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MARGARET PURSER

“Several Paradise Ladies Are Visiting in Town”: Gender Strategies in the Early Industrial West

ABSTRACT

Gender can provide a powerful interpretive construct in historical archaeology and should not be an optional dimension in archaeological site interpretation. As a central structuring principle of society, gender is not limited to either specific artifact categories and site types or to women per se. Rather, it is a fundamental part of what organizes women and men into historically and archaeologically recognizable units like households and structures their relationships with the larger community and society around them. The following discussion presents a general overview of current approaches to gender in anthropology and history. Two case studies drawn from the 19th-century American West dem- onstrate some of the implications this discourse has for both the data and the interpretive frameworks employed in historical archaeology.

Introduction

Historical archaeology is moving from a reme- dial archaeology of women to a more integrative archaeology informed by gender (e.g., Handsman 1984; Wall 1987, 1989; Hardesty 1989; McGuire 1989; Scott 1989; Spencer-Wood 1989). This is more than an expansion of a descriptive category or the recognition of yet another discrete variable in site interpretation. It is not a matter of finding methods for equating women with specific artifact types or site features. It requires a shift away from such methods, which in spite of other intentions have often portrayed women as passive objects or victims of broader social events and have circum- scribed gender within bounded contexts like household, domestic, and private.

The question is not how to go about “digging up” gender. As was true of generally ecological or behavioral issues prior to the New Archaeology of

the 1960s, archaeologists are undeniably already ‘ ‘digging up” a gendered archaeological record (Binford 1962; Dunnell 1986) but simply failing to deal with that record in those terms. As Alison Wylie has noted recently, an archaeology of gender requires first recognizing that gender is a fundamental structuring principle in any society and employing an analysis of gender as an integral part of any interpretive perspective (Wylie 1991).

As a result of this shift from “women” to ‘ ‘gender, ’’ basic archaeological categories like household or community get re-examined and redefined. So do broader-scale processes, like industrialization, emerging capitalism, urbanization, or Western expansion, that have formed the causal framework for so much of American historical archaeology. In historical archaeology, as in other social and historical fields, these gender-informed re-evaluations have powerful implications, not only for an archaeology of gender, but for historical archaeology as a whole.

The following discussion uses two case studies from the 19th-century American West to examine what some of the consequences of such a re-eval- uation might be. As two distinct phases in the course of fieldwork experience, they describe a personal transition from doing an archaeology that might (or might not) choose to identify women in the archaeological record to one that employs gender as a central analytical referent in archaeological interpretation.

The first case study involves an historical archaeology project in the small town of Paradise Valley, Nevada, conducted between 1981 and 1986 (Purser 1987). The second is drawn from a 1988-1989 project in the Sierra Nevada mining camp of Grass Flat, California (Praetzellis et al. 1990). Both sites were occupied from the 1860s to the first decades of the 20th century.

Specific historical, archaeological, architec- tural, and oral historical data are available else- where for each project (Purser 1987; Praetzellis et al. 1990). Research is continuing on materials from both sites, particularly with regard to the analytical problems involved in interpreting gender roles using archaeological data (Purser 1989, [1992]; Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1990). The fol-

GENDER STRATEGIES IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL WEST

lowing discussion will not present detailed archaeological data, but will focus instead on the broader interpretive issues raised by comparing the analyses of the two sites.

These two case studies link the transformation of gender roles during the period, often associated with the “cult of domesticity,” with contemporary changes in the social units of household and community. However, analysis is less focused on specific definitions of either gender’s social or cultural role than on the more contextual realities of what might be called gender strategies-a sort of “gender-is-as-gender-does’’ approach. In like manner, the discussion does not directly address the actual composition of households or communities as either social units or site types. It deals instead with the complex patterns of human mobility that char- acterized the second half of the 19th century in the United States and that revolutionized the nature and function of all social units in American society.

