Winifred Gallagher
Writer
At the epic intersection of America’s western expansion and its suffrage movement, unsung heroines of the turbulent settlement era bent old rules and won new rights.
From “town mothers” to “girl homesteaders,” they became more equal by acting more equally. By 1914, most could vote—unlike their eastern sisters.
The West’s diverse newcomers—and those they displaced—changed history and redefined “American woman.”
“New Women in the Old West is really two books deftly stitched together. It is a brisk history of the galvanizing role played by Western women in the national struggle for suffrage. It is also a kind of group portrait of the independent, resourceful women who managed to forge places for themselves in a man’s world ... [Gallagher] profiles the ambitious women, often unmarried, who worked as homesteaders, teachers, entrepreneurs, ranchers and cowgirls. The most effective profiles let the subjects speak for themselves in quotations that Ms. Gallagher culls from diaries, journals and letters. Most women, however, left no written record, and compiling their stories required a prodigious amount of research. Ms. Gallagher patches together their biographies from tax rolls and other public documents, as well as from private archives and newspapers ... A testament to the depth of Ms. Gallagher’s research is the range of her cast of characters. It includes Native American, black and Hispanic women as well as Asians and other immigrants ... [She] has an eye for the telling detail ... Both informative and enjoyable to read. Its roster of the accomplished, often heroic, women of the West is inspiring.”
Wall Street Journal
"Winifred Gallagher’s comprehensive New Women in the Old West: From Settlers to Suffragists, an Untold American Story unearths this story through the lives of dozens of forgotten trailblazers. Suffrage is only part of it; women settlers were integral to building communities and developing the economy as the United States expanded, and the Native and Mexican women already living in the West were critical in the fight against encroachment and discrimination. . . Gallagher’s rediscoveries are inspirational. Hard conditions and sparse populations created opportunities for women in the West unavailable to them elsewhere. They fought their way into business ownership, education, professional careers—and ultimately voting booths and elective office."
BookPage
“Winifred Gallagher weaves her multi-racial and multi-ethnic cast of characters into a fascinating story of resilience, ambition, and tragedy that ranges widely across the nineteenth century West. The extraordinary women at the heart of her narrative are brave, determined, and often flawed, and she makes it clear why it is impossible to understand the West without them.”
Richard White, author of California Exposures
“Welcome to the Women's West—a fascinating mix of newcomers and old timers, adventurous souls all, equally dedicated to the region they called home and winning rights for their sex. Their inspirational stories speak powerfully to western women's roles in the ongoing struggle for equality and justice for all Americans.”
Susan Ware, author of Why They Marched
“Journalist Gallagher delivers a buoyant women’s history of the American West … Gallagher brings a fresh lens to the suffrage movement, and rescues many of her pioneering subjects from obscurity. Feminists will be heartened by this rich and satisfying history.”
Publishers Weekly
“Employing a wonderfully engaging biographical approach, Winifred Gallagher’s New Women in the Old West tells the vitally important and complicated parallel stories of colonization and women’s empowerment in the West from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. The cast of characters, from the legendary to the long overlooked, captures the full demographic diversity of the West and the enormous importance of that region to the course of the nation, while serving as a powerful reminder that ‘despite formidable obstacles, change is possible.’”
David Wrobel, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, author of America’s West: A History, 1890-1950
“Staking her broad sweep of Western history in the bedrock of individual women's stories, Gallagher expertly chronicles their collective determination to break for freedom, equality, education, land and political power. The author incorporates Native, Hispanic, African, Asian, and Anglo-American women's experiences as she tracks the rise of women's rights—‘a jagged trajectory of advances and retreats’ that ultimately succeeds. This is an eye-opening, impressive tale of empowerment that spread from West to East and transformed the nation.”
Sherry L. Smith, author of Bohemians West: Free Love, Family and Radicals in the Twentieth Century
Long the government’s most important endeavor, the post office bound thirteen quarrelsome colonies into the United States, then played essential roles in its political, social, economic, and physical development.
Before deciding its future, Americans should understand this neglected institution’s phenomenal past.
“‘The history of its Post Office is nothing less than the story of America,’ Ms. Gallagher’s opening sentence declares, and in this lively book she makes the case well … Engaging, well-written.”
The Washington Post
“An ode to a little-heralded but flagship government enterprise. [Gallagher] reminds us … that the post office forged a communications revolution just as far-reaching as the later telegraph and internet revolutions.”
The New York Times Book Review
“‘The history of its Post Office is nothing less than the story of America,’ Ms. Gallagher’s opening sentence declares, and in this lively book she makes the case well.”
Wall Street Journal
Follow a crawling baby around, and you’ll see that right from the start, nothing excites us more than something new and different. To prevent the great strength of our “neophilia” from becoming a weakness in today’s fast-paced world, we must reconnect with its grand evolutionary purpose: to help us learn, create, and adapt to new things that have real value and dismiss the rest as distractions.
“If someone refers to you as a neophile, you should be flattered, according to Winifred Gallagher in this fascinating and totally original sequel to her earlier gem, Rapt.”
Richard Restak, author of Think Smart
“It's difficult to categorize Gallagher's exuberant survey through so many areas of interest, but she proves her point: curiosity about and hunger for the new can certainly take you to many fascinating places.”
Booklist
“An accessible, well-researched work that crosses a variety of disciplines and will satisfy scientifically curious readers. It will appeal to those who enjoy Stephen Jay Gould and Oliver Sacks.”
