Women in the mining towns of the American West were strictly stereotyped into neat categories of public and private, but the 100 intrepid female prospectors in Zanjani's book managed to (confound )those categories .In addition to providing documentation that demolishes the all-male version of prospecting ,Zanjani uses the examples of her female loners to (puncture) some of the (facile) generalizations about Euro-American women as uniformly nurturant and sociable pioneers.