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MARGARET PURSER
“Several Paradise Ladies
Are Visiting in Town”:
Gender Strategies in the
Early Industrial West
ABSTRACT
Gender can provide a powerful interpretive construct in historical archaeology and should not be an optional dimension
in archaeological site interpretation. As a central structuring
principle of society, gender is not limited to either specific
artifact categories and site types or to women per se.
Rather, it is a fundamental part of what organizes women
and men into historically and archaeologically recognizable
units like households and structures their relationships with
the larger community and society around them. The following discussion presents a general overview of current approaches to gender in anthropology and history. Two case
studies drawn from the 19th-century American West demonstrate some of the implications this discourse has for both
the data and the interpretive frameworks employed in historical archaeology.
Introduction
Historical archaeology is moving from a remedial archaeology of women to a more integrative
archaeology informed by gender (e.g., Handsman
1984; Wall 1987, 1989; Hardesty 1989; McGuire
1989; Scott 1989; Spencer-Wood 1989). This is
more than an expansion of a descriptive category
or the recognition of yet another discrete variable
in site interpretation. It is not a matter of finding
methods for equating women with specific artifact
types or site features. It requires a shift away from
such methods, which in spite of other intentions
have often portrayed women as passive objects or
victims of broader social events and have circumscribed gender within bounded contexts like
household, domestic, and private.
The question is not how to go about “digging
up” gender. As was true of generally ecological or
behavioral issues prior to the New Archaeology of
the 1960s, archaeologists are undeniably already
‘‘digging up” a gendered archaeological record
(Binford 1962; Dunnell 1986) but simply failing to
deal with that record in those terms. As Alison
Wylie has noted recently, an archaeology of gender requires first recognizing that gender is a fundamental structuring principle in any society and
employing an analysis of gender as an integral part
of any interpretive perspective (Wylie 1991).
As a result of this shift from “women” to
‘‘gender,’’ basic archaeological categories like
household or community get re-examined and redefined. So do broader-scale processes, like industrialization, emerging capitalism, urbanization, or
Western expansion, that have formed the causal
framework for so much of American historical archaeology. In historical archaeology, as in other
social and historical fields, these gender-informed
re-evaluations have powerful implications, not only
for an archaeology of gender, but for historical
archaeology as a whole.
The following discussion uses two case studies
from the 19th-century American West to examine
what some of the consequences of such a re-evaluation might be. As two distinct phases in the
course of fieldwork experience, they describe a
personal transition from doing an archaeology that
might (or might not) choose to identify women in
the archaeological record to one that employs gender as a central analytical referent in archaeological interpretation.
The first case study involves an historical archaeology project in the small town of Paradise
Valley, Nevada, conducted between 1981 and
1986 (Purser 1987). The second is drawn from a
1988-1989 project in the Sierra Nevada mining
camp of Grass Flat, California (Praetzellis et al.
1990). Both sites were occupied from the 1860s to
the first decades of the 20th century.
Specific historical, archaeological, architectural, and oral historical data are available elsewhere for each project (Purser 1987; Praetzellis et
al. 1990). Research is continuing on materials
from both sites, particularly with regard to the analytical problems involved in interpreting gender
roles using archaeological data (Purser 1989,
[1992]; Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1990). The fol-
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GENDER STRATEGIES IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL WEST
lowing discussion will not present detailed archaeological data, but will focus instead on the broader
interpretive issues raised by comparing the analyses of the two sites.
These two case studies link the transformation
of gender roles during the period, often associated
with the “cult of domesticity,” with contemporary
changes in the social units of household and community. However, analysis is less focused on specific definitions of either gender’s social or cultural
role than on the more contextual realities of what
might be called gender strategies-a sort of “gender-is-as-gender-does’’
approach. In like manner,
the discussion does not directly address the actual
composition of households or communities as either social units or site types. It deals instead with
the complex patterns of human mobility that characterized the second half of the 19th century in the
United States and that revolutionized the nature
and function of all social units in American society.
These socioeconomic categories and processual
patterns also had profound consequences for the
archaeological record of that period. These consequences are the stuff of current archaeological
studies of consumption practices, emerging class
structures, and expanding industrial capitalism (cf.