These socioeconomic categories and processual patterns also had profound consequences for the archaeological record of that period. These consequences are the stuff of current archaeological studies of consumption practices, emerging class structures, and expanding industrial capitalism (cf. Beaudry and Mrozowski 1987; Spencer-Wood 1987; Paynter 1988; Beaudry 1989). The argument that follows proposes that gender, household, community, and mobility are inherently related en- tities and that a gender-informed perspective pro- vides a powerful analytical tool for interpreting that record.

In order to place this analysis in the context of broader trends in the study of gender, a general overview of those trends, and their points of intersection with current issues in historical archaeology, is presented. Some of the implications these trends hold for historical archaeology and its approach to gender are described. In particular, a gendered approach proves useful in bridging the disparate scales at which historical archaeologists must examine the material record of the past: from individual artifact assemblages to national- and international-scale social and economic processes.

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Current Trends in Gender Studies

Alison Wylie recently questioned the continued lack of a successful archaeology of gender. She called on archaeologists to take advantage of 20 years of gender studies in anthropology and other social sciences, work that has defined terms and honed research approaches to gender as one of the central ordering principles of any society. Citing some of the criticisms of early feminist approaches to gender systems, Wylie further stated that an archaeology of gender must be focused on diversity and complexity, to counter earlier tendencies toward a simplifying, essentializing view of ‘ ‘Uni- versal Woman”-a concept further discussed by Dobres (1988). But in spite of this diversity, such an archaeology must also recognize that “gender is, in its various forms, a fundamental structuring principle” of societies (Wylie 1991:38-40).

Wylie’s argument brings into pragmatic focus similar statements made over the past decade by archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as a range of feminist scholars. People have critiqued the current state of gender studies in the social sciences, the degree to which a clear concept of gender (as opposed to women) has been articu- lated, and the relevance of feminist theory at epistemological, interpretive levels as well as in descriptive, narrative work (Rosaldo 1980; Keller 1982; Harding 1986; Scott 1986; Conkey and Gero 1988; Conkey 1990).

Two major points unify this criticism. Debate over issues of definition has focused as much on specifying what gender is not as on what it is. Gender is not the same as sex, but came into cur- rency as a term that denoted “the social organization of the relationship between the sexes” (Scott 1986:1053). As such, gender is not, and should not be, equated with women, particularly not women in isolation from broader social and ideological contexts (Scott 1986: 1056; McGaw 1989: 179- 180). In like manner, the social construction of gender is not bounded by any particular circum- scribed context, variously described as private, domestic, household, or kinship (Scott 1986:1069- 1071; McGaw 1989:180-184).

This is not to deny the significance of critical

a work that recovered an active role for women in social processes. Indeed, the more this research empowered women as actors in social and historical contexts, the more scholars could insist that gender be seen as fundamental to such processes: history and society are clearly and inescapably gendered in an active and ongoing sense.

Processual approaches derived from this insight form a second focus for critique. Discussion here has emphasized historicizing and problematizing gender. Gender categories and relations are neither natural and universal, nor fixed in time and space, but are historically and socially constituted. There- fore they are constantly in play and can be con- tested, renegotiated, or reinforced on a situational basis: in short, they are strategic. Gender roles and relations also vary greatly across class and status lines and remain open to manipulation (Scott 1986: 1056-1057, 1074; Conkey 1990).

As recent critiques have broadened and contex- tualized the concept of gender, various authors have pointed out that the analytical consequences of employing such a concept reach beyond the cre- ation of a new descriptive category of social identity and interaction. Examining the relationship between sex /gender systems and other categories of social life produces serious epistemological chal- lenges to existing interpretive categories, such as household, kinship, or economy. They call into question current understandings of the integration of individuals into social or cultural contexts, and the nature of processes of change (Wylie 1989; Conkey 1990).

Finally, some feminist critiques have argued that incorporating gender as a fundamental structuring principle of society-and all its products, from individual identity to political economy-implicates not only the objects of scholarly inquiry, but the very systems of inquiry themselves, the “science” or “history” within which studies of gender are undertaken (Keller 1982; Kelly 1984; Harding 1986; Wylie et al. 1988). Thus, problematizing gender becomes a powerful, necessary part of any critical, self-reflexive research methodology.

