Elizabeth Jameson

Elizabeth Jameson, "Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West," in Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, The Women's West (1987), 145-164.

Jameson wants to know what life on the frontier was really like for real women. She finds both the ideal of women as "civilizers' and the pejoratively labeled "cult of domesticity" equally inadequate. Neither entirely noble nor entirely degraded, real women on the frontier faced the challenges of everyday life with resourcefulness, entered into public life more frequently than their male counterparts would record in the record of public history, and ultimately were the actors in their own history. It is this history she sees to recover through oral history and through unpublished documents found in attics rather than archives.

Women's writings reveal that they were usually "The Reluctant Pioneer." One cannot know, Jameson points out, how many women foiled the attempts of their husbands to move the family west, but for the most part women's connection with local kin networks lead them to resist the move. When people did move, they often brought their extended kin networks along. When they did arrive on the frontier, women on the frontier were confronted with a "Daily Reality" that was very different from the useless and ornamental middle class wives in the East. She gives strength to the assumption that men and women shared responsibilities for work that was essential to the very survival of the family on the frontier. Although public literature often idealized the work women did, this work was hard work. Hauling water, washing clothes, cooking food all required a tremendous amount of physical exertion. The level of this exertion was necessarily increased with additional children and women understood this. It is thus unsurprising that they sought out information about contraception, pregnancy and birth from their female friends. The female world of love and sentiment was as real for the pioneer women as it was for her sister back East. Yet, both the oral histories and private writings are more or less bereft of evidence about how women on the frontier viewed their own sexuality. She suggests, however, that the private discussion of sexual activity was often "corseted" in public. In considering frontier women in "Public Life," she begins by considering the role women had in public institution building -- work establishing hospitals and libraries, rarely credited by men, are often mentioned in women's oral histories. Their work in support of suffrage movements in the West also contributes to a more nuanced picture of women's public work. In addition to the effect which temperance work had on women, bringing them out in public to smash up saloons, she also points to the role Western women played in the Populist, Greenback and Alliance politics that won the vote for women in Western states. Women "organized suffrage campaign, circulated partitions and lobbied for the vote." The experience in several Canadian provinces bears this out as well.

In closing she asks whether we have not missed the point entirely up until now with women on the frontier and she concludes that they are best understood as both workers and civilizers. Neither drudges nor saints, they accomplished a great deal and worked very hard all their lives.

Other Readings:

Clyde A. Milner II, Walter Nugent, Elliott West, Karen R. Merrill, Philip J. Deloria, Richard White, "A Historian Who Has Changed Our Thinking: A Roundtable on the Work of Richard White," Western Historical Quarterly Summer 2002 (1 Jan. 2003).… (meer)