Beaudry and Mrozowski 1987; Spencer-Wood
1987;Paynter 1988; Beaudry 1989). The argument
that follows proposes that gender, household,
community, and mobility are inherently related entities and that a gender-informed perspective provides a powerful analytical tool for interpreting
that record.
In order to place this analysis in the context of
broader trends in the study of gender, a general
overview of those trends, and their points of
intersection with current issues in historical
archaeology, is presented. Some of the implications these trends hold for historical archaeology
and its approach to gender are described. In
particular, a gendered approach proves useful in
bridging the disparate scales at which historical
archaeologists must examine the material record
of the past: from individual artifact assemblages to
national- and international-scale social and economic processes.
Current Trends in Gender Studies
Alison Wylie recently questioned the continued
lack of a successful archaeology of gender. She
called on archaeologists to take advantage of 20
years of gender studies in anthropology and other
social sciences, work that has defined terms and
honed research approaches to gender as one of the
central ordering principles of any society. Citing
some of the criticisms of early feminist approaches
to gender systems, Wylie further stated that an
archaeology of gender must be focused on diversity and complexity, to counter earlier tendencies
toward a simplifying, essentializing view of ‘‘Universal Woman”-a concept further discussed by
Dobres (1988). But in spite of this diversity, such
an archaeology must also recognize that “gender
is, in its various forms, a fundamental structuring
principle” of societies (Wylie 1991:38-40).
Wylie’s argument brings into pragmatic focus
similar statements made over the past decade by
archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians, as
well as a range of feminist scholars. People have
critiqued the current state of gender studies in the
social sciences, the degree to which a clear concept
of gender (as opposed to women) has been articulated, and the relevance of feminist theory at epistemological, interpretive levels as well as in descriptive, narrative work (Rosaldo 1980; Keller
1982; Harding 1986; Scott 1986; Conkey and Gero
1988; Conkey 1990).
Two major points unify this criticism. Debate
over issues of definition has focused as much on
specifying what gender is not as on what it is.
Gender is not the same as sex, but came into currency as a term that denoted “the social organization of the relationship between the sexes” (Scott
1986:1053).As such, gender is not, and should not
be, equated with women, particularly not women
in isolation from broader social and ideological
contexts (Scott 1986:1056; McGaw 1989:179180). In like manner, the social construction of
gender is not bounded by any particular circumscribed context, variously described as private, domestic, household, or kinship (Scott 1986:10691071; McGaw 1989:180-184).
This is not to deny the significance of critical
a
work that recovered an active role for women in
social processes. Indeed, the more this research
empowered women as actors in social and historical contexts, the more scholars could insist that
gender be seen as fundamental to such processes:
history and society are clearly and inescapably
gendered in an active and ongoing sense.
Processual approaches derived from this insight
form a second focus for critique. Discussion here
has emphasized historicizing and problematizing
gender. Gender categories and relations are neither
natural and universal, nor fixed in time and space,
but are historically and socially constituted. Therefore they are constantly in play and can be contested, renegotiated, or reinforced on a situational
basis: in short, they are strategic. Gender roles and
relations also vary greatly across class and status
lines and remain open to manipulation (Scott 1986:
1056-1057, 1074; Conkey 1990).
As recent critiques have broadened and contextualized the concept of gender, various authors
have pointed out that the analytical consequences
of employing such a concept reach beyond the creation of a new descriptive category of social identity and interaction. Examining the relationship between sex /gender systems and other categories of
social life produces serious epistemological challenges to existing interpretive categories, such as
household, kinship, or economy. They call into
question current understandings of the integration
of individuals into social or cultural contexts, and
the nature of processes of change (Wylie 1989;
Conkey 1990).
Finally, some feminist critiques have argued that
incorporating gender as a fundamental structuring
principle of society-and all its products, from individual identity to political economy-implicates
not only the objects of scholarly inquiry, but the
very systems of inquiry themselves, the “science”
or “history” within which studies of gender are
undertaken (Keller 1982; Kelly 1984; Harding
1986; Wylie et al. 1988). Thus, problematizing
gender becomes a powerful, necessary part of any
critical, self-reflexive research methodology.
