National Parks and the Woman's Voice: A History by Polly Welts Kaufman; Women andNature: Saving the "Wild" West by Glenda RileyReview by: Maxine BensonIsis, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Mar., 2001), pp. 239-240Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/237456 .

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 92: 1 (2001) 239

differences between animals and humans. These pieces are all substantive, valuable contributions.

But except for the thorough bibliography of Painleve' s films and writings, the rest of the vol- ume is less successful. Eleven "Photograms" present series of photographs from Painleve's major films accompanied by excerpts from their narration, a gesture perhaps deemed necessary to convey the essence of Painleve's films in an era when they are frequently inaccessible. Yet these displays inevitably are only inadequate substi- tutes for the enticing energy of Painleve's mov- ing images. After a portfolio of photographs, the book offers several selections from Painleve's own writings and from articles about Painleve in film magazines, arranged in chronological order. These excerpts provide snapshots of various points in his career, glimpses that are sometimes engaging but add little to our understanding of the man or his work. The final feature-repro- ductions of postcards that Sergei Eisenstein sent to Painleve while the Russian filmmaker traveled through America-is utterly pointless. Surely, it would have been wiser to remove some of these materials in favor of more detailed analyses of Painlev6's films.

Granted, Science Is Fiction is a very attractive volume, with a translucent green jacket, stylish layout, and hundreds of photographs. But the ed- itors might have devoted less care to the book's appearance and more to its contents. This work is a helpful scrapbook for anyone interested in the history of the science documentary, but it is not the sort of cohesive and comprehensive sur- vey of Painlev6's career that would better serve to restore his reputation and bring his films to the attention of a new generation of scientists and filmgoers.

GARY WESTFAHL

Polly Welts Kaufman. National Parks and the Woman's Voice: A History. xvi + 312 pp., illus., app., bibl., index. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. $18.95 (paper).

Glenda Riley. Women and Nature: Saving the "Wild" West. (Women in the West.) xx + 279 pp., illus., index. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. $24.95 (paper).

From the earliest days of settlement women have played a central role in preserving America's natural wonders, native cultures, and historic sites and structures. Until recently, however, as Polly Welts Kaufman and Glenda Riley point out, their accomplishments have remained largely unacknowledged not only in traditional

accounts of environmentalism and the conser- vation movement but also in works of women's history and westem history. In these two books both authors have done much to remedy these deficiencies and to bring women onto the stage.

Originally published in 1996 and later issued in paperback, Kaufman's National Parks and the Woman's Voice: A History focuses on women inside and outside the National Park Service who have helped to preserve the resources now pro- tected in national parks, monuments, historic sites, and recreation areas. In the first section, "Speaking for Parks: The Pioneers," Kaufman describes some of the early women travelers, mountaineers, artists, botanists, and ornitholo- gists who showed that women as well as men could participate fully in the natural world. Club women helped to establish Mesa Verde National Park and the Great Sand Dunes National Monu- ment in Colorado and to safeguard such historic places as Jamestown Island, Virginia, and Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. A few women managed to gain paid positions as rangers, ranger-naturalists, and archaeologists after the National Park Ser- vice (NPS) was founded in 1916, although until the 1960s most worked as advocates or volun- teers. Prominent within the organization were the loyal and dedicated Park Service wives "Honorary Custodians without Pay," one male superintendent called them.

In the second part, "Speaking for Parks: Mod- em Sisters," Kaufman includes two chapters on women within the Park Service. Describing their battles since the early 1960s to achieve full equality and pay equity with their male col- leagues, she notes that one of the most conten- tious issues concerned the uniforms the women wore. Set apart from men by "airline stewardess" outfits, complete with pillbox hats, in the 1960s and by polyester knit pantsuits and dresses in the early 1970s, women did not win official approval to don the traditional NPS gray-and-green uni- forms and "Smokey Bear" Stetsons until 1978.

Also beginning in the 1960s, as Kaufman il- lustrates in the final chapters, outside the Park Service women environmental activists worked alongside their sisters in the civil rights and feminist crusades to enlarge the voice and broaden the scope of the organization. They helped to preserve threatened shorelines in the Cape Cod and Canaveral National Seashores; es- tablish urban national parks such as the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in the San Fran- cisco region; and save the Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas, as part of the Brown

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240 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 92: 1 (2001)

v. Board of Education National Historic Site. Joining forces with women NPS employees, they succeeded in creating the Women's Rights Na- tional Historical Park, opened in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1982.

