Maverick Autobiographies

Cathryn Halverson reclaims a trio of female memoirists whose works tell us a great deal about the emergence of women's writing in the early twentieth century, the conception of the West, and the role of autobiography as literature that can reveal a time and a place. In this telling study of the autobiographies of Mary MacLane, Opal Whiteley, and Juanita Harrison, Halverson finds a western experience that could prove more confining than liberating for the female pioneer, and her disaffected cowgirls put a whole new spin on the notion of heading out for the territories.