Women and Gender in the American West
I found almost all of the essays in this book very interesting, and even I think I understood most of them. I was surprised to find even the most of the essays which contained a great deal of theory were written well enough to be intelligible to the general history reader. (Yes in women’s history I put myself in that category) I thought the first essay "The Gentle Tamers Revisited" a very good introduction as it clearly framed many of the important questions and identified the stereotypes. It also informed us that the number and proportion of women in particular areas of the west differed significantly by place and time. The essay Going About and Doing Good: the politics of Benevolence was interesting too in providing detail to a aspect of the social history of San Francisco.
I thought that The Eastmans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men was poorly reasoned. . Why would marriage between Mabel Luhan and ANYONE be seen as representative of the “reality” of interracial marriage. Even today her behavior would be considered somewhat eccentric given the “facts” of her sex life. The author asks “Why did Mabel Dodge Luhan and a significant number of white women suddenly become so openly passionate about Indian men?” (p322) How many? How many makes whatever number she postulates “significant?” I don’t think that a “significant” number of people “suddenly” became interested because of the influence of “an emerging anthropological theory- cultural relativism…” (p. 323) While there very well may have been “shifting conceptions of race and gender in the period from 1875 to 1935” I don’t believe that these circumstances, involving hardly “typical” people, make the case. Today there are plenty of stories about the marriages and sexual practices of some show-business celebrities - but they attract publicity just because of the novelty of the practices, their great wealth , their deliberate celebrity or all of the above.
I found portions of “A memory sweet to soldiers…” interesting and other parts hard to understand, sometimes for the theory and sometimes for the argument. After several pages of heavy theory my hopes ran high when I read “ My argument, then, runs like this: Gender is a relation of difference and domination constructed such that is appears “natural” in day-to-day life. The West is historically a place of disrupted gender relations and stunning racial and ethnic diversity, a diversity structured by inequality and injustice.” I would say that gender differences and domination are more than “appearances.” And what makes for “stunning” racial and ethnic diversity? Her statement the “we need to ask what studying gender can do for the history of the West, and what studying the West can do for the politics of gender” does seem to be very true. (p. 499)
I found Johnson's sexual textual analysis to be a bit sophomoric – calling attention to the caption on the cover illustration stating that Calamity Jane in buckskin leveling …. “a pair of cocked revolvers. ” How else does one describe a revolver, the hammer of which is in a position that it may be immediately fired (unless of course it is a "double action" revolver. Just think how she could have worked "double action" into her analysis. Later on (p. 508) she suggests that the book titles in Frontier Women, Westering Women, the Women’s West, Western Women: Their Land Their Lives were "crafted as if to say, ‘The game’s over, boys. It’s my ball and I’m going home.'" This sets up her "clever" double entendre in the next sentence "but the trouble was that the boys had balls too, and so instead of stopping the contest…" WOW.
And Johnson certainly should understand that even if the public HAD KNOWN that Custer allegedly “took sensual pleasure in his cinnamon-scented locks...” he would have been a celebrity, maybe even a hero just BECAUSE he died as he did. Not heroically to everyone but spectacularly nonetheless. If she really doesn’t know that then she needs to do a bit more reading and living in the world that non-academics live in. Analyze that!
I thought that The Eastmans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men was poorly reasoned. . Why would marriage between Mabel Luhan and ANYONE be seen as representative of the “reality” of interracial marriage. Even today her behavior would be considered somewhat eccentric given the “facts” of her sex life. The author asks “Why did Mabel Dodge Luhan and a significant number of white women suddenly become so openly passionate about Indian men?” (p322) How many? How many makes whatever number she postulates “significant?” I don’t think that a “significant” number of people “suddenly” became interested because of the influence of “an emerging anthropological theory- cultural relativism…” (p. 323) While there very well may have been “shifting conceptions of race and gender in the period from 1875 to 1935” I don’t believe that these circumstances, involving hardly “typical” people, make the case. Today there are plenty of stories about the marriages and sexual practices of some show-business celebrities - but they attract publicity just because of the novelty of the practices, their great wealth , their deliberate celebrity or all of the above.
