ABOUT THIS BOOK

Contingent Maps is an appeal to all who read, write, and care about the history of women in the North American West. Susan E. Gray and Gayle Gullett, former co-editors of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, argue that the discipline of Western women’s history, despite its many years of accomplishment, remains “the stepsister to both U.S. women’s history and the New Western history.” The problem, they assert, is one of place. Western women’s history remains unhappily chained to one place, Frederick Jackson Turner’s mythical frontier, where white civilization vanquished Indigenous savagery. Drawing on the work of feminist geographers, Gray and Gullett contend that the West is better understood as a place of many places.

Contingent Maps demonstrates how employing place as an analytical tool transforms Western women’s history. Gray and Gullett depict place as not only a physical location but as a way of understanding, as the spatial configuration of power relations that are always in flux. As a place and many places, the West is therefore always being constructed. All maps are contingent, as Gray and Gullett’s reading of the articles in this collection attest. Contingent Maps offers histories of Wests ranging from the nineteenth century to the near present. This synthesis of feminist history and geography has the potential to revitalize the field of Western women’s history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Susan E. Gray is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University. She is the author of The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier, and co-editor of The Identity of the American Midwest: Essays on Regional History.

Gayle Gullett is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University. She is the author of Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911.

REVIEWS

“This anthology makes a bold attempt to redirect women’s history by incorporating and synthesizing the work of feminist geographers in considering place and space.”—Laurie Mercier, co-author of Speaking History: Oral Histories of the American Past, 1865–Present

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“This volume seeks to serve as a call to arms for scholars to utilize the theoretical framework of socially defined ‘place.’ If Western women’s historians heed Gray and Gullett’s call, it could become a foundational volume in the next generation of Western women’s history.”—Cynthia Culver Prescott, author of Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

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“Contingent Maps is a thought-provoking and original collection of essays, a welcome addition to the rich and vibrant field of women’s history for both U.S. and western American historians.”—The Journal of American History

“A collection that enhances our understanding of race, gender, and place in the American West, revealing how Western women’s history continues to be a vibrant—and vital—field.”—New Mexico Historical Review

“A critical addition to the field of Western women’s history.”—Historical Society of Southern California

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"Will provide historians and geographers new insights into regional identities. Inventively, readers are asked to review these essays with place and region foregrounded to bring out latent content conducive to geographic analysis."—Journal of Historical Geography

“These essays are excellent in their own right; Gray and Gullet’s selection of diverse ethnic experiences, and their ability to thread temporal and analytical similarities together deftly, provide important insights into studying women in the American West.”—Southwestern Historical Quarterly

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Identities and Place
Chapter 1 The Woman’s Lodge: Constructing Gender on the Nineteenth-Century Pacific Northwest Plateau
Mary C. Wright
Chapter 2 Mindful Masquerades: Que(e)rying Japanese Immigrant Dress in Turn-of-the-Century San Francisco
Amy Sueyoshi
Chapter 3 Latitude in Mass-Produced Culture’s Capital: New Women and Other Players in Hollywood, 1920–1941
Brett L. Abrams
Chapter 4 Saying “Nothin’ ”: Pachucas and the Languages of Resistance
Catherine S. Ramírez

Part II. Colonized Places
Chapter 5 The Erotics of Racialization: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of California
Yolanda Venegas
Chapter 6 Elle Meets the President: Weaving Navajo Culture and Commerce in the Southwestern Tourist Industry
Laura Jane Moore
Chapter 7 Working on the Domestic Frontier: American Indian Domestic Servants in White Women’s Households in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1920–1940
Margaret D. Jacobs

Part III. Networks and Place
Chapter 8 Docile Children and Dangerous Revolutionaries:
The Racial Hierarchy of Manliness and the Bisbee Deportation of 1917
Katherine Benton-Cohen
Chapter 9 ILGWU Labor Organizers: Chicana and Latina Leadership in the Los Angeles Garment Industry
María A. Gutierrez de Soldatenko
Chapter 10 Esperanza v. City of San Antonio: Politics, Power, and Culture
Amy Kastely
Editors and Contributors
Index