So Much to Be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier (Women in the West) - Hardcover

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9780803231344: So Much to Be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier (Women in the West)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803231342 ISBN 13: 9780803231344

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1990

The genuine creative achievements of nineteenth-century western women have often been obscured by sentimental tributes to their devotion and diligence, while men are praised as pathfinders, entrepreneurs, and community builders. But the nineteen narratives in So Much to Be Done by women of diverse status and background reveal women's involvement in every aspect of settlement. Their part in making hard decisions, producing essential income, and developing new communities was as important as their flexibility, humor, and sense of adventure. This collection describes the experiences of pioneer women responding in individual ways to the challenge of frontier hardships.

The letters, diaries, and memoirs presented here offer glimpses of women's courage, physical strength, and independence that were the equal of any man's, even as they also reveal the failures, weaknesses, and tragedies that beset both sexes during the complex settlement process. Women describe their multiple daily tasks, the ingenuity by which they asserted themselves or circumvented patriarchal authority, the networks of relatives and friends who made the survival of both men and women possible. Such information is seldom found in men's narratives. Women's words provide rich veins of new material for social historians.

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About the Author:

Ruth B. Moynihan, a member of the Connecticut Center for Independent Historians who also teaches at the University of Connecticut, is the author of Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway (1983) and other works. Susan Armitage, director of the American Studies Program and a professor of history at Washington State University, is coeditor, with Elizabeth Jameson, of The Women's West (1987) and the author of other publications. Christiane Fischer Dichamp, formerly a professor of American Studies at the University of Nancy, edited Let Them Speak for Themselves: Women in the American West, 1849–1900 (1977).

From Publishers Weekly:

Challenges, defeats and triumphs of the harsh 19th-century American frontier are portrayed vividly through the words of 19 women who wrote of their experiences. Mrs. Lee Whipple-Haslam, whose father died in a barroom fight, describes hard-drinking miners and frontier justice in 1850s California. Mrs. J. W. Likins supports herself and her daughter by traveling to different towns as a "lady agent" selling engraved pictures of General Grant. A particularly intrepid woman, Mrs. Nat Collins, is captured by Indians and loses her possessions in a fire but ultimately triumphs to become "Cattle Queen of Montana." Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, daughter of a Piute chief, recalls the forced midwinter relocation of her tribe from their Nevada homeland to the Yakima reservation in eastern Washington. In Colorado territory, Sister Blandina Segale (a nun) stops a lynch mob and prevents an illegal attempt to take over a mine. Moynihan wrote Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway ; Armitage is co-editor of The Women's West ; and Dichamp edited Let Them Speak for Themselves: Women in the American West, 1849-1900. Illustrations not seen by PW. BOMC, QPB and History Book Club selections.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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