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about the hardships of Spanish Americans. This underlying theme departs from the usually sympathetic treatment accorded Spanish Americans. For example, Carlson asserts that many Spanish and Mexican land grant claims deserved to be rejected or whittled down, that the Pueblo Lands Board overlooked requirements that Spanish Americans prove claims to the Pueblo lands they had encroached upon, that Spanish Americans were given equal access with Anglos to alienating homesteads from the public domain, and that Spanish Americans fared very well in their acquisition of grazing permits which, in effect, only sustained an economic system that was not viable. “Too many scapegoats”, to quote Carlson, “including the Anglo-American surveyor-generals, the Court of Private Land Claims, the U.S. Forest Service, Santa Fe ring lawyers, and land grabbers, have been used to explain the Spanish Americans’ plight”. That Spanish Americans are largely responsible for their own poverty will fly in the face of many. Carlson will probably be criticized as insensitive, which will make his book contro- versial. His theme just may help swing the pendulum back to a less critical view of Anglos, however.

Whatever the reaction to his theme, Carlson’s book contributes simply by introducing some first-rate new material. Three examples are notable. Carlson analyzes plat books in the Bureau of Land Management in Santa Fe and tract books in the National Archives in Suitland, Maryland, to find that between 1862 and 1949 Spanish Americans in the Rio Arriba study area acquired 56 per cent of all homestead patents while Anglo Americans obtained only 42 per cent. Spanish American patents were smaller (199 acres on average) and more widespread while Anglo patents were larger (335 acres on average) and more concentrated. He also finds, from an analysis of grazing permits, that Spanish Amer- icans after 1925 received 90 per cent of the permits in the study area portion of the Santa Fe and Carson National Forests. His field analysis of 61 moradas, moreover, reveals that these structures lacked any particular architectural style and were, for the most part, placed outside their villages. Carlson’s new material, also the old material which he has reworked and updated, contributes nicely to his theme-with the exception of his three chapters containing the four vignettes. Abbreviated case studies of Abiquiu, El Rancho, and Vadito might more effectively have been integrated into chapters 2 and 3, and the case study of Corrales, which is actually located in the Rio Abajo and not in the Rio Arriba, probably should have been omitted completely. But these four vignettes are small matters. Like all of his publications, Carlson’s book is beautifully illustrated, heavily documented, and chuck-full of excellent material. And this book is his crowning achievement.

University of Oklahoma RICHARD L.NOSTRAND

Other Studies

KAREN OFFEN, RUTH ROACH PIERSON and JANE RENDALL (Eds), Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives (London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. xli + 552. f40.00 and & 14.99 paperback)

This fat book is a real feast - a history of women’s history, an encyclopedia of information about women and the study of women across the globe, a treasure trove of unfamiliar literature, an examination of theoretical and methodological questions that have absorbed feminist scholars for the last twenty years-all of this is packed between its covers. The collection marks the first conference held by the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (which was founed in 1987 with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation) at Bellagio in Italy in 1989 with participants from 19 countries. The succeeding huge efforts of the three editors in collecting, collating and editing led to

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this extraordinary international volume comprising in the main the papers read at the conference, with a few additions. Thus in the volume there are essays from 22 scholars, spread across all the continents, examining the theoretical and methodological problems and excitement involved in doing women’s history and gender history, as well as reports on progress in the construction of feminist historiographies in each of these countries-- some of which had disappeared (GDR) or fractured into a number of states (the USSR and Yugoslavia) between the conference and publication.

It is hard to know where to begin to give the potential reader a sense of this collection. I opened the book with an enormous number of questions in my mind. How widespread and important is the study of women and gender relations in different countries? Is there a relationship with women’s politics, to the significance of the women’s movement? Or to the development of women’s studies? Who is involved in writing women’s history? Is it written by women inside or outside the academy? How is women’s history funded? Who and what is it about? Are similar issues of concern apparent in the different countries given the huge variations in women’s material circumstances and in the political contexts? Are there methods or theoretical perspectives that are held in common by the participants?

