In-Process Monographs

Working Title for Monograph 1:
"Estelle Reel"
Motivating Goals

• Examine Reel's life in its complexity. Reel achieved incredible professional goals for her time. Born in the mid-nineteenth century, she came to Cheyenne, Wyoming as a teacher around 1890. After teaching for a short time, she successfully ran for county superintendent of schools in 1892 and was re-elected in 1894. In 1896, Reel was the first woman to be elected to Wyoming state office when she took the office of State Superintendent of Schools. Through some deft political maneuvering, she then achieved a woman's first when she was appointed to national office by the US Congress in 1898. Her office was Superintendent of Indian Schools, a post she held for 12 years. During that time, she did great service and great harm to the students and families caught up in that system. A book-length work is required to work through the complexity of her achievement.

• Present a case study of one woman's rhetorical construction and destruction. Reel was very popular in the press for her local, state, and national achievements. Even amid growing public awareness of the harms of the Indian School System, she remained celebrated. Despite her cultural capital, when she was politically pushed out of office in 1912, she completely disappeared from public life as she married a rancher and took up domestic life in Washington state. Through her scrapbooks, press clippings, letters (personal and professional), and annual federal reports, I trace her rhetorical rise and demise as a woman in the patriarchal systems at the turn of the twentieth century. 

• Apply a braided methodology to a rhetorical case study. Reel's story cannot simply be told as a straight biography because of the fraught conditions of her life and career--the first-wave feminist suffrage fight, the cultural annihilation of Indigenous identity, and the nature of political systems in which she was both agent and object. Braiding in parallel histories of Native American student and family board school experiences, Sara Ahmed's theories of use, Indigenous scholars' work on relational accountability, along with other reflective strands both presents Reel in a fuller sense and creates spaces where readers can consider for themselves the implications of her life and career.

Chapter Topics

• A Preface and Introduction set up the terms of the project, including a research puzzle, an explanation of braiding-as-methodology, and a review of sources. 

• Chapter 1 provides context to the social and political atmosphere in Wyoming, while elaborating on what can be known of Reel’s childhood, family, education, move West, and the reputation she established as a teacher and district superintendent in Cheyenne (1864-1894). Her personal scrapbooks and (auto)biographical sketches prove useful in piecing together her formative experiences and offer insights into rhetorical strategies underpinning her political accomplishments. 

• Chapter 2 examines Reel’s campaign for and time in state office (1894-1898), including her unorthodox yet rhetorically savvy political moves, her priorities while in state office, and her role on the state land board. In this chapter, Reel emerges as a principled, intelligent leader, a “benefit to her sex,” and she becomes the subject of the very kinds of news headlines she previously tracked in her scrapbooks. Deftly managing her presence in the public spotlight, Reel leverages the media’s portrayal of her as she makes her hard fought and ultimately successful bid for national office. Letters written in support of her bid demonstrate her success in orchestrating her campaign for national political appointment. 

• Chapter 3 tracks Reel’s rhetorical construction as Superintendent of Indian Schools, from her entry to office, to publication of her Course of Study for the Indian Schools of the United States: Industrial and Literary, and through the five following years, when she was at the height of her agency (1898-1906). A primary text in this chapter is her Course of Study, which directly expresses her utilitarian beliefs regarding useful knowledge for Native American people and portrays her complex efforts to simultaneously deny and affirm Indigenous culture. Through creating and disseminating that curriculum, Reel speaks from a federally sanctioned position, channeling Native children into their useful—proper, worthy, expedient—roles within white American society. 

• Chapter 4 traces the last four years, witnessing Reel’s rhetorical destruction as Superintendent through the lens of the annual reports she wrote to her supervisor, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1906-1910). Rhetorical analysis of her reports reveals a narrative arc of her rise as a competent agent followed by her rhetorical and literal erasure at the hands of the federal government’s shifting national interests and the reasserting of the patriarchy within which she served. Here is witnessed the turning of the tables, as Reel’s use of her political positioning shifts to her being used and ultimately discarded—thrown out of use—by the system. 

