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Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement - Life on the Home Frontier (Paperback)
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Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement - Life on the Home Frontier (Paperback)
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During the last half of the nineteenth century, thousands of men
went west in search of gold, land, or adventure - leaving their
wives to handle family, farm, and business affairs on their own.
The experiences of these westering men have long been a part of the
lore of the American frontier, but the stories of their wives have
rarely been told. Ten years of research into public and private
documents - including letters of couples separated during the
westward movement - has enabled Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith to
tell the forgotten stories of "women in waiting." Though these
wives were left more or less in limbo by the departure of their
adventuring husbands, they were hardly women in waiting in any
other sense. Children had to be fed, clothed, housed, and educated;
farms and businesses had to be managed; creditors had to be paid or
pacified - and, in some cases, hard-earned butter-and-egg money had
to be sent west in response to letters from broke and disillusioned
husbands. This raises some unsettling questions: How does the idea
of an "allowance" from home square with our long-standing image of
the frontiersman as rugged individualist? To what extent was the
westward movement supported by the paid and unpaid labor of women
back east? And how do we measure the heroics of husbands out west
against the heroics of wives back home? Based on the experiences of
more than fifty women - from Abiah Hiller, whose business sense
equaled or excelled her husband's, to Emma Christie, who knew
virtually nothing about the matters she was called upon to manage -
Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement offers a rare glimpse
into life on the home frontier and provides new insights into
fairly common, though poorly documented, aspect of the history of
the settling of the American West.
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