These more general trends hold a number of
implications for historical archaeology and its approach to gender. Because archaeologists work in
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, VOLUME 25
the historical past of the very society whose gender
categories have been applied as universal, and
which created the epistemological systems (like
anthropology) that have tried to analyze those categories, they have a powerful context in which to
extend critiques of contemporary gender relations.
In the same manner, gender has the potential to
expand the basis for a self-critical approach in historical archaeology, as advocated by Leone (1982)
and others.
In addition, recent discussions of the implications of gender studies for archaeology have noted
that gender-informed analysis forces one to shift to
a perspective that views all social categories and
processes as being fluid and negotiated (Conkey
1990). These trends parallel and reinforce trends in
historical archaeology that employ new social theory to create similarly flexible perspectives on the
relationships between material culture and social
or historical processes. For example, recent approaches to consumption (Purser [ 1992]), capitalism (Little 1986; Leone 1988), and households
(Beaudry 1988) all stress the need for more flexible, contextually derived, and historically sensitive
analysis to interpret the archaeologicalrecord more
fully (Beaudry et al. 1990).
Many of these efforts also have questioned the
epistemological status of the archaeological record
in historical archaeology. Current discussion involves redefining what constitutes archaeological
data, what kinds of interpretation are accessible or
legitimate for historical archaeologists, and how
inferential arguments should be structured in relationship to the various data sources employed. The
process is less one of privileging one type of data,
such as artifacts or written records, over the other
than of experimenting with the multiplicity of interpretations such data make possible. In the case
of 19th-century households, for example, much of
the new work begins by rejecting earlier, static
assumptions about the ‘‘household” or ‘‘family’’
that would have created a particular, archaeologically visible unit. Instead, this research uses the
archaeological record to critique and amplify an
emerging literature on the diversity and fluidity of
all social units from this time (LeeDecker et al.
1987; Beaudry 1988; Hardesty 1988).
GENDER STRATEGIES IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL WEST
Thus, viewing gender as a central means by
which many social categories are negotiated can
provide historical archaeologists with a further
means of articulating their smaller scale, archaeologically derived data with broader interpretive
frameworks. Such an articulation is a matter of
growing concern in the field (Leone and Crosby
1987; Deagan 1988; Schuyler 1988; Beaudry et al.
1990). Although perspectives vary considerably,
debate focuses on the degree to which historical
archaeology must remain grounded in material
concerns with excavation and artifact analysis,
without being limited to them or simplistically derived from them.
What might these shifts from women to gender,
and from definition to more process-oriented, contextual analysis entail for historical archaeologists?
In particular, how can historical archaeology move
beyond gender as a descriptive category constrained by household scales of analysis? The following case studies recount one effort to make
such a transition and describe some of the consequences for the archaeological interpretations involved.
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nent phenomenon. It included both the large-scale
migration from East to West during American territorial expansion and the smaller scale, but
equally significant, patterns of travel within regions. Explaining this complex mobility means
considering everything from the degree of individual freedom to be mobile to the relative significance of various technological methods people employed to move from place to place (Hareven and
Vinovskis 1978; Lingeman 1980; Hudson 1985).
The discussion that follows is most concerned with
something that could be called the mobile community, which will be discussed in greater detail below.
In like manner, the broad redefinition of labor
and family and the reorganization of household
economies in the expansion of 19th-centuryindustrialization are equally familiar to historical archaeologists working in this period (Handsman
1984;Beaudry and Mrozowski 1987; LeeDecker et
al. 1987). So is the specific impact of these transformations on the lives of middle-class urban
women (cf. Ryan 1981; Wall 1987). This cult of
domesticity took shape in the explosion of a commercially based, national-scale popular culture, in
which household management treatises authored
by an emerging professional corps of reformers
From Paradise Valley to Grass Flat,
and Back
and social theorists blurred into a contemporary
flood of advertisements, magazines, novels, and
Archaeologists working in the 19th-century brand names.