I found portions of “A memory sweet to soldiers…” interesting and other parts hard to understand, sometimes for the theory and sometimes for the argument. After several pages of heavy theory my hopes ran high when I read “ My argument, then, runs like this: Gender is a relation of difference and domination constructed such that is appears “natural” in day-to-day life. The West is historically a place of disrupted gender relations and stunning racial and ethnic diversity, a diversity structured by inequality and injustice.” I would say that gender differences and domination are more than “appearances.” And what makes for “stunning” racial and ethnic diversity? Her statement the “we need to ask what studying gender can do for the history of the West, and what studying the West can do for the politics of gender” does seem to be very true. (p. 499)
I found Johnson's sexual textual analysis to be a bit sophomoric – calling attention to the caption on the cover illustration stating that Calamity Jane in buckskin leveling …. “a pair of cocked revolvers. ” How else does one describe a revolver, the hammer of which is in a position that it may be immediately fired (unless of course it is a "double action" revolver. Just think how she could have worked "double action" into her analysis. Later on (p. 508) she suggests that the book titles in Frontier Women, Westering Women, the Women’s West, Western Women: Their Land Their Lives were "crafted as if to say, ‘The game’s over, boys. It’s my ball and I’m going home.'" This sets up her "clever" double entendre in the next sentence "but the trouble was that the boys had balls too, and so instead of stopping the contest…" WOW.
And Johnson certainly should understand that even if the public HAD KNOWN that Custer allegedly “took sensual pleasure in his cinnamon-scented locks...” he would have been a celebrity, maybe even a hero just BECAUSE he died as he did. Not heroically to everyone but spectacularly nonetheless. If she really doesn’t know that then she needs to do a bit more reading and living in the world that non-academics live in. Analyze that!
posted by Jim Johnson at 10:54 PM
3 Comments:
Hi Jim. Enjoyed your blog, especially the last two paragraphs! I had problems with Johnson's Custer comments, too, esp. the phrase "an interestingly gendered and unambiguously sexualized Custer, now an object of desire for his officers and men"
(p. 108). Re your first sentence, "I think I understood most of [the essays]": I envy you; I admit I am having a struggle with many of them--the oft-used theoretical semantics can be like a foreign language (more on this in my blog). I wonder if I am experiencing "sophomore slump"--I've noticed that after unrelenting class work, somewhere along the 1/2-2/3 done point, I need a mental break and lose some enthusiasm. I think I may regain it in next week's book.
Jim,
Liked your take on Women and Gender. I agree with you to a point, but I found the theory dull and tortured and unsupported. I also think that many of the analyses, especially the interracial marriages of the Eastmans and Luhans, especially Mabel Luhans marriage to Tony, was hard to take. What is the point? I don't believe that an expose' of someone's abberrant behaivior is necessarily good history or particulalry revealing. You drew a nice comparison to celebrity escapades today -- I suppose someone will capture today's antics one hundred years from now and draw conclusions about the early 21st century. If this was an attempt to use this case study as proof, it seems to me that the small sample size leaves the proof wanting.
All in all, Women and Gender was not exactly my cup of tea. I treid to read it with an open mind. I really did. You were more receptive than I. Perhaps tomorrow's discussion will reveal things to me that I missed.
Good summary in your blog. Thanks!
Ray
I've done a sizable amount of work and study of the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. And one of the things that comes up the historiography is a certain uneasiness among fair scholars about just how easy is it to find what you are looking for in the World's Fair. Want to prove African-Americans were oppressed, you can find it. Want to prove they demonstrated tremendous agency, you can find that too. Gender parameters were expanding, gender parameters were contracting, American mass culture reigned supreme, American mass culture took a hit, etc., etc. My point is, after reading this book and then Jim's and Ray's comments, I wonder if the American West doesn't suffer from the same sort of panacea effect. You can find a case study out there for just about anything...even more so when you go into Canada and the Southwest for your source material. When trying to make arguments about how gender was defined and created, does using the West as your microcosm further the overall conversation, or just add to the cacophony?
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