Elaine Goodale Eastman and the Failure of the Feminist Protestant Ethic

Authors

Ruth Ann Alexander, South Dakota State University

Date of this Version

1988

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly [GPQ 8 (Spring 1988): 89-101]. Copyright 1988 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Abstract

Elaine Goodale Eastman's childhood dreams of becoming a writer were not to be fulfilled as she imagined them. Her literary talent was subverted by conflicting forces in her life to which she also subscribed but that thwarted the artistic development of that talent. Although she wrote throughout her ninety years and couldn't remember a time that she wouldn't rather write than eat, she never satisfied "the notion ... unreasonably in the back of my head that someday I might write a book that would live."! If she is remembered at all it is as the wife of the Sioux physician Charles Alexander Eastman, or Ohiyesa, not in her own right.