New Women in the Old West

April 19, 2021
Journalist Gallagher (How the Post Office Created America) delivers a buoyant women’s history of the American West. Between the 1840s and the early 1900s, Gallagher notes, “the women’s rights movement and the colonization of the West were overlapping epochs.” Dedicated to bringing “civilization” to Western territories and states, white women used their primary roles as mothers to justify their leadership in creating schools and libraries, and to claim the moral authority to pursue temperance and other reforms. Homestead acts passed in 1862 and 1909 allowed women who were “single, divorced, deserted, or widowed” to stake their own land claims. Gallagher also spotlights Indigenous women, including Lozen, an Apache warrior who fought with Geronimo, and Susan La Flesche Picotte, who trained to become the first Native American physician. During the early 1900s, women increasingly linked their social and economic progress to politics, forging coalitions across racial and class lines to secure the right to vote; by 1914, women in most of the Western states had gained the franchise. Gallagher brings a fresh lens to the suffrage movement, and rescues many of her pioneering subjects from obscurity. Feminists will be heartened by this rich and satisfying history. Illus. Agent: Kristine Dahl, ICM Partners.

June 1, 2021
Journalist Gallagher looks beyond the archetypes of the cowgirl and the bonneted prairie homesteader to show the vast range of contributions made by women of the Old West. By 1914, with the 19th Amendment still six years away, women in 11 of 14 Western states had "secured full enfranchisement before the women of even a single state back East." This was no coincidence. Gallagher shows that between the 1840s and 1920, women had unique freedoms in the region that extends from the Great Plains to California, which was less burdened than the East "by tradition, precedent, and an entrenched, oppositional establishment." New opportunities arose from an egalitarian "all-hands-on-deck" Western ethos and from energizing social forces like the Populist Party and temperance movement. Women gained further benefits from the Homestead Acts (which gave free land to female heads of households) and the tuition-free coeducational colleges created by the Morrill Land-Grant Acts. This upbeat account of the changes abounds with brief stories of trailblazers like Zitkala-Sa, a Sioux writer and musician; Elizabeth Piper Ensley, a Black teacher who founded the Colored Women's Republican Club; and Jovita Id�r, a critic of "Juan Crow" laws and the first president of the League of Mexican Women. At times, Gallagher casts her subjects in flat, modern terms, such as writing that one of them "prioritized" or had "skill sets." Yet the stories mostly transcend occasional banalities. One of the most inspiring involves Luna Kellie, who, as an impoverished Nebraska homesteader, grew "too malnourished to produce adequate milk for two of her babies, who died." Undaunted, she joined the Farmers' Alliance and published the progressive Prairie Home newspaper on a press in her bedroom. "Somehow," writes the author, "she crammed politics into her already packed schedule of farm chores, care of her eleven offspring, temperance activities, and duties at her Methodist church." A mostly engaging account of how the West was won for women from all walks of life.

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July 1, 2021

Award-winning Stanford professor Daughton's In The Forest of No Joy covers new territory in the brutal history of colonialism by chronicling the construction of the Congo-Oc�an railroad across the Republic of Congo. In New Women in the Old West, Gallagher (How the Post Office Created America) portrays the settling of the American West from the women's perspective, including the stories of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American women. Former Wall Street Journal staffer Hagedorn's Sleeper Agent is George Koval, born in America and taken back to the Soviet Union by his idealistic Russian Jewish parents in the 1930s; he returned later after being recruited by the Red army and became the only Soviet military spy with security clearances for the Manhattan project (40,000-copy first printing). In Checkmate in Berlin, best-selling author Milton (Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy, Airman, Gangster, Kill or Die) chronicles the Allies' post-World War II division of Germany and especially Berlin and the tensions that resulted (40,000-copy first printing). A New York Times best-selling novelist, Sohn turns to nonfiction with The Man Who Hated Women, an account of anti-vice activist and U.S. Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock and the restrictive Comstock Law. In The Verge, Wyman, whose Tides of History podcast boasts 600,000 subscribers, looks at the crucial impact of Europe's Reformation/Renaissance era (50,000-copy first printing).

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August 20, 2021
Seeking to explore the lives of underrepresented women in the western U.S. during the period from 1840 to the early-twentieth century, Gallagher nevertheless largely focuses here on those individuals who left behind a solid paper trail. While lamenting the "generic 'Pioneer Wife' memorial statues" typically used as representation for the period, much of the text relies on individuals who traveled on wagon trains seeking to settle in places like Washington, Oregon, and Nevada and would be easily recognized as "pioneer wives". There is mention here of some African American, Native American, and other minority women standouts, but they often receive only a few paragraphs of attention in comparison to the more traditional stories of white women. By weaving in stories of divorc�es and widows who founded businesses, and especially suffragettes, Gallagher does expand the typical settler narrative, but the book does not rise to the promise of its introduction. The end notes and recommended readings are certainly impressive, and will likely send readers in search of more details.

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