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An ambitious scholarly work, Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives includes almost two dozen essays detailing different aspects of Texan history. Readers may be initially perplexed by the fact that Texas Women was not published in Texas at all. In fact, Texas Women is one of a series of books on southern women published by the University of Georgia Press. As such, Texas Women places the subject in the greater context of southern society. Most of the stories show how Texas women negotiated power in their communities within the overarching patriarchal structures, norms, and institutions. Texas Women is divided into three parts, arranged chronologically. The first part covers 1600-1880, from the time of the Spanish to the end of the Civil War. Although they gloss over pre-conquest Texas, the essays cover the important nodes in antebellum Texas. Part Two covers 1880-1925, a relatively short, but critical period of time in the fight for gender equality. Texas in the 20th century is addressed in Part Three. Texas Women also includes an Epilogue that deals primarily with methodology, and an afterword commentary by the three editors of the book, Turner, Cole and Sharpless.
All of the essays address the intersections of race, class,...
The essays in the first part of the book help readers understand the different roles and statuses of women in Spanish Texas versus Anglo Texas. This section addresses the status of slave women as well, especially in Eric Walther’s essay “Changing Borders and Challenging Boundaries.” Slaves generally had more opportunities to secure their own freedom prior to Texan independence, especially as the anti-abolitionist rhetoric reached a fever pitch in the middle of the 19th century. Juliana Barr’s “A Barometer of Power in Eighteenth-Century Texas” is unique in that it covers the lives of indigenous women, and how their liminal status allowed them to serve in the position of mediator between Spanish and Anglo settlers. While men were off fighting in the Civil War, even the white genteel women used to a strict order of gender roles had to assume some of the duties that were typically assigned to men. This was true elsewhere in the States, but had a special implication for Texas, which was perched between the western frontier and the firmly established Deep South. The shifting positions of women in Texan society led to tremendous changes after the war, especially with the…
Works Cited
Turner, Elizabeth Hayes, Stephanie Cole and Rebecca Sharpless. Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015.
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The complexity of Sam Houston as a man perhaps exemplifies the difficulties in arguing whether the revolution was justified. Houston has become associated with the racism of the Texan's cause, because of his effective defeat of Mexico. But Houston himself lived amongst the Cherokees early in his life and married a Cherokee woman. When he fought for Andrew Jackson as a populist, he warred against the Creeks Indians, although
While these are some of the more famous elements of rhetorical theory, they do not require extensive discussion here for two reasons. Firstly, they are fairly well-known. Secondly, and more importantly, they actually do not provide much insight into the uses of rhetoric, because Aristotle implicitly inserts an ethics into his discussion of rhetoric that precludes it from having as robust an application to the real world as would
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Women and Nonwhites Facing Prejudices Back when the frontier existed, women had very limited options for independence. So, if they wanted to travel, they had to be accompanied by a man and they had to be going to their destination. Because of this, women offered their labor so that they could get what they needed. They earned the money they needed by doing laundry or cooking, sometimes they even resorted to
Pletcher puts forth the point that many wished to overtake Texas, for example, from Mexican control because of a certain level of hatred on the part of Americans for their neighbors south of the border. Perhaps, as well, there was a certain level of jealousy on the part of Americans for the extensive culture, lifestyle and tradition of the Mexican people, something which was not existent in any major
Cisneros seems to project her own life into the character of Cleofilas as Cisneros herself is stated by Doyle (1996) to have entered into a discussion of the difficulties that she herself had known as a Mexican-American "...always straddling the two countries...but not belong to either culture...trying to define some middle ground." (Pillar, 1990; as cited in Doyle, 1996) This divide of cultures, religion and gender are a type of