No Place for a Lady

 This movable society of settlers going west had guidelines for moving...supplies that should be left behind, like elegant clothing, heavily carved furniture, or a silver service - which were plainly not practicable on the trail going west.  All possessions were to be secure, compact and portable.  Space and weight had to be conserved for food, water, shelter, ammunition and tools.  There were actually guidebooks to explain how to pack your wagon!

One thing commonly left behind in the beginning of the land rush west was women.  The mining camps were notoriously male.  In the spring of 1849 in all of San Francisco, it is said that women numbered only 15.  Every camp had its share of prostitutes, but tough, bearded, weather-beaten men would stand on the street for hours just to have the sight of a real lady or a child.  Often men would travel miles to welcome the first "homemade lady" to camp. And let's face it, mining camps were not the ideal place to raise a family!

The scarcity of women  lowered the morality and made life rougher, but it had some advantages as well.  When women did come later, they brought their morality along with their inequality.  The making of social distinctions was women's work.  "Putting on style" wrote one Montana reporter, "is the detestation of everybody.  It is neither forgiven nor forgotten and kills a man like bullets."  In these movable towns, people seems more equal than men and women do otherwise, not because of a creed, but because of their way of life. 

Women were, however, moving west.  The women who moved in the wagon trains were probably not as interested in "putting on style" as their counterparts back East.  They were interested in survival, in feeding their families and keeping their children safe from the perils of the trail.  These were not your society conscious women - they were rugged and hearty and helped make the frontier what it was - a place for people to find a new life and a new way of living.  

Women became the organizers of schools and churches in the new settlements.  They brought order to the West and a bit of civilization.  Without women, the West would not have been a place for families. Many became honest businesswomen - cooking for the men, sewing clothes and keeping the place "respectable."  Men may not have wanted respectable, but without it the West would have remained just one abandoned town after another.  We will look at that next time.

 

Next time...Ghost towns

_______________________________

Today in Pioneer History: "On August 13, 1878, Kate Bionda, a restaurant owner in Memphis, Tennessee, because the first to die of yellow fever in the epidemic that spread through America from a steamboat passenger.  Yellow fever, carried by mosquitoes, gets it name from the jaundice that usually accompanies the disease.  The cause was not known in the 19th century and spread to New York, New Orleans and Philadelphia and killed thousands of people over several outbreak years.

Women Go West

This summer we will be focusing specifically on women pioneers - their role in pioneer history, how the frontier changed them, and how they changed the frontier.

Who was the typical pioneer woman?
What motivated her to go West?

In the East, life for a woman of the 1800s was predominantly a life of domesticity.  Her lifestyle was one of manners, dances, fashion, and the romanticism of the 1800s.  Women were brought up with the necessary qualities to be a good wife and mother.

One of, if not THE magazine of the period for women was Godey's Book.  Filled with fashions, patterns, stories, styles, and all the latest news for the women of that period.  Its editor, Sarah Hale, brought to life the ideal woman, the norm of society's 19th century woman.  Although many a lady packed her Godey's for the trip west, the reality of what she was to face was not found in its pages.  The ideal woman of Boston, for instance, was not the ideal woman of Oklahoma.


Godey's was soon discarded when women realized what was actually awaiting them on the frontier, but as we'll see next time, it was actually Godey's that helped to entice the women to dream of a new life in the wild open country of the West.

To read more about Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine click here.(Wikipedia)