Frontiers Of Femininity

British explorer and professional travel writer Isabella Bird is, to the modern eye, a study in contradictions. One of the premier mountaineers and world explorers of her generation, she was, in 1892, the first woman elected to London’s Royal Geographic Society. And yet Bird’s books on her travels are filled with depictions of herself and other women that reinforce the “properly feminine” domestic and behavioral codes of her day. In this fascinating and highly original collection of essays, Karen Morin explores the self-expression of travel writers like Bird by giving geographic context to their work. With a rare degree of clarity the author examines relationships among nineteenth-century American expansionism, discourses about gender, and writings of women who traveled and lived in the American West in the late nineteenth century—British travelers, American journalists, a Native American tribal leader, and female naturalists. Drawing from a rich diversity of primary sources, from published travelogues and unpublished archival sources such as letters and diaries to newspaper reportage, Morin considers ways in which women’s writing was influenced by the material circumstances of travel in addition to the various social norms that circumscribed female roles. Ranging in scale from the interior of train cars and the homes of these women to the colonial projects of conquering the American West, the author illustrates how geography was fundamental to the formation of women’s identity and greatly influenced the gendered and colonialist language found in their writing.

As her family traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852, Mary Ellen Todd taught herself to crack the ox whip. Though gender roles often blurred on the trail, families quickly tried to re-establish separate roles for men and women once they had staked their claims. For Mary Ellen Todd, who found a “secret joy in having the power to set things moving,” this meant trading in the ox whip for the more feminine butter churn. In Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier, Cynthia Culver Prescott expertly explores the shifting gender roles and ideologies that countless Anglo-American settlers struggled with in Oregon’s Willamette Valley between 1845 and 1900. Drawing on traditional social history sources as well as divorce records, married women’s property records, period photographs, and material culture, Prescott reveals that Oregon settlers pursued a moving target of middle-class identity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Prescott traces long-term ideological changes, arguing that favorable farming conditions enabled Oregon families to progress from accepting flexible frontier roles to participating in a national consumer culture in only one generation. As settlers’ children came of age, participation in this new culture of consumption and refined leisure became the marker of the middle class. Middle-class culture shifted from the first generation’s emphasis on genteel behavior to a newer genteel consumption. This absorbing volume reveals the shifting boundaries of traditional women’s spheres, the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, and the second generation’s struggle to balance their parents’ ideology with a changing national sense of class consciousness.

Standing at the intersection of evolutionary biology and feminist theory is a large audience interested in the questions one field raises for the other. Have evolutionary biologists worked largely or strictly within a masculine paradigm, seeing males as evolving and females as merely reacting passively or carried along with the tide? Would our view of nature `red in tooth in claw' be different if women had played a larger role in the creation of evolutionary theory and through education in its transmission to younger generations? Is there any such thing as a feminist science or feminist methodology? For feminists, does any kind of biological determinism undermine their contention that gender roles purely constructed, not inherent in the human species? Does the study of animals have anything to say to those preoccupied with the evolution and behavior of humans? All these questions and many more are addressed by this book, whose contributing authors include leading scholars in both feminism and evolutionary biology. Bound to be controversial, this book is addressed to evolutionary biologists and to feminists and to the large number of people interested in women's studies.

From a rediscovered collection of autobiographical accounts written by hundreds of Kansas pioneer women in the early twentieth century, Joanna Stratton has created a collection hailed by Newsweek as “uncommonly interesting” and “a remarkable distillation of primary sources.” Never before has there been such a detailed record of women’s courage, such a living portrait of the women who civilized the American frontier. Here are their stories: wilderness mothers, schoolmarms, Indian squaws, immigrants, homesteaders, and circuit riders. Their personal recollections of prairie fires, locust plagues, cowboy shootouts, Indian raids, and blizzards on the plains vividly reveal the drama, danger and excitement of the pioneer experience. These were women of relentless determination, whose tenacity helped them to conquer loneliness and privation. Their work was the work of survival, it demanded as much from them as from their men—and at last that partnership has been recognized. “These voices are haunting” (The New York Times Book Review), and they reveal the special heroism and industriousness of pioneer women as never before.

A collection of classic feminist readings, this text presents the full diversity of women's issues and experiences, exploring their similarities as well as their differences. It offers analyses of the causes and consequences of gender inequality and introduces students to feminist theory and methodology. A sociological analysis opens each of the four parts and 11 sections of the book.

Women's Oral History: The "Frontiers" Reader is an essential guide to the practice of gathering and interpreting women's oral accounts of their lives. During the 1970s, whenøwomen's history was just developing, the lack of historical information about women's lives was glaring. Oral history quickly emerged as a vital and necessary tool for documenting the lives and experiences of women, who rarely recorded it for themselves?much less for posterity. Standard models of practicing oral history, however, were inadequate to the job of organizing and interpreting women's lives, and new models that addressed the distinctiveness of the lives of women?in all of their diversity?were needed. As one of the earliest journals devoted to feminist scholarship in the United States, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies was in the vanguard of the emerging field of women's oral history when it published its first landmark issue on the subject in 1977. Three subsequent issues exploring the evolving field has secured Frontiers' reputation at the forefront of women's oral history. Women's Oral History includes nineteen essays, each addressing the particularity of women's lives and experience. The collection provides both "how to" interview guides and examples of current research in sections covering basic methodology and rationale; the myriad uses of women's oral history; and discoveries and insights gained from oral history applications. The essays raise thought-provoking questions, glean original insights about the lives of women and the practice of history, and call for women to write and record their own histories.

This third edition combines classical and contemporary feminist writings on a range of women's issues. Special attempts have been made to reflect women's diversity as well as similarities in a variety of areas, including race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. It offers feminist analyses of the sources and consequences of gender inequality and introduces students to feminist theory and methodology. While its primary use is in courses on women's studies, sociology of women, sociology of gender/sex roles, and psychology of women, it should also be suitable for courses on women and feminist issues taught in a wide variety of disciplines at both the undergraduate and graduate level. It is designed both as a main text and as a supplementary reader. This third edition includes new sections on feminist research perspectives and methodology, and the state and international politics. Taylor's article on the future of feminism now traces the women's movement up to the present and incorporates lesbian feminism and postfeminism debates. Also, the section on work and families has been split into separate sections.