Mary Hunter Austin: A Female Writer’s Protest Against the First World War in the United States

Memory is not history, Jowan A. Mohammed insists in her "Mary Hunter Austin: A Female Writer’s Protest Against the First World War in the United States", and Mary Hunter Austin, while a fierce believer in women’s independence and civic responsibility, was not a feminist; instead, she was made so by later feminists for whom the construction of a feminist history included space for Austin Hunter’s regionalist, naturalist, overtly political writings. Where history had erased her voice, her-story renditions of the 20th century women’s suffrage movement brought her – back, they felt – into the story. In this way, Mohammed’s book is both an exploration of the legacy of an extraordinary chronicler of life in the early 20th century American West, but also a contribution to the study of collective memory studies, to feminist historiographical studies, and more broadly to history itself.

Best known for "The Land of Little Rain" (1903), Hunter Austin was a novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and eventual memoirist, as well as a climate and anti-war activist who championed the rights of women. Mohammed focuses, here, on Hunter Austin’s WWI-era work as well as its contemporaneous reception, in order to understand the ways in which later feminists made use of these works and of Hunter Austin’s legacy to create a foundational origin story to which WWI-era suffrage debates were critical.

Dr. Rashi Rohatgi

Nord universitet, Norway