Texas Women - (Southern Women: Their Lives and Times) by Elizabeth Hayes Turner & Stephanie Cole & Rebecca Sharpless (Paperback)

About the Book

From Apaches to astronauts, from pioneers to professionals, from rodeo riders to entrepreneurs, and from Civil War survivors to civil rights activists, this collection of essays of influential Texas women is an important contribution to Texas history, women's history, and the history of the nation.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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"

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"

This book is a captivating journey of resilient women. For those who study women's history, this book will add immeasurable resources to your collection; for those who casually acknowledge the role of women in the state's history, this book will blow your mind. While that last statement is not an accepted scholarly way of expressing praise for a long overdue study of women's place in the state's history, it is the most appropriate. . . . This book will appeal to anyone with a love of history. There is no doubt that Texas Women will be a required text in women's studies, as well as one that is enjoyed outside of academia. It will also become the very high bar that generations of authors will aim to reach in years to come.--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"

About the Author

Elizabeth Hayes Turner (Editor)
ELIZABETH HAYES TURNER is a professor of history at the University of North Texas.

Stephanie Cole (Editor)
STEPHANIE COLE is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Rebecca Sharpless (Editor)
REBECCA SHARPLESS is an associate professor of history at Texas Christian University.