Embedded Files
Women's Diaries
Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, Lillian Schlissel
This book is a nice combination of text, excerpts from diaries, and a number of photographs.
The following slides are excerpts from this book.
From Women's Diaries, Schlissel—Families in Transit, 1851-55
"The westward move for many men was the physical expression of a break with the past and a setting out for a new life. The journey occurred when the rhythms of maturity were primed for a change. The determination to go West was either the initial separation from a man's parental family or the second major move, the move 'upward' in the search for economic mobility and success.
The adventure took on the color of some 'dramatic rite of passage to mastery and adulthood' in the life cycle of frontier men.
But the journey could have no natural place in the life cycle of the women. The journey was a violation of life's natural rhythms for women of childbearing years. There was simply no way that the rigorous exertions of the overland journey could be considered 'normal' for a pregnant woman."
From Women's Diaries, Schlissel—Families in Transit, 1851-55
"And yet a woman's pregnancy mattered very little to emigrant families, certainly it was not sufficient cause to defer the trip.
Even with the best of care, childbirth was a precarious business in the nineteenth century. It was even more risky on the open road, followed by immediate travel in a wagon with no springs and with very little access to water for drinking or for bathing. Any complications of delivery proved critical. And frailty in the newborn was life-threatening. . . .
Childbirth is seldom mentioned in the dairies of the men, even when the new babies were their own, whereas women's diaries always mention the birth of a child, even when the birth occurred in a neighboring wagon train. . . ."
From Women's Diaries, Schlissel—Families in Transit, 1851-55
"Birth is described in all of the diaries as a commonplace event. But at the same time it is also shrouded behind a veil of 'not telling.'
Helen Marnie Steward recorded in her diary that they had 'traviled half the day and had to stop and Christie Bomgardner had a daughter added to his familie.'
Ceclia McMillen Adams told, along with a list of her chores, that a birth had occurred in one of the neighboring companies. The woman was bearing her first child and the delivery was a difficult one. The diarist recalled that 'the child was doubled up in the womb, making it a serious and strenous birth.' And the young mother was delivered, her husband could permit her but a day layover, for he remembered that 'the Indians there were not friendly.'"
From Women's Diaries, Schlissel, "Families in Transit, 1841-50"
"One of the starkest stories among the overland diaries in that of Elizabeth Smith Geer. She and her husband and their seven children came from Indiana to Oregon Territory in 1847.
There had been flute music, and fiddling, and dancing in the early months of summer, but by summer's end, the wagon party was in trouble.
A diary entry dated September 15 signals some of the stress the women felt:"
From Women's Diaries, Schlissel, "Families in Transit, 1841-50"
"This morning one company moved on except one family. The woman got mad and would not budge, nor let the children go. He had his cattle hitched on for three hours and coaxing her to go, but she would not stir. I told my husband the circumstance, and he and Adam Polk and Mr. Kimball went and took each one a young one and crammed them in the wagon and her husband drove off and left her sitting. She got up, took the back track and traveled out of sight. Cut across, overtook her husband. Meantime he sent his boy back to camp after a horse that he had left and when she came up to her husband, says, 'Did you meet John?' 'Yes' was the reply, 'and I picked up a stone and knocked out his brains.' Her husband went back to ascertain the truth, and while he was gone, she set one of his wagons on fire, which was loaded with store goods. The cover burnt off, and some valuable articles. He saw flames and came running and put it out, and then mustered spunk enough to give her a good flogging."
From Women's Diaries, Schlissel, "Families in Transit, 1841-50"
"The family [Elizabeth Smith Geer] came to the Deschutes River in Oregon territory at the end of October. Many a diary verifies that the emigrants were particularly helpless at that river crossing. The river was high, rapid, and dangerous.
'the water came clear to the top of the wagon beds. My children and I, with as many more women and children as could shove themselves into a canoe, were taken over by two Indians, which cost a good many shirts. . . . Any body preparing to come to this country should make up some calico shirts to trade to the Indians in cases of necessity. You will have to hire them to pilot you across rivers. Against we got here, my folks were stripped of shirts, trouser, jackets and 'wammusses' [a warm work jacket made of sturdy knitted or woven fabric].'"
