Mae West, wise-cracking vaudeville performer, was one of the most controversial figures of her era. Rarely, however, do people think of Mae West as a writer. In Three Plays By Mae West, Lillian Schlissel brings this underexplored part of West's career to the fore by offering for the first time in book form, three of the plays West wrote in the 1920s--Sex (1926), The Drag (1927) and Pleasure Man (1928). With an insightful introduction by Schlissel, this book offers a unique look into to the life and early career of this legendary stage and screen...

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.

Lillian Schlissel is a professor emerita of English and American Studies at Brooklyn College-CUNY. She is the author of numerous books, including The Western Women's Reader (with Catherine Lavender) and Black Frontiers: A History of African American Heroes in the Old West. Byrd Gibbens is a professor of English at the University of New Mexico, Valencia campus, and the author of This Is a Strange Country: Letters of a Western Family 1880-1906.Elizabeth Hampsten is a professor of English at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, and the author of Settlers' Children: Growing Up on the...

Mollie is a vivid, high-spirited, and intensely feminine account of city people homesteading in the raw, new land west of the Missouri. More particularly, it is the story of Mollie herself - just turned eighteen when the Dorseys left Indianapolis for Nebraska Territory - of her reaction to the transplantation and to her new life which included rattlesnakes, blizzards, Indians, and the hardships of pioneer life. Mollie describes her nearly three-year engagement to Byron Sanford, during which time she worked as a seamstress, teacher, and cook. Following her wedding Mollie's life took a new...

More than a quarter of a million Americans crossed the continental United States between 1840 and 1870, going west in one of the greatest migrations of modern times. The frontiersmen have become an integral part of our history and folklore, but the Westering experiences of American women are equally central to an accurate picture of what life was like on the frontier.
Through the diaries, letters, and reminiscences of women who participated in this migration, Women s Diaries of the Westward Journey gives us primary source material on the lives of these women, who kept campfires...

In recent years the study of western history has been transformed by scholarship on the actual experiences of the women who settled the West. The essays gathered here, first presented at a 1984 conference sponsored by the Southwest Institute for Research on Women, analyze and interpret this new body of research. Each essay is accompanied by several commentaries that reveal the complex multicultural character of the West through the experiences of American Indian, Mexican-American, and Anglo-American (including Mormon) women. The discussion of domestic ideology examines what values Anglo women...