Women Writing the West

You could read 100 books on the American West and never hear the voice of a woman. You hear the gunslingers and the sheriffs and the Indian chiefs, but women are mostly silent. Except, of course, for the “soiled doves,” often the only women who appear in a Western yarn. In the mid-1980s, Sybil Downing and some other “old family” Western women created the group Women Writing the West—now more than 250 strong—to tell the complete story of the West, including the lives, acco