Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1985
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring 1985, pp. 93-106.
Abstract
History cannot happen," says Henry Nash Smith, "that is, men cannot engage in purposive group behavior without images which simultaneously express collective desires and impose coherence." Although Smith does not mention it, women too engaged in purposive group behavior. They too had images that organized their experiences and gave impetus to action. And since women were part of the great western migration, the images that made sense to them and engaged them in action within the westering experience were formative in their history.1
This article will look at nineteenth-century western women and the symbols that formed their particular history from the 1850s through the 1890s. Such an examination must speak to both traditional concepts of women in history and literature and newer literary and historical analyses. The literature and history of the "western women" of whom this essay speaks is that of the trans-Mississippi plains West-the West of the cowboy, the homesteader, wagon trains, freighters, buffalo hunters, and farmers. Although other "Wests" existed, this is the West that captured and captures the popular imagination and thus is instrumental in formulating myths. It is the West of the popular media and of a large number of historical studies. As such it served as a focusing lens for images, male and female.2
My thesis is that women, like men, had images that gave form to their experiences; they brought these images west with them. Women's images, however, were not the same as those guiding men. Western women, like their eastern sisters, organized their lives around domesticity and piety, and then used those concepts to expand their spheres. In doing so, women often became abolitionists, enacted suffrage laws, fought for child labor laws and temperance, insisted upon schools and libraries, and saw themselves as strong and capable. Adaptation of the images to permit change in the new environment was essential to western women's lives.3
Comments
Copyright 1985 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln