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Great Plains Quarterly

Women

2005

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

"Men Alone Cannot Settle A Country": Domesticating Nature In The Kansas-Nebraska Grasslands, Chad Montrie Jan 2005

"Men Alone Cannot Settle A Country": Domesticating Nature In The Kansas-Nebraska Grasslands, Chad Montrie

Great Plains Quarterly

W h e n she traveled to Kansas from New York in November 1875 to join a husband who had gone west six months earlier, Sarah Anthony faced bitter disappointment. Her daughter, who made the journey as well, remembered that her mother often cried during the first few months. "[T]hese pioneer women [were] so suddenly transplanted from homes of comfort in the eastern states," wrote the daughter, "to these bare, treeless, wind swept, sun scorched prairies - with no conveniences - no comforts, not even a familiar face. Everything was so strange and so different from the life they had …


Gendering The Frontier In O. E. Rölvaag's Giants In The Earth, John Muthyala Jan 2005

Gendering The Frontier In O. E. Rölvaag's Giants In The Earth, John Muthyala

Great Plains Quarterly

Translated from the Norwegian into English, O. E. Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth narrates the saga of pioneer life on the American prairies. It is a saga that has the sanction of official ideology and the authority of a religious edict: to go on an "errand into the wilderness," explore and subdue the frontier, which was the "basic conditioning factor" of American experience, and, in so doing, cultivate a new civilization. Indeed, it is hard not to read the novel as dramatizing the power of Turner's frontier thesis because it seems to unabashedly affirm the frontier as the great American …