Women of the Frontier

by Brandon Marie Miller

  By organizing schools, many women entered public affairs for the first time. If women helped establish schools and worked in them as teachers, why shouldn’t they have a vote on school taxes, bonds, and school board elections? Why shouldn’t a woman sit on the school board or be elected superintendent?

  Nebraskan Luna Kellie first asked such questions when childless local men tried to cut the length of the school term to save taxes. “Right then,” claimed Kelly,

  I saw for the first time that a woman might be interested in politics and want a vote. I had been taught that it was unwomanly to concern oneself with politics and that only the worst class of women would ever vote if they had a chance etc etc but now I saw where a decent mother might wish very much to vote on local affairs at least.6

  In 1861, Kansas became the first state to allow women to vote in school elections.

  Time for Religion

  From the days of the Oregon Trail, women deplored the lack of religion in Western life. “And today is Sunday again,” mourned a westward-bound female. “O what Sundays. There is nothing that seems like the Sabbath.”7 Women missed the comfort, strength, and community found in religious services. Many feared for their children’s well-being, as they had been raised without churches and knew the benefit of traveling ministers’ visits only three or four times a year. Bible reading at home could not replace weekly worship with others, they believed.

  As they had with schools, women often took the lead in raising funds to build local churches and hire ministers. One woman took three boarders into her home so she might contribute to her community’s church-building coffers. Women opened their homes for church services and prayer meetings, taught Sunday school, and oversaw charity work.

  Other groups brought their faith to the frontier. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, faced persecution in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. In 1846-1847, Brigham Young, who led the group after founder Joseph Smith was murdered in 1844, called for a great migration of the group to the valley of the Salt Lake in Utah. In this land no one else wanted, Mormons would build their own Zion.

  Mormon women who had trekked across the plains for religious freedom served their church with devotion and supported the Mormon religion throughout the Utah Territory and the West. By the 1860s, thousands of Mormons had settled in the valley, building an irrigation system, ironworks, mills, and a telegraph system. In the heart of Salt Lake City, work began on a temple for worship and a tabernacle that would hold 10,000 people for public gatherings and singing.

  Anti-Mormon sentiments, however, ran high in America—“the Mormons must be treated as enemies and exterminated or driven from the state,” wrote the governor of Missouri in 1838.8 Though similar to other Protestants sects, people viewed Mormons as a secret society, set apart. As a theocracy, Mormon leaders ruled both church and state. The Mormon economy, based on shared work and wealth in the early days, clashed with America’s spirit of competition and free enterprise.

  But what really inspired the public’s wrath was polygamy. Joseph Smith had decreed that men had a spiritual duty to marry as many wives as they could support. Less than 20 percent of Mormons actually lived in plural marriages, but journalists and novelists skewered Mormon men as lecherous drunkards who abused their wives and kidnapped girls. They depicted Mormon women as harlots and conniving harpies—insane, stupid, and “debauched” females who failed in their role as moral guardians of society. Writers insisted that Mormon women gave birth to defective children and then neglected and abused them.

  Many of the writers describing the evils of Mormon life were women. Novels described scenes of torture and abduction. In florid language, one female novelist detailed the fate of a wife who’d spoken against polygamy: “[She] was taken one night when she stepped out for water, gagged, carried a mile into the woods, stripped nude, tied to a tree, and scourged till the blood ran from her wounds to the ground, in which condition she was left till the next night.”9

  Two Mormon women also wrote books. Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young’s 19th wife, declared, “Incest, murder, suicide, mania, and bestiality are the chief ‘beauties’ of this infamous system.”10 But Fanny Stenhouse recalled the all-too-real anguish of a first wife accepting her husband’s marriage to another woman: “I shrank from the realization that our home was at last to be desecrated by the foul presence of Polygamy.” She wrote that, on the day of the wedding, “To me their tender tones were daggers piercing my heart and filling me with a desire to revenge myself upon the father of my children.” Every day she faced the sight of her husband with another woman “in the midst of my family.”11 Fanny found the situation consuming and unbearable. After a year, her husband built a separate house for the second wife, giving Fanny some relief.

