The Separate Worlds of Men and Women on the Overland Trail

JOHN MACK FARAGHER

Midwestern society had a developed sense of gender distinction. The existence of strict division of labor and separate cultural character models for men and women . suggests that significant portions of men's and women's time were spent in the company of their own sex. Indeed, despite the importance of the family, midwestern society contained separate sexual worlds for men and women, each with its own separate bundle of behaviors and beliefs, each understood and appropriated by the right sex only. . . .

[The] situation on the trail was no different, really, from life at home. The iso­lation of women in their homes was a social fact introduced by the division of labor, but it was further reinforced by the settlement patterns of the Midwest. In 1840, in the Sangamon River farming country of Illinois, for instance, there were only about eight people per square mile. . . . The homes were not built in proximity to each other; each was isolated on its separate farmstead....

This residential isolation severely limited the social opportunities for women. Men's responsibilities

allowed them to lay up their ploughs or hoes for the day and ride or walk out to visit the neighbors or frequent the village store, but women, with their more or less constant responsibilities at home, especially the care of the chil­dren, could not be so casual. The single most important distinction between the so­cial and cultural worlds of men and women was the isolation and immobility of wives compared to husbands.

The public world, culture and society outside the family, was the world of men. The Midwest was first and foremost a society of farmers who for most of the year were locked into isolated and solitary work on their family homesteads; at these times public life was accordingly slow, almost nonexistent. But at other times, and on other occasions, neighboring men came together in cooperative work. . . . Logrollings were a first chance for the neighboring men to get together after the winter and break the social monotony that had prevailed since the close of the previ­ous hunting season. These were not only workdays but celebrations of male strength and physical prowess as well. "Each man vied with the other to show his strength. It meant much in those days to be considered the strongest man of the neighbor­hood." . . . In those days before mechanical reapers, neighboring men circulated to one another's farms, bringing in the hay and wheat, cradling, binding, and mowing in gangs.... A few weeks later one or more farmers were sure to hold a cornhusk­ing where the men worked into the night with much rivalry, competition, and heavy whiskey drinking. . . . Occasionally men came together when needed for a cabin raising, where much the same competitive and boisterous spirit prevailed....

Men rode in to mill their grain or corn, to trade surpluses in corn or pork for goods at the stores, to have their wool carded or their skins tanned and made into shoes, to call on the craftsmen, and generally to meet their neighbors and socialize. The village was the hub of country life in northern Sangamon County, the little general stores the center of village life. "Throughout the day shoppers and gossipers came and went, or lounged on its porch, reading mail, exchanging news, or talking crops and politics." . . . The common denominator of the male experience was boasting and boisterous competition, the settlement of disputes by resort to force, and the promo­tion of the hail-fellow feeling that fostered necessary social cooperation....

Politics was perhaps the most refined of the common male pursuits, and the midwestern countryside "seethed with politics." At the local level, politics and so­cial life were woven from the same yarn, spun on the wheel of male social life. Talking politics, defining the important issues - nearly all of them of local significance - was a constant habit. On election day each man stepped forward at the polls as his name was called and shouted out his preferred candidate to the huz­zahs or catcalls of his fellowmen. Election day was a local holiday; local Indians called it the day of the "big drunk." . . . In their elections, male heads of household chose male representatives to make policy for, to administer, and to sanction the so­cial and economic order of the midwestern patriarchy. The masculine state was the capstone of male control of the public world....

This male public world of cooperative farm labor, village social life, politics, and the state was a world from which women were absent.... The one public event that women claimed as their own was the religious meeting. Throughout much of Indiana and Illinois, churches were few and far between, so the few dedicated churchgoers met in schools or farmhouses. Annual camp meetings, a tradition through the thirties and forties, were a way to prevent serious backsliding. When it was camp-meeting time, work was put aside and a family might camp out for a few days of vacation. The simple cold meals freed women from most of their cooking chores, and it was one of the only times of the year when wives were free from housework. Women responded by getting into the thick of the meeting; it was often the women who were most prone to emotionalism, who would "get the jerks.". . .

 

In contrast to men, women's social relationships were mostly within their fami­lies. A certain number of family kin usually remained settled in one area, and for women the relationships among sisters and cross-generational feminine kin pro vided them with their social contacts. . . . Thus was women's world structured around the intimate events of family and personal life, events experienced not alone but within the circle of feminine kin and neighbors. Women's world was marked by qualities of personal intensity and inter-subjectivity.

In Adams County, Illinois, the mass of advice directed toward the common problems of women reflected the sympathy women felt for one another.... Granny women or midwives were storehouses of this wisdom of the feminine life cycle and were consulted by community women in matters of contraception, abortion, and miscarriage as well as menstrual problems. Most important, grannies, and women in general, were holders of the secrets of birth and obstetrics.... By the same token, men (the public) had almost no role to play in the elaborate feminine rituals of birth....

Women were much more self-consciously aware of the life and care of the body than were men. Women's personal lives, unlike men's, were shaped by pas­sage through a series of character-defining life-cycle events of bodily change. The terrible toll of miscarriage, infant mortality, and maternal mortality certainly im­pressed mothers with the close conjuncture of death and the genesis of life. In addi­tion, their responsibilities for infant care and the maintenance of family health made women most conscious of the problems of health. On the basis of such concerns women built an enormous lore concerning health and health care. Midwestern farm wives continued in the centuries-old tradition that placed women in the role of ad­ministratrix of folk medicines. Given the state of the healing profession even as late as 1850, it may have been a distinct advantage that doctors were scarce in the Mid­west. Home gardens included herbs for folk remedies, and women seemed to know substantially more than men the value of wild plants and Indian concoctions. The principle was "every disease has a herb that cures it."

