California Dreams and American ContradictionsCalifornia Dreams and American Contradictions establishes a genealogy of western American women writers publishing between 1870 and 1965 to argue that both white women and women of color regionalized dominant national literary trends to negotiate the contradictions between an American liberal individualism and American equality. Monique McDade analyzes works by Mara Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sui Sin Far, and a previously unstudied