DRAFT (12/1/06)

Gender, Race, and the Construction of the American West, 1880-1945

Graduate Consortium for Women’s Studies

Spring 2007

Thursdays, 5:30-8:30

Karen V. Hansen, Professor Lynn Johnson, Professor

Department of Sociology, Department of History

Brandeis University Boston College

khansen@brandeis.edu johnsohi@bc.edu

781-736-2651 617-552-8453

Lois Rudnick, Professor and Chair

American Studies Program

University of Massachusetts, Boston

 lois.rudnick@umb.edu

617-287-6775

Instructor availability: Each of the faculty is reachable by email and by phone. We will make ourselves available to students for the hour before class and by appointment.

Overview

This course explores the historical experiences and cultural productions of women in the North American West during the time it was being explored, settled, and imagined. Challenging the myths of western expansion as an exclusively male endeavor, and the formation of western myth and enterprise as exclusively male domains, the course pays particular attention to the roles of women in promoting, resisting, transforming, and constructing the trans-Mississippi West as reality and imaginary.

The North American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides a fascinating case study of the shifting meanings of gender, race, citizenship, and power in border societies. As the site of migration, settlement, and displacement, it spawned contests over land, labor disputes, inter-ethnic conflicts and peaceful relations, and many kinds of cultural productions.

The course uses primary sources (diaries, letters, novels, photographs) and secondary source readings to examine gender identity and practice across racial-ethnic groups, geographic region, local economies, and class lines. It does so through the lenses of social and cultural theory, history, sociology, film, literature, craft, and art. The readings consistently prompt questions about the sources of evidence -- whose voice is recorded, whose image is captured, whose art is preserved -- and how the twenty-first century scholar can interpret them. The methodological limitations of certain sources and the implications of their use will be part and parcel of our quest to understand this multi-faceted history.

Course Requirements

Course requirements include ongoing participation (40%) and a research paper (60%). Participation consists of: attendance, active and thoughtful contributions, and circulation of discussion questions 24 hours in advance of the class (two separate weeks), in collaboration with other presenters. The research paper, expected to be 15 to 20 pages, will be related to the themes of the course, on a topic of the student’s choosing. It can be a secondary literature review or an analysis of primary source materials.

Required Readings

Bernardin, Susan, Melody Graulich, Lisa MacFarlane, and Nicole Tonkovich, Trading Gazes: Euro-American Women Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880-1940 (Rutgers University Press, 2003)

Calof, Rachel, Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains (Indiana University Press, 1995)

Cather, Willa, My Antonia, ed. Joseph R. Urgo, (Broadview Literary Texts, 1918; 2003)

Irwin, Mary Ann and James F. Brooks (eds.) Women and Gender in the American West (University of New Mexico Press, 2004)

Lee, Mary Paik, A Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (University of Washington Press, 1990)

Lemke-Santangelo, Gretchen. Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)

Olsen, Tillie, Yonnondio: Notes from the Thirties (any edition is fine)

**Articles below designated by an asterisk will be available via WebCT constructed for the course.

Recommended:

Moynihan, Ruth, Susan Armitage, and Christianne Fischer Dichamp (eds.), So Much to be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier, second edition (University of Nebraska Press, 1998)

Course Outline

Week 1— February 1: Introduction and Overview of the Course

*Thornton, Russell, “Decline to Nadir, 1800-1900” American Indian Holocaust and Survival (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), pp. 91-133

Film: Nobody’s Girls: Five Women of the American West (1995)

(PBS documentary on Euro-American, Hispanic-American, Chinese-American, African-American, and Native American inhabitants, migrants, and settlers in the Trans-Mississippi West as reflected in the lives of five “unknown” women)

Weeks 2—February 8: Theoretical Overview -- Place, Borders, and Memory

*Anzaldua, Gloria “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness,” Borderlands/La Frontera (aunt lute books, 1987), pp. 77-91

*Beltran, Cristina, “Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies and the Challenge of Mestizaje,” Political Research Quarterly 57:4 (December 2004): 595-607.

*Fetterley, Judith and Marjorie Pryse, “Redefinitions,” Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2003), pp. 1-33

*Gershon, Ilana and Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj, “Symbolic Capital of Ignorance,” Social Analysis 44:2 (November 2000): 3-14

*Limerick, Patricia, “Region and Reason,” in All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions, ed. Edward L. Ayers et al. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 83-104

*Rich, Adrienne, “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (W.W. Norton, 1986), pp. 210-231

Recommended:

Massey, Doreen, Space, Place and Gender (University of Minnesota Press, 1994)

Week 3—February 15: Constructing Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and “The West”

Narratives of Travel and the West

*Pratt, Mary Louise, “Introduction,” Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 1992), pp. 1-11

*Roberson, Susan, “Narratives of Relocation and Dislocation: An Introduction,” Women, America, and Movement (University of Missouri Press, 1998), pp. 1-16

Constructing History and Analytic Categories

Castaneda, Antonia, “Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History,” Women and Gender in the American West, pp. 66-88

*Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, “Integrating Race and Gender,” Unequal Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 6-17

Johnson, Susan, “‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’: The Significance of Gender in the History of the ‘American West’,” Women and Gender in the American West, pp. 89-109

Pascoe, Peggy, “Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial Marriage” Women and Gender in the American West, pp. 53-65.

*Waters, Mary, “Flux and Choice in American Ethnicity,” Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (University of California Press, 1990), pp. 16-51.

Recommended:

Almaguer, Tomas, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (University of California Press, 1994).

