Community Building and Early Public Relations: Pioneer Women’s Role on and After the Oregon Trail

From the start, women were central to a century of westward migration in the U.S. Community Building and Early Public Relations: Pioneer Women’s Role on and after the Oregon Trail offers a path forward in broadening PR’s Caucasian/White male-gendered history in the U.S. Undergirded by humanist, communitarian, critical race theory, social constructionist perspectives, and a feminist communicology lens, this book analyzes U.S. pioneer women’s lived experiences, drawing parallels with PR’s most basic functions - relationship-building, networking, community building, boundary spanning, and advocacy.

Using narrative analysis of diaries and reminiscences of women who travelled 2,000+ miles on the Oregon Trail in the mid-to-late 1800s, Pompper uncovers how these women filled roles of Caretaker/Advocate, Community Builder of Meeting Houses and Schools, served a Civilizing Function, offered Agency and Leadership, and provided Emotional Connection for Social Cohesion. Revealed also is an inevitable paradox as Caucasian/White pioneer women’s interactional qualities made them complicit as colonizers, forever altering indigenous peoples’ way of life.

This book will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate PR students, PR practitioners, and researchers of PR history and social identity intersectionalities. It encourages us to expand the definition of PR to include community building, and to revise linear timeline and evolutionary models to accommodate voices of women and people of color prior to the twentieth century.

Donnalyn Pompper (Ph.D., Media & Communication, Temple University) teaches courses in and researches public relations, corporate social responsibility, and social identity. Overall, her research provides routes for enabling people, globally, to achieve their maximum potential at work, to embrace their intersecting social identity dimensions (e.g., age, ethnicity, gender), and to critically examine these issues across mass media representations.

Pompper is an internationally recognized and award-winning scholar. She holds the Accredited Public Relations credential from Public Relations Society of America. Prior to joining the academy, she worked as a public relations manager and journalist, bringing 25 years of practical experience to the classroom and her research. She worked in public affairs management at Campbell’s Soup Company, marketing public relations management at Tasty Baking Company, where she created the public relations department, and as an account manager at Lewis, Gilman & Kynett (Philadelphia’s then-largest public relations/advertising firm). She also worked as a daily newspaper freelance reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Courier-Post, as well as news editor at a weekly New Jersey newspaper chain.