This Land is Herland

Magic City Books is proud to welcome the editors and contributors of This Land is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s for an in-store event on Wednesday September 8 at 7:00 pm.

Editors Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin will be joined by contributor Farina King and they will discuss their anthology, published earlier this year by University of Oklahoma Press.

Copies of This Land is Herland are available now at Magic City Books.

About This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s

Since well before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 secured their right to vote, women in Oklahoma have sought to change and uplift their communities through political activism. This Land Is Herland brings together the stories of thirteen women activists and explores their varied experiences from the territorial period to the present. Organized chronologically, the essays discuss Progressive reformer Kate Barnard, educator and civil rights leader Clara Luper, and Comanche leader and activist LaDonna Harris, as well as lesser-known individuals such as Cherokee historian and educator Rachel Caroline Eaton, entrepreneur and NAACP organizer California M. Taylor, and Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) champion Wanda Jo Peltier Stapleton.

Edited by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin, the collection connects Oklahoma women’s individual and collective endeavors to the larger themes of intersectionality, suffrage, politics, motherhood, and civil rights in the American West and the United States. The historians explore how race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and political power shaped-and were shaped by-these women’s efforts to improve their local, state, and national communities.

Underscoring the diversity of women’s experiences, the editors and contributors provide fresh and engaging perspectives on the western roots of gendered activism in Oklahoma. This volume expands and enhances our understanding of the complexities of western women’s history.

Farina King, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is Assistant Professor of History and affiliated faculty of Cherokee and Indigenous Studies at Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, Oklahoma. She received her Ph.D. at Arizona State University in U.S. History. King specializes in twentieth-century Native American Studies. She is the author of The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century (University Press of Kansas, 2018). Learn more about her work at farinaking.com.

Sarah Eppler Janda is Professor of History at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma. She received a Ph.D. in history in 2002 from the University of Oklahoma, where she focused on 20^th Century Oklahoma and Native American women’s history. She is the author of Beloved Women: The Political Lives of LaDonna Harris and Wilma Mankiller (Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), Pride of the Wichitas: A History of Cameron University (Oklahoma Heritage Association, 2010), and Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Oklahoma, 1962–1972 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). She is the president Cameron University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and is an active member of the Coalition for Western Women’s History, the Western History Association and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.

Patti Loughlin is Professor of History at the University of Central Oklahoma. She specializes in the history of the American West, American Indian history, and women’s and gender history. Patti serves on the Oklahoma Historical Society board of directors, has served on the editorial boards of the Western Historical Quarterly and The Chronicles of Oklahoma, and remains active in the Coalition for Western Women’s History and the Western History Association. Her book, Hidden Treasures of the American West: Muriel H. Wright, Angie Debo and Alice Marriott (University of New Mexico Press, 2005), received the Outstanding Book on Oklahoma History from the Oklahoma Historical Society and the Director’s Award and Finalist in Nonfiction from the Oklahoma Center for the Book in 2006. She coauthored Building Traditions, Educating Generations: A History of the University of Central Oklahoma (Oklahoma Heritage Association, 2007) with Bob Burke and co-edited Main Street Oklahoma: An American Story (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013) with Linda Reese. Her latest book Angie Debo, Daughter of the Prairie (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Hall of Fame, 2017), received the 2018 Oklahoma Book Award for children/young adult.