1. David J. Garrow, "Foreword," to Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), pp. viii-xv.

2. On the significance of mobility in American history, see George W. Pierson, "The M-Factor in American History," American Quarterly 14, no. 2 (Summer 1962): 275-289. For an example of an extended attempt to understand geographical mobility in feminist terms, see Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Free Press, 1991).

3. For critical reviews of feminist geography literature, see L. Bondi and M. Domosh, "Other Figures in Other Places: On Feminism, Postmodernism, and Geography," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10 (1992): 199-221; Linda McDowell, "Space, Place, and Gender Relations: Part I. Feminist Empiricism and the Geography of Social Relations," Progress in Human Geography 17, no. 2 (1993): 157-179; Linda McDowell, "Space, Place, and Gender Relations: Part II. Identity, Difference, Feminist Geometries and Geographies," Progress in Human Geography 17, no. 3 (1993): 305-308. A pioneering work analyzing the spatial implications of American women's history is Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1986). The most ambitious example of new work in feminist historical geography is Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

4. Johnny Faragher and Christine Stansell, "Women and Their Families on the Overland Trail to California and Oregon, 1842-1867," Feminist Studies 2 (Fall 1975): 150-166; John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1880 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979); Sandra Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Byrd Gibbens, This Is a Strange Country: Letters of a Westering Family, 1880-1906 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988); Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988); Lillian Schlissel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken Books, 1982); Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbens, and Elizabeth Hampsten, Far from Home: Families of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken Books, 1989).

5. On Native women, see Margot Liberty, "Hell Came with Horses: Plains Indian Women in the Equestrian Era," Montana, The Magazine of Western History 32, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 14-15; Margot Liberty, "Plains Indian Women through Time: A Preliminary Overview," in Leslie B. Davis, ed., Lifeways of Intermontane and Plains Montana Indians: In Honor of J. Verne Dusenberry, Occasional Papers of the Museum of the Rockies, no. 1 (Bozeman: Montana State University, 1979), pp. 138-141; Elliott West, The Way to the West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming); Rebecca Bales, "Changing Gender Roles and Sexuality in the Modoc Tribe of Northeastern California," paper presented to the Western History Association, New Haven, Connecticut, October, 1992. On Mexican migration, see Rosalinda Melendez Gonzalez, "Distinctions in Western Women's Experience: Ethnicity, Class, and Social Change," in Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women's West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), pp. 237-251; Vicki L. Ruiz and Susan Tiano, eds., Women on the United States-Mexico Border: Responses to Change (Boston: Allen and Unwin, Inc., 1987); George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). On Asian immigration and relocation, see Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Valerie Matsumoto, 'Japanese American Women during World War II," Frontiers 8, no. 1 (1984): 6-14. On migrant farmworkers, see Fran Leeper Buss, Forjada Bajo el Sur: Forged under the Sun: The Life of Maria Elena Lucas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). On cowgirls and women in wild west shows, see Dee Brown, The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Teresa Jordan, Cowgirls: Women of the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). On African American migrants to the Plains, see Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976). On middle class women drivers, see Virginia Scharff, "Of Parking Spaces and Women's Places: The Los Angeles Parking Ban of 1920," NWSA Journal 1, no. 1 (Fall 1988): 37-51; and Scharff, Taking the Wheel; Sandra Rosenbloom, "Why Working Families Need a Car," in Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford, eds., The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment, and Daily Urban Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). For a more comprehensive bibliography of sources, see J. Etulain and P. Devejian, Women and Family in the American West (Albuquerque: Center for the American West, 1991). Thanks also to Elliott West for help with citations on Native American women.

6. I have made a similar argument in Virginia Scharff, "Gender and Western History: Is Anybody Home on the Range?" Montana: The Magazine of Western History 41, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 62-65. For a suggestive example of the possibility of such analysis, see Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

7. For a model of this form of dialectical analysis, see Belinda Bozzoli, "Marxism, Feminism, and South African Studies," Journal of Southern African Studies 9, no. 2 (April 1983): 137-171.

8. On space-time relations, see Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (New York: Macmillan, 1981); William H. Sewell, Jr., "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation," American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (July 1992): 1-29.

9. On the problem of univocality, interpretation, and appropriation in the social sciences, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); D. Gordon et al., "Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Discourse," Inscriptions nos. 3 and 4 (1988); Frances E. Mascia-Lees et al., "The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective," SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 1 (Fall 1989): 7-33.

10. Donna Haraway, "Reading Buchi Emecheta: Contests for Women's Experience in Women's Studies," Women: A Cultural Review 1 (1990): 243.

11. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, pp. xii, 9-10.

12. Ibid., p. 15.

13. Ibid., pp. 79, 90. For a detailed account of the rise of segregation practices, see Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

14. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, p. 79.

15. Ibid., pp. xiii, 15-16.

16. Pleasant succeeded in forcing the company to transport black passengers. Helen Holdredge, Mammy Pleasant (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1953), p. 62. Paula Giddings details a history of black women's opposition to discrimination in transportation in When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984), pp. 261-270; see also Barbara Y. Welke, "When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855-1914," Law and History Review 13, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 261-316; Robin D. G. Kelley, "'We Are Not What We Seem': Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South," Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (June 1993): 75-112.

17. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, pp. 22, 31-2.

18. Ibid., p. 43; Giddings, When and Where I Enter, pp. 262-264.

19. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 131.

20. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, pp. 45-46.

21. Ibid., pp. 92-94.

22. Ibid., pp. 39-74, 115.

23. Ibid., p. 140.

24. Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 312.

25. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, pp. 169-171. Kelley, "'We Are Not What We Seem,"' p. 95, notes that "Central to black working-class politics was mobility, for it afforded workers relative freedom to escape oppressive living and working conditions and power to negotiate better working conditions."

26. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, pp. xii, xv.

27. Ibid., pp. 171-172.

28. Robin Kelley uses the term "infrapolitics" to approach the political meaning of black working class opposition in the South, and acknowledges a scholarly tradition examining the meaning of everyday life ranging from the work of anthropologist James C. Scott, to theorist Michel de Certeau, to labor historian E. P. Thompson; Kelley, p. 77 fn. 9. Kelley, however, fails to acknowledge a long, global, and sophisticated tradition of feminist theoretical analysis of sexual and personal politics, including the work of, among many others, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexandra Kollontai, Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, and Joan Wallach Scott.

29. Glenda Riley, The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Isabella Bird, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960); T. A. Larson, History of Wyoming (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 84-94.

30. David Gutierrez, "Significant to Whom? Mexican Americans and the History of the American West," The Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 4 (November 1993): 519-539, offers a powerful analysis of the significance of the literature of Chicano history. See also Antonia I. Castaneda, "Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History: The Discourse, Politics, and Decolonization of History," Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 4 (November 1992): 501-534; Virginia Scharff, "Else Surely We Shall all Hange Separately: The Politics of Western Women's History," Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 4 (November 1992): 535-556.

31. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, "Introduction," DuBois and Ruiz, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. xii; Scharff, "Else Surely We Shall all Hange Separately," p. 546.

32. Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District, from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994); Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Shirley Ann Moore, "Getting There, Being There: African American Migration to Richmond, California, 1910-1945," in Joe William Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 111, 118-120; Douglas Flamming, essay in this volume.

33. David A. Hollinger, "Postethnic America," Contention: Debates in Society, Culture, and Science 2, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 79-96; David A. Hollinger, "How Wide the Circle of the 'We'? American Intellectuals and the Problem of the Ethnos since World War II," American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April 1993): 317-337.