Playing House in the American West: Western Women's Life Narratives, 1839-1987

How domestic life shaped identity, gender, and power in the American West

The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is "playing house." From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman's difference from western neighbors and eastern readers alike.

The readings in Playing Hou...