Review of Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning the American West Edited and with an introduction by Shirley A. Leckie and Nancy J. Parezo

Authors

Kathleen A. Boardman, University of Nevada, Reno

Date of this Version

2010

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 30:1 (Winter 2010)

Comments

Copyright 2013 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Pioneering women ethnohistorians and anthropologists who studied American Indians and the trans-Mississippi West deserve greater recognition, not only for the important information they gathered but also for their theoretical insights and methodological advances. As we learn about these women's lives and scholarly contributions, we also come to understand the barriers and prejudices they dealt with in order to pursue the work they valued. This is the argument of Shirley Leckie and Nancy Parezo's collection of intellectual biographies of ten women, born between 1873 and 1910, whose active research careers spanned most of the twentieth century. Their Own Frontier extends the scope of cultural anthropologist Parezo's earlier Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest (1993) into the Great Plains and the discipline of history (coeditor Leckie is a historian), although anthropologists remain in the majority.