Women and the Myth of the American West
Zcalo Public Square is a magazine of ideas from Arizona State University Knowledge Enterprise. In the American imagination, the rugged, vast landscapes of the West are dotted with solitary men on horsebackcowboys, outlaws, sheriffs. But the frontier was also home to women whose stories don't match the standard Hollywood Western script. What brought women to places like California and Wyoming, and what lives could they lead there? Did Western women experience the same freedoms and adventures as their male counterparts?, In advance of the "What It Means to Be American" launch event "The Women of the West," we asked historians What opportunities did the American West offer women that they may not have had back East?, A land of contradictions as well as opportunity  Virginia Scharff, Let's begin with one of those invisible, obvious facts of history Women had been living in what became "the West" centuries before anyone arrived from "back East." We have plenty of evidence of the ways they claimed homes and made communities, from the remnants of the Cahokia Mounds to the majestic ruins of Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon, where archaeologist Patricia Crown has found evidence of chocolate and macaws from the 12th century. With the advent of European contact, Spanish and Mexican and indigenous women lived inand came fromall directions. So we're really talking about those recent immigrants who came from the eastern U.S. and from across the globe, particularly in the 19th century. In the years after the Civil War, those women found plenty of opportunities in the West that were not available in the East everything from the right to vote to equal pay for women teachers to more liberal divorce laws. Wyoming Territory passed a series of such laws in 1869, partly in an effort to attract more white settlement, which, of course, was also intended to unsettle indigenous people. The West was the first home of women's suffrage in the U.S. with nearly every western state or territory enfranchising women long before women won the right to vote in eastern states. Is the West still a land of opportunity for women? I'd say it's more a land of contradictions. We've got women in public offices and CEO suites throughout the region. But here in the West, women continue to lag behind men in too many areas to declare the "Woman Problem" solved. The chance to be a landowner  Vicki L. Ruiz , Under colonial Spain and newly independent Mexico, married women living in the borderlands of what is now the American Southwest had certain legal advantages not afforded their European-American peers. Under English common law, women, when they married, became feme covert effectively dead in the eyes of the legal system and thus unable to own property separately from their husbands. Conversely, Spanish-Mexican women retained control of their land after marriage and held one-half interest in the community property they shared with their spouses. As I tell my students, imagine you are a woman on the Illinois prairie, the only child of a prosperous farmer. Your parents die, and you inherit the family homestead. You marry, raise crops, and rear several children. But if your husband has a mind to sell the farm and travel west, you cannot stop the sale, and up on the buckboard you go. However, if you grew up near Albuquerque, your husband could not sell the property you had brought to the marriage, thus giving you significant leverage in household decisions. So you might not end up on that buckboard after all. There were numerous landed women of note in the West. For example, Mara Rita Valdez operated Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, now better known as a center of affluence and glamour Beverly Hills. Rodeo Drive takes its name from Rancho Rodeo. After the U.S.-Mexican War, the del Valle family of Southern California held on to Rancho Camulos, and when Ygnacio, the patriarch, died, his widow Isabel and daughter Josefa successfully took over the ranch's operations. Other successful entrepreneurs and property holders, who defended their interests in court when necessary, included San Francisco's Juana Briones, Santa Fe's Gertrudis Barcel, San Antonio-born Mara del Carmen Calvillo, and Phoenix's Trinidad Escalante Swilling. In a frontier environment, they utilized the legal system to their advantage as women unafraid to exert their own authority. Mobilitybut not necessarily upward  Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, When we talk about "the American West" and the women who made it their home, what do we really mean? Often, the term conjures images of those who migrated east to west, specifically from the East Coast of the United States. However, the region understood as the "West" was home to indigenous and Mexican women who lived here before Anglo-American and African-American settlers. Some of these women who already resided in the West experienced forced physical, cultural, economic, and political dislocation to make space for "pioneers." Women also migrated from the "East," meaning Asia and other parts of the Eastern hemisphere. They also came "North" and "South" within the western hemisphere. Asking about distinct opportunities for women in the West also assumes that these opportunities didn't exist elsewhere. This is a long-standing belief in U.S. society that the West epitomizes the American dream and the basis of American identity. This region of presumably "free land" provided opportunities for economic mobility and self-reinvention. But not all women could participate in these opportunities. State policies throughout much of the Western states denied Asians the right to own land as well as interracially marry. Furthermore, some women were forced to migrate to work in the sex industry, one of the few jobs allocated for women in the male-dominated western "frontier.", Certainly, many people, including women, relocated to the West based on the belief that opportunity awaited them. For example, Margaret Chung, the subject of a biography I wrote, became the first American-born Chinese female physician. Her mother had been sold into servitude and prostitution, and her father struggled to make ends meet through most of their family's lives. However, Margaret found religious and educational allies to obtain a medical education. During World War II, she served as an adopted "mother" to over 1,000 "sons"Anglo-American soldiers, entertainers, and politicians. On the surface, this appears to be a success story. However, Chung's economic and social rise also depended upon her manipulation of her identity, including strategically performing a projected role of foreign womanhood. At times, despite her status as a professional woman, Chung played the role of an Oriental mammy. Her story, like others of women in the West, was not a simple one of upward mobility. The opportunity to learn from one another  Jane Simonsen, The American West presented opportunities for some 19th-century Anglo-American women to cultivate a stronger sense of authority by positioning their domestic work as part of nation-building. Middle-class white women reformers interested in promoting Native American assimilation, for example, worked to define the well-kept single-family homeand the woman at its centeras a key marker of civilization. Their widely recognized power as moral guardians of the home justified their action and work outside of the narrow domestic realm, and these reformers carved out a niche for themselves among the politicians, scientists, and field workers who sought to "civilize" the western tribes in the latter half of the 19th century. Yet working among Native Americans in western locations, from the Nez Perce in northern Idaho to the Cahuilla of Southern California, gave these women the opportunity to measure themselves against their indigenous counterpartsand at least some found their own civilization lacking. Close contact with indigenous women sometimes held up a harsh mirror to "civilized" society, which devalued the very work these women sought to promote. For their part, indigenous women took advantage of new resources on their reservations when they could, and were cannily selective in what they chose to adopt of the lessons and models of conduct offered by Anglo reformers. The reservation system, land allotment, and reform movements disrupted many social ties and work patterns. Still, resourceful indigenous women sought opportunities to earn seasonal income, own property, and provide health care to their families. By maintaining some familiar forms of work, such as farming, foraging, and needlework, women helped to mitigate new economic realities on the reservation. Remaining at the margins of the new economy, indigenous women used new trade opportunities to maintain some of the very systems that reformers had hoped to destroy.