All these sources didactically redefined a new
West have become familiar with the interpretive
dilemma confronted when they work to link the middle-class world, an indispensable parlor set of
physical place of an archaeological site to some childrearing practices and calling cards, mass consector of a highly mobile, local or regional popu- sumption and antimacassars (Ewen 1976; Wright
lation. Documents often present a sketchy, bewil- 1981; Trachtenberg 1982). Linking the expanding
dering array of occupation, with frequent turnover role of womenas sole controllers of household
in the households of a given site. Archaeological purchasing decisions with an archaeological focus
approaches to individual residences are challenged on consumption patterns as an index of participafurther by the inherently transient, corporate phe- tion in the culture of industrial capitalism forms an
nomena of boardinghouses, company towns, and acknowledged, if problematic, interpretive device
mining camps. In moving beyond the household to in household archaeology for the period (Beaudry
the community level, the problems are com- 1988; Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1990).
pounded, and the effort forces a re-examination of
It was in this general context that analytical
what is meant by concepts like household or com- problems in the Nevada and California examples
discussed below ultimately linked interpretations
munity in these contexts (Hardesty 1988).
The human mobility that produced such archae- of gender, transformations of households and comological patterns was a complex and multi-compo- munities, and varying scales of human mobility.
10
These links took two very different field projects
and nearly 10 years to develop. Initially, the historical device of the cult of domesticity made any
connections between gender and household seem
relatively self-evident and not requiring much further thought. At the same time, archaeological difficulties posed by widespread and only partially
documented mobility looked far more problematic.
What to do about highly mobile historical populations first became an issue during research in the
small town of Paradise Valley, Nevada (Purser
1987). It proved of even greater importance during
the later work in the Sierra Nevada mining camp of
Grass Flat, California (Praetzellis et al. 1990).
In both instances, the relative mobility of the
resident populations affected the approach to fundamental archaeological questions about the distribution of sites across a landscape, long- and shortterm settlement patterns, demographics, and the
relevant technologies of transportation and communication. Beyond these issues, the constant
flow of people through both settlements and the
long-term patterns of occupation, abandonment,
and resettlement called into question the legitimacy of attempting to identify a specific community that had created either site in any finite sense.
In the crossroads town of Paradise, this produced a pragmatic, if somewhat prosaic, split in
the way the historical population was identified.
Analysis sorted the more or less permanent commercial sector of individually documented storekeepers and tradespeople from their more or less
transient, and generally anonymous, customers. In
Grass Flat, an even higher rate of mobility meant
realizing that a community of sorts did exist, but
that it floated up and down the gold districts of the
surrounding area, following the news of strikes
and opportunities for employment. In any given
season, its members could be scattered along a
gold-bearing vein that stretched roughly 20 miles,
in a dozen or more little camps. Yet, these camps
were linked nonetheless by patterns of commerce
and employment, and eventually by marriage and
other kinship ties. The trick was to extract a sense
of this inherently fluid, diachronic community organization from the archaeological and documentary record of a single such camp.
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, VOLUME 25
It was in an effort to expand the two-dimensional view of these synchronic, economically defined communities that the concept of gender
roles, or gender strategies, came into play. The
initial connection between gender and mobility on
the Western industrial frontier was conventional
enough: it ran through the changing organization
and function of the household and the links between individual households and any larger community. Recognizing the relevance of gender to
mobility, however, first required discarding a
number of unconscious assumptions about women
and households.
During early work on the Paradise Valley
project (1981 through 1985), gender did not seem
a particularly significant factor. The history of the
small cow town looked quite straightforward.
Founded in the mid-1860s in north central Nevada,
the community experienced an early, very successful commercial agriculture industry, followed by a
short-lived local silver boom, and finally settled
into cattle and sheep ranching during the 1890s.
In this context, mobility came primarily from
the settlement’s location near a main stage route
leading north from the Central Pacific Railroad
into the frontier territories of Idaho and Oregon.
Settlement of these residual pockets of frontier
continued through the turn of the century and kept
a steady flow of immigrants moving through Paradise Valley on their way to other destinations.
A second element in the overall mobility of the
population came from the seasonal movements of
an expanding agricultural migrant labor force
which used the railroads to follow planting and
harvest cycles throughout the Great Basin, Pacific
Northwest, and California. Sporadic regional mining strikes added miners and their families to this
pool of migrant labor at irregular intervals.
Given this focus on the occupational categories
of their husbands or fathers, the lives of women
who lived in Paradise remained mostly peripheral
to the analysis, if not invisible altogether. Those
who did emerge from the documents and oral history seemed to have led lives that exemplified the
middle-class expectations of Ladies’ Home Companion and Harper’s Weekly. ‘‘Mobility” may
have affected their households but hardly seemed
.
