The storybook history of the American West is a male-dominated narrative of drifters, dreamers, hucksters, and heroes - a tale that relegates women, assuming they appear at all, to the distant background. "Home Lands: How Women Made the West" upends this view to remember the West as a place of homes[...]
The twentieth century rise of the automobile collided head on with Victorian prescriptions for the proper role and place of women in society. Gender conventions cast women as too weak, dependent and flighty to manage the fiery motorised beast. Overcoming the stereotypes was as difficult for women as[...]