Vicki Ruiz – författare

This book illuminates the reality of border women's lives and challenges the conventional notion that women need not work for wages because they are economically supported by men. It offers insight into the lives of undocumented women.

This book illuminates the reality of border women's lives and challenges the conventional notion that women need not work for wages because they are economically supported by men. It offers insight into the lives of undocumented women.

In the last several decades, U.S. women’s history has come of age. Not only have historians challenged the national narrative on the basis of their rich explorations of the personal, the social, the economic, and the political, but they have also entered into dialogues with each other over the meaning of women’s history itself.In this collection of seventeen original essays on women’s lives from the colonial period to the present, contributors take the competing forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and region into account. Among many other examples, they examine how conceptions of gender shaped government officials’ attitudes towards East Asian immigrants; how race and gender inequality pervaded the welfare state; and how color and class shaped Mexican American women’s mobilization for civil and labor rights.

In recent years the study of western history has been transformed by scholarship on the actual experiences of the women who settled the West. The essays gathered here, first presented in a 1984 conference sponsored by the South-west Institute for Research on Women, analyse and interpret this new body of research. Each essay is accompanied by several commentaries that reveal the complex multicultural character of the West through the experience of American Indian, Mexican-American and Anglo-American (including Mormon) women. The discussion of domestic ideology examines what values Anglo women carried West and how their values influenced their perception of women of other races, cultures and religions.