Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter 1
2. Contents 5
3. Acknowledgments 9
4. Abstract 13
5. 1 The 19th-Century American West: A Social Laboratory for Multifarious Transformations and Reforms
6. Introduction 15
7. 2 Historical Reflections of American Autobiographical Narrative Practice(s)
8. Introduction 37
9. 2.1 Women’s Life Writings in the “Forgotten Century” 42
10. 2.2 “Damned mob of scribbling women” 43
11. 2.3 Narrative Spaces of Life Writing 51
12. 2.4 Native American Autobiography: A “Mangled” Genre 59
13. 3 The Cultural West as a Transformational Place of Many Spaces
14. 3.1 Cultural Concepts of Space and Place 69
15. 3.2 “Manifest Destiny Aesthetics” – Cultural (Mis)representations of the West 75
16. 3.3 Bringing “Progress” to the West 78
17. 3.4 Go West, Young Woman! 81
18. 3.5 Cultural Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Women’s “Proper Place” 90
19. 3.6 The Transformation of Domestic Boundaries and Nineteenth-Century Medicine 105
20. 4 Women’s Transformative Counter-Narratives to the Ontological History of the 19^th Century American West
21. 4.1 Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte: “The First Woman Physician Among Her People” 121
22. 4.2 Patty Bartlett Sessions: The Role of Mormon Women and Medicine in Settling Salt Lake, Utah 177
23. 4.3 Life of Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair: “Mother of [Oregon’s] Sterilization Bill” 204
24. 5 Blazing their Paths into the Future
25. Introduction 257
26. Works Cited 267