Ad
Last month I had the privilege of meeting and telling the stories of many different women and girls in the community in honor of Women’s History Month. It has filled me with so much pride and hope, especially when I imagine my 4-year-old daughter’s future. This month I’ve met local heroes, hunters, doctors, and entrepreneurs, and I left each interview feeling inspired and grateful that I, too, get to be a woman in this world.
When I think of all the places on earth where my daughter and I could have been born little girls, I count my blessings that it was in New Mexico, a place where women have always had a bit more freedom than other ladies of their time.
My daughter and I are both Navajo, and our clan is Áshįįhi. Navajo are matrilineal, meaning our first clan is passed down from our mothers, and historically when our men married they went to live with their wife’s people. Even today Navajo women are highly respected as leaders and matriarchs. I don’t know as much about the specific gender roles of the Pueblo people, but in general women have historically held positions of authority in all Native American communities. So, this presence of empowered female leadership was already the vibe when New Mexico became a Spanish colony in 1598.
While Europe’s social structure was patrilineal, women in Spanish colonial New Mexico could, and often did, own land and property. Women such as Josefa Baca, who was the original owner of the land that comprises present-day Pajarito, and Juliana Gutiérrez y Chavez Hubbell, who inherited the 40,000 acre estate where the historic Gutiérrez Hubbell House was built, are two examples of Spanish women that not only owned land but created communities and enterprise.
In the United States, it wasn’t until the 1900s that women in all states could own property. What’s more, women in the US couldn’t open a bank account or get a credit card in their own name and without a male co-signer until 1974.
In 1850, Congress established the New Mexico Territory, and in 1878 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway had made its way through the new territory, bringing with it people from the eastern part of the country. One such woman was Charlotte Johnson Baker from Akron, OH, who moved to Socorro in 1882 to become the first woman to practice medicine in New Mexico.
Drawn by the freedom and adventure the Wild West could offer them, free spirited women like author Mable Dodge Luhan and painter Georgia O’Keeffe first journeyed to New Mexico in 1917, just a few years after it became the country’s 48th state.
By the 1940s and ‘50s many large ranches were in full operation around the state, and where there is a ranch, there is a ranch wife. While most of these pioneering women have gone unnamed in the annals of history, a few tough ladies left their mark on the world. In the Socorro area, women such as Betty Pound, Florence Martin, Wilma Kelly, and Evelyn Fite are remembered as remarkable women of their time. Whether they were branding, rounding up cattle, chopping wood, or fixing fences, these ranch wives weren’t afraid of hard work or breaking stereotypes. My own paternal grandmother, Linda Gutiérrez Dávila, was a registered nurse, mother of four, and spent over half her life working the ranch in Mangas alongside my grandpa.
In 1943 Levi Stauss & Co. designed the first pair of women’s denim jeans, and after that I don’t think there was any going back for women in the West – a legacy of fiercely independent, courageous women of whom I am so proud to be a granddaughter of.
And with that, cheers to the strong women of New Mexico. May we know them, may we be them, may we raise them.