These more general trends hold a number of implications for historical archaeology and its approach to gender. Because archaeologists work in

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, VOLUME 25

the historical past of the very society whose gender categories have been applied as universal, and which created the epistemological systems (like anthropology) that have tried to analyze those categories, they have a powerful context in which to extend critiques of contemporary gender relations. In the same manner, gender has the potential to expand the basis for a self-critical approach in historical archaeology, as advocated by Leone (1982) and others.

In addition, recent discussions of the implications of gender studies for archaeology have noted that gender-informed analysis forces one to shift to a perspective that views all social categories and processes as being fluid and negotiated (Conkey 1990). These trends parallel and reinforce trends in historical archaeology that employ new social theory to create similarly flexible perspectives on the relationships between material culture and social or historical processes. For example, recent approaches to consumption (Purser [ 1992]), capitalism (Little 1986; Leone 1988), and households (Beaudry 1988) all stress the need for more flexible, contextually derived, and historically sensitive analysis to interpret the archaeological record more fully (Beaudry et al. 1990).

Many of these efforts also have questioned the epistemological status of the archaeological record in historical archaeology. Current discussion involves redefining what constitutes archaeological data, what kinds of interpretation are accessible or legitimate for historical archaeologists, and how inferential arguments should be structured in relationship to the various data sources employed. The process is less one of privileging one type of data, such as artifacts or written records, over the other than of experimenting with the multiplicity of interpretations such data make possible. In the case of 19th-century households, for example, much of the new work begins by rejecting earlier, static assumptions about the ‘‘household” or ‘‘family’’ that would have created a particular, archaeologically visible unit. Instead, this research uses the archaeological record to critique and amplify an emerging literature on the diversity and fluidity of all social units from this time (LeeDecker et al. 1987; Beaudry 1988; Hardesty 1988).

GENDER STRATEGIES IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL WEST 9

Thus, viewing gender as a central means by which many social categories are negotiated can provide historical archaeologists with a further means of articulating their smaller scale, archaeologically derived data with broader interpretive frameworks. Such an articulation is a matter of growing concern in the field (Leone and Crosby 1987; Deagan 1988; Schuyler 1988; Beaudry et al. 1990). Although perspectives vary considerably, debate focuses on the degree to which historical archaeology must remain grounded in material concerns with excavation and artifact analysis, without being limited to them or simplistically derived from them.

What might these shifts from women to gender, and from definition to more process-oriented, contextual analysis entail for historical archaeologists? In particular, how can historical archaeology move beyond gender as a descriptive category con- strained by household scales of analysis? The following case studies recount one effort to make such a transition and describe some of the consequences for the archaeological interpretations involved.

From Paradise Valley to Grass Flat, and Back

Archaeologists working in the 19th-century West have become familiar with the interpretive dilemma confronted when they work to link the physical place of an archaeological site to some sector of a highly mobile, local or regional population. Documents often present a sketchy, bewil- dering array of occupation, with frequent turnover in the households of a given site. Archaeological approaches to individual residences are challenged further by the inherently transient, corporate phe- nomena of boardinghouses, company towns, and mining camps. In moving beyond the household to the community level, the problems are compounded, and the effort forces a re-examination of what is meant by concepts like household or community in these contexts (Hardesty 1988).

The human mobility that produced such archaeological patterns was a complex and multi-compo-

nent phenomenon. It included both the large-scale migration from East to West during American ter- ritorial expansion and the smaller scale, but equally significant, patterns of travel within re- gions. Explaining this complex mobility means considering everything from the degree of individual freedom to be mobile to the relative significance of various technological methods people employed to move from place to place (Hareven and Vinovskis 1978; Lingeman 1980; Hudson 1985). The discussion that follows is most concerned with something that could be called the mobile community, which will be discussed in greater detail below.