  While many Mormon women disliked plural marriages, they defended their moral character and pointed to a Biblical precedent for polygamy. They argued that Mormon women actually gained freedom because of polygamy, as wifely demands were shared. However, under political pressure from the United States, in 1890 the Mormon Church ended the practice of polygamy.

  Small numbers of Jewish women also made new homes in the West. Most emigrated from Europe, mainly Bavaria and Poland, to escape religious persecution and economic hardship. Many Western Jews moved not to farms but to towns, like San Francisco, where they stood a better chance of organizing synagogues with other Jewish families and hiring rabbis. Jewish men wanted Jewish brides, and many women came west as part of arranged marriages, their husbands-to-be (whom they had never met) paying their travel to America and the cost of their new outfits.

  Family roots in Europe determined social rank in Western Jewish communities. A Polish Jew was denied access to the upper crust of society that welcomed a Jewish woman from Bavaria. Jewish woman strove to maintain strict standards within their households; daughters bathed and “dressed for dinner,” and wine was set on the table next to candelabras. As Claire Hofer Hewes recalled of her girlhood in Carson City, Nevada, “Everyone had servants,” dinner “was always a great ceremony…. You wouldn’t believe it with the little homes there in Carson.”12

  “Aiming for Better Communities”

  Throughout the West, a great wave of Ladies Aid societies undertook fundraising and charity activities aimed at community improvement. Women founded libraries, donating books and volunteer hours to keep them open. Bazaars, box suppers, and socials raised money to help widows and orphans, provide scholarships for female students, and aid the poor. Groups like the Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Society assisted new Jewish settlers with loans and advice. Black pioneer women organized clubs, such as the Sojourner Truth Club of Los Angeles, the Black Woman’s Beneficial Society, and the Sisters of Ethiopia, which served African American communities.

  Women also aided starving families devastated by drought or grasshopper invasions. Male community leaders sometimes opposed this work, reluctant to call attention to such problems and discourage new settlers from coming. In one Kansas town, women refuted this logic in a letter to the local paper, offering to take the men to see the devastation firsthand. Wouldn’t it hurt Kansas’s image more, argued the women, to let settlers die of starvation? That said, they gathered food and clothing to aid the farmers.

  Not surprisingly, women’s reform efforts spilled into the political arena. The first issue uniting large numbers of women was the question of temperance—refusing to drink alcohol. Much of the West’s violence—shootings, hangings, fighting, beatings, and abuse—stemmed from male drunkenness. In their role as protectors of family and society, women focused on alcohol’s power to destroy. As early as the 1850s, some women demanded saloons close on Sundays. To this end, women’s groups collected signatures and held public meetings.

  In 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) formed in Ohio. By 1890, the WCTU was the largest women’s organization in the United States. In 1878, Kansas alone had 26 local chapters. The organization proved a political training ground for women
who learned how to petition, lobby, speak in public, and plan marches, rallies, and conventions. Kansan Carry Nation, whose first husband died of alcoholism, became the most famous temperance crusader in the country. Nation felt that fighting the “Demon Rum” was her God-given mission, and armed with a hatchet, she fearlessly invaded saloons, smashing bottles, mirrors, and furniture.

  Most temperance supporters, however, used less violent means to highlight the issue. Women marched with banners blazoned with slogans like “Tremble King Alcohol, I shall grow up.” Temperance workers lectured, wrote songs, lobbied state legislatures, passed out pamphlets, and sponsored essay contests in schools about the curses of alcohol. An 1889 publication appealed to Kansas Teachers, “The Schoolhouse Exalted, the Saloon Banished. Temperance, Health, and Moral Purity.”13 The work of temperance women eventually paved the way for the passage of the 18th Amendment, which—for a time—prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks throughout the United States.