*Fields, Barbara, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (May-June 1990): 95-118

Week 4—February 22: The Great Plains and the Farm Frontier

*Prospectus and Short Bibliography for final paper due

*Albers, Patricia, “Autonomy and Dependency in the Lives of Dakota Women: A Study in Historical Change.” Review of Radical Political Economics 17:3 (1985): 109-134

Calof, Rachel, Rachel Calof’s Story

*Hampsten, Elizabeth, “Little Houses on the Prairie,” Read this Only to Yourself (University of Indiana Press, 1982), pp. 29-47

*Hansen, Karen V., “Land Was Everything: Scandinavian Homesteaders and Dakota Indians, 1900-1930,”

Recommended:

Bettelyoun, Susan Bordeau and Josephine Waggoner, With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People’s History (University of Nebraska Press, 1988)

*Garceau, Dee, “Single Women Homesteaders and the Meanings of Independence,” Frontiers, 15 (Spring 1995)

*Lindgren, Elaine, “Ethnic Women Homesteading on the Plains of North Dakota,” in Great Plains Quarterly, 9 (Summer 1989): 157-73

Stewart, Eleanor Pruitt, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914; 1988)

Recommended Film: The New Land (1972)

Week 5—March 1: The Farm Frontier—Literary Perspectives

Cather, Willa, My Antonia

*O’Brien, Sharon, “‘The Thing Not Named’: Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer,” Signs 9:4 (Summer 1984):576-599

Week 6—March 8: The Mining and Ranching Frontiers

Moynihan, Ruth, et al, eds., So Much to be Done, chapters 5, 12, 13, 15, 17, 22

*Murphy, Mary, “Private Lives of Public Women: Prostitution in Butte, Montana, 1878-1917,” in The Women’s West, 193-205

*Benton-Cohen, Catherine, “Common Purposes, Worlds Apart: Mexican-American, Mormon, and Midwestern Women Homesteaders in Cochise County, Arizona,” Western Historical Quarterly 36:4 (Winter 2005): 429-452.

Article on child labor

Recommended:

Lamont, Victoria, "Cattle Branding and the Traffic in Women in Early Twenteith-Century Westerns by Women," available on Project Muse.

Week 7 –March 15: Spring Recess

Week 8 –March 22: Challenging Gender and Sexuality

*First 7-9 pages of term paper due

Barman, Jean, “Taming Aboriginal Sexuality: Gender Power, and Race in British Columbia, 1850-1900,” Women and Gender in the American West, pp. 210-235

*Boag, Peter, “Go West Young Man, Go East Young Women: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History,” Western Historical Quarterly 36:4 (Winter 2005):477-498.

*Schlatter, Evelyn A., “Drag’s a Life: Women, Gender, and Cross-Dressing in the Nineteenth-Century West,” in Writing the Range, edited by Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), pp. 334-348

Film: The Ballad of Little Jo (1993)

Week 9 -- March 29: Immigration, Migration, and Farm Labor on the West Coast

Lee, Mary Paik, A Quiet Odyssey

*Chiu, Monica, “Constructing ‘Home’ in Mary Paik Lee’s Quiet Odyssey,” in Susan Roberson, ed., Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation (University of Missouri Press, 1998), pp. 121-36

Recommended:

*Yung, Judy, “It’s Hard to Be Born a Woman but Hopeless to Be Born a Chinese,” Women Writing Women (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), pp. 241-264

*Far, Sui Sin, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, ed. Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks (1912; 1995), pp. 218-232

Week 10 – April 5: Women, Politics, and the Radical West

Olsen, Tillie, Yonnondio: Notes from the Thirties

*Rosenfelt, Deborah, “From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition,” Feminist Criticism and Social Change, ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (Methuen, 1985), pp. 216-248

*Ludlow Massacre primary documents

Recommended Film: Salt of the Earth (1954)

Week 11 – April 12: Cultural Brokers and Moral Reform

*Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola, We Fed Them Cactus, selections (University of New Mexico Press, 1950; 1994)

*Jacobs, Margaret D. “Maternal Colonialism: White Women and Indigenous Child Removal in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940,” 36:4 Western Historical Quarterly (Winter 2005): 453-476.

*Scharff, Virginia, “So Many Miles to a Person: Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Makes New Mexico,” Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement and the West (University of California Press, 2003), pp. 115-135

Recommended:

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, Unequal Freedom, Chapter 5

Moynihan, Ruth, So Much To Be Done, Ch. 21

Recommended film: “Rabbit Fences”

Week 12 – April 19: Cultural Brokers via the “Empire of the Lens”

Bernandin, Susan, et al., Trading Gazes

Recommended:

Williams, Carol J., Framing the West: Race, Gender, and the Photographic Frontier in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford University Press, 2003)

Week 13 – April 26: Representations of the West: Writers, Artists, and Mythmakers

*Final Paper due

*Austin, Mary, Stories from the Country of Lost Borders, ed. Marjorie Pryse (Rutgers University Press, 1903; 1909; 1987), selections

*Rudnick, Lois, “Re-naming the Land: Anglo-Expatriate Women in the Southwest,” The Desert is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art, ed. Vera Norwood and Janice Monk (University of Arizona Press, 1987), pp. 10-26; 239-244

*Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonin), American Indian Stories (University of Nebraska Press, 1921; 2003), selections

*Spack, Ruth, “Transforming Women: Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories,” America’s Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of English, 1860-1900 (University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 144-170; 179-199

Recommended:

Totten, Gary, “Zitkala-Sa and the Problem of Regionalism: Nations, Narratives, and Critical Traditions,” American Indian Quarterly 29:1 & 2 (Winter & Spring 2005): 84-123

Week 14 – May 3: War and the Second Gold Rush

Lemke-Santangelo, Gretchen. Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community

*Johnson, Marilyn, Chapter 6 on Use of Public Space, The Second Gold Rush (University of California Press, 1993), 143-184.

Week 15 – May 10: Student Presentations on Term Projects

Lecture/Slide Show on Georgia O’Keeffe’s West