Non-fiction review: Ladies of the Canyons

One of my friends sent me this book, and I've already managed to forget who. Thanks--it was a good read and I learned a lot.

 

 

Title: Ladies of the Canyons: A League of Extraordinary Women and Their Adventures in the American Southwest

Author: Lesley Poling-Kempes
Publication Info: University of Arizona Press, 2015.  373 pages
Source: Gift

Publisher’s Blurb:
Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world.

Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them.

Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos.

Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston’s Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe’s art and literary colony.

Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.

My Review:
As I mentioned above, one of my friends sent me this book, but it is easily the sort I would buy when visiting National Parks in the Southwest. Part adventure story, part art history, and part feminist history, this book covers a lot of ground, and at first I wasn't sure how I felt about it. There are a lot of women represented here, and the book covers a large span of years. But there is one thing that seems to be a constant thread: these were women who came to the Southwest for a variety of reasons, but stayed because they fell in love with the landscape. I get that.

If I'd just been told this was about art and especially the foundation of the Modern Art movement, I probably wouldn't have picked it up. But while caught up in the lives of the women profiled in the book, I found myself interested in and learning about modern art. A lot of names are dropped that I don't know, but eventually we get around to some I do, including (of course) Georgia O'Keeffe. In the meantime, I learned about those who went before, and the book always circles back around to the landscape--and the indigenous people who were often defended by these same women.

The west represented for these women, an escape from the rigid social expectations of their class. It allowed them to be strong, independent, and physically active in the outdoors--none of which was wholly acceptable in the high society of New York or Boston.

My Recommendation:
Definitely a good read if the region or the topics interest you at all.

FTC Disclosure: I was given a copy of Ladies of the Canyons by a friend and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2023
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