Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Picturing The Past" Farm Women On The Grasslands Frontier, 1850-1900, Sara Brooks Sundberg

Great Plains Quarterly

According to a widely used, recently published college survey text about westward expansion in the United States, "rural life in the great open spaces of the trans-Mississippi west was filled with hard work, monotony, and often stultifying isolation." The textbook goes on to say, "Nowhere were the physical hardships more starkly revealed than in the lives of pioneer women." The authors emphasize this point with a passage from Hamlin Garland's autobiography describing his family's pioneer experience on the prairie: '''My heart filled with bitterness and rebellion, bitterness against the pioneering madness which had scattered our family, and rebellion toward my …