the docks of San Francisco; Native American women brutally displaced by the unstoppable tide of white settlers - these were the women who settled the American West, whose stories until now have remained mostly untold. As the internationally bestselling historian Katie Hickman writes, "Myth and misunderstanding spring from the American frontier as readily as rye grass from sod, and--like the wiry grass--seem as difficult to weed out and discard." But the true-life story of women's experiences in the Wild West is more gripping, heart-rending, and stirring than all the movies, novels, folk-legends, and ballads of popular imagination. Drawing on letters, diaries, and other extraordinary contemporary accounts, sifting through the legends and the myths, the laws and the treaties, Katie Hickman presents us with a cast of unforgettable women, all forced to draw on huge reserves of resilienceand courage in the face of tumultuous change: the half Cree, Marguerite McLoughlin, the much-admired "First Lady" of Fort Vancouver; the Presbyterian missionary Narcissa Whitman, who in 1837 became the first white woman to make the overland journey west across the Rocky Mountains; Biddy Mason, the Mississippi slave who fought for her freedom through the courts of California; Olive Oatman, adopted by the Mohave, famous for her facial tattoos. This is the story of the women who participated in the greatest mass migration in American history, transforming their country in the process. This is American history not as it was romanticized but as it was lived.
Witness by ISBN: 0803245645Publication Date: 2013-11-01During the 1920s and 1930s, Josephine Waggoner (1871–1943), a Lakota woman who had been educated at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, grew increasingly concerned that the history and culture of her people were being lost as elders died without passing along their knowledge. A skilled writer, Waggoner set out to record the lifeways of her people and correct much of the misinformation about them spread by white writers, journalists, and scholars of the day. To accomplish this task, she traveled to several Lakota and Dakota reservations to interview chiefs, elders, traditional tribal historians, and other tribal members, including women. Published for the first time and augmented by extensive annotations, Witness offers a rare participant’s perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lakota and Dakota life. The first of Waggoner’s two manuscripts presented here includes extraordinary firsthand and as-told-to historical stories by tribal members, such as accounts of life in the Powder River camps and at the agencies in the 1870s, the experiences of a mixed-blood Húŋkpapȟa girl at the first off-reservation boarding school, and descriptions of traditional beliefs. The second manuscript consists of Waggoner’s sixty biographies of Lakota and Dakota chiefs and headmen based on eyewitness accounts and interviews with the men themselves. Together these singular manuscripts provide new and extensive information on the history, culture, and experiences of the Lakota and Dakota peoples. nbsp; nbsp;
Life among the Piutes by ISBN: 8027333954Publication Date: 2019-10-15Life Among the Paiutes is considered the "first known autobiography written by a Native American woman." This is both an autobiographic memoir and history of the Paiute people during their first forty years of contact with European Americans. It Anthropologist Omer Stewart described it as "one of the first and one of the most enduring ethnohistorical books written by an American Indian." Contents: * First Meeting of Piutes and Whites * Domestic and Social Moralities * Wars and Their Causes * Captain Truckee's Death * Reservation of Pyramid and Muddy Lakes * The Malheur Agency * The Bannock War * The Yakima Affair
Cherokee Sister by ISBN: 9780803240759Publication Date: 2014-01-01Catharine Brown (1800?–1823) became Brainerd Mission School’s first Cherokee convert to Christianity, a missionary teacher, and the first Native American woman whose own writings saw extensive publication in her lifetime. After her death from tuberculosis at age twenty-three, the missionary organization that had educated and later employed Brown commissioned a posthumous biography, Memoir of Catharine Brown, whichnbsp; enjoyed widespread contemporary popularity and praise. In the following decade, her writings, along with those of other educated Cherokees, became highly politicized and were used in debates about the removal of the Cherokees and other tribes to Indian Territory. Although she was once viewed by literary critics as a docile and dominated victim of missionaries who represented the tragic fate of Indians who abandoned their identities, Brown is now being reconsidered as a figure of enduring Cherokee revitalization, survival, adaptability, and leadership. In Cherokee Sister Theresa Strouth Gaul collects all of Brown’s writings, consisting of letters and a diary, some appearing in print for the first time, as well as Brown’s biography and a drama and poems about her. This edition of Brown’s collected works and related materials firmly establishes her place in early nineteenth-century culture and her influence on American perceptions of Native Americans.
Confronting Race by ISBN: 0826336256Publication Date: 2004-10-30In 1984, when Glenda Riley's Women and Indians on the Frontier was published, it was hailed for being the first study to take into account the roles that gender, race, and class played in Indian/white relations during the westward migration. In the twenty years since, the study of those aspects of western history has exploded. Confronting Race reflects the changes in western women's history and in the author's own approach. In spite of white women's shifting attitudes toward Indians, they retained colonialist outlooks toward all peoples. Women who migrated West carried deeply ingrained images and preconceptions of themselves and racially based ideas of the non-white groups they would meet. In their letters home and in their personal diaries and journals, they perpetuated racial stereotypes, institutions, and practices. The women also discovered their own resilience in the face of the harsh demands of the West. Although most retained their racist concepts, they came to realise that women need not be passive or fearful in their interactions with Indians. wives, and missionaries, and popular accounts in newspapers and novels. She has also incorporated the literature in the field published since 1984 and a deeper analysis of relationships between white women and Indians in westward expansion.
