In recent years the study of western history has been transformed by scholarship on the actual experiences of the women who settled the West. The essays gathered here, first presented in a 1984 conference sponsored by the South-west Institute for Research on Women, analyse and interpret this new body of research. Each essay is accompanied by several commentaries that reveal the complex multicultural character of the West through the experience of American Indian, Mexican-American and Anglo-American (including Mormon) women. The discussion of domestic ideology examines what values Anglo women carried West and how their values influenced their perception of women of other races, cultures and religions.