WOMEN AND THE WEST
 Books:  Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women, The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1880) (1979)
 Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (1992)
 Ramón Gutiérrrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away (1991)
Image:  “Madonna of the Prairie” - 1921
Reality:  Frederick Jackson Turner
Turner thesis on the significance of the frontier
 in American history - 1893
  free land
  individualism
  economic opportunity
  egalitarianism
  democracy
  “American exceptionalism”
Stages:  trappers/traders
  posts & settlers
  farmers & villagers - Homestead Acts
  towns & cities
1840s - Overland Trail
  California, Oregon Territory
  Great Migration
  Gold Rush - 1849
division of labor
SECOND SHIFT
buffalo chips
“helping out” versus “women’s work”
homespun and butter
Isolation and Workload
  Mrs. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans prostitution
 boardinghouses, domestic crafts
 emancipation
settlement ? reform
Indian women’s status
 control fertility
 property ownership
 participation in governance
  Kickapoo Tribe on Sangamon River (Illinois)
   abstinence, prolonged nursing, herbal contraceptives, abortifacients, infanticide
   matrilocal
 Cherokee (NC, GA, OK)
  ruling council
 Oregon Seaboard, Coast Salish tribes
  shamans, intermediaries, intermarriage
production of household goods
Plains Indians
 Pueblo, Apache, Sioux
 permanent warrior society
 hunter/nomadic
 Buffalo
 Horse - 1500s
 Guns - 1600s
Trail of Tears of Cherokee - 1830s
 National Council 1817 & 1818
Hispanic (Spanish heritage)
Chicana (Mexican-American)
Tejanas (Texans Hispanics or Chicanas)
 1521 - Hernando Cortez  and Aztecs
 1821 - Mexican Independence ? secularization
 1848 - Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo
 1851 - Godwin Act
la familia and compadres