The Female Frontier by ISBN: 9780700604241Publication Date: 1988-04-28This book introduces the important concept of a female frontier--a frontier "every bit as real and coherent, as, for example, the mining frontier." It gives us a new understanding of western women's shared experiences and of the full implications of their participation in America's westward movement. Riley has reconstructed women's roles and concerns from census data, legal proceedings, newspaper accounts, local histories, essays, sermons, novels, photographs, works of art, and in large part from their own words, as recorded in diaries, day books, journals, letters, memoirs, reminiscences, and interviews. These women include the barely literate and the educated, the young and the old, single and married, white and black, native-born and immigrant. What emerges is a new understanding of the shared experiences--at home, in paid employment, and in community activities--that constituted the female frontier.
Women of the West by ISBN: 9780393321555Publication Date: 2001-05-17Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. A myth-shattering look at the women who helped to settle the West, told through their own words and illustrated with 150 period photographs. Through these photos, plus diaries, memoirs, letters, and journals, Women of the West introduces 11 real frontier women whose words combine to re-create a place and time when resourcefulness and courage were demanded of everyone. This is American history, not as it was romanticized, but as it was lived.
New Women in the Old West by ISBN: 9780735223257Publication Date: 2021-07-20A riveting history of the American West told for the first time through the pioneering women who used the challenges of migration and settlement as opportunities to advocate for their rights, and transformed the country in the process. Drawing on an extraordinary collection of research, including personal letters and diaries, Gallagher weaves together the striking achievements of those who not only created homes on weather-wracked prairies and built communities in muddy mining camps, but played a crucial, unrecognised role in the women's rights movement.
A Black Women's History of the United States by ISBN: 9780807001998Publication Date: 2021-03-16The award-winning Revisioning American History series continues with this "groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States" (Ibram X. Kendi)-the perfect companion to An Indigenous People's History of the United States and An African American and Latinx History of the United States. An empowering and intersectional history that centers the stories of African American women across 400+ years, showing how they are-and have always been-instrumental in shaping our country. In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women's History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women's lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices- enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women's history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.
Cathy Williams by ISBN: 0811735699Publication Date: 2009-01-15Women in the United States military have received more recognition than ever in recent years, but women also played vital roles in battles and campaigns of previous generations. Cathy Williams served as Pvt. William Cathay from 1866 to 1868 with the famed Buffalo Soldiers who patrolled the 900-mile Santa Fe Trail. Tucker traces her life from her birth as a slave near Independence,. Missouri, to her service in Company A, 38th U.S. Infantry, one of the six black units formed following the Civil War. Cathy Williams remains the only known African American woman to have served as a Buffalo Soldier in the Indian Wars. Her remarkable story continues to represent a triumph of the human spirit. AUTHOR: Phillip Thomas Tucker is the author or editor of more than 20 books on the Civil War and African American, women's and Irish history. He is a United States Air Force historian at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, DC. REVIEW: "A unique story of gender and race, time and place, Tucker's work is a recommended read that reaches across categories, from American, African American, and military history to Western and women's history". - Library Journal 11 b/w photos
Independent Spirits by ISBN: 0520202023Publication Date: 1995-11-27Independent Spirits brings to vivid life the West as seen through the eyes of women painters from 1890 to the end of World War II. Expert scholars and curators identify long-lost talent and reveal how these women were formidable cultural innovators as well as agitators for the rights of artists and women during a period of extraordinary development. Abundantly illustrated, with over one-hundred color plates, this book is a rich compendium of Western art by women, including those of Native American, African, Mexican, and Asian descent. The essays examine the many economic, social, and political forces that shaped this art over years of pivotal change. The West's dynamic growth altered the role of women, often allowing new avenues of opportunity within the prevailing Anglo culture. At the same time, boundaries of femininity were pushed earlier and further than in other parts of the country. Women artists in the West painted a wide range of subjects, and their work embraced a variety of styles: Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism, Surrealism. Some women championed modern art as gallery owners, collectors, and critics, while others were educators and curators. All played an important role in gaining the acceptance of women as men's peers in artistic communities, and their independent spirit resonates in studios and galleries throughout the country today.
Online Resources
- Archives of Women of the Southwest"Housed in the DeGolyer Library, the Archives currently has over 200 collections that fall into two areas: letters, diaries, and journals of women who settled in or traveled through the West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the papers of 20th and 21st century women who have influenced women’s roles in society and shaped the culture, arts, business, social issues, law, and politics in Texas and the Southwest."
- Library of Congress - Digital Collections - Women's History CollectionAccess Library of Congress digital collections that are focused on women's history.