From Women's Diaries, Schlissel, "Families in Transit, 1841-50"
"The bad weather wore away the stamina of strong men, and her friend's husband died. By mid-November Elizabeth's husband was sick too . . . She wrote:
"It rains and snows. We start this morning around the falls with our wagons. . . . I carry my babe and lead, or rather carry, another through snow, mud, and water, almost to my knees. It is the worst road . . . I went ahead with my children and I was afraid to look behind me for fear of seeing the wagons turn over into the mud. . . . My children gave out with cold and fatigue and could not travel, and the boys had to unhitch the oxen and bring them and carry the children on to camp. I was so cold and numb I could not tell by feeling that I had any feet at all. . . .there was not one dry thread on one of us—not even my babe. . . . I have not told you half we suffered. I am not adequate to the task."
By thanksgiving they had reached Portland, but her husband died. So Elizabeth packed up her family and started out for a new home.
From Women's Diaries, Schlissel, "Families in Transit, 1841-50"
"For a year, Elizabeth and her children managed to keep themselves alive . . . Three of the older boys left for the gold mines and she was left with the four youngest.
I became poor as a snake, yet I was in good health. . . . I could run a half mile without stopping to breathe. Well, I thought perhaps I had better try my fortune again; so on the 24th of June, 1849, I was married to a Mr. Joseph Geer, a man 14 years older than myself, though young enough for me. He is the father of ten children. . . . He is a Yankee.
Yankee husbands enjoyed the highest of reputations among the pioneer women, being universally judged the most considerate and gentle.
"He is as kind to me as I can ask. Indeed he sometimes provokes me for trying to humor me so much."
Elizabeth built a good life with this second husband who appended a letter from him to her diary.
From Women's Diaries, Schlissel, "Families in Transit, 1841-50"
It's dated "Butteville, Sept. 9, 1859"
Dear Ladies, As Mrs. Geer has introduced me to you as her old Yankee husband, I will say a few words, in the hope of becoming more acquainted hereafter. She so often speaks of you, that you seem like old neighbors. . . . Of her I will only say she makes me a first-rate wife, industrious, and kind almost to a fault to me, however, that I can cheerfully overlook, you know.
We are not rich, but independent, and live agreeably together, which is enough. We are located on the west bank of the Williamette River . . . a very pleasant situation. Intend putting out a large orchard as soon as I can prepare the ground; have about ten thousand apple trees, and about 200 pear trees on hand."
He continues with his personal history, born in Windham, Conn, lived in Ohio until 1840, when he left for Illinois, arrived in Oregon in 1847, buried his first wife that December.
Questions? Comments?
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
This photo appears at the beginning of an article "Women and the Myth of the American West" published by Time magazine, January 11, 2015, that asked historians: What opportunities did the American West offer women that they may not have had back East?
This was preparatory to the event “What It Means to Be American,” a conversation jointly hosted by the Smithsonian and Arizona State University. The website is located at https://www.whatitmeanstobeamerican.org/
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Introduction:
In the American imagination, the rugged, vast landscapes of the West are dotted with solitary men on horseback—cowboys, outlaws, sheriffs. But the frontier was also home to women whose stories don’t match the standard Hollywood Western script. What brought women to places like California and Wyoming, and what lives could they lead there? Did Western women experience the same freedoms and adventures as their male counterparts?
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
A land of contradictions as well as opportunity—Virginia Scharff
Let’s begin with one of those invisible, obvious facts of history: Women had been living in what became “the West” centuries before anyone arrived from “back East.” We have plenty of evidence of the ways they claimed homes and made communities, from the remnants of the Cahokia Mounds to the majestic ruins of Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon, where archaeologist Patricia Crown has found evidence of chocolate and macaws from the 12th century. With the advent of European contact, Spanish and Mexican and indigenous women lived in—and came from—all directions.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
A land of contradictions as well as opportunity—Virginia Scharff
So we’re really talking about those recent immigrants who came from the eastern U.S. and from across the globe, particularly in the 19th century.
In the years after the Civil War, those women found plenty of opportunities in the West that were not available in the East: everything from the right to vote to equal pay for women teachers to more liberal divorce laws.
Wyoming Territory passed a series of such laws in 1869, partly in an effort to attract more white settlement, which, of course, was also intended to unsettle indigenous people. The West was the first home of women’s suffrage in the U.S., with nearly every western state or territory enfranchising women long before women won the right to vote in eastern states.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
A land of contradictions as well as opportunity—Virginia Scharff
Is the West still a land of opportunity for women? I’d say it’s more a land of contradictions. We’ve got women in public offices and CEO suites throughout the region. But here in the West, women continue to lag behind men in too many areas to declare the “Woman Problem” solved.
