GETTY^ IMAGESdistribution, could receive title to 160 acres of land as heads of
household as long as they were over 21, paid the registration fee,
lived on the site and proved that they had ‘improved’ that land.
Diaries and journals written by homesteading women reveal
their lot to be a hard one: they endured challenging environ-
ments, social isolation and a seemingly never-ending litany of
domestic chores. One woman on the plains wrote in her diary
of a pressing personal dilemma: whether to eat her last chicken
for sustenance or preserve it as a companion. Their stories,
though, were also full of female camaraderie, resilience and in-
genuity – sharing home remedies for illnesses, building gardens
to enliven sod houses, and taking command of households
when faced with absent, dead or useless husbands.
In fledgling towns, meanwhile, women found themselves rare
commodities: in early mining settlements, men outnumbered
women nine to one. Sarah Herndon described the Virginia City
mining camp as an energetic and sprawling community where
men scrambled for claims like “bees around a hive” and left the
ground with “great deep holes and high heaps of dirt”. Services
such as boarding, laundry and prostitution were prized in these
frenetic, rapidly developing settlements. Fortunes were there to
be made and lost, not only by prospectors but also by female en-
trepreneurs – though such women were also vulnerable to abuse.Steps towards suffrage
Women on the 19th-century frontier made steps towards politi-
cal suffrage. The territory of Wyoming gave women the vote in
1869, the same year the National Woman Suffrage Association
was founded (though this reflected not only the campaigning of
early female suffragists but also a sentiment to cancel out the
votes of African-American men with white women). The next
eight states to grant suffrage to women were all in the West: Col-
orado (1893), Utah, Idaho (both 1896), Washington (1910),
California (1911), Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona (all 1912). This
indicates how the racial fissures of frontier geopolitics, the apti-
tudes of pioneer women and ideas about the ‘civilising’ female
voice conspired to change suffrage laws.
Elsewhere, women redefined gender norms in all sorts of
ways. Martha Jane Cannary – popularly known as CalamityFrontier women endured
challenging environments,
social isolation and a
seemingly never-ending
litany of domestic chores
Beyond the pail
A woman milks a cow at a farmstead in
the mountains of Colorado, c1900.
Perhaps because of the many hardships
they suffered in the West, the story of
women pioneers is characterised by
camaraderie, resilience and ingenuityWomen of the American West