Womens in the west - Essay Example

How Women Made the West reading response How Women Made the West demonstrates the significant role of women in creating and preserving western endeavor to existence across the history. Historical artifacts, art, photographys, and biographies of individuals will provide visitors with idea of how womens history, western history, and environment history have been created and subdued by women. Women’s historical and cultural involvement become clearer as it explores the way in which they encountered and altered major archetypal Western landscapes like Rio Arriba region of northern New Mexico, the From Range of Colorado, and the Puget Sound waterscape.

Women were not deprived of the chances to pursue their own innovations on tool making, food preservation, pottery, art and architecture. As the ancestral occupation was agriculture, major portion of their experiments was associated with the requirements of their daily life. For instance, as food preservation was their major concern, they initiated making earthen pots because they knew that earthen pots could withstand the higher temperatures needed to cook ground corn and beans.

Moreover, women learned how to locate and mine the best types of clay for making pots, and they passed their knowledge on to their daughters too. They could develop the technique to temper clay by mixing the sand to broken pottery as it would prevent damage during firing. The result was highly fitting as they could produce beautiful pots that ensure storing and preserving seeds, cooking, and gathering water. Subsequently pottery emerged to be new occupation to certain segments of women and their families.

Women’s achievements on pottery led them to rather broad architectural concerns like construction of shelters and walls using clay. The art was highly prevalent in the North American regions. The construction of walls revealed their awareness on the science because they used some specific techniques like applying clay, with each layer allowed to dry before the next coat was applied. By19th century ethnic groups like Hispanic, Indians, and Rio Grande had established their own accommodation.

An array of factors including the Spanish language, Catholicism, technology and foods integrated them along with the women’s contributions to art and labor. For instance, the post World WarI decade brought hundreds of artists ,writer and visionaries, many from the East to Northern New México to maintain a home; and the migration indeed was led by Anglo women who determined convention in mater of love, family, and occupation. Some of the women who came to Santa Fe and Taos intended self actualization and individual freedom.

Elizabeth Shipley Sergeant and Mary Austin were the two single women invested in pottery and called themselves "Mud women”. Hispanic women considered themselves potential enough to make their own good living and to develop a healthy way of linking past with modernization. Potter Maria Martinez was notable among them who used her income from pottery to buy an iron cooking range and car. Martinez could earn about two thousand dollars a year from her business by 1924. Her pottery was the major source of income that surpassed farming in San Ildelfo Village.

Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, the writer and government extension agent believed that Americanization could be resisted by preserving Hispanic past. Cabeza de Baca initiated to provide families with information by translating government bulletins from English to Hispanic. She was a firm believer in science and development; and was equipped with the latest canning kettle, the pleasure cooker, government bulletins. She had college training in home economics and she pursued thirty years of life on the same career.

Another women Santa Clara who chose painting as career rejected tradition and pursued her own innovative way of painting. Western history indeed includes the strong contributions of women. Furthermore, if we notice Indian culture we can assume the different ways in which women got adapted to innovations. However, those innovations also forced them to undertake new obligations to initiate business of creating home and community on the area of mountains and plain-Denver and its hinterland.

On the other hand, women detained the power of the transportation revolution to insist on their rights ambitions. For them both the railroad and horse were inspiring alike. To illustrate, the way Colorado women exploited the new rail lines to carry the debate on the referendum across the territory was significant. Denver entrepreneurs made considerable contribution to infrastructural development by funding transit lines, horse cars, trolleys, and ultimately road for motorcars.

In addition, .Jhon Evans and William Byers, attempted to bring a railroad to Denver by investing in the Denver Tramway company in 1886. Americans were leveraged with trolleys and railroads which added to their ability and desire to move. Consequently, Denver became the faster growing city in the nation notably between 18970 and 1890. The Five Points area consists of a mix of working- and middle class German, Jewish, African American and Irish residents. We have seen how ordinary women found the means to carry on in seemingly empty places.

The adversity of life or social limitations has not yet impeded her ambitious outlook to be more creative. They have adopted new ways to surpass all social constraints in order to be the active part of designing strategies for daily life; and at a broader sense, for nation building process.