Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893); John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979); Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women (1979); Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915 (1982); Cynthia Culver Prescott, Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier (2007).
Source: Kansas State Historical Society.
Here, Ada McColl gathers buffalo chips to be burned for fuel. How the frontier affected women received scant attention in the accounts of nineteenth-century historians. Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay (1893) on the centrality of the frontier to American history made no mention of women. Subsequent scholars provided anecdotal accounts of women on the frontier, but it was not until the 1970s that scholars flocked to the subject. John Mack Faragher (1979) concluded that women had been exploited on the overland trail. They worked ceaselessly—preparing meals, caring for children, cleaning clothes—in nearly impossible conditions. That same year Julie Roy Jeffrey added that husbands made the "major decisions."Equally important, she cited letters and diaries indicating that frontier women themselves endorsed the "cult of true womanhood":They sought to civilize the frontier. Sandra L. Myres (1982), on the
Other hand, argued that difficult frontier conditions enlarged "the scope of women's place"and in so doing undermined traditional gender roles. Cynthia Culver Prescott (2007) used a generational model to reconcile these different interpreta-tions:The first generation of pioneering husbands and wives, confronted with extreme and unusual situations, had no choice but to pitch in, performing whatever task presented itself. But the more settled next generation of pioneers reacted against the flexible gender relations of their parents. Husbands in particular attempted to establish themselves as "manly providers."
Although many women had doubts about their austere new world—“Nothing can atone for the loss of society of friends,” one wrote—others took satisfaction. Another homesteader wrote that “any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the wash tub, will certainly succeed, will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.”
Behind the dreams of the Far West as an American Eden lay the commercial importance of the three major West Coast harbors: San Diego, San Francisco, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca leading into Puget Sound. Eastern merchants considered these harbors the keys to the trade of the Orient. That San Diego and San Francisco were Mexican and the Puget Sound district was claimed by Great Britain only heightened their desire to possess them. As early as 1835, Jackson tried to buy the San Francisco region. Even Calhoun called San Francisco the future New York of the Pacific and proposed buying all of California from Mexico.
World History
