The Plains Truth About How the West Was Womanized

In writing the other day about a visit to the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, I wrote that “revisionists are tearing our myths apart, and the West has been spared.”

Obviously, that should have read “the West has not been spared.” I apologize for the lapse.

In a low-key way, the museum itself diminishes the myth by suggesting that its authors, mainly the movies, have depicted the frontier as largely white and male.

On the other hand, many movies have shown the Indians as honorable human beings, much wronged, and women as shrewd and tough business proprietors or ranchers.

I was especially provoked by a card noting that Frederic Remington, the famous Western artist, “glorified and romanticized a masculinized West of his own vision.”

True, I agreed; Remington painted what he saw. If Edgar Degas had visited the West, he would have left a number of charming miniature sculptures of women washing clothes, pumping water and chopping wood. (I might have added dancing in saloons.)

But the museum did make me curious about woman’s role in the West. In the museum bookshop I bought a copy of “The Female Frontier” (University Press of Kansas), by Glenda Riley, a study of women on the prairie and the plains.

It scorns as “puerile stereotypes” the Pioneers in Petticoats, Saints in Sunbonnets and Madonnas of the Prairies of romantic fiction and seeks to show that women played various critical roles in the West besides that of homemaker.

Riley says at the outset and reiterates often, however, that “in almost every case, the primary focus of women’s lives, whether they were married or single, was supposed to be, and usually was, domestic.”

Again, she says, “In the final analysis, the core of women’s lives was home and family. Although their ‘helper’ role to men might marginally affect their activities, women seldom abandoned the domestic role as the focus of their lives. . . . “

Women on the plains suffered unimaginable hardships. They endured drought, fire, snowstorms and cyclones. (The plains include the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, northern Oklahoma, western Texas, eastern Colorado and most of Montana and Wyoming--Western movie land.) Most jobs in the West were men’s jobs, traditionally, and women were not welcome.

Many women took up homesteads and ran their land. Many became teachers or worked as missionaries to Indians. Some never married. Many were divorced, the divorce laws being relatively easy. Many were widowed. Some single women returned to homes in the East. Some stuck it out.

Contraceptives were scarce; the birthrate was high. Births were unattended except by friends or midwives. The infant mortality rate was high. Diapers were scarce and had to be washed by hand. Children’s clothes were hand-sewn, often from flour sacks. Toys were hand-made. Home was a log cabin, a wood-and-tarpaper shack or a sod house.

Women rarely went to town unescorted. The mud streets were lined with prostitutes, drunks, thieves and murderers. Dance halls, hurdy-gurdy houses and saloons abounded.

Yet women’s influence was felt. For middle- and upper-class women, plains towns offered a variety of shops, women’s clubs, teas and social life. The poor were often excluded.

Many women blamed men for their plight, with cause. “Many . . . were abusive, alcoholic, lazy, financially inept or irresponsible. . . . Sad and frightening accounts of men who verbally and physically abused women disclose a dark side to the male-female relationship on the plains frontier. . . . “

Women coped, Riley says, because of three things: “their ability to create a rich social life from limited resources, their roles as cultural conservators and their ability to bond to each other.”

When women worked outside the home it was as clerks, teachers, seamstresses, domestic help and boardinghouse keepers. One 16-year-old teacher rode a pony 20 miles to teach 10 pupils in a sod hut for $20 a month. But some women became journalists, photographers, lawyers and doctors, despite the barriers.

Many young women were employed in prostitution. In Helena, Mont., prostitution was the largest single source of employment for women. They were regularly fined, as a source of revenue, but were rarely run out of town.

Historians have tended to overlook “girl homesteaders,” as they were called--single women who homesteaded land and worked it. One historian notes that one-third of homesteads in the Dakota Territory in 1877 were held by women.

Slowly and subtly women began to challenge the male bastion. Through the WCTU they attacked alcoholism; they formed other clubs to combat other social ills; they demanded the vote, even despite women anti-suffragists, and in 1869--40 years before suffrage became the law of the land--the Wyoming Territory adopted it.

Despite these gains, Riley concludes, women “never wavered from home and family as the primary force in their lives. . . .”

And a lot of them wore sunbonnets.