Virginia Scharff is distinguished professor of history at the University of New Mexico.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
The chance to be a landowner—Vicki L. Ruiz
Under colonial Spain and newly independent Mexico, married women living in the borderlands of what is now the American Southwest had certain legal advantages not afforded their European-American peers.
Under English common law, women, when they married, became feme covert (effectively dead in the eyes of the legal system) and thus unable to own property separately from their husbands.
Conversely, Spanish-Mexican women retained control of their land after marriage and held one-half interest in the community property they shared with their spouses.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
The chance to be a landowner—Vicki L. Ruiz
As I tell my students, imagine you are a woman on the Illinois prairie, the only child of a prosperous farmer. Your parents die, and you inherit the family homestead. You marry, raise crops, and rear several children. But if your husband has a mind to sell the farm and travel west, you cannot stop the sale, and up on the buckboard you go.
However, if you grew up near Albuquerque, your husband could not sell the property you had brought to the marriage, thus giving you significant leverage in household decisions. So you might not end up on that buckboard after all.
There were numerous landed women of note in the West. For example, María Rita Valdez operated Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, now better known as a center of affluence and glamour: Beverly Hills. (Rodeo Drive takes its name from Rancho Rodeo.)
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
The chance to be a landowner—Vicki L. Ruiz
After the U.S.-Mexican War, the del Valle family of Southern California held on to Rancho Camulos, and when Ygnacio, the patriarch, died, his widow Isabel and daughter Josefa successfully took over the ranch’s operations.
Other successful entrepreneurs and property holders, who defended their interests in court when necessary, included San Francisco’s Juana Briones, Santa Fe’s Gertrudis Barceló, San Antonio-born María del Carmen Calvillo, and Phoenix’s Trinidad Escalante Swilling. In a frontier environment, they utilized the legal system to their advantage as women unafraid to exert their own authority.
Vicki L. Ruiz is distinguished professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and president-elect of the American Historical Association, she is the author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Writerly inspiration—Cathryn Halverson
The West gave women special opportunities as authors. Aspiring writers saw literary “material” in the stuff of their daily lives in frontier, rural, and urban western spaces.
They shaped that material into letters, journals, sketches, essays, and stories for eastern magazines and presses—and received popular acclaim.
For readers outside the West, the settings these women described were exotic: California gold camps and desert outposts, northwestern logging and mining communities, Rocky Mountain and Great Plains homesteads.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Writerly inspiration—Cathryn Halverson
Elinore Pruitt Stewart, writing from Wyoming in 1913, placed a series of letters about her homesteading experience in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. She reported on the letters of thanks she received from appreciative readers, like the elderly woman who told her “the Letters satisfied her every wish. She said she had only to shut her eyes to see it all, to smell the pines and the sage.”
Through its association with romantic national mythologies of sublime landscape and heroic endeavor, an ordinary woman’s life on a ranch in Wyoming seemed to mean more—and to reveal more—than one on a farm in Wisconsin or Connecticut.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Writerly inspiration—Cathryn Halverson
Yet women writers were just as likely to revise as support these mythologies, which centered on male endeavor, and they frequently portrayed western sites as not wild and liberating, but provincial and claustrophobic.
The Story of Mary MacLane, for example, one of the most notorious books of 1902, depicted the 19-year-old author’s desperation to escape her middle-class home in the copper boomtown of Butte: “Can I be possessed of a peculiar rare genius,” she demands, “and yet drag my life out in obscurity in this uncouth, warped, Montana town!”
Nevertheless, the city MacLane denounced was key to her literary success: Readers would have been far less intrigued by the thoughts and experience of a girl hailing from a more familiar place.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Writerly inspiration—Cathryn Halverson
Cathryn Halverson is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is the author most recently of Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
It depends on which women, and where — Laura Woodworth-Ney
The answer depends on which women, and the geography of their circumstances. During the post-Civil War period in the American West (1865-1910), middle-class and upper-class white women often did enjoy more flexibility and more freedom—to travel, to own land in their name, to exercise control over their children.
Minority women—particularly Chinese and Native American—did not experience greater freedoms. For these groups, the idea of an American “West” was meaningless.
