NEW WOMEN IN THE OLD WEST

Journalist Gallagher looks beyond the archetypes of the cowgirl and the bonneted prairie homesteader to show the vast range of contributions made by women of the Old West.

By 1914, with the 19th Amendment still six years away, women in 11 of 14 Western states had “secured full enfranchisement before the women of even a single state back East.” This was no coincidence. Gallagher shows that between the 1840s and 1920, women had unique freedoms in the region that extends from the Great Plains to California, which was less burdened than the East “by tradition, precedent, and an entrenched, oppositional establishment.” New opportunities arose from an egalitarian “all-hands-on-deck” Western ethos and from energizing social forces like the Populist Party and temperance movement. Women gained further benefits from the Homestead Acts (which gave free land to female heads of households) and the tuition-free coeducational colleges created by the Morrill Land-Grant Acts. This upbeat account of the changes abounds with brief stories of trailblazers like Zitkala-Sa, a Sioux writer and musician; Elizabeth Piper Ensley, a Black teacher who founded the Colored Women’s Republican Club; and Jovita Idár, a critic of “Juan Crow” laws and the first president of the League of Mexican Women. At times, Gallagher casts her subjects in flat, modern terms, such as writing that one of them “prioritized” or had “skill sets.” Yet the stories mostly transcend occasional banalities. One of the most inspiring involves Luna Kellie, who, as an impoverished Nebraska homesteader, grew “too malnourished to produce adequate milk for two of her babies, who died.” Undaunted, she joined the Farmers’ Alliance and published the progressive Prairie Home newspaper on a press in her bedroom. “Somehow,” writes the author, “she crammed politics into her already packed schedule of farm chores, care of her eleven offspring, temperance activities, and duties at her Methodist church.”

A mostly engaging account of how the West was won for women from all walks of life.