Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1992
Abstract
If this book suffers from anything it's too much enthusiasm for its subject. Joyce Roach sets out to prove that the cowgirl is our "foremost genuine American heroine," and while this is at least arguable, she tends to overstate her case at the expense of the early suffragists (cowgirls, not they, were the "advance guard of the feminist movement") and in particular at the expense of other western women: "Other frontier women were more or less forgotten with the passing of the frontier. The life of the farm woman, for instance, was never heroic, just miserable . . . and she disappeared from our consciousness." And, "Farm wives walked behind a plow, where horizons were blocked by a horse's rump and days were spent trying to keep from stepping in something." While amusing, statements such as these distort and beg the question of whose heroine it is we are looking for in the first place.
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 12:3 (Summer 1992). Copyright © 1992 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.