Women's Role In The West Analysis

The article I chose to critique was Women's Role in the American West by T. A. Larson. One main argument presented was that women’s roles in the West were often ignored in most writings during the late 1800’s. Larson stated that women of the West were treated as if they were of small significance, judging by the little attention they received from historians. Such examples of this were shown throughout the article from sources such as John A. Hawgood's America's Western Frontier, LeRoy R. Hafen and Carl Coke Rister’s edition of Western America (2nd ed., 1950), and Jackson Turner’s famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” These historians devoted very little attention to women in their writings, usually only one