A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom

Author:Marilyn Yalom [Yalom, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Family & Relationships, Marriage & Long Term Relationships, Social Science, Women's Studies, History, Civilization, Marriage
ISBN: 9780060931568
Google: 2ZuySBtqGrAC
Amazon: 0060931566
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2002-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

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Victorian Wives on the American Frontier

The story of the pioneers who set- tled the American Midwest and West is the rightful stuff of legend, so

mythologized by survivors that it’s often hard to untangle historical fact from stereotype and fiction. Our best records for the experience of mar- ried women are diaries, travel journals, letters, and memoirs—multifar- ious handwritten documents that have found their way into local archives, and which have only recently been systematically studied.1

Many aspects of their lives strangely recall the experiences of immi- grants to America two hundred years earlier. For one thing, there was a high ratio of men to women. Men from the eastern states, Canada, and Europe often preceded the women, and then found themselves longing for feminine companionship. They sent back for their wives and sweet- hearts or ostentatiously welcomed any single woman brave enough to venture forth on her own.

A young man who had left his native Switzerland at the age of sev- enteen to homestead in Minnesota wrote to his family a few years later to send him a wife as soon as possible. She would have to be quite strong to care for the cows, pigs, and chickens, and keep house in the log cabin he had built, while he would be occupied with “man’s work.” After a two-year correspondence with the woman chosen by his par- ents, he met his bride for the first time in Saint Paul on June 4, 1858, at the end of her five-thousand-mile journey to America, and they mar- ried the very next day.2

Thousands of women responded to the call of the lonely frontiers- men, though few were so bold as one eastern woman who placed this advertisement in a Waterloo, Iowa, newspaper in 1860:

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