The extraordinary women at the heart of her narrative are brave, determined, and often flawed, and she makes it clear why it is impossible to understand the West without them.” “Winifred Gallagher weaves her multi-racial and multi-ethnic cast of characters into a fascinating story of resilience, ambition, and tragedy that ranges widely across the nineteenth century West.
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They fought their way into business ownership, education, professional careers-and ultimately voting booths and elective office." BookPage Hard conditions and sparse populations created opportunities for women in the West unavailable to them elsewhere. Gallagher’s rediscoveries are inspirational. Suffrage is only part of it women settlers were integral to building communities and developing the economy as the United States expanded, and the Native and Mexican women already living in the West were critical in the fight against encroachment and discrimination. "Winifred Gallagher’s comprehensive New Women in the Old West: From Settlers to Suffragists, an Untold American Story unearths this story through the lives of dozens of forgotten trailblazers. Its roster of the accomplished, often heroic, women of the West is inspiring.” Wall Street Journal It includes Native American, black and Hispanic women as well as Asians and other immigrants. Gallagher’s research is the range of her cast of characters. Gallagher patches together their biographies from tax rolls and other public documents, as well as from private archives and newspapers.
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Most women, however, left no written record, and compiling their stories required a prodigious amount of research. Gallagher culls from diaries, journals and letters. The most effective profiles let the subjects speak for themselves in quotations that Ms. profiles the ambitious women, often unmarried, who worked as homesteaders, teachers, entrepreneurs, ranchers and cowgirls.
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It is also a kind of group portrait of the independent, resourceful women who managed to forge places for themselves in a man’s world. It is a brisk history of the galvanizing role played by Western women in the national struggle for suffrage. “New Women in the Old West is really two books deftly stitched together.