Calif. historian studied roles in American West

Cookbooks, Bibles letters examined to tell women’s story.

LOS ANGELES — Gloria Ricci Lothrop, a California historian who studied domestic crafts, cookbooks, letters, tombstones and other artifacts to uncover the roles women played in the development of the American West, died Feb. 2 in Arcadia, Calif. She was 80.

Lothrop had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia, said her friend, Cecilia Rasmussen, a former Los Angeles Times staff writer.

A former high school teacher and longtime Pasadena, Calif., resident, Lothrop spent most of her career teaching at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and California State University, Northridge, where she became the first W.P. Whitsett Professor of California History in 1994. She held that post until her retirement in 2004.

When she began her research in the 1970s, she discovered that the topic of women in the Old West was territory few scholars had explored. The textbook she used at Cal Poly Pomona during that period, for instance, devoted only 2½ of its more than 1,000 pages to notable women — and they were largely “shady ladies” and other outlaws.

“Many of the early Western historians were male writers,” Lothrop, who later co-wrote one of the first books to survey the contributions of women to the westward movement, told the Times in 1987. “They wrote about what they knew and what they considered important from their frame of reference. They went to the most accessible records, using treaties of war, business records, court proceedings and legislative proceedings,” accounts that rendered women virtually invisible.

Lothrop turned to other sources, combing attics for items such as cookbooks and mementos tucked into old family Bibles. Some valuable material, including women’s diaries and letters, had been buried in collections indexed under a man’s name.

“She had an eye for what is common now but was unusual then, which was using cultural artifacts” to tell women’s history, said Joan M. Jensen, who collaborated with Lothrop on the book “California Women: A History” (1987).