I was going west to try out as a wife and homemaker."" And Florence Bingham, who moved to a ten-acre tract outside Abilene where her husband gave her a horse to ride so she wouldn't get trampled by long-horned cattle. There's Clara Hildebrand, pioneer bride, who before agreeing to marry and move to Kansas made certain the word ""obey"" was left out of the pact: ""I had served my time of tutelage to my parents. Throughout, the women emerge as physically and emotionally strong. The most interesting segments deal with aspects of pioneer life specific to Kansas: the construction of dugouts and sodhouses, fighting off the grasshoppers, life in boomtown Abilene, the tension surrounding the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the outbreak of Civil War. She does, however, succeed in welding these personal histories into a collective saga. Stratton recognizes the weaknesses in the material: almost all the women are white middle class the stories are based on memories and often colored by a nostalgia that she herself is prey to. While rummaging in the family attic in Topeka, Joanna Stratton came across several drawers of yellowing folders containing the life stories of 800 Kansas pioneer women that had been carefully collected in the 1920s by her great-grandmother, then a lawyer and ex-suffragette.
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