Bitchy History - Season 2, Episode 9： Women and the Homesteading Act of 1862

00:00:00.080 Welcome to Bitchy History, the irreverent history podcast that thinks if we'd just let women handle everything in the past, we'd probably be a lot better off today. 1.00

00:00:24.540 Welcome back to Bitchy History. Can you believe that you've actually gotten two episodes in two weeks? 1.00

00:00:29.460 I almost can't believe it myself, but hopefully this means I am actually back on track.

00:00:34.420 For today's topic, I wanted to get back out of the 20th century since almost all the episodes

00:00:39.100 this season have been focused on that period. I mean, look, I love the 20th century and most

00:00:44.040 of my research interests focus on the 1950s and later in America, but the 19th century has a lot

00:00:49.200 of unexplored history when it comes to women as well. We mostly tend to focus on men during this

00:00:54.060 period. It's a very rugged time period in most of our minds. With westward expansion and the

00:00:59.600 Civil War and the robber barons of the Gilded Age, women seem like they were just fading into 0.96

00:01:04.960 the background like an extra in a movie. But women in the 19th century were just as vibrant as they 0.96

00:01:10.360 are now, and they did it in the face of even more systemic inequalities working against them.

00:01:15.380 So for today, we're going to be talking about a period that's been almost entirely dominated by

00:01:19.740 men in the narrative, the homesteading of the West. I'm definitely dating myself with this

00:01:24.580 reference, but one of the shows I remember watching the most as a kid was Dr. Quinn Medicine

00:01:29.140 Woman. I grew up with no cable, so channels like PBS and the three big networks were the ones I

00:01:34.080 got, and CBS was one of the stations we had access to through our antenna. Yes, I'm old,

00:01:39.880 but I'm not actually as old as you might think, hearing that I used to use a rabbit ear antenna

00:01:43.660 that had tinfoil on it. My family was also poor, so we were always about a decade out of date

00:01:49.160 with technology when I was growing up. The series, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, starts in 1867 when Dr.

00:01:55.960 Michaela Quinn is traveling west to Colorado Springs to set up her own medical practice in 0.59

00:02:00.280 the frontier. I don't honestly remember a lot of the plot or historical setting for this series.

00:02:05.380 I was very young when I watched it, but as a historian, I find the premise of the series

00:02:09.640 extremely interesting, and I'd like to think that at least some historical research was put into the

00:02:14.420 concept. Mostly because I know reviewers hated it. They called it primetime hokum and too

00:02:20.560 politically correct, starring a politically correct frontier feminist that was filled with 1.00

00:02:26.320 a pacifist, multicultural, ecological feminist contraption so sanctimonious it could chase a 1.00

00:02:32.240 left-winger into Rush Limbaugh's arms. Those are all actual quotes from reviewers of the show.

00:02:38.840 Aline Eaton, a professor at American University, clarifies the problem these critics seem to have

00:02:43.520 with the series. By political correctness, the critics mean that in its very acknowledgement

00:02:48.240 of the existence of historical systemic injustice and its inclusion of plot lines about emancipated

00:02:54.100 formerly enslaved people, indigenous people, and immigrants, the show is imposing a liberal

00:02:59.240 modern sensibility upon the past. Except that all of those things existed, and people definitely 0.93

00:03:04.760 existed who believed in equality and freedom and systemic injustice even then, and in fact I'd

00:03:10.060 argue many of them would have found themselves in the West. The problem critics seem to have

00:03:15.080 was that Dr. Quinn was representing a more accurate, diverse history of America rather

00:03:20.140 than the John Wayne movies they preferred. Eaton comments on this in her article as well.

00:03:25.680 In this case, the critiques seem partly a complaint of genre. Dr. Quinn is a Western.

00:03:30.880 American Westerns, a historically conservative genre, have often worked to maintain the white 0.96

00:03:35.380 patriarchal status quo, but it's also a complaint regarding the gender dynamics that

00:03:39.880 characterize the show. The critics weren't just rebuking an anachronistically progressive western,

00:03:45.140 they were specifically protesting the progressive values espoused by a woman starring in a western.

00:03:50.880 The problem here seems to be that the image of the old west that we all had was one where women

00:03:55.440 played little to no independent role. So the very concept of a show about an independent,

00:04:00.400 unmarried woman on the frontier making her own way felt anachronistic and impossible.

00:04:05.380 Except, independent women making their own way, whether a doctor or a gambler or a prospector, on the American frontier is an entirely historically accurate possibility.

00:04:16.080 Not just plausible, but relatively commonplace in the time period in which Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman was set.

00:04:22.660 Movement into the western frontier had started very early in the 19th century.

00:04:26.760 Lewis and Clark's expedition searching for a water route to the Pacific is the most famous push west, but they were hardly the first to set their eyes on the frontier.

00:04:35.380 Fur traders and explorers had been pushing west for a long time before that.

00:04:39.680 But it isn't until after Lewis and Clark's expedition that we begin to see people migrating in bulk,

00:04:44.520 with the largest push coming during the California Gold Rush of 1848 to 1855.

00:04:50.560 Now, the Gold Rush was dominated by men, but it was by no means only men who went west during this period.

