During a time when female reporters were almost always relegated to the society and women's pages of the newspapers, a few hundred notable women broke barriers and wrote their way onto the front pages of metropolitan newspapers. Front-Page Women Journalists, 1920-1950 takes a look at the lives and careers of women who worked successfully in this male-dominated profession. Kathleen A. Cairns 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...

When the town of Pendleton, Oregon, held its first large-scale rodeo, it introduced a new kind of rodeo queen not a traveling cowgirl performer but a young, middle-class woman from its own town. Riding Pretty examines the history, evolution, and significance of the community-sponsored rodeo queen, from the introduction of this new phenomenon at the 1910 Pendleton Round-Up to the advent of Miss Rodeo America in 1956, and places the main theme connection of queens to community within the context of the evolution of rodeo as a spectator sport and the changing concepts of gender relations...

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. Over the next six years she witnessed many of the monumental events that affected the Lakotas, including the inception of the Ghost Dance religion and the fallout from the Wounded Knee massacre in December 1890. She also fell in love with and married Charles Eastman, a Dakota doctor with whom she had six children, and went on to help edit his many popular books on...

In 1901, Philadelphia's celebrity female journalist stepped off a train in Blackfoot, Montana, and into a world of living legends. The miners and frontiersmen, Indians and trappers that Caroline Lockhart met there inspired this beautiful, single, strong-willed woman to live a life she had only dreamed about in what remained of the Wild West.This is the true story of 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. Prep-school educated (she attended the Moravian Seminary for...

In 1924 eight young women drove across the American West in two Model T Fords. In nine weeks they traveled more than nine thousand unpaved miles on an extended car-camping trip through six national parks, -without a man or a gun along.- It was the era of the flapper, but this book 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, Eight Women is a story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Weaving together a...

"Oh how I do wish I could have a little help in maintaining my home. I shall dread the cold winter so much. I don't have very good success getting employment," wrote Emily French in her diary in 1890. Emily was recently divorced but received no alimony or child support. She worked as a laundress, cleaning woman, and nurse, first in the farming community of Elbert, Colorado, then in the growing city of Denver, the mining town of Dake, and back into Denver.

Emily's diary discloses an example of the desperate lives lived by many. Having enough money and food is a source of constant anxiety,...

Over the course of a dozen years, Scottish plant collector Isobel Wylie Hutchison (1889-1982) explored northern latitudes from the Lofoten Islands of Norway to the far reaches of the American Aleutians. To achieve her goals, she traveled by any means available, from rowboats in Greenland to trading schooners and coast-guard vessels in Alaska. When necessary, she journeyed by snowshoe or sled in pursuit of her botanical specimens, accompanied only by strangers who served as guides. In Flowers in the Snow, Gwyneth Hoyle paints a vivid portrait of a woman gloriously out of the step with the...

In this interdisciplinary study of gender, cross-cultural encounters, and federal Indian policy, Margaret D. Jacobs explores the changing relationship between Anglo-American women and Pueblo Indians before and after the turn of the century. During the late nineteenth century, the Pueblos were often characterized by women reformers as barbaric and needing to be "uplifted" into civilization. By the 1920s, however, the Pueblos were widely admired by activist Anglo-American women, who challenged assimilation policies and worked hard to protect the Pueblos' "traditional" way of life. Deftly...

The modern woman who tries to juggle private and public roles with equilibrium will discover a spiritual ancestor in Alice Kirk Grierson. The colonel's lady spent most of her life at army outposts on the nineteenth-century western frontier, where she faced the problems of raising a large family while fulfilling the duties of a commanding officer's wife. Fortunately for history, she left a large and extraordinarily candid correspondence, which has now been edited by Shirley Anne Leckie. Alice was the wife of Benjamin B. Grierson, a major general in the Civil War who won fame for a raid that...

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...