In late nineteenth-century America, women worked, studied, labored in factories, went to college, and became teachers, writers, nurses, government clerks, and, increasingly, secretaries. In the West, women worked, farmed, raised money for schools and churches, and, increasingly, voted. They were as central to western life as they were to society in the East. But on Turner’s frontier, just as in the mythic version of the cowboys’ world, the women were invisible, offstage: the wives who supported the men and nurtured the children, or the painted ladies who wore striped stockings and lived above
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