Settlement on the Oklahoma frontier, which began as abruptly as a pistol shot on a starting line, produced a collision of cultures. Women of Oklahoma, 1890-1920, uses primary sources, particularly diaries and letters, to tell the stories of white, black, and Native American women who crossed racial and cultural barriers to work together, first in domestic concerns and later in community and national affairs.

Linda Williams Reese tells of political activist Kate Barnard, who became Oklahoma's Commissioner of Charities and Corrections but fell from political grace, of Alice Robertson, who in 1920 abandoned the acceptable female endeavors of teaching and charity work to become a representative to the U.S Congress, and of Isabel Crawford, missionary to the Kiowas, who confided to her journal, "There are different kinds of hardships and those of the heart and spirit are harder to bear.".

Examining educational opportunities for frontier women, Reese describes the Cherokee Female Seminary, in Tahlequah, and Oklahoma Industrial Institute and College for Girls. She looks at the status of women in early all-black communities, recounting the cultural influence of Zelia Page Breaux, and at the social and political influence of newspaperwomen Elva Shartel Ferguson, Lucia Loomis Ferguson, and Edith Cherry Johnson.

The personal stories of pioneering Oklahoma women cross boundaries of race and class; their attitudes and concerns cross the bridges of time and place. Women of Oklahoma, 1890-1920, is a significant contribution to the history of women, Oklahoma, cultural and inter-racial relations, and the American West.