Using Kaufman's book and other recent sec- ondary accounts as well as an impressive array of primary sources, Riley provides a reconcep- tualization of women's roles as environmental- ists in Women and Nature: Saving the "Wild" West. Focusing on the trans-Mississippi West, including Alaska and Hawaii (a wider scope, she notes, would have produced an encyclopedia, not a book-length study), Riley seeks to show that women have made significant, indeed piv- otal, contributions to the conservation move- ment, "the formal activities of people interested in preserving nature," as she uses the term, and to environmentalism, "the beliefs and practices of those pursuing conservation and preservation" (p. xvi).

Setting the scene with a general discussion of "environmentally minded" women in the United States and Europe, especially England, Riley de- votes the main part of her book to the period between the early 1870s and the early 1940s. In "Botanizers, Birders, and Other Naturalists," she highlights the careers of the botanist Alice East- wood and the ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey (both of whom Kaufman features as "women forerunners of Park Service natural- ists"). In subsequent sections she discusses women writers and poets; artists, photographers, gardeners, landscape architects, and other "vi- sual image-makers"; club women; mountaineers and other athletes; and travelers and tourists. Particularly memorable is Riley's vignette of the Denver mountain climber Agnes Vaille, whose fatal attempt to ascend Longs Peak in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park in the winter of 1925 demonstrated that danger as well as solace and inspiration could be part of women's wil- derness experiences. Two concluding chapters consider women' s efforts to preserve Native American cultures and the built environment and examine current movements such as ecofemin- ism. Finally, in "Rethinking Environmental His- tory," Riley offers suggestions for future re- search and challenges scholars to recast the history of American environmentalism in light of women's achievements.

Both books are based on prodigious research. Riley scoured libraries and archives throughout the western United States and at Oxford Univer- sity in England, in the process turning up hun- dreds of hitherto hidden letters, diaries, and rem- iniscences. Kaufman taped interviews with

nearly four hundred NPS women employees and wives and used many more oral histories from the NPS archives, in addition to questionnaires, NPS publications, manuscripts, articles, and books. Each study includes detailed notes and a bibliographical essay along with selections of fresh and unusual photographs. Kaufman ap- pends a helpful list of NPS sites that interpret women's history. In all, each book complements and reinforces the other; together the two con- tribute both factually and conceptually to ad- vancing our understanding of women's interac- tions with the environment.

MAXINE BENSON

Shepard Krech III; Barbara A. Hail (Editors). Collecting Native America, 1870-1960. Fore- word by William C. Sturtevant. vi + 298 pp., illus., index. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian In- stitution Press, 1999. $45.

The nine essays in this book describe the col- lecting activities of a dozen individuals who gathered American Indian materials in the years between 1870 and 1960 and founded museums in which to display them. The personal idiosyn- crasies and passions of these collectors were as diverse as the museums they built. Most of the museums still exist, although several have been folded into larger entities.

The collectors range from Sheldon Jackson, the Alaskan missionary and educator who begin- ning around 1880 adopted a "vacuum cleaner" (p. 31) approach to the task of amassing Native artifacts and founded the Sheldon Jackson Mu- seum in Sitka, Alaska, to Francis and Mary Crane, nature lovers and dog breeders who be- came interested in Indians only after a retirement move to Florida. Their comprehensive collec- tion, remarkable for having been made during the 1950s, is now at the Denver Museum of Nat- ural History. Others include David Ross Mc- Cord, who built a museum of Canadian history including the aboriginal peoples of Canada that is now at McGill; Rudolf F. Haffenreffer, the beer magnate who built the King Philip Museum at Bristol, Rhode Island, and promoted Ameri- can Indian lore and customs among the Boy Scouts; and Charles F. Lummis, the propagan- dist for southern California who founded the Southwest Museum at Los Angeles, a museum that, as Thomas H. Wilson and Cheri Falken- stien-Doyle write, is "for better and for worse ... indelibly stamped with Charles Lummis' s vi- sion" (p. 76), including diverse holdings, prob-

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