Wild West history, from her perspective

This book, which culls research and insights from 20-plus years of studying the American West and its women, is a bit of an odd duck — ambitious in scope, original in thought. Yet it does not hang together as a holistic work.

Virginia Scharff, a history professor at the University of New Mexico, is a spirited writer, given to fresh observations voiced with admirable clarity.

In declaring her thesis, she also provides a handy answer for those who secretly wonder just why we need to be concerned with "women's studies" along with regular ol' history: "I see women moving into and away from, through and around, the shifting ground of the American West," Scharff writes in the introduction. "If we try to see the great events of our history through the eyes of women in motion and action, those events and the places they happened, look different."

Any one of the book's three sections could provide enough rich material to keep a scholar busy for an entire career. Scharff begins with accounts of women who experienced the West before it broke into the states we know today. Sacagawea, the Native American who accompanied Lewis and Clark, and white pioneer wife and diarist Susan Magoffin are two who are profiled.

Scharff continues into the era of industrialization and explores the lives of some of the independent women attending this great change. The book's final section looks at 20th-century Western women (including rock-band groupie and tell-all author Pamela Des Barres and civil-rights activist Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, an African American and transplanted Southerner) whose lives are "shaped more by gender, race, and nation, by modernity and postmodernity, than by the decreasing claims of region."

Reading the book as three separate works would be more satisfying than gobbling it up in sequence — and no doubt, those who wisely teach from it in the classroom will do just that.

Reading history intelligently requires frequent context-checks, lest the reader forget that her present values and assumptions (about gender, class, the law and social custom) are neither timeless nor universal. Scharff, unlike many of her peers, has a knack for aiding the reader in that respect, easily injecting such context checkpoints along the way.

An example: A reader who assumes that American college campuses were largely a Northeastern, male world until well into the 20th century will find herself with a new framework to consider.

"Like thousands of American women, Grace Raymond Hebard took advantage, for the first time, of the opportunity to attend college." (University of Iowa; she graduated in 1882.) "She was, moreover, lucky enough to come along at the intersection of unprecedented moments in American women's history and the history of the American West." Scharff thoughtfully does not send her reader to the endnotes to learn that the Morrill Act of 1862 set aside money for Western colleges, and women were very much part of the resulting admissions push.

Regardless of just how Scharff's work is experienced — as a choppy single volume or in smaller, more focused interludes — a reader comes away with new knowledge, sense of context, and heightened respect for the value of tracing the travels of American women.

Kimberly B. Marlowe: kmarlowe@seattletimes.com