Unsettling the West

"In Unsettling the West, Levy shows how each [of these remarkable women] in her own way is an early and especially vivid example of the powerful allure that California has exerted on men and women who seek to reinvent not only themselves but the world in which they live."---Los Angeles Times

From the Dustjacket:
By the end of 1849, an estimated thirty-nine thousand gold-seekers had arrived in San Francisco by sea, and some thirty thousand others had crossed the continent on land. Another eighty-six thousand would arrive in 1850. According to the census for that year, there were twelve men for every woman in California. But who would want them? The words "gold rush" generate at best an image of raucous, all-male camaraderie, at worst a storm of lawless and irredeemable violence.
Eliza Wood Burhans Farnham, a young widow who had already generated considerable attention for herself as the matron of Sing Sing Prison, had a vision for California. "Woman, with all her kindly cares and powers, so peculiarly conservative to man under such circumstances," would bring a civilizing influence to the state. Farnham's vision went beyond gentility however, to a society in which individuals--male or female--could fulfill their potential, and virtues championed by free-thinking New England philosophers would reign supreme.
The realities of everyday life in gold-rush California were daunting, but when Farnham's friend Georgiana Bruce (later Kirby) joined her the following year, hope returned in full measure: "She fills up a great place in my dark world and comes to me like a pleasant breeze or a bright sun after one of our long rains. We are going to be very independent and free...dashing about at our discretion."
Crusading, reforming, and advocating, adopting the Bloomer costume, building a house, vacationing on horseback and picking wild strawberries on the California coast, lecturing across the nation, and generally trying to lead the West into a more civilized state--while raising families of their own--Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby were forces to be reckoned with. Always outspoken, often outrageous, and fervent on behalf of their causes--prison reform, women's rights, Spiritualism, phrenology, abolitionism, suffrage--these admirable idealists believed not only in the perfectibility of humankind, but devoutly in their personal responsibility to point the way.
Quoting extensively from their books and articles, as well as unpublished correspondence, newspaper articles of the day, and numerous other sources, author JoAnn Levy has assembled a biographic gem, an entertaining and groundbreaking work that all readers with an interest in the history of the American West or women's rights will want on their bookshelves.

"JoAnn Levy's dual biography of two audacious leaders (till now unheralded) who helped find the way to suffrage and other longed-for rights is an inspiration. What a revelation, what an achievement!"
--J. S. Holliday, author of Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California