For Chinese women who immigrated during the late-19th century to work in the laundries, saloons, and grimy inns of mining camps scattered throughout California and the Rocky Mountain interior, the West was not west at all but rather east, and it was often not a voyage of choice.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
It depends on which women, and where — Laura Woodworth-Ney
Impoverished families in China were encouraged to sell their daughters, who were shipped to San Francisco, held in “pens,” and taken to mining camps. Even though slavery had been outlawed after the Civil War, the isolation of these camps—in places like Warrens, Idaho—meant that slavery existed in fact if not in law.
For the West’s native women of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the American West represented a battleground of culture, conquest, and hunger. Non-Indian settlement destroyed the food sources and lifeways for the tribes of the western United States, while U.S. government policy forced them onto federally managed reservations.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
It depends on which women, and where—Laura Woodworth-Ney
With their peoples ravaged by disease and forced assimilation, many tribal women faced crippling poverty and cultural genocide as the 20th century dawned. The survival and success of tribes in 21st-century America is due to the ability of these native women to hold their families together during the era of the “American West.”
Laura Woodworth-Ney is provost and vice president for academic affairs at Idaho State University. Formerly the chair of the department of history, she has published more than 30 articles and books on topics in history, humanities, and higher education. She is currently at work on a history of women and irrigation settlement in the American West.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Mobility—but not necessarily upward—Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
When we talk about “the American West” and the women who made it their home, what do we really mean? Often, the term conjures images of those who migrated east to west, specifically from the East Coast of the United States.
However, the region understood as the “West” was home to indigenous and Mexican women who lived here before Anglo-American and African-American settlers. Some of these women who already resided in the West experienced forced physical, cultural, economic, and political dislocation to make space for “pioneers.”
Women also migrated from the “East,” meaning Asia and other parts of the Eastern hemisphere. They also came “North” and “South” within the western hemisphere.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Mobility—but not necessarily upward—Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Asking about distinct opportunities for women in the West also assumes that these opportunities didn’t exist elsewhere. This is a long-standing belief in U.S. society that the West epitomizes the American dream and the basis of American identity. This region of presumably “free land” provided opportunities for economic mobility and self-reinvention.
But not all women could participate in these opportunities. State policies throughout much of the Western states denied Asians the right to own land as well as interracially marry.
Furthermore, some women were forced to migrate to work in the sex industry, one of the few jobs allocated for women in the male-dominated western “frontier.”
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Mobility—but not necessarily upward—Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Certainly, many people, including women, relocated to the West based on the belief that opportunity awaited them.
For example, Margaret Chung, the subject of a biography I wrote, became the first American-born Chinese female physician. Her mother had been sold into servitude and prostitution, and her father struggled to make ends meet through most of their family’s lives.
However, Margaret found religious and educational allies to obtain a medical education. During World War II, she served as an adopted “mother” to over 1,000 “sons”—Anglo-American soldiers, entertainers, and politicians.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Mobility—but not necessarily upward—Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
On the surface, this appears to be a success story. However, Chung’s economic and social rise also depended upon her manipulation of her identity, including strategically performing a projected role of foreign womanhood.
At times, despite her status as a professional woman, Chung played the role of an Oriental mammy. Her story, like others of women in the West, was not a simple one of upward mobility.
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor of Asian American studies and history at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
The opportunity to learn from one another—Jane Simonsen
The American West presented opportunities for some 19th-century Anglo-American women to cultivate a stronger sense of authority by positioning their domestic work as part of nation-building.
Middle-class white women reformers interested in promoting Native American assimilation, for example, worked to define the well-kept single-family home—and the woman at its center—as a key marker of civilization. Their widely recognized power as moral guardians of the home justified their action and work outside of the narrow domestic realm, and these reformers carved out a niche for themselves among the politicians, scientists, and field workers who sought to “civilize” the western tribes in the latter half of the 19th century.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
The opportunity to learn from one another—Jane Simonsen
Yet working among Native Americans in western locations, from the Nez Perce in northern Idaho to the Cahuilla of Southern California, gave these women the opportunity to measure themselves against their indigenous counterparts—and at least some found their own civilization lacking.
Close contact with indigenous women sometimes held up a harsh mirror to “civilized” society, which devalued the very work these women sought to promote.
