New Women in the Old West

A riveting history of the American West told for the first time through the pioneering women who used the challenges of migration and settlement as opportunities to advocate for their rights,and transformed the country in the process Between 1840 and 1910hundreds of thousands of men and women traveled deep into the underdeveloped American Westlured by the prospect of adventure and opportunityand galvanized by the spirit of Manifest Destiny. Alongside this rapid expansion of the United Statesa secondoverlapping social shift was taking place: survival in a settler society busy building itself from scratch required two equally hardworking partnerscompelling women to compromise eastern sensibilities and take on some of the same responsibilities as their husbands. At a time when women had very few legal or economic–much less political–rightsthese women soon proved they were just as essential as men to westward expansion. Their efforts to attain equality by acting as men’s equals paid offand well before the Nineteenth Amendmentthey became the first American women to vote. During the mid-nineteenth centurythe fight for women’s suffrage was radical indeed. But as the traditional domestic model of womanhood shifted to one that included public servicethe women of the West were becoming not only coproviders for their families but also town mothers who established schoolschurchesand philanthropies. At a time of few economic opportunities elsewherethey claimed their own homesteads and graduated from newfree coeducational colleges that provided career alternatives to marriage. In 1869the men of the Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote–partly to persuade more of them to move west–but with this victory in handwestern suffragists fought relentlessly until the rest of the region followed suit. By 1914 most western women could vote–a right still denied to women in every eastern state. In New Women in the Old WestWinifred Gallagher brings to life the riveting history of the little-known women–the WhiteBlackand Asian settlersand the Native Americans and Hispanics they displaced–who played monumental roles in one of America’s most transformative periods. Like western history in generalthe record of women’s crucial place at the intersection of settlement and suffrage has long been overlooked. Drawing on an extraordinary collection of researchGallagher weaves together the striking legacy of the persistent individuals who not only created homes on weather-wracked prairies and built communities in muddy mining campsbut also played a vitalunrecognized role in the women’s rights movement and forever redefined the \