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Unsettling the West: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby in Frontier California

JoAnn Levy, foreword by Kevin Starr

Cloth, ISBN: 1-890771-85-6, $24.95
Trade Paper, ISBN: 1-890771-83-X, $16.95
With 30 black & white images

A California Legacy book

Gold rush California offered many strange sights, but few were as startling as the arrival of two women activists in Santa Cruz in 1850. When Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce showed up to work on the farm dressed in bloomers and boots, the townsfolk were amazed. Before long, these two East Coast women became known as suffragettes, and Eliza was famous not for advocating women’s equality, but rather for lecturing on women’s superiority. The entire state was abuzz.

JoAnn Levy, the well-known historian and author of They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush, has pieced together for the first time the grand story of two of American history’s forgotten treasures: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby. Together they made national headlines with their writings and their beliefs, including abolitionism, women’s suffrage, Spiritualism, and phrenology. Both were extraordinarily gifted authors, and Levy has mined extensively their writings, and found gold: Eliza—herself the author of five books—was the first woman to write a book about California, and the letters written by her and Georgiana are full of intelligence and humor.

More than just a history of women in the American frontier, Unsettling the West is the story of a profound friendship. The courage, passion, and wit exhibited by Eliza and Georgiana are surpassed only by their love and respect for one another. These women were at the vanguard of the major social and political movements of their time; they invented identities for themselves that the world had never seen before. They were both oddities and inspirations. In this energetic new book we find ourselves introduced to two characters whose courageous examples we need today more than ever.

Reviews:

"Unsettling the West is a compelling, eminently readable portrait of two remarkable women…"—San Francisco Chronicle

"JoAnn Levy’s dual biography of two audacious leaders (till now unheralded) who helped find the way to suffrage and other longed-for rights is an inspiration. What a revelation, what an achievement!"—J. S. Holliday, author of Rush for Riches

"Thanks to JoAnn Levy, the lives of these two pioneer reformers—so inextricably bound up with each other through the lifetime gift of friendship—stand revealed as important chapters in the story of nineteenth-century American women."—Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California

“Levy has further illuminated women’s experiences in nineteenth-century America, and delivered a compelling tribute to two dynamic and consequential crusaders.”—California History

About the Author:

JoAnn Levy is the author of They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California God Rush and Daughter of Joy: A Novel of Gold Rush San Francisco, winner of the 1999 Women Writing the West WILLA Literary Award for Best Historical Fiction, and For California’s Gold, winner of the 2001 WILLA Award for Best Historical Fiction. She lives and writes in Sutter Creek, in the heart of California’s gold country.

For more information on Unsettling the West and other JoAnn Levy titles, visit www.goldrush.com/~joann.