Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier (Oklahoma Paperbacks Edition)

by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith

Book Overview

"If only one book about women in the West were available, this certainly would be an appropriate choice."--Westerners Bookshelf Pioneer Women provides a rare look at frontier life through the eyes of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806130547
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 1.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.0" x 0.3" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Pioneer Women

This book is very informative on the pioneer womens' behalf. It shows their hardships and their strengths. The fortitude and endurance these women had is amazing. The photos are excellent too.

A must read for women of all ages

This book will open your eyes up to the way things were a century and a half ago. Back to the basics is an understatement. Imagine raising 8 children on a farm that you had to establish yourself because your husband and other family members perished on the trip west to get to an unknown territory far far away from immediate family? These women did it. They survived and thier children either a: lived and learned the life or b: died from illness or accidents. This is very graphic and very personable to the very core of many women's souls. Women who kept diaries on the Oregon Trail in 1850 and onwards. Women who were always "in the background" keeping the family fed, clothed, silent and schooled. Women are most definitly the most gentle and most strong of the sexes.. Why? Because they have a continuous human spirit and one that gets them through the toughest of times of all.Please read this book and with that said.. the pictures in this book are a historian's dream!

A Book to be Treasured

Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith do a fine job of showing and telling the pioneer experience through the eyes of our frontier women. With visual images and descriptive narratives, PIONEER WOMEN details the everyday struggles and deprivations experienced by our westward women. The stories are about courageous women that left behind well-established homes to travel to unsettled regions; women that learned to "make do" and start from scratch to set up housekeeping; women from all walks of life who melded together to do what they could to improve their new surroundings; and the women who civilized the West. PIONEER WOMEN is a collection of stories as taken from letters, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, and other personal papers of women themselves. It's brilliantly reconstructed and a must read for the avid or casual reader!

Good, inclusive view of the women who civilized the West

In Pioneer Women, Peavy and Smith do a good job of inclusion of the women of different classes and races who helped "civilize" the western U.S. They also do a good job of confronting myths with facts and in juxtaposing ideal portraits with real. In Pioneer Women, one sees mud as mud and buffalo chips as buffalo chips. But the authors also point out the resourcefulness of pioneering women who overcame the mud and used the buffalo chips for fuel and for survival. Pioneer Women is a very good, informative read!

A MUST read!

This book on the lives of the Frontier Women is extrodinary! So many subjects on their trials and life-styles that I hadn't even Thought of! It's amazing what these women went through, and how they 'adapted' to their situations. Remarkable.