Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier Book

I would have liked this book more if it had used more primary sources. It quotes people from at least the 1830s into the early twentieth century, but rarely is there any way of figuring out when something was said, and even looking up the source does not give you a date, because it's nearly all secondary sources. Most books that cover "the pioneer era" or "the Victorian era" (both of which are huge), I can at least make a good guess when someone was on the pioneer trail or whatever by looking into the original source (since there's so much available online at archive.org and Gutenberg and Google books), but all the references here are to collections like Black Victorians or Westering Women or Daughters of the Earth or whatever.

Some of those books that are a collection of information can offer stuff that wasn't published, which is lovely, but in terms of reading this book, they're no help at all in figuring out when something happened. Because the American frontier is vast, in both time and space, and what was true early on is not true later -- the Civil War era and the transcontinental railroad creating a great split, for starts, where people on the frontier before it had little access to technologies and comforts that were much more common after. Windmills, barbed wire fences, the enormous drop in the cost of kerosene, and other factors also made some practices obsolete and others possible. So for someone who is interested in researching a particular time frame, this book is not going to help.

The photos are often a bit easier to date, first because the date is more often mentioned, second because you're just not going to have casual photos in indoor settings until cameras were advanced enough, and third using the fashions (although most women on the frontier were not all that fashion-conscious, of course). And sometimes the photos can just add to the confusion, since most of the photos are from the 1880s and beyond, but are used to illustrate events happening much earlier. They do offer illustrations from earlier... but also from later, so you can't date something as antebellum just because it's drawn. Sometimes the date is given for when a particular individual was traveling once, which is helpful for those quoted multiple times, but the rest of the time it's guesswork.

It's a short book and the information is pretty general, but at the same time they do a nice job of offering specifics. It's just that some of those specifics were much more common at particular dates and locations, rather than being representative of the overall pioneer experience, and they don't seem to recognize that!

Nor do they recognize the changes that occur during the time period they're covering. One example is their story about the nun who had repeatedly read that "No virtuous woman is safe near a cowboy," then meets a cowboy who acts like a gentleman. The implication is that the nun was a naive innocent, but in actual fact the meaning of the word "cowboy" changed over time, and did at various points refer to men who were violent and dangerous -- in the 1880s, many a working cow hand would have been insulted if you called him a cowboy!

Classic example of using a word's modern meaning to poke fun at someone in another time, which is not something I expect from a serious historical book, because it ends up confusing the issue and making people in the past seem more alien and peculiar. The authors are generally respectful of the women they discuss, which makes me suspect they don't know enough of history themselves to realize that 'cowboy' was not a neutral word for goodly chunks of the Pioneer Era.

As another reviewer said, a good book when it comes to the pictures. When it comes to the prose, not so much. The index is good, and links references to the bibliography, which would be terrific if the bibliography were more helpful.

EDIT:

Forgot to mention that the sidebar on p. 80 ends in the middle of a quote on what tonics were made from. Here's the full paragraph the quote was pulled from:

"At that time doctors were few and far between. Every family had a "doctor book" which advised a treatment for every ill and injury to man and beast. Many wild plants were used as medicines, most of them steeped and drunk as tea. Among these were "Culver's root" taken "for the liver". The dandelion, both as extract and as wine, was used for the same purpose. Tonics were made from the butterfly weed, sweet flag root, sassafras bark, and boneset. Of course sulphur and molasses were taken nearly every spring. For colds, pennyroyal, prairie balm, and horse mint were popular remedies. Mullen was used externally for pleurisy. Mullen seeds were among those mother had brought with her from Howard County. Smartweed was used externally for boils. Cubeb berries were smoked for catarrh. Castile soap was used to cleanse wounds on stock as well as for hand and shaving soap. Dry baking soda was also applied to barbed wire cuts on the stock."