Women and the New Western History

Susan Armitage

We need to begin by thinking clearly about the range of meanings encompassed in the phrase “meeting ground of peoples.”  Meetings can be peaceful or violent, and they can result in  destruction, amalgamation, or any number of mixed outcomes between these extremes.  Because of the way most western history has been written, we think first of violent conflict—Indian wars, in particular—and of the rapid European-American conquest of the western part of the continent in the mid to late nineteenth century.  But, this nineteenth-century focus leads to a simple and truncated view of western history.  A longer, more gendered perspective yields a much more complicated and fascinating story of real people of one cultural group, encumbered with their own ideas about race and gender, meeting strangers with different cultural ideas.  Let’s look first at the impact of some meetings on the first western women: Native American women.

It was, however, rare for a Native American tribe to live continuously at peace with all of its neighbors.  The possibility of capture put women at extreme risk in hostile situations.  War parties prized women and young children; invaders usually killed adult males whom they considered too dangerous and troublesome.  Captive women had several benefits, especially as workers and as childbearers.  They added to both the productive and reproductive capacity of their captors.  Captivity, rather than death, was the most common fate of women when Native American societies warred with each other.  As one can see from these two examples, women were valued for their sexuality as well as for their abilities to produce and trade. 

In contrast, European contact brought with it an almost exclusive emphasis solely on the sexuality of native women.  For example, Spanish men mixed freely with Indian women, thus creating the Mexican people in the early sixteenth century.  Similarly, in the Canadian West, unions between Indian women and European fur trappers of the Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Companies created the Métis (literally “mixed” in French.)  And in the nineteenth-century United States West, the mixed-race offspring of American trappers and traders and their Indian wives were more numerous than most European-American settlers, conditioned to think in rigid black and white terms, recognized.  Nevertheless, the rapid European-American settlement of the American West forestalled the growth of the mixed race or mestizo population that would undoubtedly have occurred otherwise. 

Women’s sexuality played an important role in European conquest in other ways as well.  It is well documented that Spanish-Mexican soldiers in Spanish California and New Mexico used rape as a weapon of conquest.  Intermarriage, too, served as a tool of conquest.  European-American traders, eager to advance economically, often married the daughters of the Spanish-Mexican elite in California, New Mexico, and Texas before 1848.  Women of Northwest Indian coastal groups traded furs with American and British ships, and soon found themselves trading sex as well as sea otter pelts.  Europeans, unaccustomed to women in trading roles, uniformly labelled the women’s sexual activity as prostitution.  Captivity practiced by Europeans as well as Native Americans and ransom of both Indian and Spanish-Mexican women were two important elements in the relationship between native groups and Spanish-Mexican settlements in colonial New Mexico.  The most famous captive came from the Northern Plains.  Sacajawea, a Shoshone girl captured by the Hidatsa and later traded to the French-Canadian Charbonneau accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804. 

As these examples show, the first and most common result of the “meetings” of Europeans and indigenous peoples in the American West was sexual contact between interloping males and native women.  These sexual contacts may have been as forcible as rape or as mutual and formal as an elaborate church wedding.  In either case, the result was the engendering of new, mixed-race offspring. 

Events surrounding the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 provide the clearest examples of the differences women made.  Large numbers of Chinese men first came to the United States in the 1860s to build the Central Pacific railroad.  (The first transcontinental rail link was completed in 1869.)  When many Chinese subsequently moved into agriculture, they met a wall of prejudice that culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which admitted only diplomats and members of their immediate families, students and teachers, and merchants.  Laborers already in the United States, many of whom had wives in China, were unable to bring their spouses to the United States.  Thus, federal legislation skewed the normal process of settlement and the Chinese in America were subsequently characterized and reviled for the very “bachelor society” that United States laws had created.  In addition, western states passed antimiscengenation laws outlawing intermarriage between Chinese (later Filipino and Japanese) men and European-American women.  These immigration and marriage laws remained in force until after World War II, thereby preventing the vast majority of Asian immigrants from building communities  with the promise of continuity through the generations.

The community-building activities of European-American women have not yet been fully documented.  This is partly because the boisterous boosterism of male business interests in western towns  drowned out the evidence of smaller-scale and more informal efforts by women.  Historians are just now beginning to recognize the extent of women’s activities as they study the vast network of women’s clubs that stretched across the West in the nineteenth century. 

A more basic reason for the dearth of research on women’s community building in the West is that many studies of European-American pioneer women still suffer from the what might be called the “snapshot fallacy.”  Because of historians’ fascination with the initial experiences of settlement, and because of the nature of existing sources, many have often forgotten to ask what happened after the first encounter with the West.  Those first reactions have left some vivid vignettes like this one from Kansas:

When our covered wagon drew up beside the door of the one-roomed sod house that father had provided, he helped mother down and I remember how her face looked as she gazed about that barren farm, then threw her arms about his neck and gave way to the only fit of weeping I ever remember seeing her indulge in.

Some of the fullest accounts of female community-building have resulted from studying women of color.  In Colorado during the early part of the twentieth century, women maintained Dearfield, a Black homesteading community while their men raised cash through wage work.  As one woman recalled, “the Negro women, of course, were the backbone of the church, the backbone of the family, they were the backbone of the social life, everything.”  Similarly, the success of Hispañas in maintaining their communities in northern New Mexico while the men were away doing distant wage work clearly indicates that the definition of “community” needs to be  wider and less place-specific.  A new definition that encompasses long-distance relationships will cause some rethinking of classic western figures like the “single” men who participated in the West’s many gold rushes.  European-American women’s letters and diaries reveal that many of these men were supported, financially as well as emotionally, by the wives they left behind.  Women not only kept farms and businesses going while the men were away, but they also did their best to stay in communication by mail and in some cases even sent money to help unsuccessful goldseekers.

