Land of Sunshine: Race, Gender, and Regional Development in a California Periodical

Although denied the right to vote, late nineteenth-century women writers engaged in debates over land settlement and expansion through literary texts in regional periodicals. In “Land of Sunshine”: Race, Gender, and Regional Development in a California Periodical, Sigrid Anderson uncovers the political fictions of writers Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Austin, Constance Goddard DuBois, Beatriz Bellido de Luna, and Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far), all of whom were contributors to the Southern California periodical Land of Sunshine.

In this magazine, which generally touted the superiority of the West and its white settlers, women authors undercut triumphalist narratives of racial superiority and rapid development by focusing on the stories of hardship experienced by the marginalized communities displaced by white expansion. By telling stories from the points of view of marginalized peoples who had been disempowered in the political sphere and shaping those stories to offer solutions to land settlement questions, these women writers used literature to make a political point. “Land of Sunshine” unpacks the competing visions of Southern California embedded in this periodical while revealing the essential role of magazines in place-making.
 

Sigrid Anderson is the librarian for English language and literature at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library and a lecturer in the Department of American Culture. She is the author of Fictions of Dissent: Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women’s Writing.