Post Eight: Women and Gender in the American West
This book struck me as essential in defining the role of women in the American West. Previous works distort, invent, or plainly omit womens' roles in the history of the West. As the first essay points out, Dee Brown's The Gentle Tamers, needed revision. The four categories of imagined women in the West were stereotypical and unrealistic: the gentle tamers, sunbonnetted helpmates, hellraisers, and badwomen. The idea that women were scare throughout the West (part of the western myth) was also challenged in The Gentle Tamers Revisited, demonstrating that there was no scarcity of women except in certain areas where that scarcity did not last for long. Additionally authors Joan Jensen and Darlis Miller point out that in many areas such as in California, a high rate of single women were present and that the 1862 Homestead Act allowed single women to stake a claim.
By contrast, Antonia Castaneda in her essay, Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History, goes further to point out that Jensen and Miller only focused their work on the contributions of White Anglo Women who supported and augmented white men's attempts to colonize the West. Her essay by far is the most interesting. Castaneda asserts that women of color contributed to history with the context of cultural conflict. This notion of cultural conflict would be explained in Peggy Pascoe's essay as opposite to the classic idea of culture as a static set of values, beliefs and attitudes of a given society. Castaneda also asserts that American feminists such as Jensen and Miller predominately support the Anglo-American view towards women of color. She suggests that it takes third world feminists to tell a more accurate story of Native American, Mexican, Asian, and African American Women in the American West. She also challenges and debunks other stereotypes as well - Indians as sexual savages to captive white women (p83) and resistance to domination by Native Americans and Mexicans (p81). In rewriting Western history, Castaneda's essay is a needed historiographical work that challenges the myths of women of color who lived in the American West. And by challenging the myths and stereotypes of women and color she also challenges those historians who supported those myths all along.
Another essay I liked was Peggy Pascoe's Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: the Case of Interracial Marriage. Here she showed that the miscegenation laws challenged the white colonizers notions of race, gender, and intercultural relations. Also demonstrated was the fact that cultural history is "shifting from a paradigm of seeing culture as a unified system of values and beliefs toward a paradigm as a series of conflicts over meaning played out along such dividing lines such as race, class, and gender". (p61) In other words, what we did know and understand as history, can be redefined and rewritten based on new ways of challenging the basic beliefs and values we thought were once static and unchanging - the beliefs and values that forged the Western Myth.
By contrast, Antonia Castaneda in her essay, Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History, goes further to point out that Jensen and Miller only focused their work on the contributions of White Anglo Women who supported and augmented white men's attempts to colonize the West. Her essay by far is the most interesting. Castaneda asserts that women of color contributed to history with the context of cultural conflict. This notion of cultural conflict would be explained in Peggy Pascoe's essay as opposite to the classic idea of culture as a static set of values, beliefs and attitudes of a given society. Castaneda also asserts that American feminists such as Jensen and Miller predominately support the Anglo-American view towards women of color. She suggests that it takes third world feminists to tell a more accurate story of Native American, Mexican, Asian, and African American Women in the American West. She also challenges and debunks other stereotypes as well - Indians as sexual savages to captive white women (p83) and resistance to domination by Native Americans and Mexicans (p81). In rewriting Western history, Castaneda's essay is a needed historiographical work that challenges the myths of women of color who lived in the American West. And by challenging the myths and stereotypes of women and color she also challenges those historians who supported those myths all along.
Another essay I liked was Peggy Pascoe's Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: the Case of Interracial Marriage. Here she showed that the miscegenation laws challenged the white colonizers notions of race, gender, and intercultural relations. Also demonstrated was the fact that cultural history is "shifting from a paradigm of seeing culture as a unified system of values and beliefs toward a paradigm as a series of conflicts over meaning played out along such dividing lines such as race, class, and gender". (p61) In other words, what we did know and understand as history, can be redefined and rewritten based on new ways of challenging the basic beliefs and values we thought were once static and unchanging - the beliefs and values that forged the Western Myth.
posted by BrianGoodson | 10:33 PM
2 Comments:
I think I would agree with many of the authors in this book that race, gender and other identities are not static or fixed. They do change.
But I think to a single individual frozen in a single moment, gender, race, etc. more often than not do seem fixed and static...so basic they can't conceive of a past or a future when they were anything different. That's why I sometimes get hung up on this concept of "conflict." To me, conflict implies a conscious, resisted change in identity...where the individuals are aware of the process and are working for or against it. I'm not so sure that is always the case. While I don't think identities are static, I do think they change in quieter, more subtle, more subconscious ways. They evolve, not just through conflict, but through erosion, weathering, wearing down. This may be a whole lot of fuss over semantics...the authors and I might ultimately be speaking about the same thing. I guess my bottom line is that the "series of conflicts" aren't necessarily great culture wars played out in the consciousness of the groups shaping their race, gender, or class. To me, the much more interesting is the dynamic process that happens quietly and gradually...call it osmosis and evolution instead of conflict and challenge.
You have done a good job of pointing out some of the main themes that run through this work. However, I would have been a little more critical of Castaneda. She does raise invaluable questions about race and gender that must be confronted. We must include women of color in our analysis of Western history. However, I beleive that she takes it much too far. Her argument that Western history must be re-written, and what's more disturbing, re-written from a singular analytical framework is very disturbing.
As you pointed out, Jensen and Miller do tackle the myth on demographics. They do an adequate job at pointing out that women are at times assumed to be missing in areas that they were clearly present. However, to take it a step further and argue that they are in actuality more prevelant in the West and therefore must become a focal point of studies of the West in any area goes too far.
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