By far the most common intercultural experience of women of color was that of defending their families and communities from the interference of European Americans bent on “civilizing” them.  The cultural damage done by missionary efforts to Native Americans—boarding schools, for example—has been well documented, and there are a few biographies of women such as the Paiute woman, Sarah Winnemucca, who attempted to act as cultural brokers between their people and European-American officials.  However, we have only recently realized the rich cultural and historical insights available at the “cultural crossroads” where women of different races and classes meet.  The bonds of gender, which strongly attracted many European-American women to interracial reform and humanitarian efforts in the West, were offset by racial, class, and cultural differences between women of which the reformers were often unaware.  A number of women’s historians are now studying the complex process in which both sides of the exchange adapted to, resisted, and changed each other.  The richness of the first few historical studies of western women in these “relations of rescue” attests to the promise of work still to come. 

For too long, western historians were preoccupied with “pioneers,” by which they meant only the first European Americans to settle in a particular town or region.  This made it very hard to get western history out of the nineteenth century.  One happy result of the New Western History is a new appreciation of the continuities between nineteenth- and twentieth-century western history, especially the similarity between the experience of twentieth-century immigrants to that of the fabled nineteenth-century pioneers.  In the broadest sense, issues of adaptation are similar over time; what changes is the extent and effectiveness of opposition from earlier peoples, whether it be Red Cloud and the Sioux who closed the Bozeman Trail to goldseekers in 1866, or the Anti-Asiatic Associations that opposed Japanese landownership on the west coast in the 1920s.  Indeed, one author gave her recent study of an agricultural community founded by Japanese immigrants the title, Farming the Home Place, a phrase clearly meant to underline the basic continuities of immigration and settlement.

The linked concepts of work and family are essential for  historians who wish to compare the successive waves of immigration to the West.  Asian-American and Chicañoa/o historians have taken the lead in western labor studies.  They have expanded the regional boundaries of traditional western history by linking the work patterns of (mostly male) racial and ethnic immigrants to international labor movements.  Studies of the wage work of Asian and Chicaña women have, in their turn, provided the field of women’s labor history with valuable comparisons with the industrial work of Italian, Jewish, Slavic, and other immigrant women in the East.  Comparative study of the work available to immigrant women provides a new source of insight into the ways in which different regions of the United States have structured racial and class differences.

In a different way, recognition of the limited range of wage work available to European-American women in the West until well into the twentieth century has led to other comparisons which at first seemed startling.  Horace Greeley doubtless did not realize how gender-specific he was when he urged opportunity-seekers to “Go West, young man.”  Because of the economic underdevelopment of the West, the place of economic opportunity for the single woman was not the West but the eastern city.  This observation has led to the realization that popularly-held myths about the West as the site of freedom and opportunity were deeply gendered.  It also raised the question of the nature of opportunity for western women.

One clear answer to this question was that opportunity for women in the West was often not so much individual as familial.  Native Americans, long-settled and recent Mexicanas, and immigrant families of all races and time periods have all worked for and with their families over the span of western history.  As we have seen, the most common unit of economic survival and adaptation was not the solitary man but, rather, the family.  One must agree with Kathleen Neils Conzen’s forthright summation that “a family story lies at the heart of American western history.”  Women are central to the study of family adaptation to the land and to other peoples.  In all societies, women’s work has included a commitment to the future: to nurture the next generation and transmit the central messages of the culture to them.  This was as true in the American West as elsewhere, but the task was complicated by the fluid patterns of conquest, migration, and intermingling of peoples that continue to make the West a “meeting ground of peoples.”  Exploring and explaining women’s activities in the multicultural arenas described in this essay—and rewriting western history to reflect those findings—will keep western history new for many years to come. 

\Armitage, Susan and Elizabeth Jameson, eds. The Women’s West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.

Canfield, Gae Whitney. Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, l983.

Chan, Sucheng. This Bitter-Sweet Soil: The Chinese in California  Agriculture, l860-l910. Berkeley: University of California Press, l986.

Conzen, Kathleen. “A Saga of Families.” In Clyde Milner II, Carol O’Connor, and Martha Sandweiss,eds. The Oxford History of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, l994.

de la Torre, Adele and Beatriz M. Pesquera, eds. Building With Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, l993.

Deutsch, Sarah. No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, l880-l940. New York: Oxford University Press, l987.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. Legacy of Conquest. New York: W. W. Norton, l987.

Matsumoto, Valerie. Farming the Home Place: The Japanese  Community of Cortez, CA. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, l994.

Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West     l847-l939. New York: Oxford University Press, l990.

Peavy, Linda and Ursula Smith. Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement: Life on the Home Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, l994.

Ruiz, Vicki. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization and the California Food Processing Industy, l930-l950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, l987.

Schlissel, Lillian, Vicki Ruiz, and Jan Monk, eds. Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, l988.

Susan Armitage is Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Washington State University.  She is the coeditor of The Women's West (1987) and So Much to Be Done (1990).