GENDER STRATEGIES IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL WEST
an issue for individual women. Exceptions appeared anecdotally unique: the piano-playing storekeeper’s wife who taught her two young sons to
play the fiddle and would drive a buckboard all the
way to Idaho to play for a local dance, returning
the next day (Frederick C. Buckingham 1983,
pers. comm.). Equally eccentric was the cryptically worded 1879 newspaper announcement:
“Laura D. Fair passed here Saturday, with her
little pistol, going east” (Silver State [SS], 31
March 1879:3, col. 3). One valley resident pointed
out a carefully preserved buggy, kept in the garage
at his ranch. “It was my grandmother’s,’’ he
said, “for visiting” (Leslie Stewart 1984, pers.
comm.). At the time, writing a discussion of women’s lives in Paradise, undertaken as a component
of local domestic life, proved frustratingly dull and
full of stereotypes.
Four years later, excavations and analysis at
Grass Flat forced a different opinion. Located high
in the Sierra Nevada mountains, at the southern
edge of Plumas County, California, the camp began in the early 1860s when the Pioneer Gold Mine
opened. It continued sporadically through the late
1890s, following the boom-and-bust cycle of the
Pioneer’s fortunes. Even at its height, the camp
remained very small, with two boarding houses
and perhaps 10 or 12 private residences.
During its early years, the Pioneer was a hydraulic mine, like most of its competitors along the
ridge. Mine production was dependent on the local
water supply derived from the annual snowmelt.
Working the gold-bearing gravels was therefore a
seasonal activity; by April or May the water was
gone, until the next spring’s melt. Although some
miners were retained to do maintenance and repair
work, most found themselves unemployed or substantially underemployed until the water returned.
Even after converting to drift mining in the mid
1880s, the labor force fluctuated seasonally, employing more men in the spring and summer, fewer
in winter.
Here, mobility could not be addressed by sorting
those who moved from those who did not: between
the seasonal availability of work and the more episodic periods of boom and decline, no one stayed
put for long. And yet there developed a kind of
11
mobile community, with recognizable members
and boundaries, whose physical location shifted
constantly within the geographical limits of the
gold districts. This community was not a random
assortment of whatever migrant miners arrived at a
new strike to work, but was composed of a core of
families who remained in the area for as many as
three generations.
More importantly for this discussion, the most
explicit information on the nature of this mobile
community not only was about women, but often
literally came from women. The Mountain Messenger (MM), a contemporary local newspaper
published from the county seat of Downieville,
conveniently included a ‘‘Local Items” column.
Submitted columns from Grass Flat and the nearby
mining camps of Port Wine, Scales, and Howland
Flat appeared regularly. Many of these columns
actually were authored by women living in the
camps (MM 1870-1901).
At first it seemed a mere distraction that so
much of each column was taken up with the
accounts of who visited whom among the ladies
living at various locations along what was known
as the Port Wine Ridge. After all, aside from
supplementing census and tax data about camp
residents, this information did little to document
useful things, like construction dates for houses or
employment figures at the mine. But eventually,
patterns began to emerge from all the visits, return
visits, ice cream parties, dances, and poetry
readings. In the shifting physical locations of
mining-district settlement, women’s patterns of
visiting created and maintained sets of social ties
that provided some continuity to the community as
a whole. Some of these networks linked and
reinforced kinship ties; others mirrored, and in
some instances presaged, sets of small business
partnerships seen among the men of the ridge
community.
Visiting relationships may have had a more
practical function as well. During the dry summer
and early fall seasons, a number of Grass Flat
women made regular visits to relatives and friends
living down in the foothill valleys west of the Sierra. These mostly agricultural settlements provided much of the food for the mining districts,
12
where high altitudes meant prohibitively short
growing seasons. Women travelling down to the
valleys often brought along an older daughter or
son, who remained below when their mother returned to the mountains. The child would return
later, just before winter snows would close off
travel to the mountains for the year. The following
spring, guests from the lower valleys would arrive
in the mountains to enjoy the upland climate, fishing trips, and tours of the local mines.
