Jun 19, 2011 through Sep 11, 2011
The storybook history of the American West is a male-dominated narrative of drifters, dreamers, hucksters, and heroes—a tale that relegates women, assuming they appear at all, to the distant background. Home Lands: How Women Made the West upends this view to remember the West as a place of homes and habitations brought into being by the women who lived there.
From ancient pueblos to modern suburbs, women have shaped the Western landscape through choices about how to sustain home, family, and community. Home Lands, organized by the Autry National Center of Los Angeles, brings together women’s history, Western history, and environmental history to show how women have been at the heart of the Western enterprise across cultures and over time. Historical artifacts, art, photographs, and biographies of individual women will lead visitors through three distinctive Western environments created and inhabited by women.