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REVIEWS
GENDER AND GENERATION ON THE FAR WESTERN FRONTIER
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by Cynthia Culver Prescott
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| University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2007. Illustrations, photographs, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 230 pages. $49.95 cloth. |
| During the late 1970s and 1980s, historians produced many studies that illuminated and explained the migration that flooded the far western territories with land-hungry settlers from the Midwest. Readers of these histories, pleased but not completely satisfied, asked: "What happened then?" This book is a compact reply to that question, sharply focused on evolving gender roles and ideologies on settler farms in Oregon's Willamette Valley from 1845 to 1900. |
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Cynthia Prescott tells readers that the next generation became as much like Easterners as possible. In the Willamette Valley, she argues, settlers quickly reestablished a domestic ideology that separated the roles for women and men and dictated that women's place was working inside the home while men worked outside in the fields. This lush farming valley, predominantly composed of equal numbers of male and female Euro-Americans, was both geographically and culturally like the Midwest. On the ideological frontier, settlers cultivated "good manners." The second generation, however, quickly veered away from that founding culture to a new middle-class culture of "consumption and refined leisure." |
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Prescott argues this point in different ways. Euro-American families on first-generation farms did most of their own work, but the second generation changed that culture. While male and female responsibilities within the family remained basically static, the children of the first settlers married at an older age and worked within an increasingly gendered division of labor. Young men questioned their fathers' authority, and young women sought more balanced power relationships within marriage. Together, they created social activities that mirrored the evolving, national middleclass lifestyle. |
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Prescott describes that new lifestyle primarily through its domestic side. In careful detail, she shows evidence from material culture to make her point. Quilts, clothing, and photographs all reflect the generational change in lifestyle. The section on quilting is a particularly refreshing look at women's visual expressive culture. |
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The new domestic sphere generated tensions as some women expanded their educational and political aspirations. Women's involvement in public politics collided with the concept of separate gender-specific spheres at home. To solve this contradiction, some Oregon women activists argued that separate spheres offered women a perfectly consistent role in politics. Just as they had shared in settling the region in different ways than men, they could now share in developing new political spheres for themselves. If Euro-American women had helped "civilize" the frontier, they argued, their votes could help "civilize" the current culture. While much of this political history is well known, its telling here helps expand our understanding of how old rhetoric could be contained within a new context. In a final chapter, Prescott explores the construction and persistence of "this pioneer women myth." According to the myth, all the men were brave and all the women were self-sacrificing "mothers" who gave birth to a civilized country in the midst of "savagery" (p.125). |
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Readers are left to wonder how the concept of "savagery" developed if there was little conflict or racial diversity in the area. With its sharp focus on gender, this book misses some opportunities to explore class and ethnic fissures that might have helped explain the gender ideology. On the trail west, tasks that were not categorized precisely as either men's or women's work were often done by people of "lesser social status" (p. 19). After arriving in Oregon, "Indian or Chinese men were considered suited to domestic work and even degraded by their association with it" (p. 29). Euro-American men sometimes did the work but disassociated themselves from it. Such observations beg for closer analysis of the relations between these workers and the settlers, both first and second generation, and of how those relations altered gender roles within the farm family. One wonders about the "girls from the country" who helped the Euro-American middle-class women as they elaborated their spheres of influence (p. 51). The book does not discuss occasions, such as harvest work in hop and fruit farms, when Euro-American and Indian families might have shared in harvest work. Fruit and hop production are types of rural industry that usually cross class, ethnic, and gender boundaries. Looking more closely at how families rearranged their labor and hosted the migratory labor that moved to the area at harvest time might have showed more class and ethnic diversity than this study implies. |
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It is exciting to have a book so centered on a rural people. While the book could have explored beyond its sharp focus on gender roles, within its limits, Prescott has given readers a careful work that may lead to explorations beyond its firm beginning. The book has a strong thesis, is carefully documented, and is supported by engaging details that speak for the importance of using valleys like the Willamette, and the Oregon story itself, to answer the important question "what happened then" after the initial settling of the West. |
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| Joan M. Jensen
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| New Mexico State University |
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