Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives (Southern Women: Their Lives and Times Ser.)
Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives engages current scholarship on women in Texas, the South, and the United States. It provides insights into Texas’s singular geographic position, bordering on the West and sharing a unique history with Mexico, while analyzing the ways in which Texas stories mirror a larger American narrative. The biographies and essays illustrate an uncommon diversity among Texas women, reflecting experiences ranging from those of dispossessed enslaved women to wealthy patrons of the arts. That history also captures the ways in which women’s lives reflect both personal autonomy and opportunities to engage in the public sphere. From the vast spaces of northern New Spain and the rural counties of antebellum Texas to the growing urban centers in the post–Civil War era, women balanced traditional gender and racial prescriptions with reform activism, educational enterprise, and economic development.
Contributors to Texas Women address major questions in women’s history, demonstrating how national and regional themes in the scholarship on women are answered or reconceived in Texas. Texas women negotiated significant boundaries raised by gender, race, and class. The writers address the fluid nature of the border with Mexico, the growing importance of federal policies, and the eventual reforms engendered by the civil rights movement. From Apaches to astronauts, from pioneers to professionals, from rodeo riders to entrepreneurs, and from Civil War survivors to civil rights activists, the subjects of Texas Women offer important contributions to Texas history, women’s history, and the history of the nation.
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Reviews for Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives (Southern Women: Their Lives and Times Ser.)
Debbie Liles
Panhandle Plains Historical Review
Turner, Cole and Sharpless are to be applauded for including biographical subjects that reflect the enormous racial, class, and religious diversity of Texas. Taken as a whole, this volume offers significant insights into the complex ways that Texas's position on the margins of the United States has shaped a particular kind of gendered experience there.
Melissa Walker
author of Southern Farmers and Their Stories
For anyone interested in the real women who built Texas while struggling against long odds, it is revelatory reading.
Joyce Sáenz Harris
Dallas Morning News
One of the most important contributions to Texas historiography in recent years . . . The three editors are to be commended: there is not a single weak essay, and all of the contributions are analytical yet written in an engaging and readable style. Indispensable for anyone interested in the history of the Lone Star State.
T. P. Bowman
Choice
The essays are all well grounded in primary source research ranging from translated letters from the eighteenth century to oral histories from the twentieth century. . . . Perhaps potential future volumes will focus more on Texas’s earlier women, but the current one remains a worthwhile addition to the series.
Jonathan D. Sarnoff
Journal of Southern History
The volume will greatly benefit southern, Texas, and Texas women’s history classes.
Cynthia E. Orozco
Journal of American History
Texas Women represents the best of its genre: ambitious, representative, revealing, and eminently readable. It is a milestone. . . . As an academic field, Texas women's history is young. . . . This collection reflects its maturity and robust health, the wealth of its subject matter, and its sizable pool of practitioners.
Nancy Baker Jones
Southwestern Historical Quarterly