Playing House in the American West: Western Womens Life Narratives, 1839-1987 [Hardcover]

How domestic life shaped identity, gender, and power in the American West

The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is playing house.  From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a womans difference from western neighbors and eastern readers alike.

The readings inPlaying Houseinvestigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles.  Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation.

The western women examined inPlaying House in the American Westare promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.

Playing House in the American Westby Cathryn Halverson offers a revealing exploration of domestic life and gendered expectations in the western United States. By examining how homes were imagined, built, and lived in, Halverson shows how womens domestic labor and family roles shaped both everyday life and broader cultural meanings of the West. Challenging narratives that privilege mobility, masculinity, and conquest, this study centers the household as a critical site where identity, power, and place were negotiated. This book redefines how private life influenced the social and cultural development of the American WestlҠ