For many years historians, caught up in the trailblazing heroics of "frontiersmen," gave little attention to women in the West. But except for the mining frontier, white migration westward was largely a family process. Yet even as historians have come to recognize that women were central to western history, they continue to disagree about the effect of the western experience on white women.

Some historians have argued that women enjoyed greater freedom and status in the West. They see western women as crucial to the family economy in a way they no longer were in the industrializing market economy of the East. Thus women's wages were higher in the West, where labor was scarce and women a minority. To a much greater extent, western schoolteachers were women; a surprising number ended up making teaching a career. Far from helpless or passive, women actively accepted frontier challenges, were economic partners with their husbands, refused to surrender their domestic mission, and took pride in their achievements. Some historians have even argued that western women's greater opportunities and more equal status explain why divorce was more common in the West and why women gained political and legal rights more quickly there.

Other historians portray the impact of the western experience quite differently. Drawing on diaries women kept on the Overland Trail, they contend that the decision to migrate was almost always made by the husband and that wives often opposed the move. Moreover, many women who made the trek westward regretted going. These historians argue that the domestic work women performed was more akin to drudgery than liberating and no different from women's work in preindustrial society. They do not see western society according women greater power, and they emphasize that western women were equally subject to male dominance. "This is the Paradise of men," Martha Hitchcock wrote home in 1851. "I wonder if a paradize for poor Women will ever be discovered."

1			Read these letters from Julia Lovejoy, who traveled West to Kansas with her family during the 1850s. How did the move West affect her family? Her community? Her work? Do these letters convey a sense that her life was freer or more constrained in Kansas than in New Hampshire? Now read this essay about our cultural conception of pioneer women in the American West. What sources does this author use as evidence? How convincing do you find her use of these previously unconventional sources? What are the dangers of using such sources? What arguments does she utilize these sources to make? On what side of the debate about women's lives in the West do these documents reside? http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/four/lovejoy1.htm http://www.angelfire.com/journal/worldtour99/womeninwest.html