  “I Could, I Can, I Do”

  Many women active in temperance work and other civic projects joined another growing movement—the fight for women’s suffrage, the right to vote. Opponents argued that female suffrage would strip women of their femininity, destroy families, and even go against the laws of God. Many believed that as creatures of emotion, women lacked the education and reason to understand politics and voting.

  Though the battle for women’s rights originated in the East during the 1840s, the West garnered the first real gains. By 1861, Kansas women won the right to vote in school elections and hold property in their own names. An attempt in 1867 to grant women full suffrage in Kansas attracted national attention. Eastern suffrage heavy-hitters like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony traveled west to support the cause. Women lost the bitter battle, however, and Kansas women did not receive the vote in state and national elections until 1912. However, in 1887 they did gain the right to vote and run for office in city elections.

  Wyoming women, on the other hand, quietly won the right to vote without rallies, petitions, or conventions. Perhaps influenced by his wife and 56-year-old Esther Morris, territorial senator William Bright introduced a bill in the Wyoming legislature in November 1869. The legislation grew partly from the belief that women needed the vote to effectively protect the family and society in such a rough and often lawless land. The bill proclaimed that every woman age 21 and older would have the right to vote and hold office. Before opposition could organize, the bill passed on December 10, and the governor signed it into law.

  So, in Wyoming, on September 6, 1870, women turned out at the polls and exercised their legal right to vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later described Wyoming as “a blessed land, where for the first time in the history of the world, the true idea of a just government is realized, where woman is the political equal of man.”14

  Earlier that year, Esther Morris won appointment as a justice of the peace, and Wyoming became the first territory to select women for jury duty. Eastern newspapers ridiculed the idea, running a cartoon depicting women chomping cigars while nursing babies in the jury box. The caption read, “Baby, baby don’t get in a fury, your mother’s going to sit on a jury.” But the judge in charge of the first trial with female jurors assured the women their right was protected by law, and “ jeers and insults of a laughing crowd” would not drive them from their duty.15

  In 1890, Wyoming entered the Union as the first state to include state and national voting rights for women in its constitution.

  Wyoming women exercising their right to vote. Library of Congress

  Other suffrage struggles ended in defeat. Utah women won the vote in 1870 and lost it in 1877. After losing their bid for suffrage in 1877, Colorado women won the vote in 1893, followed in 1896 by the women of Idaho and, again, Utah. By 1914, 11 of the last 18 states to join the Union—all of them in the West—had guaranteed women’s suffrage, while none of the first 30 states allowed women to vote. Perhaps the difference lay in the West’s newness. Writing new laws was easier than repealing long-standing ones. Susan B. Anthony wrote to a Utah newspaper in 1894:

  Now in the formative period of your constitution is the time to establish justice and equality to all the people…. Once ignored in your constitution—you’ll be powerless to secure recognition as are we in the older states.16

  Maybe Western men, who had to grant women the right to vote, appreciated the roles their wives, daughters, and mothers played in settling the West.

  Perhaps another reason suffrage succeeded in the West was the support given to the movement by new grassroots political organizations: the Farmers’ Alliance and the Populist Party. Both championed the rights of farmers and other working people and enjoyed a strong Western following in the 1880s and 1890s. Women flocked to the cause, seeking to preserve their homes and families, and for the first time, they played an important role in major political parties. They marched in processions, attended rallies, painted banners, and stood in wagon beds and on stages to address throngs of people.

  Luna Kellie, who had first longed to vote on local school issues, blossomed into an active participant in the Farmers’ Alliance. A mother of 11, she served as an editor, secretary, bookkeeper, and speaker for the Alliance. She also wrote several songs for Populist rallies and edited the Populist newspaper Prairie Home at her dining room table.

