Pioneer Women by Joanna Stratton
Voices from the Kansas Frontier Sheds New Light on Frontier Women
Mar 20, 2008
Stratton Gives Voice to the Invisible
Joanna Stratton’s Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier gives voice to an under-represented group of women who are at risk of being forgotten from history.
History tells us of the beautiful and bountiful land of Kansas and how the pioneers craved land, freedom, and prosperity. Sometimes, though, history doesn’t tell us of the pioneer women who are often considered inconsequential to this history of the frontier. Stratton brilliantly arranges hundreds of primary sources, told by the invisible women of the plains, that shows these women outside the traditional roles of wife and mother.
These women were farmhands and nurses, hostesses and teachers, and most importantly they were God fearing women who rarely complained about the hazardous conditions that Kansas offered their families. Ultimately, they were the backbone of the pioneer family.
Stratton arranges the primary sources of the book in a clear, organized, and concise manner that shows all aspects of life from moving west to a prairie childhood to life in and outside of town.
Moving to Kansas
Stratton uses Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier as a tool to show the world how important these women were to the development of the West. Perhaps the biggest struggle for these women was leaving their family and friends in the East. Rather than complain, though, many women understood the hardships and met them head on.
“It might seem a cheerless life, but there were many compensations: the thrill of conquering a new country; the wonderful atmosphere; the attraction of the prairie, which simply gets into your blood … The pioneer spirit was continuous in our family."
Making a Home
If leaving was hard for these women, making a home in Kansas was even harder. New families to the Kansas frontier often lived in nothing more than a dugout rather than a home made of wood.
“With their shovels in hand, they literally dug their homes into the sides of hills or ravines the cavelike dugout provided cramped and primitive quarters.”
However hard the living conditions might have been though, these women knew it would be for the greater good of their families to persevere and make the best of any situation thrown at them.
Equal Rights
Stratton uses Pioneer Women as a way to show that isolated life on the Kansas frontier gave women the opportunity to be equal partners in the land that they helped cultivate.
“Men and women worked together as partners, combining their strengths and talents to provide food and clothing for themselves and their children. As a result, women found themselves on a far more equal footing with their spouses.”
Pioneer Women shows how invaluable the women were in making the farms across Kansas work, and to some, it meant more freedom.
“I was a woman now and capable of being the other half of the head of the family. His word and my word would have equal strength. God had endowed me with reason and understanding and a sense of responsibility.”
This is Stratton’s greatest tool because now Pioneer Women is not just a compilation of primary sources, it’s a compilation of primary sources detailing the toiling hours of work that went into being a pioneer bride and how it impacted women’s rights in the West.
Stratton, Joanna. Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier. Introduction by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.