For their part, indigenous women took advantage of new resources on their reservations when they could, and were cannily selective in what they chose to adopt of the lessons and models of conduct offered by Anglo reformers.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
The opportunity to learn from one another—Jane Simonsen
The reservation system, land allotment, and reform movements disrupted many social ties and work patterns. Still, resourceful indigenous women sought opportunities to earn seasonal income, own property, and provide health care to their families. By maintaining some familiar forms of work, such as farming, foraging, and needlework, women helped to mitigate new economic realities on the reservation. Remaining at the margins of the new economy, indigenous women used new trade opportunities to maintain some of the very systems that reformers had hoped to destroy.
Jane Simonsen is associate professor of history and women’s and gender studies at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. She is the author of Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Room to invent new identities—Maria Raquel Casas
On December 23, 1868, a Native American woman died in Los Angeles, and Anglo-Americans paid no attention to her passage. Within the new racial and social order established by Americans after the Mexican American war, Victoria Bartolomea Comicrabit was an Indian, but what 19th-century Americans failed to recognize was that this woman had survived two colonization efforts and lived a uniquely Californian life.
Born in 1808, Victoria was a member of the San Gabriel people and fully hispanicized by the Spanish friars to the point that she and her “Indian” husband, Pablo Maria, were given mission lands once they married and became fully Catholic. As a property owner and hispanicized woman, Victoria interacted and was socially accepted by the other local elite California families. When her husband died, she inherited all the lands granted to the couple.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Room to invent new identities—Maria Raquel Casas
If she had remained a widow, Victoria would have continued to work her lands, take care of her four children, and be a respected member of her community. She was an “Indian,” but in the Spanish colonial system race was more fluid. Victoria, however, did not remain a widow, and in September 1836 she married the Scottish trader Hugo Reid, who eventually squandered Victoria’s lands. After his death, Victoria was left destitute, treated as “just another Indian.”
As Victoria Reid’s story shows, women’s lives in the American West have to be understood through complicated categories of race, class, religion, marriage, and legal standing that did not remain static during the 19th century. If we see women’s contributions to settling the West as nothing more than dependent mates to men, we fail to see the complex woman that Victoria represents.
Women and the Myth of the American West, Time (1-11-2015)
Maria Raquel Casas is an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880.
Questions? Comments?
Breakout Room Question
Open-ended. So what do you make of all this?
Women's Diaries
Covered wagon women: diaries & letters from the Western trails, by Kenneth L Holmes and David Duniway, published from 1995 onward by the University of Nebraska Press in 11 volumes:
Volume 1: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849
The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on the trail between Omaha and Salt Lake City; Rachel Fisher, who buried both her husband and her little girl before reaching Oregon. Still others make themselves heard, starting out from different places and recording details along the way, from the mundane to the soul-shattering and spirit-lifting.
Women's Diaries
Covered wagon women: diaries & letters from the Western trails, by Kenneth L Holmes and David Duniway, published from 1995 onward by the University of Nebraska Press in 11 volumes:
Volume 2: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1850 (Covered Wagon Women)
Volume 4: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1852: The California Trail
Volume 5: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1852: The Oregon Trail
Volume 10: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1875-1883
Note: UD library has these, as does Amazon
YouTube Video presentation by Kenneth Holmes for Bennington, NE Historical Society
Also Homesteading, by Prairie Public
Women's Diaries
Best of Covered Wagon Women, by Kenneth L Holmes, 2008, Univ. of Nebraska Pr.
Firsthand accounts of women who braved the overland trails during the great 19th-century westward migration are collected here. The accounts were selected for the power with which they portray the hardship, adventure, and family and friendship bonds that characterized the overland experience.
Some were written by educated women, and others bear the mark of cabin learning, with archaic spelling and a simplicity of expression.
Each account begins with an introduction to its author and what is known about her life. A few b&w historical photos are included. Holmes (1914-95) was a professor of history at Oregon College of Education (now Western Oregon University).
Women's Diaries
Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, Lillian Schlissel
This book is a nice combination of text, excerpts from diaries, and a number of photographs.
"I Wish to Keep a Record": Nineteenth-Century New Brunswick Women Diarists and Their World, by Gail Campbell
. . . the first book to focus exclusively on the life-course experiences of 19th-century New Brunswick women, this book is an interpretive scholarly analysis of 28 women's diaries [that] show women constructing themselves as individuals, assuming their essential place in building families and communities, and shaping their society by directing its outward gaze and envisioning its future.
Women's Diaries
Westward the women, Nancy Wilson Ross, Alfred A. Knopf, 1944.