  Annie Diggs of Kansas rose to leadership in the Alliance and the Populist organization. But the most famous voice of the Populist movement belonged to Mary Elizabeth Lease, a Kansan lawyer and mother of four. Lease held railroad companies and Wall Street bankers responsible for the farmer’s financial troubles. “What the farmers need,” she told her audience, “is to raise less corn and more hell!” Annie Diggs wrote of Lease, “A woman of other quality would have sunk under the avalanche. She was quite competent to cope with all that was visited upon her. Indeed, the abuse did her much service. The people but loved her the more for the enemies she made.”17

  A cartoon shows “A Chamber of Female Horrors” that included Carry Nation with her hatchet and Mary Lease with a rake. Library of Congress

  Western newspapers noted women’s involvement in politics and reported, “Women who never dreamed of becoming public speakers, grew eloquent in their zeal and fervor.” Women, said another paper, “could talk straight to the point.” And political humorist Joseph Billings summed things up: “Wimmin is everywhere.”18

  Western women reflected on their own accomplishments. As one mining town woman wrote her sister in Massachusetts, she had sent her roots into the barren Western soil and “gained unwanted strength in what seemed to you such unfavorable surroundings.”19

  Mary Elizabeth Lease

  Political Firebrand

  In the 1880s, on the prairies of Kansas, a woman stepped out of the shadows and onto the political platform. A tall, pale, dark-haired woman clad in a long black dress, her blue eyes flashing, she rose to speak on behalf of poor farmers and laborers. She mesmerized audiences, whether striding across a convention hall stage or standing in a wagon bed with rows of glossy corn stretching behind her. In a deep, rich voice that infused listeners with her passion, she harangued against greed and corruption and politicians who did nothing. Her name was Mary Lease. She set the plains on fire and gave voice to a political movement that ultimately failed but changed America along the way.

  Born Mary Elizabeth Clyens in Pennsylvania on September 11, 1853, her parents were poor Irish immigrants. The death of her father and two brothers in the carnage of the Civil War marked her early life. To Mary, they died fighting oppression and slavery, a continuation of her Irish ancestors’ struggle against the English.

  Mary Lease. kansasmemory.org, Kansas State Historical Society

  At age 17, in 1870, she boldly boarded a train bound for Kansas, answering the state’s call for teachers and its promise of good pay. At a Catholic school in Osage Mission, Mary worked hard, sending money home to her mother. Like other young woman who he
aded west, Mary enjoyed a throng of male admirers. In January 1873, the 19-year-old wed a drugstore clerk named Charles Lease, a man past 30. She exchanged life as a teacher for life as a farmwife on the empty, wind-blown prairies of Kansas.

  Charles borrowed money to pay the homesteader’s land fees and buy tools, equipment, seeds, and animals. Like most farmers, the Leases began life mired deeply in debt. But farming held no guarantees, and during the 1870s and 1880s disaster after disaster ravaged the farms of the plains. In 1873, a great economic panic struck the country, shutting banks, textile mills, and coal mines. Grain merchants cancelled orders. By the end of the decade, harsh economic times escalated into violence, strikes, and riots. The government did nothing to ease the situation and often used force to end strikes or break up protests.

  For farmers like Mary and Charles, even a good crop provided no relief. Prices for wheat and corn sank under the nation’s money woes, and farmers’ hopes to pay their own debts sank too. The next year brought further calamity—the 1874 invasion of grasshoppers. In a matter of hours, the greedy insects devoured crops, trees, and homes, leaving farmers with nothing to sell at all. With Mary pregnant and the family facing a bleak future, they moved to Denison, Texas, leaving their land for the loan company to repossess.

  In Denison, Charles worked as a drugstore clerk. Mary gave birth to a son, whom they named after his father. The family stayed in Denison for a number of years and scraped by. Mary had two more babies, who died in infancy. Then in 1880 she had a daughter, Louise, and in 1883 another daughter, Grace, nicknamed Jimmie. Like many educated women on the frontier, Mary found the growing temperance movement an outlet for her energy.