Books in the Women in the West series

""With eighty men I could ride through the entire Sioux nation."" The story of the Fetterman Fight, near Fort Phil Kearney in present-day Wyoming in 1866, is based entirely on this infamous declaration attributed to Capt. William J. Fetterman. Give Me Eighty Men challenges standard interpretations of this American myth.

Margaret Bell (1888-1982) was a rancher and horse breaker. Bell was seven when her mother died, and her stepfather, moved Bell and her three younger half-sisters to the Canadian plains and a life of extreme poverty, hardship, and abuse. This memoir tells the story of a frontier childhood on the high plains of Montana and Canada.

Tells the tale of Nellie May Madison, the first woman on Death Row in California. This story offers a glimpse into law and disorder in 1930s Los Angeles and presents a remarkable character whose plight focuses on the status of women, the workings of the media and the judiciary system, and the stratification of society in her time.

Tells the story of female students' early mixed-gender encounters at four institutions: Iowa Agricultural College, the University of Nebraska, Oregon Agricultural College, and Utah State Agricultural College. This work illuminates the diversity of other courses of study available to female students, including the sciences, literature, and law.

In 1910, when the town of Pendleton, Oregon, held its first large-scale rodeo, the Pendleton Round-Up, it introduced a new kind of rodeo queen - not a traveling cowgirl performer but a young, middle-class woman from its own town. This work examines the history, evolution, and significance of the community-sponsored rodeo queen.

Emily French was divorced but received no alimony or child support. She worked as a laundress, cleaning woman, and nurse. Having enough money and food is a source of constant anxiety, but her deepest fears center on the loss of family and of home. She becomes discouraged but never gives up and always believes things will change.

Examines how American leftist radicalism was experienced through the lives of three women who led the California branches of the Communist Party from its founding in 1919 to 1992. Separately, each woman represents a generation of the membership and activism of the party. Collectively their histories represent the story of all women who have devoted their lives to radicalism in America.

Tells the story of a group of farm girls who met while attending Iowa's Teacher's College and who shared a "yen to see some things." A blend of oral and written history, adventure, memoir, and just plain heartfelt living, this book presents a story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

The modern woman who tries to juggle private and public roles with equilibrium will discover a spiritual ancestor in Alice Kirk Grierson, wife of Benjamin B Grierson, a major general in the Civil War. This book presents Alice's letters to her husband which offer insight into nineteenth-century attitudes toward birth control, and race relations.

Examines the impact of the black press through the narrative of Brown's life and work.

Examines women's work and family lives in Sweetwater County in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demonstrating how survival on the ranching and mining frontier heightened the value of group cooperation in ways that bred conservative attitudes toward gender.

Gives a sense of the heady days as Leadville became a major mining center. This title describes the challenges of life for women in the Pacific Northwest. It offers a glimpse of the operations of the mission system while illuminating the perils of living with the acquisitive Americans.

A study of women conservationists that provides a needed corrective to the male-dominated historiography of environmental studies.

Called "Her Majesty" because of her resemblance to Queen Victoria and known as "the measuring woman" among the Indians whose land allotments she administered, Alice Fletcher (1838-1923) commanded respect from both friend and foe. She was the foremost woman anthropologist in the United States in the nineteenth century and instrumental in the adoption of the policy of severalty that dominated Indian affairs in the 1880s. This is the full and intimate story of a woman who, as she grew in understanding of Indian ways, came to recognize that she was the one who was alien, a stranger in her native land. Joan Mark recreates the long and active life of Alice Fletcher from diaries, correspondence, and other records, placing her achievements for the first time in a feminist perspective. Sustained by a sense of mission, Alice Fletcher challenged her society's definition of what women could be and do.

Combining Stewart's letters with Susanne K George's extensive research, this book presents a candid portrait of Elinore, the illness, disappointments, and grinding hard work that lay behind her genial public persona; the family, neighbors, and correspondents who peopled her letter-stories and shared her life.

Tells the story of Caroline Lockhart, a woman whose work and life teetered between realism and romanticism and who wrote novels 'like a man' yet ran her businesses and love affairs like a liberated feminist.

The writings of the American West have long dealt with masculine ideals. This book showcases ten women intellectuals who were pioneers in the writing of Indian-centred history, ethnology, and folklore that incorporated the insights, voices, and perspectives of American Indians. It also includes individual biographies describing their struggles.

The West offered new opportunities for middle-class eastern families who endured hardship, uncertainty, and displacement during the Civil War, and struggled to carve out social space in the war's aftermath. This book examines the motivations of late-nineteenth-century middle-class migrants who moved west to build communities.

Explores the changing relationship between Anglo-American women and Pueblo Indians before and after the turn of the century. This title argues that the impetus for this transformation in perception rests less with Native peoples and with fundamental shifts in the ways Anglo-American women saw their own sexuality and social responsibilities.

Raised in a sheltered, puritanical household in New England, Elaine Goodale Eastman (1863-1953) followed her conscience and calling in 1885 when she traveled west and opened a school on the Great Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. This biography draws on more than one hundred letters from Elaine that were collected by one of her sisters.

Looks at the lives and careers of women who worked in the male-dominated profession of journalism. The author examines the roles women played in early-twentieth-century newspaper journalism and the influence they had on future generations of newspaperwomen through the examples of Agness Underwood, Charlotta Bass, and Ruth Finney.

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America.