In like manner, the broad redefinition of labor and family and the reorganization of household economies in the expansion of 19th-century industrialization are equally familiar to historical archaeologists working in this period (Handsman 1984; Beaudry and Mrozowski 1987; LeeDecker et al. 1987). So is the specific impact of these transformations on the lives of middle-class urban women (cf. Ryan 1981; Wall 1987). This cult of domesticity took shape in the explosion of a com- mercially based, national-scale popular culture, in which household management treatises authored by an emerging professional corps of reformers and social theorists blurred into a contemporary flood of advertisements, magazines, novels, and brand names.

All these sources didactically redefined a new middle-class world, an indispensable parlor set of childrearing practices and calling cards, mass consumption and antimacassars (Ewen 1976; Wright 1981; Trachtenberg 1982). Linking the expanding role of women as sole controllers of household purchasing decisions with an archaeological focus on consumption patterns as an index of participa- tion in the culture of industrial capitalism forms an acknowledged, if problematic, interpretive device in household archaeology for the period (Beaudry 1988; Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1990).

It was in this general context that analytical problems in the Nevada and California examples discussed below ultimately linked interpretations of gender, transformations of households and communities, and varying scales of human mobility.

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These links took two very different field projects and nearly 10 years to develop. Initially, the historical device of the cult of domesticity made any connections between gender and household seem relatively self-evident and not requiring much further thought. At the same time, archaeological dif- ficulties posed by widespread and only partially documented mobility looked far more problematic. What to do about highly mobile historical populations first became an issue during research in the small town of Paradise Valley, Nevada (Purser 1987). It proved of even greater importance during the later work in the Sierra Nevada mining camp of Grass Flat, California (Praetzellis et al. 1990).

In both instances, the relative mobility of the resident populations affected the approach to fundamental archaeological questions about the distri- bution of sites across a landscape, long- and short- term settlement patterns, demographics, and the relevant technologies of transportation and com- munication. Beyond these issues, the constant flow of people through both settlements and the long-term patterns of occupation, abandonment, and resettlement called into question the legiti- macy of attempting to identify a specific community that had created either site in any finite sense.

In the crossroads town of Paradise, this produced a pragmatic, if somewhat prosaic, split in the way the historical population was identified. Analysis sorted the more or less permanent commercial sector of individually documented store- keepers and tradespeople from their more or less transient, and generally anonymous, customers. In Grass Flat, an even higher rate of mobility meant realizing that a community of sorts did exist, but that it floated up and down the gold districts of the surrounding area, following the news of strikes and opportunities for employment. In any given season, its members could be scattered along a gold-bearing vein that stretched roughly 20 miles, in a dozen or more little camps. Yet, these camps were linked nonetheless by patterns of commerce and employment, and eventually by marriage and other kinship ties. The trick was to extract a sense of this inherently fluid, diachronic community organization from the archaeological and documentary record of a single such camp.


It was in an effort to expand the two-dimen- sional view of these synchronic, economically defined communities that the concept of gender roles, or gender strategies, came into play. The initial connection between gender and mobility on the Western industrial frontier was conventional enough: it ran through the changing organization and function of the household and the links between individual households and any larger community. Recognizing the relevance of gender to mobility, however, first required discarding a number of unconscious assumptions about women and households.

During early work on the Paradise Valley project (1981 through 1985), gender did not seem a particularly significant factor. The history of the small cow town looked quite straightforward. Founded in the mid-1860s in north central Nevada, the community experienced an early, very successful commercial agriculture industry, followed by a short-lived local silver boom, and finally settled into cattle and sheep ranching during the 1890s.

In this context, mobility came primarily from the settlement’s location near a main stage route leading north from the Central Pacific Railroad into the frontier territories of Idaho and Oregon. Settlement of these residual pockets of frontier continued through the turn of the century and kept a steady flow of immigrants moving through Par- adise Valley on their way to other destinations.

