Word: frontier
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...Lilla Day Monroe--a pioneer herself as one of the more influential suffrage leaders of her day, the founder of a western newspaper, and the first woman admitted to practice before the Kansas Supreme Court. In the 1920s, she concocted the idea of soliciting female survivors of the Kansas frontier to chronicle their lives and entrust the stories to her care. She had in mind a magazine article, but when the submissions flooded in by the hundreds. Monroe expanded her project to an anthology. Illness and the obligations of public life prevented her from completing the work, and she left...
Stratton, who was in Cambridge last week, says that after making her fortuitous excursion to the attic, she returned to Harvard in search of an adviser but could find no frontier historian in the History Department. She finally appealed to Frank Freidel. Warren Professor of American History, inquiring if he would be free for an independent study. Sorry, no time, he told her. "Then I told him I had 800 memoirs from Kansas pioneers that no one had ever seen before." He found time. Working closely with Freidel and Michael F. Jimenez, a graduate student in history. Stratton produced...
...lives, not analyze them," she explains. But one wonders why she felt compelled at all to depart from her great-grandmother's desire to compile an anthology. If her plan was simply preservation, an unfragmented assemblage of these memoirs would have provided a greater service to historians of the frontier and to women studies than Stratton's dissection and seemingly arbitrary reorganization of their tales. This is especially true since the original papers are tucked away in the Kansas Historical Society archives, inaccessible to most history students. (Stratton says Schlesinger Library wanted the documents, but her family decided to keep...
...this style--"For these women, life was far from easy"--reemerges 20 pages after it first appears as. "For Emma Mitchell New and her growing family, life on the plains of central Kansas was far from easy," and crops up yet again 100 pages later as. "For the frontier teacher, life on the job was far from easy." Such observations add nothing to our understanding of the pioneering experience and detract from the women's spirited accounts. Amy M. Loucks' recollection of suturing a scalped friend "with a fiddle string and common needle" more effectively conveys the same message...
...book is at its best when Stratton quotes long segments of the memoirs without interruption. The ungarnished language of these pioneers presents a quiet celebration of lives simply lived, without grand ambition, self-glorification or moralizing, Mother never judged, one frontier daughter recalls. "She always saw all sides and nothing seemed to horrify her, for she always made allowances for human frailty." To survive from day to day was regarded an achievement deserving of praise. Esther Clark remembered her mother's solo wagon ride to save their sheep from a flooding river and how later the men cheered "Leny...