Stories of the women of all classes, from missionaries and doctors to captives and dollar-a-dance girls, who helped build the Pacific Northwest. A book about women, from nuns to prostitutes, who pioneered across the continent. Not only does the material represent half-forgotten history―which the author garnered from attics, libraries, state historical museums, and the reminiscences of Far Western Old-timers—but it is unique in presenting the woman's side of the story.
Among these pioneer women, the Maine blue-stocking pursuing her studies of botany and taxidermy in frontier solitude; the gentle nuns from Belgium teaching needlework and litanies to "children of the forest," the little ex-milliner who performed the first autopsy by a woman; the suffragette who established a newspaper for Western women and rode plushy river boats and the dusty roads preaching her gospel of Equal Rights, hurdy-gurdy girls from Idaho boomtowns, and many another martyr, heroine, diarist, gun moll, missionary, feminist, and mother in this turbulent era of pioneering.
Women's Diaries
By Ox Team to California: A Narrative of Crossing the Plains in 1860, by Lavinia Honeyman Porter
"A secret to be burried": the diary and life of Emily Hawley Gillespie, 1858-1888, Emily Hawley Gillespie, Judy Nolte Temple.
The sound of nineteenth-century women, once thought lost to us, is alive because ordinary women like Emily Hawley Gillespie gave voice to their thoughts in diaries. This condensed version of the 2,500-page journals of Emily Gillespie, faithfully written from 1858 to 1888, is a detailed account of rural Iowa life. More than this, it contains the reflections of a woman who dreamed of being a painter and writer and instead became a wife and a mother, a woman whose radical convictions were recorded in her diary, while publicly she conformed to the prescribed life of a Victorian pioneer woman.
Women's Diaries
The diary of Elisabeth Koren, 1853-1855, by Elisabeth Koren 1832-1918, Northfield, Minn., Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1955.
"Else Elisabeth Hysing, an upper-class Norwegian woman, married Ulrik Vilhelm Koren on August 18, 1853 and, almost immediately afterward, the couple made the perilous Atlantic Crossing to America, where her husband had been called to serve as the first Lutheran pastor west of the Mississippi. The diary Elisabeth kept chronicles that crossing and the first two years of their life in America, capturing the stark contrast between the comfort and privilege of their life in Norway and the rugged rigors of pioneer America. She describes traveling the Wisconsin River by dugout canoe, crossing the Mississippi River by ice, and traveling by wagon through snow. She also captures in homely detail the daily life of a pastor and wife on the Midwestern frontier-the cooking, the laundry, the monotonous diet, the clumsy furniture, and the hard-working neighbors and friends that made up a pioneer community. Elisabeth emerges as the kind and accomplished mistress of Washington Prairie Parsonage until her death in 1918."
Women's Diaries
Faith and betrayal: a pioneer woman's passage in the American West, by Sally Denton, New York: Knopf, 2005.
Based on the diaries of the author's great-great grandmother, describes how Jean Rio, a recent widow and mother of seven, lured by the promises of Mormon missionaries, embarked on a long and difficult journey to Utah, where she found disillusionment, zealotry, violence, the loss of her wealth, and the repellent practice of polygamy. The richly told story of a 19th century woman whose religious faith was betrayed and regained on a journey across the American West. In the 1850s, Jean Rio was a recently widowed English mother of seven.
Rich, well educated, musically gifted, deeply spiritual, and increasingly dismayed by the social injustices she saw around her, she was moved by the promises of Mormon missionaries and set out from England for Utah. On her 56-day Atlantic crossing, she began keeping a diary, from New Orleans, up the Mississippi by riverboat, and westward by wagon train. We see her family mastering frontier skills, surviving storms, finding their own food, overcoming illness and injury during the five months it takes them to reach Zion.
She is forced to surrender her money to the church, realizes she has been lied to about polygamy; Mormons do practice it, which she detests. Acts of Mormon violence against nonbelievers repel her. Her musical skills are buried beneath the daily rigors of farming. Two of her sons flee to California. We witness her seventeen-year struggle to make peace with her situation before she, too, escapes to California, to freedom, a career as a midwife, and a new religion that fulfills her.
Women's Diaries
Most of these books focus on women diarists who were also pioneers to the American West, and most were white, middle class, with some education, husband, and children.
But these books by no means tell the whole story; and other books focus on other immigrant groups, like African-American, Oriental, particularly Chinese, and American Indian.
So this list is by no mean exhaustive, or even representative.
Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans, Jean Pfaelzer, UD author
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