• Chapter 5 begins as Reel’s political career ends, as she abruptly leaves Washington DC, marries a rancher in small-town Washington, and disappears herself into a mundane life of gardening and darning socks. Considering this happened as the national woman suffrage movement was gathering strength for its final push towards the 19th Amendment, Reel’s lack of participation in the political conversation seems unusual. This chapter takes up the scattering of media profiles and bits of material ephemera to explore Reel’s complicated relationship to that movement and how she fell into a different kind of use and disuse for the second half of her life (1910-1959).

• An Afterword steps back to asking what it means to judge, and perhaps to forgive, our foremothers and what we might learn from witnessing the story of Estelle Reel Meyer’s life as it became bound up with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Native American children and as it moved through the gristmill of a white supremacist federal agency.

Working Title for Monograph 2:
“Pantaloonatics of Wyoming: Rhetoric and Public Memory”

Motivating Goals

• Speak back to and complicate what we remember as a nation. The US suffrage narrative defaults to being set in the East, catalyzed via the Seneca Falls Convention and starring  Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Alice Paul. While the NWSA-AWSA-NAWSA efforts are one story of the suffrage movement, theirs is not the only story. This book will be another effort at revising and resisting the singular national master narrative.

• Strategically contemplate how we remember together. As other scholars in rhetoric, public memory, and material culture have been arguing, our sites of public memory shape who is remembered, how they are remembered, and who is forgotten and erased from our landscapes of culture and belonging. This transdisciplinary book will challenge readers and scholars to continue considering the mechanisms for how memory circles through time. 

• Expand inclusion of who is remembered in a more inclusive storying of women’s suffrage and contemporary women’s agency. As communities, we live together in entangled narratives. By recuperating lesser-known Wyoming women of the past and relating their stories through recent research on contemporary Wyoming women’s perspectives in the present, this book will more fully tell the story of the West from the West. 

To accomplish my goals, I examine sites of public memory through different rhetorical containers or vessels:

• Master narratives (national museum displays)

• Material rhetoric (commemorative statue)

• Discursive patterns of the past (“first woman” trope)

• Community memory books (city directories/family books)

• Discursive patterns of the present (contemporary art and reflections)

Current Chapter Summaries

• Preface and Introduction—Establish the research puzzle, methodology, and methods of the project. Situate the project in scholarly conversations of public memory and feminist rhetorical practices, and as resisting the over-simplification of the US master narrative of women’s rights/suffrage. Introduce the book as a means of exploring contemporary women’s agencies and self-conceptions as rhetorically constructed/controlled and as circling through time.

• Ch 1: The Fringes of the Frontier—Asserts Wyoming’s absence from the US narrative via critique of 2019 Washington DC suffrage commemorative displays at the National Archives and the Portrait Gallery. Re-examines the rhetorical construction of the national suffrage narrative by rhetorically analyzing foundational texts regarding the movement's history. Re-asserts Wyoming’s role in the suffrage movement, including a review of the complicated nature of suffrage in Wyoming (the “gift” argument, the role of empire building, etc.).

• Ch 2: The Woman in the Cage—Turns to Louisa Swain as a case study of an important figure who has been generally erased from the US master narrative. Adds to what we might know about Swain through adjacent resources such as news stories about her son and daughter-in-law’s public activities while in Laramie, material analysis of a baby dress she made, and more thorough investigation of her childhood and years as an orphan. Presents a rhetorical analysis of Swain’s statue and courtyard as a living site of public memory. 

• Ch 3: The Trope of “The First”— Unsettles the trope of "the first woman" through the story of Estelle Reel, the first woman in Wyoming elected to state-wide office (Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1894-1899) and the first woman to be confirmed by the US Senate when she was appointed Superintendent of Indian Schools (1898-1910). Reel has been called “the first liberated woman in America,” yet contemporary reflection forces us to reconsider if that’s the kind of liberation we desire and to account for how stories of our "firsts" are told.

• Ch 4: Presence on the Page—Examines city directories and "prominent families" books as containers of self-ascribed public memory, where local families record their own storied memories  which are then published as town histories. Adds to ongoing diversification of historic women's public engagement via Cheyenne, Wyoming's "Search Light Club" and other stories of folx of color foundational to the West.

• Ch 5: Contemporary Wyoming Women—Engages other texts, including a 2016 presidential election gathering, art exhibitions, and a Casper Star-Tribune project “what is a Wyoming woman,” to (re)examine how contemporary Wyoming women conceive of themselves as agents in relation to the rhetorical concepts laid out in chapters 1-4.