PIONEER WOMEN

Rating:
Summary: It was women like these that made this country strong!
Review: A fast, facinating read. The courage these women had to have just to live day to day, brought tears to my eyes! Without their strength, courage, and resourcefulness the frontier would never have been tamed! This should be required reading for every woman from these United States!

Thank you Pioneer Women and thank you Joanna Stratton for sharing these incredible stories!

Rating:
Summary: It was women like these that made this country strong!
Review: A fast, facinating read. The courage these women had to have just to live day to day, brought tears to my eyes! Without their strength, courage, and resourcefulness the frontier would never have been tamed! This should be required reading for every woman from these United States!

Thank you Pioneer Women and thank you Joanna Stratton for sharing these incredible stories!

Rating:
Summary: ". . . the legend wears its Sunday best."
Review: As Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s says in his forward to Stratton's Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier our historical record is built upon "important" people. People who leave records of their lives. For years, women, for the most part, left no such records (Unless of course, they were infamous, Americans seem able to recall the names of Lizzie Borden and Typhoid Mary without trouble.) In Pioneer Women, Stratton attempts to rectify this historical oversight by presenting scores of memoirs written by women who inhabited and helped push Kansas along from being a synonym for a luckless hardship filled land (We need to look no farther than Baum's using it for the earth-bound, twister-prone setting for his book, The Wizard of Oz) to a state whose women urged farmers to "raise less corn and more Hell" politically (13).
Stratton's introduction to her book is excellent, providing us with an unusual example of proto-womanism: a rich woman, Lilla Day Monroe (Stratton's grandmother) worked to preserve the words, thoughts and experiences of the hard-scrabble settlers who were the first Anglos to arrive in Kansas. Monroe, publisher of The Kansas Woman's Journal and the first woman in Kansas to be admitted into practice before the Kansas Supreme Court in 1895, began collecting the stories of pioneer women in the 1920's. It was a job that soon mushroomed into an almost insurmountable task. Monroe kept with the project, even at the expense of her health, using the women's experiences to document the growth of Kansas from frigid forbidding land to birthplace of the Temperance movement and stronghold for Suffrage.
The tone of the memories is jarring. In a very matter of fact way, they tell stories of rescuing dead bodies from wolves, children narrowly escaping all sorts of looming death and wars fought over abolition, along with their descriptions of everyday life as a pioneer. Exotic to the late Twentieth century reader, even though they occurred little over a hundred years ago, the stories remind one how young this country really is.
The chapters build upon one another to form a narrative history of Kansas. In the first chapter, "To the Stars Through the Wilderness", the memories are of death along the trail to Kansas- the small weather worn stones marking the graves of those who didn't or couldn't survive the journey westward. The hardships of travel are detailed, the freezing blizzards and the stress of so many strangers being crammed into the narrow confines of a Conestoga wagon. Chapter Two details the building of homes once arrival was made, containing instructions on how sod houses were constructed (and the unwelcome co-tenants of these homes, such as bull snakes that showed up in rafters) and slowly we begin to see the changing of the prairie, the plowing and inhabitation (51). Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, the only time we hear of any pioneers getting help or supplies from back-East is within the gentle fun poked at the wealthy Englishmen who came to settle a thousand acre tract of land in the early 1870s and continued to receive canned food from the old country (229). The legacy of disdain for the civilization back East, still found today in the West, is clear in these recollections.
We are treated to long discussions of how lonely it was on the prairies, but more interestingly, we begin to see how the settlers all worked together. Their sharing is a far cry from our media-drawn image of the rugged individualist, one man going for years without seeing anyone else. Stratton opens Chapter 3 with a quotation, asking "What was the work of a farm woman in those early days?"(57). The answer quickly becomes evident: What wasn't? Inequality was not an option since it was literally do or die when it came to helping men with the plowing, planting, gathering of wood, and helping with livestock, in addition to their traditional feminine role.
Part Two details the problems the settlers had after homestead completion. Stratton presents memoirs that portray fires, wolves, and most interesting, the grasshopper plagues (102) that tormented the pioneers with Biblical ferocity.
Part Three details the few small opportunities for pioneer women to work outside the home. We also see the impact of religion, depicted by the ladies as much more laid back, less fundamentalist, than would be expected by the contemporary reputation of the Midwest as the Bible Belt.
By Part Four, the frontier cabins have joined together to form frontier towns. With the banding together comes a whole new set of problems. Drunken cowboys and pioneer justice which consisted, as portrayed by Stratton's writers, of lynching the guiltiest looking fellow presented previously unheard of problems that now demanded attention. At the same time, the wild cattle drives of Texas longhorns flattened homeowners' crops and led to a growing animosity between settlers and cattle drivers.
Finally in Part Five, Stratton's writers create a vivid and disturbing picture of the horrors that went on in Kansas during the Civil War. Burning, looting, and the murder of civilians are the images that predominate. The section ends with Kansas finally enough at ease with itself to start working on issues of Suffrage and Temperance (Kansas was, after all, the first state to institute Prohibition). No longer having to worry about bull snakes falling into their beds, Kansas women wanted the logical extension of the side by side work they had done with the men in the settling days, equal voting rights. Kansas women would have just as much trouble extracting those rights from those in charge as they had eking out an existence from the unforgiving prairie.
If there's a fault to Pioneer Women, it's the very nature of the writing. Memoirs, as Stratton notes (25-26), are suspect because they tend to be colored by time. Sometimes the stories do seem a bit stretched, like one woman's recollection of sitting out a fierce blizzard in a Prairie Clipper, calmly slicing up mince pies that she had brought from home (40). It seems like the prospect of freezing to death in a strange land would have produced a more emotionally charged atmosphere. Also, as Stratton herself notes, there is no ultra-marginalized voices - prostitutes or slave women. There were also topics that the women would not discuss, due to decorum. In discussing Indian raids and her own experience of being taken captive by Native Americans, Anna Morgan adds a terse, "There were many things that I have not spoken of" (125).
Stratton stays away from comparing the women's recollections to that of "official" history, probably to reduce confusion on the part of the reader. However, these are minor complaints, and ones that Stratton addresses in the foreword. They do not discolor the beauty and importance of her collection of long silenced voices from the Kansas frontier, but as Stratton herself writes, ". . . the legend wears its Sunday best."(222).


