Contingent Maps: Rethinking Western Women's History and the North American West (Women's Western Voices)

ISBN 10: 0816528896 / ISBN 13: 9780816528899

Published by University of Arizona Press, 2014

About this Item

Reading copy. May have signs of wear and previous use scuffs, library copy, highlighting, writing, and underlining . Dust jacket may be missing. 100% GUARANTEE! Shipped with delivery confirmation. If you're not satisfied with purchase please return item for full refund.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Contingent Maps: Rethinking Western Women's History and the North American West (Women's Western Voices)
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816528896
• ISBN 13: 9780816528899
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: acceptable

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.