This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 8, 2010 - Colorado had Dr. Justina Ford, the first African-American woman doctor in the state. Seattle had Bertha Knight Landes, the first woman mayor of a major American city. And New Mexico had noted educator and author Fabiola Cabeza de Baca.
But before you meet those powerful ladies in the new exhibit "Home Lands: How Women Made the West" at the Missouri History Museum, you will get a brief refresher course on our own Marie Therese Bourgeois Chouteau, the "founding mother" of St. Louis who can hold her own against any other woman of history. Chouteau, who lived with fur trader Pierre Laclede in St. Louis after her husband deserted her, had the kind of clout that women in America's eastern cities never dreamed of during the Revolutionary War era.
The local addition to "Home Land,'' a national touring exhibit, also celebrates the lives of suffragist Edna Gellhorn and activist and environmentalist Freddie Mae Brown. You might be surprised to learn, for example, that colonial women of color in St. Louis could own land, or that 20th-century women activists helped push the crusade for clean air and water in the city.
That's part of the fun of "Home Lands,'' which explores the role of women in the American West -- from Native Americans to the women of diverse cultures who migrated to the region and worked alongside men to hack new lives out of the wilderness. The tribal warriors, frontiersmen and cowboys didn't have all of the fun, it turns out.
The exhibit was organized by the Autry National Center in Los Angeles and focuses on three regions: northern New Mexico, the Colorado Front Range and Puget Sound in Washington. The late actor Gene Autry -- "America's Singing Cowboy" -- was a co-founder of the Museum of the American West, which merged with the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in 2004 to form the Autry.
On display are 200 objects spanning a time period of more than 1,000 years: grinding stones and earthenware, including some used at Cahokia Mounds; textiles; clothing; pottery, paintings and even a snazzy vintage car, cut in half, that contains a display about women drivers.
