In Organized Womanhood, Sandra Haarsager shows how women's organizations in the Pacific Northwest became a major social force, imposing education, culture, and political reform to counter others' vision of a Wild West. Meeting in clubs to study great literature or art, women soon found themselves lobbying for better social, legal, and economic status for women, from working women to widows. Their ideas about education and culture counterbalanced the pressures of fast-paced economic and political development in the Northwest. Through reference to a vast number of documents, most unpublished, Haarsager pieces together the history and influence of women's organizations. Profiles of club leaders interspersed throughout the text highlight the achievements of individual women.
Gender Remade explores a little-known experiment in gender equality in Washington Territory in the 1870s and 1880s. Building on path-breaking innovations in marital and civil equality, lawmakers extended a long list of political rights and obligations to both men and women, including the right to serve on juries and hold public office. As the territory moved toward statehood, however, jury duty and constitutional co-sovereignty proved to be particularly controversial; in the end, 'modernization' and national integration brought disastrous losses for women until 1910, when political rights were partially restored. Losses to women's sovereignty were profound and enduring - a finding that points, not to rights and powers, but to constitutionalism and the power of social practice as Americans struggled to establish gender equality. Gender Remade is a significant contribution to the understudied legal history of the American West, especially the role that legal culture played in transitioning from territory to statehood.
A rich compendium of Western art by women, this book also contains essays which examine the many economic, social, and political forces that have shaped the art over years of pivotal change. The women profiled played an important role in gaining the acceptance of women as men's peers in artistic communities. Their independent spirit resonates in studios and galleries throughout the country today. Photos.
In 1926, Bertha Knight Landes made history as the first woman elected mayor of a major U.S. city. This biography of Mayor Landes of Seattle by Sandra Haarsager reveals an intelligent, pragmatic woman who used urban reform to order city priorities, making the business of government not just business but the welfare of its citizens. Landes and her husband were Seattle pioneers, moving there in 1895. Through participation in women's clubs she honed her leadership skills and began to advance the causes of both urban reform and feminism, although she called herself neither a reformer nor a feminist. Landes's first public office was a seat on the Seattle City Council. Her vision of the city as "a larger home" contrasted with the prevailing emphasis on businesslike efficiency but reflected an effective, results-oriented strategy. On the council, Landes promoted city planning and zoning, the licensing and regulation of dance halls and clubs, and improved public-health and safety programs. Relying on a campaign team of politically inexperienced women, Landes was elected mayor by the largest margin Seattle had seen in a mayoral vote. To her existing agenda for the city she added forward-looking environmental goals, police training, and social concerns such as hospitals and recreation programs. The press treated Landes as a novelty and found it necessary to reassure the community that she was no New Woman. Aware of her role as an example of what women could achieve in public office, Landes insisted on doing whatever was expected of a mayor, including opening baseball games and hiking to dam sites. In her bid for reelection she was defeated by a secretly financed, mean-spirited political unknown who ran a negative campaign attacking Landes on the basis of gender and class. Drawing on the theories of Michel Foucault and Victor Turner, the conclusion explores issues of power, social change, and women in politics, connecting Landes's experiences to the much-touted 1992 Year of the Woman.
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