A second element in the overall mobility of the population came from the seasonal movements of an expanding agricultural migrant labor force which used the railroads to follow planting and harvest cycles throughout the Great Basin, Pacific Northwest, and California. Sporadic regional mining strikes added miners and their families to this pool of migrant labor at irregular intervals.

Given this focus on the occupational categories of their husbands or fathers, the lives of women who lived in Paradise remained mostly peripheral to the analysis, if not invisible altogether. Those who did emerge from the documents and oral history seemed to have led lives that exemplified the middle-class expectations of Ladies’ Home Com- panion and Harper’s Weekly. ‘‘Mobility” may have affected their households but hardly seemed

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GENDER STRATEGIES IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL WEST

an issue for individual women. Exceptions appeared anecdotally unique: the piano-playing store- keeper’s wife who taught her two young sons to play the fiddle and would drive a buckboard all the way to Idaho to play for a local dance, returning the next day (Frederick C. Buckingham 1983, pers. comm.). Equally eccentric was the crypti- cally worded 1879 newspaper announcement: “Laura D. Fair passed here Saturday, with her little pistol, going east” (Silver State [SS], 31 March 1879:3, col. 3). One valley resident pointed out a carefully preserved buggy, kept in the garage at his ranch. “It was my grandmother’s,’’ he said, “for visiting” (Leslie Stewart 1984, pers. comm.). At the time, writing a discussion of women’s lives in Paradise, undertaken as a component of local domestic life, proved frustratingly dull and full of stereotypes.

Four years later, excavations and analysis at Grass Flat forced a different opinion. Located high in the Sierra Nevada mountains, at the southern edge of Plumas County, California, the camp began in the early 1860s when the Pioneer Gold Mine opened. It continued sporadically through the late 1890s, following the boom-and-bust cycle of the Pioneer’s fortunes. Even at its height, the camp remained very small, with two boarding houses and perhaps 10 or 12 private residences.

During its early years, the Pioneer was a hy- draulic mine, like most of its competitors along the ridge. Mine production was dependent on the local water supply derived from the annual snowmelt. Working the gold-bearing gravels was therefore a seasonal activity; by April or May the water was gone, until the next spring’s melt. Although some miners were retained to do maintenance and repair work, most found themselves unemployed or substantially underemployed until the water returned. Even after converting to drift mining in the mid 1880s, the labor force fluctuated seasonally, employing more men in the spring and summer, fewer in winter.

Here, mobility could not be addressed by sorting those who moved from those who did not: between the seasonal availability of work and the more ep- isodic periods of boom and decline, no one stayed put for long. And yet there developed a kind of

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mobile community, with recognizable members and boundaries, whose physical location shifted constantly within the geographical limits of the gold districts. This community was not a random assortment of whatever migrant miners arrived at a new strike to work, but was composed of a core of families who remained in the area for as many as three generations.

More importantly for this discussion, the most explicit information on the nature of this mobile community not only was about women, but often literally came from women. The Mountain Mes- senger (MM), a contemporary local newspaper published from the county seat of Downieville, conveniently included a ‘ ‘Local Items” column. Submitted columns from Grass Flat and the nearby mining camps of Port Wine, Scales, and Howland Flat appeared regularly. Many of these columns actually were authored by women living in the

At first it seemed a mere distraction that so much of each column was taken up with the accounts of who visited whom among the ladies living at various locations along what was known as the Port Wine Ridge. After all, aside from supplementing census and tax data about camp residents, this information did little to document useful things, like construction dates for houses or employment figures at the mine. But eventually, patterns began to emerge from all the visits, return visits, ice cream parties, dances, and poetry readings. In the shifting physical locations of mining-district settlement, women’s patterns of visiting created and maintained sets of social ties that provided some continuity to the community as a whole. Some of these networks linked and reinforced kinship ties; others mirrored, and in some instances presaged, sets of small business partnerships seen among the men of the ridge community.

