Review of Land in Her Own Name: Women as Homesteaders in North Dakota and Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880-1940

Authors

Evelyn Funda, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date of this Version

1993

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 13:2 (Spring 1993). Copyright © 1993 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

Much of the work studying women's role in the American West has served to establish the significance and celebrate the contributions of women to Western American history. Lindgren's book is such a work. Strikingly handsome, it portrays the lives of homesteading women in North Dakota from 1870 to about 1915 by providing excerpts from diaries, memoirs, and from personal interviews with homesteading women and their families, as well as a wealth of photographs and comparative statistics from land records. Lindgren's goals are to dispute the stereotypes of women pioneers and to argue that "women must be recognized as main characters in the settlement drama" (233), a view too often overlooked, she says, because women have been thought of only in secondary roles (iii).