This new edition of Karen Blair’s popular anthology originally published in 1989 includes thirteen essays, eight of which are new. Together they suggest the wide spectrum of women’s experiences that make up a vital part of Northwest history.
Considering accounts written by Northwest Coast marine tourists between 1861 and 1990, Nancy Pagh examines the ways that gender influences the roles women play at sea, the spaces they occupy on boats, and the language they use to describe their experiences, their natural surroundings, and their contact with Native peoples. Unique features of this book include its interdisciplinary nature and its combination of scholarly information and a style that general readers will appreciate. The text is engaging but also serves to make fresh and relevant links between scholarship in diverse areas of inquiry; for example, Western Canadian and American history, feminist geography, post-colonial theory, and women and environments.
Challenging traditional histories of abolition, this book shifts the focus away from the East to show how the women of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin helped build a vibrant antislavery movement in the Old Northwest. Stacey Robertson argues that the environment of the Old Northwest--with its own complicated history of slavery and racism--created a uniquely collaborative and flexible approach to abolitionism. Western women helped build this local focus through their unusual and occasionally transgressive activities. They plunged into Liberty Party politics, vociferously supported a Quaker-led boycott of slave goods, and tirelessly aided fugitives and free blacks in their communities. Western women worked closely with male abolitionists, belying the notion of separate spheres that characterized abolitionism in the East. The contested history of race relations in the West also affected the development of abolitionism in the region, necessitating a pragmatic bent in their activities. Female antislavery societies focused on eliminating racist laws, aiding fugitive slaves, and building and sustaining schools for blacks. This approach required that abolitionists of all stripes work together, and women proved especially adept at such cooperation.
For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively being repressed, beading supported cultural continuity, demonstrating Tlingit women’s resilience, strength, and power. Beadwork served many uses, from the ceremonial to the economic, as women created beaded pieces for community use and to sell to tourists. Like other Tlingit art, beadwork reflects rich artistic visions with deep connections to the environment, clan histories, and Tlingit worldviews. Contemporary Tlingit artists Alison Bremner, Chloe French, Shgen Doo Tan George, Lily Hudson Hope, Tanis S’eiltin, and Larry McNeil foreground the significance of historical beading practices in their diverse, boundary-pushing artworks. Working with museum collection materials, photographs, archives, and interviews with artists and elders, Megan Smetzer reframes this often overlooked artform as a site of historical negotiations and contemporary inspirations. She shows how beading gave Tlingit women the freedom to innovate aesthetically, assert their clan crests and identities, support tribal sovereignty, and pass on cultural knowledge. Painful Beauty is the first dedicated study of Tlingit beadwork and contributes to the expanding literature addressing women’s artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast.
This remarkable gathering of stories, essays, memoirs, letters, and poems give voice to the experiences of a diverse group of thirty Oregon and Washington women, including Abigail Scott Duniway, Hazel Hall, and Sarah Winnemucca. Introductory essays examine how race, class, gender, and place affected these women and their writing.
Jean Barman was the recipient of the 2014 George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. In French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest, Jean Barman rewrites the history of the Pacific Northwest from the perspective of French Canadians attracted by the fur economy, the indigenous women whose presence in their lives encouraged them to stay, and their descendants. Joined in this distant setting by Quebec paternal origins, the French language, and Catholicism, French Canadians comprised Canadiens from Quebec, Iroquois from the Montreal area, and métis combining Canadien and indigenous descent. For half a century, French Canadians were the largest group of newcomers to this region extending from Oregon and Washington east into Montana and north through British Columbia. Here, they facilitated the early overland crossings, drove the fur economy, initiated non-wholly-indigenous agricultural settlement, eased relations with indigenous peoples, and ensured that, when the region was divided in 1846, the northern half would go to Britain, giving today’s Canada its Pacific shoreline.
Feminist contentions in socialist state formation: a case study of the Shanghai Women's Federation -- The political perils in 1957: struggles over "women's liberation"--Creating a socialist feminist cultural front: women of China -- When a Maoist "class" intersected gender -- Chen Bo'er and the feminist paradigm of socialist film -- Fashioning socialist visual culture: Xia Yan and the new culture heritage -- The cultural origins of the Cultural Revolution -- The Iron Girls: gender and class in cultural representations -- Conclusion: socialist state feminism and its legacies in capitalist China
Recollecting is a rich collection of essays that illuminate the lives of late eighteenth-century to the mid twentieth-century Aboriginal women, who have been overlooked in sweeping narratives of the history of the West. Some essays focus on individual women - a trader, a performer, a non-human woman - while others examine cohorts of women - wives, midwives, seamstresses, nuns. Authors look beyond the documentary record and standard representations of women, drawing also on records generated by the women themselves, including their beadwork, other material culture, and oral histories.