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Virginia Scharff
Twenty Thousand Roads
Women, Movement, and the West
$21.95, £12.95 paperback
978-0-520-23777-3
Available Now
249 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 7 maps, 2 b/w illustrations
December 2002, Available worldwide
Categories: History; Women's Studies; California & the West
December 2002, Available worldwide
Categories: History; Women's Studies; California & the West
Downloadable eBook version available:
Adobe E-Reader at ebooks.com, $15.95
Adobe E-Reader at ebooks.com, $15.95
"A compelling storyteller who bases her work on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, she avoids the danger of episodic, disconnected chapters through her framework, style, and wit. . . . Both scholars and novices will find their view of women and the West enriched by Scharff's account. The landscape does indeed shift when women move."—Kathryn M. Daynes, The Historian
"The unspoken bias against women who leave hearth and home is exposed and debunked in 'Twenty Thousand Roads,' a scholarly but also rhapsodic study of the role of women in the making of the American West and, quite literally, how the freedom to get up and go changed what it meant to be a woman. . . . Scharff displays a genius for extracting the hidden and often profound meanings of ostensibly ordinary lives."—Los Angeles Times Book Review, "Westwords" column
"The unspoken bias against women who leave hearth and home is exposed and debunked in 'Twenty Thousand Roads,' a scholarly but also rhapsodic study of the role of women in the making of the American West and, quite literally, how the freedom to get up and go changed what it meant to be a woman. . . . Scharff displays a genius for extracting the hidden and often profound meanings of ostensibly ordinary lives."—Los Angeles Times Book Review, "Westwords" column
"Virginia Scharff's wonderfully readable account of women in motion complicates and enriches our understanding of the nineteenth and twentieth century Wests. Her gendered remapping of the regional landscape explodes traditional notions of western movement. All students of women and gender, travel and place, the West and America, would do well to read this excellent book."—David M. Wrobel, author of Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West
"Virginia Scharff claims for women what has long been central to the masculine mythology of the West—free movement and its many gifts, real and imagined. Her book is as exhilarating and as intellectually and emotionally expansive as our enduring dream of flight across the American land."—Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado
"Brilliant is not a word that is often a part of my critical vocabulary, but brilliantly is how Twenty Thousand Roads begins. When writing of Sacagawea and Susan Magoffin, Virginia Scharff shows vividly how a single life can be a source of sophisticated cultural analysis without becoming an academic artifact or an object of condescension."—Richard White, author of It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West
"Virginia Scharff claims for women what has long been central to the masculine mythology of the West—free movement and its many gifts, real and imagined. Her book is as exhilarating and as intellectually and emotionally expansive as our enduring dream of flight across the American land."—Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado
"Brilliant is not a word that is often a part of my critical vocabulary, but brilliantly is how Twenty Thousand Roads begins. When writing of Sacagawea and Susan Magoffin, Virginia Scharff shows vividly how a single life can be a source of sophisticated cultural analysis without becoming an academic artifact or an object of condescension."—Richard White, author of It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West
From Sacagawea's travels with Lewis and Clark to rock groupie Pamela Des Barres's California trips, women have moved across the American West with profound consequences for the people and places they encounter. Virginia Scharff revisits a grand theme of United States history—our restless, relentless westward movement--but sets out in new directions, following women's trails from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. In colorful, spirited stories, she weaves a lyrical reconsideration of the processes that created, gave meaning to, and ultimately shattered the West.
Twenty Thousand Roads introduces a cast of women mapping the world on their own terms, often crossing political and cultural boundaries defined by male-dominated institutions and perceptions. Scharff examines the faint traces left by Sacagawea and revisits Susan Magoffin's famed honeymoon journey down the Santa Fe Trail. We also meet educated women like historian Grace Hebard and government extension agent Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, who mapped the West with different voyages and visions. Scharff introduces women whose lives gave shape to the forces of gender, race, region, and modernity; participants in exploration, war, politics, empire, and struggles for social justice; and movers and shakers of everyday family life.
This book powerfully and poetically shows us that to understand the American West, we must examine the lives of women who both built and resisted American expansion. Scharff remaps western history as she reveals how moving women have shaped our past, present, and future.
Twenty Thousand Roads introduces a cast of women mapping the world on their own terms, often crossing political and cultural boundaries defined by male-dominated institutions and perceptions. Scharff examines the faint traces left by Sacagawea and revisits Susan Magoffin's famed honeymoon journey down the Santa Fe Trail. We also meet educated women like historian Grace Hebard and government extension agent Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, who mapped the West with different voyages and visions. Scharff introduces women whose lives gave shape to the forces of gender, race, region, and modernity; participants in exploration, war, politics, empire, and struggles for social justice; and movers and shakers of everyday family life.
This book powerfully and poetically shows us that to understand the American West, we must examine the lives of women who both built and resisted American expansion. Scharff remaps western history as she reveals how moving women have shaped our past, present, and future.
List of Maps
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Before the West
1. Seeking Sacagawea
2. The Hearth of Darkness: Susan Magoffin on Suspect Terrain
Part Two: In the West
3. Empire, Liberty, and Legend: The Ironies of Woman Suffrage in Wyoming
4. Marking Wyoming: Grace Raymond Hebard and the West as Woman's Place
5. "So Many Miles to a Person": Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Makes New Mexico
Part Three: Beyond the West
6. Resisting Arrest: Jo Ann Robinson and the Power to Move
7. The Long Strange Trip of Pamela Des Barres
8. They Paved Paradise
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Before the West
1. Seeking Sacagawea
2. The Hearth of Darkness: Susan Magoffin on Suspect Terrain
Part Two: In the West
3. Empire, Liberty, and Legend: The Ironies of Woman Suffrage in Wyoming
4. Marking Wyoming: Grace Raymond Hebard and the West as Woman's Place
5. "So Many Miles to a Person": Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Makes New Mexico
Part Three: Beyond the West
6. Resisting Arrest: Jo Ann Robinson and the Power to Move
7. The Long Strange Trip of Pamela Des Barres
8. They Paved Paradise
Notes
Index
The Frontier in American Culture, by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick
Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan, by Mikiso Hane, translator & editor
Mary Austin and the American West, by Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson
Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life, by Kate Phillips
Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan, by Mikiso Hane, translator & editor
Mary Austin and the American West, by Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson
Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life, by Kate Phillips