Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1994
Abstract
Julie Jones-Eddy has compiled her interviews with forty-seven women from northwestern Colorado into a work that preserves the women's perspective of homesteading. Like many oral histories, this one divides excerpts of the interviews thematically into subjects such as "Home and Family," "Marriage, Pregnancy, and Childbirth," and "Working Women." The excerpts address a range of women's homesteading experiences, from the art and precision of soap-making to the sorrow of nursing children during the 1918 flu epidemic. Although this format does not always allow the reader to see the pattern of an individual life, such groupings do recreate the pattern of women's lives more generally, and individual voices blend into a chorus of women who, despite the difficulties of homesteading, "succeeded at this kind oflife and lived long enough to reflect on it" (p. xi).
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:1 (Winter 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.