Daughters of Joy will prove to be a gold mine of information, since the author's massive research makes the book a primary source as well as a thoughtful study of soiled doves on the frontier.....Butler has portrayed the stark realities of prostitution in the American West With sensitivity and insight.

Deals with the ugly realities that made life in prison even more difficult for women in the American West, revealing lives and adding their voices and experiences to the saga of the American West.

Tracing events from the pre-history to the present day, this book offers a concise and accessible history of the American West.

• Explores the complex interactions between and among cultures in the American West
  
• Chronologically organized and informed by the latest scholarship
  
• Grounded in attention to race, class, gender, and the environment, the text focuses on social, economic, and political forces that shaped the lived experiences of diverse westerners and influenced the patterns of western history.

Tracing events from the pre-history to the present day, this book offers a concise and accessible history of the American West.

• Explores the complex interactions between and among cultures in the American West
  
• Chronologically organized and informed by the latest scholarship
  
• Grounded in attention to race, class, gender, and the environment, the text focuses on social, economic, and political forces that shaped the lived experiences of diverse westerners and influenced the patterns of western history.

The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on the trail between Omaha and Salt Lake City; Rachel Fisher, who buried both her husband and her little girl before reaching Oregon. Still others make themselves heard, starting out from different places and recording details along the way, from the mundane to the soul-shattering and spirit-lifting.

Roman Catholic sisters first traveled to the American West as providers of social services, education, and medical assistance. In Across God's Frontiers, Anne M. Butler traces the ways in which sisters challenged and reconfigured contemporary ideas about women, work, religion, and the West; moreover, she demonstrates how religious life became a vehicle for increasing women's agency and power.
Moving to the West introduced significant changes for these women, including public employment and thoroughly unconventional monastic lives. As nuns and sisters adjusted to new circumstances...