Library Journal
Much of the quality of your life depends not on fame or fortune, beauty or brains, fate or coincidence, but on what you choose to focus on. In this New York Times best-seller, lessons from the complex science of attention come to life in a diverse cast of characters, from researchers to artists to ranchers, who shape their inner experience and expand their world by focusing on the most positive and productive elements of any situation.
By learning to focus, all of us can improve our concentration, broaden our horizons, and most important, feel what it means to be fully alive.
“You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. You can drive yourself crazy trying to multitask and answer every e-mail message instantly. Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of what Ms. Gallagher calls the focused life.”
The New York Times
“Engaging.”
The Washington Post
“‘Rapt’ is a fascinating discussion of how consciousness works, and Ms. Gallagher offers much helpful advice on how to lead a ‘focused life.’”
Wall Street Journal
“In prose that is lucid and engaging, she traces connections between such apparently disparate phenomena as the parietal cortex, Milton's ‘Paradise Lost’ and families who eat dinner together regularly. According to Gallagher, attention—or its absence—is at the heart of what ails us, and our lives would be longer, richer and more empathetic if we would only learn to pay attention.”
The Globe and Mail
The “good bag” competes with pricey designer shoes, jeans, and jewelry as the must-have fashion possession, but the trend isn't just an outgrowth of a strong luxury–goods market––women’s thoughts, feelings, and dreams are involved, too.
This cultural history of the handbag, which also borrows from psychology, sociology, and even economics, is a light-hearted look at modern identity as seen through one fashion obsession.
“A jaunty meditation on the apotheosis of the designer handbag.”
The New York Times
“If you want to understand a woman, look in her bag.”
Valerie Steele, director, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology
“A purse for a woman is like a toolbox for a carpenter.”
Ann Richards, former governor of Texas
IKEA, Ethan Allen and HGTV may have plenty to say about making a home look right, but what makes a home feel right? House Thinking is a psychological, social, and historical tour of the American home, exploring how our dwellings influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Provocative questions—How does the entryway shape the home? How can the bathroom spark private fears?—invite us to look at how we live and think about how we could.
“In her engaging new book, ‘House Thinking,’ Gallagher gives us a room-by-room architectural history—a tour that, of course, turns out to involve fascinating points of sociology, economics, culture and politics.”
The New York Times
“An engaging book ... enlightening and helpful”
Los Angeles Times
“Stylish ... Winifred Gallagher approaches the idea of personal environment more like Margaret Mead than Martha Stewart, and her deconstruction of domesticity is captivating.”
Chicago Tribune
Whether called saints, gurus, tzaddiks, or shamans, numinous individuals who possess exceptional insight, altruism, and charisma are attuned to the deepest truths. These spiritual geniuses share important lessons about life’s meaning and our own potential for creating profound good.
“The heart of this book—the second on religion from a journalist known for her elegant forays into behavioral science—is the kind of vivid reporting we have come to expect from Winifred Gallagher … With her gentle guidance, religious people of all stripes will find that they have much to learn.”
The New York Times
“Spirituality finds vivid expression in the lives of the men and women pictured here.”
Los Angeles Times
“A great reminder that we all have within us the power to pursue something greater … Gallagher’s charming writing style is sometimes playful and always skilled.”
Rocky Mountain News
Why do I exist? Is this all there is? What is my true nature? What is most important in life? How should I live? These are humanity's oldest spiritual questions, but today, many who ask them are profoundly estranged from religion.
What unites this diverse group of skeptical, ambivalent, spiritual-but-not-religious individuals is their inchoate desire for meaning and a sense of something deep and vital that eludes the reach of intellect and education. Their eclectic quest has created an unofficial movement that is transforming American culture as well as religion.
“A fascinating mosaic of contemporary religious thought … A rich and beautifully written harvest for the reader.”
The New York Times
“Rich and intelligent … An outstanding piece of writing that shows the strength and beauty of America’s religious heart.”
Boston Globe
“Working on God is one of the greatest spiritual works of this decade, as delightful as it is wise.”
Anne Lamott
(Published in paperback as Just the Way You Are: How Heredity and Experience Create the Individual)
By combining hard science, cutting-edge psychology, and the true story of an emotionally abandoned child, this New York Times Notable Book explores the wonders and mysteries of being human by asking age-old questions central to human individuality: Who am I? Was I born that way? Why are my relatives so different from me? Or so similar? How much can I influence my children? Can I change?
“This book is about how to think about who you are. And in introducing us to the groundbreaking research on why we are the way we are, as well as its personal, moral, political and social implications, Ms. Gallagher's fascinating book has broadened our capacity to wonder.”
The New York Times
“Gallagher has taken a difficult, contentious and often poorly reported body of research material and rendered it intriguing and understandable.”
Boston Globe
Why do some of us prefer the city to the country? How do urban settings increase crime? Why do we feel better after an experience in nature? According to behavioral and environmental science, our reactions to the world around us—whether Alaska's hinterlands or New York City’s subways—offer vital insights into the many ways we can change our lives by changing the places we live.
“Ms. Gallagher shows that one physical setting can intersect with the lives of its users in a variety of surprising ways … . This engrossing book ends with a plea for putting a little nature back in our lives, for the good of body and soul. Nature is us, after all.”
The New York Times
“Bold and fascinating.”
Los Angeles Times
“First-rate and alarmingly fresh … A brand-new vision of how we are affected by how and where we live.”
Jim Harrison, author of Dalva
Photo by Nina Subin