It was from these common bases - the experience of being a woman, of child­birth and motherhood, of healer and nurse - that a specific female culture took form. Just as men were united in competitive action, women too shared a unique view of the world, a common culture.

Moreover, this common culture was given meaning beyond the family in the social relationships neighboring women enjoyed with one another. Although the op­portunities for social contact were severely limited in the Midwest, nonetheless women had occasion to come together. There was a female side to the work bees, for instance; at logrollings, cabin raisings, cornhuskings and the like, visiting wives joined the hostess in the kitchen to prepare the midday meal.... The ritual of the kitchen complemented the male ritual of the field....

In the context of these separate sexual worlds the experience of men and women on the trail looks very familiar. For men the trip was a continuation and ex­tension of their social lives at home. The grand encampment outside the jumping off place replaced the logrolling as the opening social event of the year. Men repro­duced their own experience when they organized the trains and parties, so the society of the trail most resembled local militias and local politics. Electioneering for trail office was complete with the panoply of midwestern democracy: campaign­ing, speechmaking, demonstrating, and patriotic displays.... The male camaraderie of country life, in fact, was exaggerated by the dangers and excitements of the trail. "Men were drawn together on the plains as in every day walks of life," William Thompson remembered, "only the bonds were closer and far more enduring. The very dangers through which they passed together rendered the ties more lasting." . . . Truly one of the great attractions of the trip was the notion of spending the entire spring and summer "in the rough" with the boys, away from the routines of farm work. Trail work was hard, to be sure, but farm drudgery held none of this romantic allure....

In some ways, then, the trip across the plains fulfilled male dreams of cama­raderie, action, and achievement. For women the experience was perceived in quite another way. First, there was no relief from the daily drudgery of women's work. To be fair, the work so familiar at home was the same on the trail, only more diffi­cult and more frustrating-as any mother who has tried roadside camping with a family of children can testify. The burden of work, however, took second place to the disruption the emigration brought to women's social and cultural lives. Women constructed a social life on the trail, but in their diaries and recollections they demonstrated a deep regret at their inability to sustain close and deep attachments with other women. Men by habit participated in a cultural life that abounded in out­ward forms of sociability, and they found it relatively easy to adapt to life on the trail. Women, whose cultural needs were traditionally met in closer quarters, with an intensity that could survive periods of isolation, found the superficial relations of hr trail inadequate; for them. the trip was a lonely experience.

The failure of the more organized trains was a bitter disappointment to women who had benefited from the number of families - and women - the trains brought together. Women traveling alone with their husbands and children, in the catch-as- catch-can manner of the trail, always had to be on the lookout for female company. Watching for women became a central preoccupation: July 18, 1853, a group of packers passed by, "no women but twenty men in the camp"; July 19, "twenty one men, well armed, but no ladies." Each day the survey was made. When two parties with womenfolk happened into each other's company, the women often pressured their men to travel together. ...

But since men usually saw little reason to slow or quicken their own pace to match that of strangers, more often women had to be content with the fleeting contact they made with other women along their way. ...

Brief contacts were not always all women had. If several women found themselves traveling together, or if a family party included a number of female kin, they would visit together as they traveled along, perhaps walking in a group "talking over our home life back in 'the states, , telling of the loved ones left behind, voicing our hopes for the future in the far west and even whispering a little friendly gossip of emigrant life"...

Perhaps women' s most important relations with each other were expressed in the sisterhood of the sickbed. Women took it upon themselves to act in nurturant and nursing roles for the sick and injured about them, most especially for stricken women. ...This was even more the case with childbirth, when men were absolutely incapacitated and women in fine fettle. Woman ' s work continued on the trail, and childbirth was no exception to the rule. ...But at delivery women wanted women to assist: what woman was prepared and willing to be alone, with just her husband? If there was no sister in camp, men desperately rode ahead or back looking for a surrogate midwife or doctor. ...

...With childbirth suddenly upon them, men, too, understood the importance of women's relationships with women. But for women there was no forgetting at any time; the need was only more desperate at delivery. Women were haunted by the fear that the trauma of leaving home would be repeated in the loss of whatever feminine company they had been able to find along the way. ...

The loneliness, isolation and dread of loss that women felt frequently brought to mind friends they had left behind. "How often I have thought of my dear friend Mary E. Ballard," Harriet Cummings confided. "How earnestly do I pray that she maybe happy and that she may never know sorrow and care. How I would like to see her and hers." "This is a beautiful morning," Esther McMillan Hanna wrote. "1 think of home and the dear ones there; each day I am getting farther from them." Agnes Stewart, desperately missing her lifelong friend Martha, wondered "\'fhether it is my nature to love so well, or because I have no one else to love, I do not know. But one thing I do know; I miss you more than I can find words to express;"

This catalogue of women' s laments could be continued for pages, so vocal were women about their disrupted relationships. It is the contrast with men, how- ever, that is most striking. In their diaries most family men accompanied by their wives were virtually silent about the loneliness or isolation they must have felt. But then men were by no means short on company; there were always other men on the road. More importantly, men were on familiar ground, easily able to communicate with strangers through the silent languages of male competitions and solidarities, if not casual conversation. Women, on the other hand, were living out a male-constructed enterprise with little control over its social terms.  What feminine relations they could construct existed only at male pleasure.  The anguish women expressed was a measure of the importance that same-sex relations held for them, and of how much they needed their own autonomous context for living out those relationships.