This Land Is Herland

“This Land Is Herland probes the state’s conflictive history through the lens of Indigenous, Black, and settler white women activists and scholars to spotlight thirteen courageous women, past and present, who attempted to create a better world. It accomplishes this free of boosterism, romanticization, or fear of exposing the demons of white supremacy and settler-colonialism.”—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie
 

“This exemplary collection is a model of scholarship on western women’s history. A pleasure to read, the rich essays reveal an exciting diversity of women whose hard work and political engagement have shaped the present-day state of Oklahoma and tribal nations.”—Cathleen D. Cahill, author of Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement
 

“This Land is Herland contributes much to this vibrant field of western women’s history. The anthology’s editors, Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin, both of whom are noted historians of gender and the American West, have woven a historical tapestry that artfully represents the activism of Oklahoma women from a variety of socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds between the 1870s and the 2010s.”—Journal of Southern History
 

“With a title that evokes both a quintessential American folk song and a foundational work of feminist utopian fiction, This Land is Herland centers on Oklahoma as a space of juxtapositions and contracts. Editors Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin bring together a collection of thirteen essays exploring how women in Oklahoma engaged in community and political activism. Across all sections, the writers frequently emphasize how stories of Oklahoma women have often been neglected and marginalized, as well as how the women self-fashioned identities and wielded significant political power founded in community and relationships. This is Herland is an accessible, readable collection that shines a spotlight on women’s lives and work that often fall outside mainstream histories of the American West, and as such, it is a useful entry point into further research for both scholars and students.”—Great Plains Quarterly