While the answers to all these questions are included in the book, it is difficult to both draw out common themes and to do justice to the extent of diversity between countries. Women’s history has variously been closely related to the second wave women’s movement of the 1960s and onwards (in West Germany, Japan, Norway and the USA) or not at all, has been written as women’s history in some places and as feminist history in others, has been undertaken within the academy in the main (in most countries) but not everywhere (Ireland for example), has its closest links with the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology in some places but with the humanities, especially literary theory elsewhere, and has ranged widely in methodological and theoretical approach. In the US women’s history is well funded within state institutions, whereas elsewhere, especially in Spain under Franc0 and in the former socialist societies, it has been virtually forbidden. In most of the countries represented at the conference the circumstances of feminist scholars and women studying women is somewhere in between-neither well-supported nor actively encouraged but not forbidden. Motiva- tions to mount a challenge to the accepted versions of history also varied. While countering the gender blindness of conventional histories and the phallocentric assump- tions embodied in a great deal of historical knowledge was a common stimulus and aim, in a number of the countries represented in the volume, women’s history also developed as part of a post-colonial critique.

While the extent of variation is thus immense, the contributors are united by their energy, sense of excitement and determination to make visible their own and their foremothers’ histories and to challenge the absences in conventional histories. As Patricia Grimshaw, the Australian contributor to the volume makes clear, “the Australian” that stalks the pages of contemporary texts is identified as a man, and “he” only emerged once the aboriginals were conquered. The late Lydia Skelevicky, a Yugoslav historian quoted here, was tarter. There are more horses than women in Yugoslav history, she is reported to have commented. A strong sense of personal commitment of each of the authors to her subject is evident in essay after essay, and makes the text as a whole stimulating reading. It is also a welcome counter for those of us working in the west to the intellectual hegemony of Anglo-American perspectives, and to the dominance of the English language in feminist literature as a whole. The final chapter, for example, is a bibliography of work on the position of women in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. This is particularly useful given the huge rise in interest in questions about the impact that the market will have on women in these countries.

Although the volume as a whole is ostensibly about women’s history, or history from a women’s perspective (which is not always the same thing), it challenges conventional disciplinary boundaries quite as much as conventional historical knowledge and

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methods. If, for example, as we discover, women historians in Nigeria are excavating the rural past of women in non-literate societies from myths and legends using the techniques of anthropology and sociology as documentary evidence is absent, then the boundaries between their work and that of feminist scholars located in other depart- ments begin to dissolve. This, to my mind, is a mark of the maturity of feminist scholarship. It is increasingly clear that similar questions are being raised by feminists in a range of disciplines and that they demand cross-disciplinary approaches in their investigation. Hence we find in this book serious consideration of many of the issues that currently fascinate and perplex us as geographers. Thus the historians of the colonial experience represented here raise questions about the intersection of ethnic and gender divisions in the construction of oppositional national identities. And in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural societies, historians must of necessity investigate the extent of local and regional differences in gender identities and gender relations: a self-evident geographical focus.

The editors provide a splendid introduction to the volume that sets the scene for the two succeeding parts-the first is seven chapters on general theoretical and methodolo- gical issues, the second nineteen chapters on individual countries. They also raise questions about periodisation that are being addressed in contemporary geographical scholarship too. How appropriate, for example, is the conventional western fourfold division between the ancient, medieval, early modern and modem periods to the history of different societies? Are questions about the fragmentation of identity associated with the postmodem condition in the west appropriate elsewhere? The volume addresses these and other themes and theoretical issues that unite contemporary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, in the west at least. In fact most of the contributors, from east and west, north and south, broach, implicity if not explicitly, questions about the extent and consequences of the fragmentation of theoretical and political perspectives. Uncovering the extent of variety and diversity in women’s lives, for example, is potentially challenging, indeed threatening to the very existence of women’s history. Other issues will be familiar, too, to historical, cultural and social geographers where a growing interest in representing the subjects’ “ voice” rather than speaking for them has led to questions about subjectivity and consciousness and a turn towards literary and psychoanalytic approaches.

