![]() Would such a landscape even be possible without wives and mothers piloting automobiles and wielding cell phones, strategizing and navigating their way through an American day? Picture a Walmart or a Wendy’s, and see where today’s western women gather the necessities of life in the contemporary West of car-culture suburbs.įrom the fields to the franchises, women have worked to sustain their households in the midst of a wider terrain. ![]() Now imagine the strip malls and superstores and fast-food franchises of Seattle, Sacramento, St. When we examine petroglyphs and potsherds, fragments of archaeological remains at ancient pueblos in New Mexico, we might envision women at work: planting and hoeing corn, harvesting and grinding, cooking meals, storing what isn’t consumed, and communicating the world they see around them. Once you start looking for it, women’s history is, in fact, everywhere in the West. They have gathered, grown, and processed the vegetables and animals that fed and clothed their families, have constructed and maintained dwellings, and have taken part in the rituals and creative activities that nurture the connections of kinship, spirit, and trade. ![]() But just as the West could not have developed without water, the region never could have flourished without important contributions from the women who lived there.įrom the Paleolithic period to the present, women have made essential contributions to the claiming of western places as homes to families and communities. Both have been represented as scarce commodities in a region where masculinity and aridity have appeared, quite simply, as natural. ![]() Both have flowed through the terrain we have come to call the West, long before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part of an expanding United States. ![]()
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