Choice 评论
This study of writings by women between the years of 1830 and 1930 incorporates that period of American history when the West went from an undiscovered and unsettled frontier to a tourist attraction. Drawing on a wealth of published and unpublished primary sources--including letters, diaries and journals, travel narratives, memoirs, stories, and novels--Georgi-Findlay reconstructs the American West from a female point of view. However, the writers chosen for the study are principally white, literate, and middle- to upper-class (e.g., Caroline Kirkland, Caroline Leighton), and the reader discovers that for the most part, the rhetoric of this class of writers supported and contributed to the colonization of the West and the building of a white, Anglo empire. Ideals of femininity and domesticity are narrated and seem to take their stand alongside 19th-century masculine ideals of conquest followed by ownership. The complicity of women in the ravishment of the West is neither complete nor uniform, but it is at the center of this provocative study that is sure to expand notions of feminist rhetoric. All levels. P. J. Ferlazzo Northern Arizona University