The essays in both parts of the book chart a progression in women’s history that is common to feminist scholarship in other disciplines, geography included. From an initial focus on women’s lives, interest then shifted to gender relations, to an examina- tion of the hierarchies of power that place women and men in differential positions. In this work a number of key dualisms, in particular the nature/culture and the private/ public divisions in which women where associated with the former sphere, have been of crucial importance in documenting and explaining women’s oppression and in structur- ing historical research. In each case the attributes associated with the former arena were regarded as inferior. However, once so crucial to the conceptual development of women’s history, these dualisms or dichotomies are now being criticised and decon- strutted. As comparative work has demonstrated, they universal& specifically modem and European traditions of discussing sexual difference. The growing body of work from other societies and other times has demonstrated the inadequacies of these distinctions. Further, it is becoming clear that even in contemporary modem and western societies, they fail to effectively capture the extent of variation in gender relations. And, as the editors point out, such conceptual dualisms were also in danger of depoliticising women’s history. Such history must not only be the history of the natural, social or private worlds but of women’s struggle against their association with or restriction to these worlds.

Three other sets of dichotomous concepts-that themselves too are beginning to be criticised-also unite many of these essays. These are sex/gender, equality/difference and integration/autonomy. The latter two pairs are particularly important in developing women’s political strategies and have long structured arguments about the objectives of

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campaigns within feminism as a political movement. The integration/autonomy debate also has implications for strategies within the academy. As the essays reveal, feminist history is still far from secure as an academic area of study, with perhaps the single exception of the United States. Historians in several countries are engaged in a fierce debate about the advantages and disadvantages of the development of women’s history and gender history as an autonomous field of research.

Autonomous or not, feminist historical scholarship has taken great strides in its short existence. The aim is no longer, or rather not solely, to correct biases, to counter absences and to add knowledge about women’s lives into conventional history but to construct a new type of scholarship: self reflexive, self critical and self conscious, with a political purpose. It is “women’s history” in the sense that it is historyfor women, as well as about women, and its political aim is the dismantling of gender hierarchies, of the structures that oppress women. But it is also a history that recognises and theorises the vast differences between and among women that this volume documents. Feminist historians have perhaps developed a sense of humility that has tempered, although not reduced their excitement, a humility that enriches the magnificent work completed and in progress on uncovering women’s lives and creating feminist scholarship. Although it is often difficult and painful to accept, feminist scholars are also beginning to recognise the hierarchies of power that structure feminist scholarship, its institutions and the relations between historians and their subjects. It is no longer taken for granted that a historian from a different and dominant culture or class is able to reclaim the “experiences” of those previously hidden from history solely on the basis of their common sex/gender position. This book marks a step on the way towards the establishment of both humility and mutual learning. Cross-cultural exchanges offer a route to understanding each other’s experiences and ways of challenging dominant theoretical perspectives and concerns. The 1980s have been marked by an enormous expansion of research on women and gender relations and a quantum leap in our understanding of what Yvonne Hirdman, the Swedish contributor, calls here different “gender systems”. Whether or not we must now grapple with the implications of alternative theoretical frameworks and different paths to writing women’s history that are restricted to particular times and places is the question that the editors pose for the future. It is a question that is as challenging for geographers as for historians, and suggests an agenda that feminist geographers might profitably address.

University of Cambridge LINDA MCDOWELL

TREVOR J. BARNEY and JAMES S. DUNCAN (Ed@, Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992. Pp. xiii + 282. g45.00 and 02.99 paperback)

There are 12 essays here on the representation of landscape. Two, by Daniels and Harley, have been published elsewhere; the rest are new. The editors contribute a joint Introduction and Afterword. The essays cover different genres, places and times; Barnes and Duncan seek to gather them under a loose “post-structuralist” banner. I think there is a problem in this gathering, deriving less from the essays’ variety than from the theoretical arguments employed by the editors. I return to this point below. One can I think regard this as a landmark text, but not in terms of it inaugurating a new post- structuralist geography. Rather it captures a particular, ongoing and valuable moment in cultural geography where geographers have engaged with the humanities in a variety of ways. This “moment”, like any other, has a course produced work of varying worth; the book displays variety in that sense too.

Of the 12 essays four stand out; I will first cover the other eight, in their order of appearance. James and Nancy Duncan begin with a piece on Roland Barthes and his