Homesteading the Plains by Jacob K. Friefeld & Richard Edwards & Rebecca S. Wingo

Author:Jacob K. Friefeld & Richard Edwards & Rebecca S. Wingo [Friefeld, Jacob K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036140 History / United States / State & Local / West (ak, Ca, Co, Hi, Id, Mt, Nv, Ut, Wy)
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0229-1
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2017-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Fig. 6.1. Woman binding wheat shocks, North Dakota, ca. 1910. Courtesy North Dakota State University.

Another woman peripherally associated with our study area (she was listed as a witness for one of our male homesteaders), Elvira Vore, also hired most of the labor on her farm worth $710. She oversaw her fifty acres of broken land and planted more than six hundred trees. While she and Hogue are the only women who reported hiring labor, they surely were not alone; the form did not ask for this information, but hiring, exchanging, and bartering labor was common in the homesteading economy. As western literature scholar Marcia Meredith Hensley noted, by the time Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, women homesteaders had already successfully staked their claims in the West and were “independent from male authority and self-supporting, women who exercised control over their personal, social, and economic lives.”7

Beginning in the 1970s, women scholars have revisited homesteading and revealed a more complicated, nuanced history of women homesteaders across many regions and time periods. The Homestead Act, they argue, represented far more for women than just the legal capacity to acquire land. Dee Garceau asserted that “homesteading fell into that compelling region where the mythic West—and opportunity for reinvention of the self—was grounded in actuality.” For women, she continued, the law straddled “the seams between homesteading as concrete reality and as a literary metaphor for gender role change.” Homesteading allowed women to cast off the thralldom of Victorianism and challenge the mores of traditional gender roles. Some female “literary homesteaders,” as Garceau called them, produced newspaper stories for East Coast readers and other reminiscences or memoirs, but these women reflect only a small part of female homesteaders’ typical experience. More broadly, as Katherine Harris noted in her study of women homesteaders in Colorado, homesteading imbued women with self-determination not typically available to them back east.8

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