Review by Choice Review
Historian Leckie (emer., Univ. of Central Florida) and anthropologist Parezo (Univ. of Arizona) introduce biographies of 10 women born around 1900 who wrote significant historical studies of the US West: Annie Heloise Abel, Angie Debo, Mari Sandoz, Isabel T. Kelly, Marjorie Ferguson Lambert, Alice Marriott, Ella C. Deloria, Zitkala-sa (Gertrude Bonnin), Dorothea Cross Leighton, and Ruth M. Underhill. Each impressed her professors with intellectual brilliance and scholarly ability; none were rewarded with tenured academic positions, as men would have been. Perhaps because as women they were socialized to be more sensitive to others, they researched and wrote about Indian people as well as the Euroamerican men whom male historians focused on. Ethnohistorians decades before the term was invented, the women challenged Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier hypothesis" that brave, hardworking settler families developed US democracy on the western frontier. As historians, these women scholars described the brutalizing effect of the frontier, where Indian nations fought for homelands; as anthropologists, they pioneered interviewing of and writing about Indian women. Most wrote deliberately jargon-free, interesting, widely read books, disdained by tenured male professors. These biographies argue that these women laid the groundwork for the revisionist "New West" histories that first appeared in the late 1970s. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. A. B. Kehoe University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
