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"Virginia Scharff's wonderfully readable account of women in motion complicates and enriches our understanding of the nineteenth and twentieth century Wests. Her gendered remapping of the regional landscape explodes traditional notions of western movement. All students of women and gender, travel and place, the West and America, would do well to read this excellent book."—David M. Wrobel, author of Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West
"Virginia Scharff claims for women what has long been central to the masculine mythology of the West—free movement and its many gifts, real and imagined. Her book is as exhilarating and as intellectually and emotionally expansive as our enduring dream of flight across the American land."—Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado
"Brilliant is not a word that is often a part of my critical vocabulary, but brilliantly is how Twenty Thousand Roads begins. When writing of Sacagawea and Susan Magoffin, Virginia Scharff shows vividly how a single life can be a source of sophisticated cultural analysis without becoming an academic artifact or an object of condescension."—Richard White, author of It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West
List of contents
List of Maps
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Before the West
1. Seeking Sacagawea
2. The Hearth of Darkness: Susan Magoffin on Suspect Terrain
Part Two: In the West
3. Empire, Liberty, and Legend: The Ironies of Woman Suffrage in Wyoming
4. Marking Wyoming: Grace Raymond Hebard and the West as Woman’s Place
5. "So Many Miles to a Person": Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Makes New Mexico
Part Three: Beyond the West
6. Resisting Arrest: Jo Ann Robinson and the Power to Move
7. The Long Strange Trip of Pamela Des Barres
8. They Paved Paradise
Notes
Index
About the author
Virginia Scharff is Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. She is author of Bad Company (2002), Brown-Eyed Girl (2000), Coming of Age: America in the Twentieth Century (1998, with Michael Schaller and Robert Schulzinger), Present Tense: The United States since 1945 (1996, with Michael Schaller and Robert Schulzinger), and Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (1991).
Summary
Introduces a cast of women mapping the world on their own terms, often crossing political and cultural boundaries defined by male-dominated institutions and perceptions. This title examines the faint traces left by Sacagawea and revisits Susan Magoffin's famed honeymoon journey down the Santa Fe Trail.