Rating:
Summary: Pioneer Women
Review: I had never heard of the book until I started doing research on my honeys family. One of the women that Ms. Stratton talks about was my honeys ggrandmother. Her name was Katharine Dunsworth. It help so much to bring their lifes into the furture. So, now our children and grandchildren can really see what it took for these women to go through, that we might be born. I wish that all the history classes in kansas or even other part of the country would have to read this kind of story so they might thank their lucky stars that we live in this time and not then. I do really what to thank people like joanna who take their time to do these books so that the rest of us can enjoy them.

Rating:
Summary: Gritty, eye-opening look at lives on the frontier.
Review: I read this book many years ago and still revisit the memories of how women and children lived during those frontier years.I'm ordering another copy to pass on. I have recommended this book to many, including adolescent students in my classrooms. Rather than the romantic, Hollywood views of these times, this book offers raw images of the harshness of life from the actual women who struggled on the frontier. The book is a compilation of letters the author's grandmother requested and received from these women. If you want to validate how fortunate we are to live in these times, read this book!

Rating:
Summary: Haunting
Review: I read this book when it was first published, and then recommended it to friends and, ultimately, passed it on and it has never been returned. Year after year the story comes back to me as one of the finest I have every read. J. Stratton wrote this novel after finding a stash of letters in a family attic, and there's nothing like true life for gripping drama. A gem.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting
Review: Stratton is great at combining research done by the author and first-hand accounts from written diaries and letters. It also has great pictures that give the reader a clear idea of what life was like in the pioneer days. This book makes you want to read and learn more about the little-know lives of pioneer women.

Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: Stratton is great at combining research done by the author and first-hand accounts from written diaries and letters. It also has great pictures that give the reader a clear idea of what life was like in the pioneer days. This book makes you want to read and learn more about the little-know lives of pioneer women.