eBook - ePub
The Important Things of Life
Women, Work, and Family in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 1880-1929
- 224 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
The Important Things of Life
Women, Work, and Family in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 1880-1929
About this book
Sweetwater County lies in southwestern Wyoming, and has stood as a significant symbolic geography for the "new Western Woman’s" history. As the county in which Elinore Pruitt Stewart (Letters of a Woman Homesteader, Nebraska 1990) said she proved up her homestead in 1913, it is a fitting locale for the study of western gender relations.
The Important Things of Life examines women’s work and family lives in Sweetwater County in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1880’s discovery of coal caused a population boom, attracting immigrants from numerous ethnic groups. At the same time, liberalized homestead law drew sheep and cattle ranchers. Dee Garceau demonstrates how survival on the ranching and mining frontier heightened the value of group cooperation in ways that bred conservative attitudes toward gender.
Augmented by reminiscences and oral histories, Garceau traces the adaptations that broadened women’s work roles and increased their domestic authority. Hers is a compelling portrait of the American West as a laboratory of gender role change, in which migration, relocation, and new settlement underscored the development of new social identities.
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access The Important Things of Life by Dee Garceau in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & World History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Front Cover
- Half Title Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Sweetwater County: Desert Highway, Company Town, Cowboy West
- 2. Family Networks: A Web of Support
- 3. “I Got a Girl Here, Would You Like to Meet Her?”: Courtship, Ethnicity, and Community
- 4. “My Wife Just Doesn’t Like It Here and I’m Going to Let Her Go Back”: Marriage and Patriarchal Authority in Transition
- 5. Group Partnership and Cowboy Myth: The Gendering of Ranch Work
- 6. Single Women Homesteaders and the Meanings of Independence: Places on the Map, Places in the Mind
- 7. From Klenickso to Main Street: Town Women’s Work
- 8. “Grasping at the Shadow”: The Paradox of Change
- Appendix
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Back Cover