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Reprinted from Cowgirls by Candace Savage:
In the 1880s and 1890s, women flooded west by the thousands, and the skewed sex ratios of the early days began to swing quite rapidly towards equality. Something like 100,000 women (and 160,000 men) surged into the cow country of Montana and Wyoming in just two decades. In the yellowing pages of western histories, these women have been recalled with tender sentiment as Gentle Tamers, Pioneers in Petticoats, Saints in Sunbonnets and Madonnas of the Prairie. What a trial it must have been for them, we are invited to reflect–all those proper nineteenth-century ladies who bravely faced the insult of a rude and untamed land. Instinctive homebodies, they were nonetheless cruelly torn from their families, friends and familiar comforts. Yet what could a lady do except to follow her lord and master wherever he might lead, even if it be into darkest Wyoming? A womanly woman had no choice but to go and meekly suffer the consequences of loneliness, overwork and deprivation, even as she labored to bring beauty and grace to her new home. Her martyrdom became her heroism.
Like most stereotypes, this image of the Noble Pioneer Woman is both seductive and laughable. Certainly, settlers of both sexes survived hardships as they established themselves in the West. Life and work were often brutal, perhaps especially so for women. In addition to the continuous physical labor, in which everyone shared, women faced the additional difficulties of childbirth and childcare. (Recalling her pioneer childhood in the 1840s, Martha Ann Morrison came to the conclusion that “Mothers . . . had to undergo more trial and suffering than anybody else.”) Many women were also pained by the crudeness of their lives, so unlike the lily-white, ladylike ideal to which they aspired. (“I have cooked so much out in the sun and smoke, that I hardly know who I am,” mourned Miriam Davis in 1855. “[W]hen I look into the little looking glass I ask, ‘Can this be me?’”)
But if emigrant women were often anxious about losing their “womanliness,” some of them were also anxious to lose it or, at least (like Mountain Charley before them), to escape from the most aggravating limitations of Victorian femininity. Almost from the beginning, the West offered unusual opportunities to aspiring females. Wyoming Territory, for example, was the first jurisdiction in North America to enact women’s suffrage (1869), appoint a female justice of the peace (Esther Morries, in 1870), welcome a woman in to the state legislature (Mary Bellamy, in 1910) and induct a female governor (Nellie Taylor Ross, in 1925). Other western states and provinces, though they lagged behind Wyoming’s trail-blazing example, were generally well ahead of their eastern counterparts. In 1913, several years before suffrage was finally extended to women throughout the United States, Theodore Roosevelt quipped, “I think civilization is coming Eastward gradually.”
Western jurisdictions were also among the first to establish the legal right of married women to their own incomes and lands. In an appeal to bachelor-members of the California legislature in 1849, one lawmaker argued that improved property laws “offer a great inducement for women of fortune” to come west and become wives. But western wives, once gotten, did not always stay married, for the divorce laws of most western states were also relatively generous. Not only were the grounds for the divorce quite broad–impotence, adultery, desertion, drunkenness and cruelty, among others–but the courts were liberal in their interpretation of women’s grievances. Around Helena, Montana, between 1865 and 1870, for example, one divorce was granted for every three marriages, and almost all the dissolutions were instigated by women. In 1853, Abby Mansur confided to her sister that she might just look around for a richer spouse, on the grounds that “it is all the go here for Lady’s to leave there Husbands.”
But the real lure of the West, for women as for men, was the promise of free land. As early as 1862, homesteads, preemptions and other land grants in the western states were available to any female who was the head of her own household, be she single, widowed, divorced–even a runaway wife–provided that she could meet certain residency requirements. As one commentator put it, men and women “were appallingly equal” under the U.S. Homestead Act–”equal labor, equal privation and equal failure–or victory.” A surprisingly large number of women were willing to take the chance in both farm and ranch country. In parts of Wyoming, for example, the proportion of single women who settled on homesteads averaged about 12 percent through the 1890s, and most of them succeeded in gaining title to their land. Writing from South Dakota in 1905, one settler commented, “There are the most old maids out here holding down claims that a person must wonder where they all come from.”
Reprinted from Cowgirls by Candace Savage. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 1996. Pp. 13-17.