Visiting relationships may have had a more practical function as well. During the dry summer and early fall seasons, a number of Grass Flat women made regular visits to relatives and friends living down in the foothill valleys west of the Si- erra. These mostly agricultural settlements provided much of the food for the mining districts,

camps (MM 1870-1901).

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where high altitudes meant prohibitively short growing seasons. Women travelling down to the valleys often brought along an older daughter or son, who remained below when their mother returned to the mountains. The child would return later, just before winter snows would close off travel to the mountains for the year. The following spring, guests from the lower valleys would arrive in the mountains to enjoy the upland climate, fish- ing trips, and tours of the local mines.

Such a pattern of reciprocal visits would have created direct economic as well as social benefits, since the mountain household fed one less mouth during the lean, non-mining season and possibly provided additional labor to the valley household during summer harvests. It also linked the mining- camp household with a supply of fresh vegetables, fruits, and meat. While the current data for this pattern are anecdotal and require further substan- tiation, the pattern is supported by oral historical information from both women and men who were long-term residents of the area.

The news columns carefully described these trips between households in terms of the fashion- able upper-class social practice of the day, of calling cards and parlor games. And yet, this was not high society visiting as it was done in urban New York or Boston (Veblen 1912; Schlesinger 1947; Ames 1978). “Visits” could last for days or weeks. A number of the most active visitors were women who ran boardinghouses, stores, or other enterprises, either alone or with their families.

The links between long-term visiting patterns, the economic life of individual households, and historical structure of the community at large, are highlighted in the activities of these women in particular. For example, one such woman was Mrs. Gibson, who in the early 1890s lived in the south- ernmost camp of Scales. Mrs. Gibson was a frequent guest in Grass Flat and Port Wine through the summer and fall of 1892. By that November she had been hired by the Pioneer Gold Mine to run its boardinghouse, followed shortly by her son, who got a job as a laborer in the mine. By the next spring her husband had also moved north from Scales to Port Wine, just below Grass Flat, and set up a new saloon. (MM 26 November 1892:3, col.


4, 25 February 1893:3, col. 2, 22 April 1893:3, col. 3).

Discussion

The insights gained from the Grass Flat visiting patterns have brought a different perspective to the Paradise Valley data. Research has returned to the country newspapers, looking for information on who visited whom, how often, and when. Mobility is no longer treated as something that men did, with their appended women and children strung out behind them like kite tails in the wind. On one hand, the Paradise women who first appeared to be anecdotal exceptions, with their visiting buggies and trips to dances, look far less exceptional. On the other hand, significant differences exist in the patterns of men’s and women’s mobility in either place and between Grass Flat and Paradise Valley as communities shaped by those gendered patterns of mobility.

One of the more useful realizations gleaned from the Grass Flat work concerns the different ways men and women moved around. For example, the men of the gold district community also visited, according to the newspapers, but they tended to visit public places and commercial es- tablishments: courthouses, saloons, general stores, or the newspaper office itself. Women visited private homes, almost exclusively. Men were less likely to be identified as visiting kin, women more likely. Men did not seem to stay very long; women tended to stay at least a day or two, even when the distance travelled was very short.

Mobility was even less possible for the faceless, static agglomerate called ‘‘household.” House- holds were often split for long periods of time: a husband might leave a wife in California to go to the Alaskan gold fields for a year; a Nevada wife might visit her parents in Sacramento from August until the next May.

So where and how would one locate, archaeologically, the household of Grass Flat boardinghouse keeper Mrs. Gibson, described earlier? Don- ald Hardesty (1988) has noted already that co- residence is not a necessary attribute of western


mining households, a pattern repeated among contemporary urban working class households as well (Glasco 1978; Johnson 1978; Beaudry and Mro- zowski 1987, 1989; LeeDecker et al. 1987; Har- desty 1988). Analyzing the extent to which both long- and short-term mobility were gendered may contribute to more complex, fluid concepts of both household and community, which in turn could help to explore a more inferentially powerful archaeological record.

