| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 101.1

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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 101.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Life in Prairie Land

By Eliza W. Farnham. Introduction by John Hallwas

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Pp. xxxv, 269. Introduction, notes. $19.95.)


Eliza Farnham's Life in Prairie Land, originally published in 1846, is a classic account of early settlements on the Illinois prairies. Increased scholarly interest in rural women's history and midwestern settlement makes the University of Illinois Press's reissue of the 1988 edition timely and welcome. Farnham, a New Yorker who lived in the Illinois Territory for about four years, reveals as much about herself as an eastern woman, steeped in the ideology of domesticity but troubled by inequities in patriarchal society, as she does about the nature of early nineteenth-century Illinois.	1
John Hallwas's introduction offers salient background on Farnham's post-Illinois career as a writer and reformer influenced by Transcendentalism, spiritualism, and ideas of female moral superiority. Hallwas also illustrates Farnham's method of setting up contrasts between nature as a beneficent garden and as a dangerous force, and between antithetical forms of human behavior. This useful introduction, however, was not revised for the 2003 edition and thus is not informed by recent scholarship on rural, women's, gender, or reform history.	. . .

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