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Miss Ellie's Purple Sage Saloon

The term "The Women's West" comes from the title of the ground breaking collection of scholarly essays of the same title published by University of Oklahoma Press almost twenty years ago. It was edited by Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jamison. Since then, any novel or non-fiction that reflects this new view of women and their role in the settlement of the American West has come be to dubbed "novels of the Women's West" or "a book of the Women's West."
Want to know more? Check the book list here and the following essay.

Bidding Adieu to Sunbonnet Sue
OR
What's New About Writing the Women's West

From Roundup Magazine, December 1995
By Jerrie Hurd

There's a new woman riding the range. She isn't Owen Wister's schoolmarm, and she's not the gun-toting molls Hollywood recently gave us in the movie Bad Girls. Real women of the West have never been stand-ins for their men. Or shadows of them.
We always knew that.

What's different is the current excitement attending the rediscovery of women in the American West. I'm not talking about historical revisionism or political correctness. Nobody is whining that these stones have been neglected and ought to be told or taught I'm talking about the growing recognition that stories of real women in the American West have freshness and broad appeal.

. In fact "The Women's West" has become such a phenomenon some publishers, such as Pocket Books, are calling it a new genre and some bookstores, such as the Tattered Cover in Denver, are shelving it under its own category "The Women's West" is a term borrowed from the ground breaking book of the same title edited by Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson that came out from the University of Oklahoma Press eight years ago. That book and a subsequent flood of scholarly books on the same subject, have presented such a strikingly different view of women in the American West that many people describe their first encounter with this new perspective as if they'd experienced an epiphany Most can name the book that first exposed them to it For me, it was reading Glendon Swarthout's Spur-award winning novel, The Homesman.

Want To Discover the Women's West But Don't Know Where to Start?

Here's Sue Armitage's recommended reading list:

·Armitage and Jameson, The Women's West (Norman, University of Oklahoma, 1987)

·Schlissel, Ruiz, and Monk, Western Women: Their Lives, Their Land (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1988)

·Silvia van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society (Norman, University of Oklahoma, 1983)

·Schlissel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (Schocken, 1982)

·Ruiz and DuBois, Unequal Sisters, Second Edition, (Routledge, 1994) Articles on western women of color.

·Hurd, Jerrie, Miss Ellie's Purple Sage Saloon, and Kate Burke Shoots the Old West (Pocket Books 1995, 1997) Novels popularizing this new view of women.

·Barnes and Blue, Circle of Women (Penguin, 1994) short stories by contemporary western women writers.

·Moynihan, Armitage and Dichamp, So Much To Be Done: Women on the Mining and Ranching Frontier (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1989)


	"No other region of the United States has so shaped the image of our national identity as has the West." --opening page The Women's West

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