Carved into a rock overlooking the Columbia River stands the arresting image of Tsagaglalal, or “She Who Watches,” an ancient female chief. As the Wishram people recount, when men replaced women in positions of power, Tsagaglalal was turned to stone by Coyote so that she could forever guide her community and guard its development.

Using the story of She Who Watches as her guide, Armitage shows that even though  women were barred from positions of public authority until recently, they have always worked quietly and informally to assure the stability and security of their families and communities. Women’s community-building and cooperative skills have been decisive in developing the societies of the Pacific Northwest—Washington, Oregon, Idaho, western Montana, and British Columbia. Like She Who Watches, women have never been mere observers, but watchful guardians and active shapers of the public good.

Drawing on her three decades of research and teaching and based on hundreds of secondary sources, Armitage’s account explores the varied ways in which, beginning in the earliest times and continuing to the present, women of all races and ethnicities have made the history of our region. An accessible introduction for general readers and scholars alike, Shaping the Public Good restores a missing piece of Pacific Northwest history by demonstrating the part that women—“the famous, the forgotten, and all the women in between”—have always played in establishing their families and building communities.

Nourished by the cultural exuberance of second wave feminism, Helaine Victoria Press was a home-grown effort of two young women, Jocelyn Cohen and Nancy Poore, who learned how to print, established a printshop, and became the first publishers of women’s history postcards. The authors of Women Making History demonstrate that by creating postcards, Helaine Victoria Press aimed to do more than provide a convenient writing surface or even affect collective memory. Instead, they argue, the press generated feminist memory. The cards, each with the picture of a woman or group of women from history, were multimodal. Pictures were framed in colors and borders appropriate to the era and subject. Lengthy captions offered details about the lives of the women pictured. Unlike other memorials, the cards were mobile: they traveled through the postal system, viewed along the way by the purchasers, mail sorters, mail carriers, and recipients. Upon arriving at their destinations, cards were often posted on office bulletin boards or refrigerators at home, where surroundings shaped their meanings.
 

This is the first book to demonstrate the relationships between the feminist art movement, the women in print movement, and the scholars studying women’s history. Readers will be drawn to both the large quantity of illustrative materials and the theoretical framework of the book, as it provides an expanded understanding of rhetorical multimodality.