Interestingly, initial results from re-analyzing the Paradise Valley material indicate that while mobility was equally gendered there, the distinc- tions were somewhat different than in Grass Flat. Both men and women travelled greater distances and stayed for longer periods of time. These trips were usually to the eastern United States or Euro- pean home countries, and could last from several weeks to a year or more. Differences between the Nevada and California situations also highlight the degree to which women’s mobility, in particular, could be graded by class, age, and marital status.

Finally, patterns of travel and visiting change substantially over time for all Paradise Valley residents. Those changes have been identified previ- ously as the product of the community’s shifting relative status as an economic center in northern Humboldt County, its connections to other nearby settlements, and the increasingly fixed socioeconomic hierarchy that ranked its members (Purser 1989). The comparison with Grass Flat suggests that determining the extent to which gender relations underlay and helped to structure these seem- ingly more self-evident social and economic tran- sitions could cast much of Paradise Valley’s history in somewhat different terms.

Thus, the intellectual shift described above only begins to move from excavating “women” in “households” to perceiving gender relations as an historically constituted structuring principle inherent throughout society. It raises questions about what is being excavated, and why, in specific contexts, but cannot yet answer those questions fully. These questions are not about “doing” versus “not doing” gender in historical archaeology, or how to “find” women or men in the archaeological record. Rather, they examine the extent to

which recognizing the gendered character of social life problematizes archaeological concepts like household, community, or human mobility.

In raising such questions, the personal transition from looking for women to looking through gender also begins to articulate the critical potential of gendered research with other, parallel arguments for critical, self-reflexive approaches in historical archaeology.

Conclusions

The experience of comparing Paradise Valley and Grass Flat taught four important lessons about employing a study of gender in historical archaeology. The first involved the danger inherent in the rich body of comparative historical literature available to historical archaeologists and in the seeming familiarity of the subject matter. It made it so easy to turn something like the cult of domesticity, as a concept, into a universalizing essential, a historical parallel of the prehistorians’ elusive “Universal Woman” (Dobres 1988).

Secondly, this assumption blind-sided the approach to the women of Paradise Valley and made it impossible to identify them with any greater so- phistication than as participants in a stereotyped popular culture, as opposed to nonparticipants. Shifting attention to the diversity with which individuals and communities manipulated a popular- ized ideal to their own ends, in their own situations, produced a more fluid, diachronic gender “strategy,” as opposed to the fixed, atemporal “roles” unconsciously assumed before.

Thirdly, this danger was compounded by the temptation to treat gender as a specialized topic, which could only be “done” in the backyards of individual households. If a site did not include features of that functional category, then gender did not need to be addressed. And finally, such an approach also limited the treatment of gender to the scale of the household and to the study of women in isolation, a sort of interpretive equiva- lent of that ubiquitous 19th-century census desig- nation of a woman’s occupation: “keeping house. ” Again, the women of the population, hav-

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ing been first sorted from the men, were further sorted into those who stayed home, and the often famous, always individual exceptions who did not.

As a central structuring principle of society, gender is not limited to households, or to women, but is a fundamental part of what organizes individuals into households and structures their relationships with the larger community and society around them. Archaeologically, it does not consti- tute a special category of research, something one could simply choose not to “do” in Paradise Val- ley. The visiting ladies of Grass Flat have made gender an integral part of the analytical methodology to be brought to any site.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Donna Siefert for organizing the 1990 SHA session for which this paper was originally written and for her patient labor as volume editor I am also grateful to Sonoma State University colleagues Mildred Dickemann, Adrian Praetzellis, and Mary Praetzellis, as well as to three anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments and sugges- tions I owe a great deal to Alison Wylie, who first asked me in 1987 why it was that I knew almost nothing about the women who had lived in Paradise Valley, in spite of six full years of research on the town Finally, I would like to acknowledge the quiet encouragement of Isabelle Lamance, a genuine Paradise lady gifted with the gentle persistence found only among the long dead

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MARGARET PURSER DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY ROHNERT PARK, CALIFORNIA 94928