Word: strattons
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...introduction to Pioneer Women, by Joanna Stratton '76, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. recalls the iron-gray Auntie Em of The Wizard of Oz, the sexless and colorless lady of the Kansas plains who has come to represent the withered frontier woman in the minds of childhood readers. The transformation of Dorothy's maternal surrogate, one of the more familiar passages of the beloved novel, goes like this...
...Stratton's recent discovery of hundreds of memoirs from the women who settled the western wilderness against great odds in the mid-19th century has unveiled a female frontier population which seemed to strengthen and thrive and gain color from the prairie sun and wind. These women, who trailed west after their husbands, unwillingly at first, soon burst out in lively appreciation of and identification with the frontier landscape. Carrie Stearns Smith, one pioneer woman, recollects the liberating power of the prairie as it accosted her constricted New England sensibility...
...Stratton stumbled upon this gold mine of frontier history--a unique and impressive collection--five years ago in her grandmother's attic. Visiting her ancestor's Topeka. Kansas, home during a semester break from Harvard. Stratton uncovered the manuscripts while poking in a musty filing cabinet lodged under the eaves. Its contents revealed reams of personal testimonies from 800 Kansas women: women in combat with rattlers, prairie blazes and cayotes: women in solitary labor in the cornfields and in the home giving birth with only the cows as witnesses: and, by the 1870s, women embroiled in local politics, temperance...
Behind this discovery is Stratton's great-grandmother. 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...
Crimson forward Monroe Trout then turned the ball over with an offensive foul and the Elis' Doug Stratton--a 3.4 points-per-game shooter who led all Yale scorers last night with 20 points--hit an 18-footer to tie it up at the 9:45 mark...