Review of Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939

If plenary speeches at the Coalition for Western Women's History conference in the summer of 1992 in Lincoln, Nebraska, are any indication, the 1990s have begun with an apparent methodological consensus by women's historians: that race and class conflict and cooperation, as well as gender differences, must serve as organizing themes for a genuine history of western women. In Relations of Rescue , Peggy Pascoe, professor of history at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, delivers an excellent model for framing such multicultural research. Her starting point for the history of Protestant missionary women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is not with the reformers themselves but "in the negotiation of conflicts between matrons' ideology and residents' needs." Mission home residents are not portrayed as victims or "putty" in the hands of social reformers, but as fullfledged actors in the story with their own motivations and concerns.