Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

by Cynthia Culver Prescott

As her family traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852, Mary Ellen Todd taught herself to crack the ox whip. Though gender roles often blurred on the trail, families quickly tried to re-establish separate roles for men and women once they had staked their claims. For Mary Ellen Todd, who found a “secret joy in having the power to set things moving,” this meant trading in the ox whip for the more feminine butter churn.

In Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier , Cynthia Culver Prescott expertly explores the shifting gender roles and ideologies that countless Anglo-American settlers struggled with in Oregon’s Willamette Valley between 1845 and 1900. Drawing on traditional social history sources as well as divorce records, married women’s property records, period photographs, and material culture, Prescott reveals that Oregon settlers pursued a moving target of middle-class identity in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Prescott traces long-term ideological changes, arguing that favorable farming conditions enabled Oregon families to progress from accepting flexible frontier roles to participating in a national consumer culture in only one generation. As settlers’ children came of age, participation in this new culture of consumption and refined leisure became the marker of the middle class. Middle-class culture shifted from the first generation’s emphasis on genteel behavior to a newer genteel consumption.

This absorbing volume reveals the shifting boundaries of traditional women’s spheres, the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, and the second generation’s struggle to balance their parents’ ideology with a changing national sense of class consciousness.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2007

Reviews

[Camela Hicks · Rating 2 out of 5]

The entire book can be summed up as: When able, people of the first generation of settlers adhered to traditional and strict gender roles, however, necessity often demanded that they go outside these to survive. The next generation had more choice and crossed boundaries more. People have created romanticized views of settlers.

The only way this could be a book is with lots of repetition. Within each paragraph, within the sections, within the chapter, so much repetition! The conclusion to each chapter and at the end of the books are not conclusions, they are summaries. Brief summaries to chapters that once you have read, with so many repetitions, you have more than learned. And now, once again! It is amazing that such a poorly written piece of work was published by a University Press.

[Paula Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good read. I feel that I have a greater knowledge of how the first settlers in the Willamette Valley survived and how the 2nd and 3rd generations have come to create change and form a new roads for the women of the Oregon frontier. Each generation has made a new path to follow for future generations to come.