Such a pattern of reciprocal visits would have
created direct economic as well as social benefits,
since the mountain household fed one less mouth
during the lean, non-mining season and possibly
provided additional labor to the valley household
during summer harvests. It also linked the miningcamp household with a supply of fresh vegetables,
fruits, and meat. While the current data for this
pattern are anecdotal and require further substantiation, the pattern is supported by oral historical
information from both women and men who were
long-term residents of the area.
The news columns carefully described these
trips between households in terms of the fashionable upper-class social practice of the day, of calling cards and parlor games. And yet, this was not
high society visiting as it was done in urban New
York or Boston (Veblen 1912; Schlesinger 1947;
Ames 1978). “Visits” could last for days or
weeks. A number of the most active visitors were
women who ran boardinghouses, stores, or other
enterprises, either alone or with their families.
The links between long-term visiting patterns,
the economic life of individual households, and
historical structure of the community at large, are
highlighted in the activities of these women in particular. For example, one such woman was Mrs.
Gibson, who in the early 1890s lived in the southernmost camp of Scales. Mrs. Gibson was a frequent guest in Grass Flat and Port Wine through
the summer and fall of 1892. By that November
she had been hired by the Pioneer Gold Mine to
run its boardinghouse, followed shortly by her son,
who got a job as a laborer in the mine. By the next
spring her husband had also moved north from
Scales to Port Wine, just below Grass Flat, and set
up a new saloon. (MM 26 November 1892:3, col.
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, VOLUME 25
4, 25 February 1893:3, col. 2, 22 April 1893:3,
col. 3).
Discussion
The insights gained from the Grass Flat visiting
patterns have brought a different perspective to the
Paradise Valley data. Research has returned to the
country newspapers, looking for information on
who visited whom, how often, and when. Mobility
is no longer treated as something that men did,
with their appended women and children strung
out behind them like kite tails in the wind. On one
hand, the Paradise women who first appeared to be
anecdotal exceptions, with their visiting buggies
and trips to dances, look far less exceptional. On
the other hand, significant differences exist in the
patterns of men’s and women’s mobility in either
place and between Grass Flat and Paradise Valley
as communities shaped by those gendered patterns
of mobility.
One of the more useful realizations gleaned
from the Grass Flat work concerns the different
ways men and women moved around. For example, the men of the gold district community also
visited, according to the newspapers, but they
tended to visit public places and commercial establishments: courthouses, saloons, general stores,
or the newspaper office itself. Women visited private homes, almost exclusively. Men were less
likely to be identified as visiting kin, women more
likely. Men did not seem to stay very long; women
tended to stay at least a day or two, even when the
distance travelled was very short.
Mobility was even less possible for the faceless,
static agglomerate called ‘‘household.”
Households were often split for long periods of time: a
husband might leave a wife in California to go to
the Alaskan gold fields for a year; a Nevada wife
might visit her parents in Sacramento from August
until the next May.
So where and how would one locate, archaeologically, the household of Grass Flat boardinghouse keeper Mrs. Gibson, described earlier? Donald Hardesty (1988) has noted already that coresidence is not a necessary attribute of western
GENDER STRATEGIES IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL WEST
mining households, a pattern repeated among contemporary urban working class households as well
(Glasco 1978; Johnson 1978; Beaudry and Mrozowski 1987, 1989; LeeDecker et al. 1987; Hardesty 1988). Analyzing the extent to which both
long- and short-term mobility were gendered may
contribute to more complex, fluid concepts of both
household and community, which in turn could
help to explore a more inferentially powerful archaeological record.
Interestingly, initial results from re-analyzing
the Paradise Valley material indicate that while
mobility was equally gendered there, the distinctions were somewhat different than in Grass Flat.
Both men and women travelled greater distances
and stayed for longer periods of time. These trips
were usually to the eastern United States or European home countries, and could last from several
weeks to a year or more. Differences between the
Nevada and California situations also highlight the
degree to which women’s mobility, in particular,
could be graded by class, age, and marital status.
Finally, patterns of travel and visiting change
substantially over time for all Paradise Valley residents. Those changes have been identified previously as the product of the community’s shifting
relative status as an economic center in northern
Humboldt County, its connections to other nearby
settlements, and the increasingly fixed socioeconomic hierarchy that ranked its members (Purser
1989). The comparison with Grass Flat suggests
that determining the extent to which gender relations underlay and helped to structure these seemingly more self-evident social and economic transitions could cast much of Paradise Valley’s
history in somewhat different terms.
