Farm Life
During the early years of settlement on the Great Plains, women played an integral role in ensuring family survival by working the fields alongside their husbands and children. This was in addition to their handling of many other responsibilities, such as child-rearing, feeding and clothing the family and hired hands, and managing the housework. As late as 1900, a typical farm wife could expect to devote 9 hours per day to chores such as cleaning, sewing, laundering, and preparing food. Two additional hours were spent cleaning the barn and chicken coop, milking the cows, caring for the chickens, and tending the family garden.
While some women could find employment in the newly settled towns as teachers, cooks, or seamstresses, they originally were deprived of many rights. Women were not permitted to sell property, sue for divorce, serve on juries, or vote. For the vast majority of women, work was not in towns for money, but on the farm. Despite these obstacles, the challenges of farm life eventually empowered women to break through certain legal and social barriers. Many lived more equitably as partners with their husbands than did their eastern US counterparts. If widowed, a wife typically took over responsibility for the farm, a level of management very rare back east, where the farm would fall to a son or another male relation. Pioneer women made important decisions and were considered by their husbands to be more equal partners in the success of the homestead. This was because of the necessity that all members had to work hard and contribute to the farming enterprise for it to succeed. Therefore, it is not surprising that the first states to grant women’s rights, including the right to vote, were those in the Pacific Northwest and Upper Midwest, where women pioneers worked the land side by side with men.
Outside the family, women also played a crucial role in the community. People living in rural areas created rich social lives for themselves, often sponsoring activities that combined work, food, and entertainment, such as barn raising, corn husking, quilting bees, Grange meetings, church activities, and school functions. Women also organized shared meals, potluck events, and extended visits between families.
Homesteading family
Many women traveled west with family groups, such as the mother in this 1886 photograph.
Ranching and Mining Towns
While homesteaders were often families, gold speculators and ranchers tended to be single men in pursuit of fortune. The few women who went to these wild outposts were typically prostitutes, and even their numbers were limited. In 1860, in the Comstock Lode region of Nevada, for example, there were reportedly only 30 women in a town with some 2,500 men.
Women found occupations in all walks of frontier life. Some women worked in brothels despite the harsh and dangerous working conditions. Many Chinese women, for example, came to the western camps as prostitutes to make money to send back home. Some of the “painted ladies” who began as prostitutes eventually owned brothels and became businesswomen in their own right. However, life for these young women remained a challenging one as western settlement progressed. A handful of women, no more than 600, braved both the elements and male-dominated culture to become teachers in several of the more established cities in the West. Even fewer arrived to support their husbands or operate stores in the mining towns.
Toward the latter part of the 19th century, wealthy men began bringing their families west, and the mostly lawless landscape slowly began to change. Middle-class women arrived in the 1880s with their husbands and established boarding houses, organized church societies, and worked as laundresses and seamstresses. These women began to organize churches, school, civic clubs, and other community programs to promote family values. They fought to remove opportunities for prostitution and other vices they felt threatened their values. Protestant missionaries eventually joined the women in their efforts, and Congress responded by passing both the Comstock Law (named after its chief proponent, anti-obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock) in 1873 to ban the spread of “lewd and lascivious literature” through the mail, and the subsequent Page Act of 1875 to prohibit transportation of women into the United States for employment as prostitutes. However, the brothels continued to operate and remained popular throughout the West despite reformers' efforts.
Famous Women of the West
The western frontier also gave rise to many famous women, including Annie Oakley, Pearl Hart, and Nellie Cashman.
Annie Oakley
Annie Oakley (1860–1926) was an American sharpshooter and exhibition shooter whose talent first came to light when, at age 15, she won a shooting match with traveling show marksman Frank E. Butler (whom she later married). The couple joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and later Oakley became a renowned international star, performing before royalty and heads of state.
Pearl Hart
Pearl Hart (c. 1871 to after 1928) was a Canadian-born outlaw of the American Old West. She committed one of the last recorded stagecoach robberies in the United States. Her crime gained notoriety primarily because she was a woman. Many details of Hart's life are uncertain, with available reports often varied and contradictory.
Nellie Cashman
Ellen "Nellie" Cashman (1845–1925) became known across the American West and in western Canada as a nurse, restaurateur, businesswoman, Roman Catholic philanthropist in Arizona, and gold prospector in Alaska. A native of County Cork, Ireland, she and her sister were brought as young children to the United States by their mother around 1850 to escape the poverty of the Great Famine. Cashman established her first boarding house for miners in British Columbia during the Klondike Gold Rush. During her time there, she led a rescue of dozens of miners in the Cassiar Mountains.
After moving to Tombstone, Arizona, around 1880, Cashman built the Sacred Heart Catholic Church and did charitable work with the Sisters of St. Joseph. In the late 1880s, Cashman set up several restaurants and boarding houses in Arizona. In 1898, she went to the Yukon for gold prospecting, and worked there until 1905. She became nationally known as a frontierswoman, with the Associated Press covering a later trip.