Sweetwater County, which lies in southwestern Wyoming, has stood as a significant symbolic geography for the "new Western Women's" history. As the country in which Elinore Pruitt Stewart said she proved up her homestead in 1913, it is a fitting locale for the study of western gender relations. "The Important things of life" examines women's work and family lives in Sweetwater County in the late nineteenth century and early twenty centuries. The discovery...

In 1901, Philadelphia's celebrity female journalist stepped off a train in Blackfoot, Montana. The miners and frontiersmen, Indians and trappers that Caroline Lockhart met there inspired this beautiful, single, strong-willed woman to live a life she had only dreamed about in what remained of the Wild West. This is the true story of a woman who wrote novels "like a man" yet ran her businesses and love affairs like a liberated feminist. Prep-school...