Review of Schoolwomen of the Prairies and Plains: Personal Narratives from Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, 1860-1920 By Mary Hurlbut Cordier

Authors

Sylvia Hunt, Eastern Michigan University

Date of this Version

1995

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:1 (Winter 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Abstract

The book is disappointing, however, in at least two respects. Although Cordier asserts that the women in her study both conformed to and challenged expectations of their gender, she fails to provide supporting evidence. The threads of autonomy for women, demands for equality (at the early date of 1860), and activism toward those ends are evidenced by these school women throughout the work, but they are not woven together into a coherent argument. It is difficult, therefore, to assess the contribution women teachers from the heartland might have made to the women's movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.