Thus, the intellectual shift described above only
begins to move from excavating “women” in
“households” to perceiving gender relations as an
historically constituted structuring principle inherent throughout society. It raises questions about
what is being excavated, and why, in specific contexts, but cannot yet answer those questions fully.
These questions are not about “doing” versus
“not doing” gender in historical archaeology, or
how to “find” women or men in the archaeological record. Rather, they examine the extent to
13
which recognizing the gendered character of social
life problematizes archaeological concepts like
household, community, or human mobility.
In raising such questions, the personal transition
from lookingfor women to looking through gender
also begins to articulate the critical potential of
gendered research with other, parallel arguments
for critical, self-reflexive approaches in historical
archaeology.
Conclusions
The experience of comparing Paradise Valley
and Grass Flat taught four important lessons about
employing a study of gender in historical archaeology. The first involved the danger inherent in the
rich body of comparative historical literature available to historical archaeologists and in the seeming
familiarity of the subject matter. It made it so easy
to turn something like the cult of domesticity, as a
concept, into a universalizing essential, a historical
parallel of the prehistorians’ elusive “Universal
Woman” (Dobres 1988).
Secondly, this assumption blind-sided the approach to the women of Paradise Valley and made
it impossible to identify them with any greater sophistication than as participants in a stereotyped
popular culture, as opposed to nonparticipants.
Shifting attention to the diversity with which individuals and communities manipulated a popularized ideal to their own ends, in their own situations, produced a more fluid, diachronic gender
“strategy,” as opposed to the fixed, atemporal
“roles” unconsciously assumed before.
Thirdly, this danger was compounded by the
temptation to treat gender as a specialized topic,
which could only be “done” in the backyards of
individual households. If a site did not include features of that functional category, then gender did
not need to be addressed. And finally, such an
approach also limited the treatment of gender to
the scale of the household and to the study of
women in isolation, a sort of interpretive equivalent of that ubiquitous 19th-century census designation of a woman’s occupation: “keeping
house. Again, the women of the population, hav”
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, VOLUME 25
14
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quality, edited by Robert Paynter and Randall H
McGuire Basil Blackwell, Oxford, in press
gender is not limited to households, or to women,
but is a fundamental part of what organizes indi- BEAUDRY,MARYC . , AND STEPHENA . MROZOWSKI
viduals into households and structures their rela- (EDITORS)
1987 Interdisciplinary Investigations of the Boott Mills,
tionships with the larger community and society
Lowell, Massachusetts Vol 2, The Kirk Street
around them. Archaeologically, it does not constiAgents’ House Cultural Resources Management
tute a special category of research, something one
Study No 19 National Park Service, North Atlantic
could simply choose not to “do” in Paradise ValRegional Office, Boston, Massachusetts
1989 Interdisciplinary Investigations of the Boott Mills,
ley. The visiting ladies of Grass Flat have made
Lowell, Massachusetts Vol 3, The Boarding House
gender an integral part of the analytical methodolSystem as a Way of Life Cultural Resources Manogy to be brought to any site.
agement Study No 21 National Park Service, North
Atlantic Regional Office, Boston, Massachusetts
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BINFORD,LOUISR.
1962
Archaeology as Anthropology American Antiquity
28 217-225
I would like to thank Donna Siefert for organizing
the 1990 SHA session for which this paper was
originally written and for her patient labor as volume
editor I am also grateful to Sonoma State University
colleagues Mildred Dickemann, Adrian Praetzellis,
and Mary Praetzellis, as well as to three anonymous
reviewers, for their helpful comments and suggestions I owe a great deal to Alison Wylie, who first
asked me in 1987 why it was that I knew almost
nothing about the women who had lived in Paradise
Valley, in spite of six full years of research on the
town Finally, I would like to acknowledge the quiet
encouragement of Isabelle Lamance, a genuine
Paradise lady gifted with the gentle persistence
found only among the long dead
CONKEY,MARGARET
W
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MARGARET
PURSER
DEPARTMENT
OF ANTHROPOLOGY
SONOMASTATEUNIVERSITY
ROHNERT
PARK,CALIFORNIA
94928