Women, Conquest, and Imperialism in the American West

Women, Conquest, and Imperialism in the American West

Lisa Materson and Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, eds. The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History

(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2018)

Spanish-Mexican and Native/indigenous women of the borderland territories that became the US West created lives circumscribed by conquest, resistance, and decolonization. Their ability to survive was based on defying stereotypes about who they were, accessing structures, building resources to circumvent hostility and violence, and resisting inequities by sustaining a presence in the written record that slowly is being recovered. White settler women enabled Manifest Destiny, but a few demonstrated degrees of cultural understanding despite the stringent racialism and distrust that their migration originally engendered. Women of color and Euro-American women interacted both violently and peacefully. Key to knowing their stories, particularly of poor or non-English speaking women, is the difficult work of archival recovery and discovery.