UW-Madison historian aims to broaden perceptions of American West

“I wish I’d been a fly on the wall instead of a first-grader,” says Susan L. Johnson, the Women’s Studies Research Center Fellow for this fall, referring to a meeting in 1962. Those attending it established the Western History Association, and Johnson contends that the list of participants says a lot about the discipline of history then.

“A group of both university-trained and amateur scholars, virtually all of them white men, met in Denver and founded the first professional organization of historians of the American West. The presence of nonprofessional historians at the meeting reflected the popularity of Western history beyond the academy. It also reflected the tenuous status of Western studies among professional scholars, a mutually reinforcing set of circumstances that had kept Western history the terrain of ‘buffs.’

“The absence of women in Denver bespoke the more general absence of women in the historical profession as well as the peculiarly gendered nature of that Western terrain. Western history was no place for a lady,” Johnson says.

Nevertheless, even before women entered the field in large numbers, two intrepid individuals, neither of them professionals, prevailed in their pursuit of a domesticated West in which white men led lives of intimate connection, not just solitary adventure, Johnson says.

“Quantrille McClung, a retired librarian who called herself ‘an old maid,’ and Bernice Blackwelder, a former singer and CIA employee who described herself as a housewife, each published a book in 1962 about the famous Westerner Kit Carson,” Johnson says.

They also kept up a lively correspondence as Western heroes like Carson tumbled from grace in the wake of social movements during the 1960s. The women followed the evolution of the Western History Association and continued their enthusiasm for the West. Johnson says that a big part of its allure is its representation of men and things traditionally held to be male: “triumphal, masculine stories of Americans westward expansion,” she says. “Those stories both masked the racial traumas of expansion and reflected a narrow range of gender relations, both historical and contemporary.”

Johnson will use her fellowship, which gives her a semester leave from teaching, to broaden the discussion and add texture to the picture that many of us have of the American West.

“I will address relations between women historians and their male historical subjects, and between professional historians and amateur ‘buffs.’ I also will explore the practice of history in the context of everyday life, the seductions of gender in the context of racialized power and the spatial dimensions of 20th century relationships predicated on 19th century regional pasts,” she says.

Johnson routinely teaches courses about Western history and about the history of men and masculinity. She says that this work definitely will shape them. The research she is doing now eventually will become a book tentatively titled, “A Traffic in Men: The Old Maid, the Housewife, and Their Great Westerner.”