Great Plains Quarterly

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 contrasts. 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. These biographical essays present narratives of Oklahoma women, offering “a glimpse into the complexities of women’s activism as they sought to define the physical, social, and political spaces in which they lived” (279). The activist causes taken up by these women range from suffrage, child welfare, civil rights, Native rights, and LGBTQ rights.

The book is organized into three loosely themed chronological sections. Part 1, which spans from the 1870s to the 1920s, looks at the years surrounding Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and “[explores] the fluidity of power with which women took advantage of a society in flux by fashioning their own communities and identities” (3). Part 2, perhaps the most cohesively themed section, focuses exclusively on the “gendered politics in civil rights activism in Oklahoma from the 1920s through the 1960s” (121). Part 3, covering the 1970s to the 2010s, explores various “contested notions of equality” involved in the issues of “Indigenous rights and sovereignty, the Equal Rights Amendment, LGBTQ+ rights, and the conservative politics of motherhood” (4–5). [End Page 365]

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. Although focusing exclusively on cisgender women, the book tells the stories of several BIPOC women, as well as women from all ends of the political spectrum.

While the chapters carefully catalog and showcase the accomplishments and successes of each woman, they also reveal the costs resulting from the women’s activism. Janda and Loughlin conclude that “Oklahoma is a land that has been shaped by generations of determined women who skillfully—some more so than others—navigated gender role constructions, legal and political constraints, and racial and ethnic discrimination to create change” (280). This Land 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.