00:04:57.280 About 3% of the travel to California before 1850 was made up of women, something like

00:05:02.680 3,500 women to 115,000 men.

00:05:06.340 Many of these were women of color, but as word got back to the East Coast of job opportunities

00:05:10.920 for women, more women began to migrate West, and these were not merely women coming to

00:05:15.760 the West with their husbands.

00:05:17.380 Many of them were independent women making their own way.

00:05:20.860 Now, of course, the job opportunities for women in the West weren't always the best. 0.83

00:05:24.820 two of the major job opportunities for women were found in sex work and entertainment. 1.00

00:05:29.620 Often those two had a lot of crossover. Now I'm not here to judge sex workers, so my comment on

00:05:34.640 that not being the best job has nothing to do with a moral judgment of their profession,

00:05:39.100 only the working conditions that they usually found themselves in. In 1850s Gold Rush, California,

00:05:44.900 there were little to no laws prohibiting or regulating sex work, and women were in short 1.00

00:05:49.180 supply. Madams who ran their own brothels were common, and some of them became incredibly 0.87

00:05:53.820 prosperous, such as Madame Lou Graham, who became one of the wealthiest citizens of Seattle, 0.96

00:05:59.020 and, depending on who you ask, might have stopped the entire Seattle economy from collapsing during

00:06:03.780 the bank crisis of 1893. I'll undoubtedly be revisiting Madame Lou in a future episode because

00:06:09.520 she's a fascinating figure and opens a door to discuss some very interesting factors of the

00:06:14.000 progressive era and women's suffrage movements, but this episode isn't actually about prostitution,

00:06:19.660 though that certainly was a major factor in employing women in the American West during

00:06:23.580 this period. We're here to talk about homesteading, so let's fast forward a bit from the gold rush of

00:06:28.580 the 1850s to the Homesteading Act of 1862. As a side note, I won't be discussing the downsides

00:06:35.420 of westward expansion in this episode. Let's leave it as a given for now that what was done

00:06:40.340 in the name of Manifest Destiny was a vicious act of colonialism, white supremacy, and both

00:06:45.060 cultural and literal genocide. I'll revisit that topic in the future, but for now, let's stay on

00:06:50.440 the topic of how homesteading and westward expansion affected women, especially single

00:06:54.820 women. That's not to say, of course, that married women didn't play a major role in settling the

00:06:59.420 West, but often the reluctant wife of a starry-eyed man with dreams of staking his claim is the image

00:07:05.600 that we have of women during this period, dragged along by their husbands' dreams when they would

00:07:10.340 much rather have stayed in a more civilized world. Personally, I blame Little House on the Prairie 0.95

00:07:15.180 for this. The book, not the television series. Ma was hardly depicted as a fragile woman,

00:07:20.360 but she definitely wasn't the one enamored with moving west.

00:07:24.040 In the long winter evenings, he talked to Ma about the western country. In the west,

00:07:30.540 the land was level, and there were no trees. The grass grew thick and high. There the wild

00:07:37.980 animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much further than

00:07:42.420 a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there. One day, in the very last of

00:07:51.160 the winter, Pa said to Ma, seeing you don't object, I've decided to go see the West. I've had an offer

00:07:59.180 for this place, and we can sell it now for as much as we're ever likely to get, enough to give us a

00:08:05.080 start in a new country. Oh, Charles, must we go now? Ma said. The weather was so cold and the

00:08:13.540 Snugh House was so comfortable. In her 1972 article, Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains

00:08:19.460 Frontier, Cheryl Patterson Black wrote about the stereotype of women on the frontier. 0.72

00:08:24.580 In one early account, Marion Colt Davis describes her family's Western migration,

00:08:28.980 in which, in rapid succession, she lost her husband and child to epidemic. Devastated,

00:08:34.280 remorseful and exhausted, she hastily retreated to her point of origin, and there her memoirs end.

00:08:40.180 Marion Colt Davis is typical of the image of women as reluctant pioneer, a stereotypic image

00:08:45.580 which is perpetuated by history books, or at least not destroyed by them. However, this image is 0.91

00:08:51.120 refuted by my study of homestead women. For some time, I have been concerned with the historic

00:08:56.160 image of women on the frontier, the stereotype that would have us believe that most women in

00:09:00.240 West in the 19th century had followed men and were prostitutes, dance hall girls, or dependent

00:09:05.420 helpless wives accompanying their husbands. The image of women as reluctant pioneers has long 0.66

00:09:10.880 been popular and entirely accepted. In fact, little or no evidence of the contrary has been

00:09:16.180 readily available. During the duration of the Homestead Act, 1862-1934, would-be farmers claimed

00:09:23.240 hundreds of millions of acres of land in the West. As it turns out, thousands of these homesteaders

00:09:28.660 were women, a hidden force on the agricultural frontier. Women were moving west, not just as 1.00

00:09:34.900 long-suffering wives, but as single women in search of their own fortunes. The Homesteading

00:09:39.660 Act of 1862 made that possible. The Homestead Act of 1862 stated that any person who is the

00:09:46.740 head of a family or has arrived at the age of 21 years and is a citizen of the United States

00:09:52.660 or who shall have filled his declaration of intention to become such as required by the

00:09:57.560 naturalization laws of the United States was entitled to claim up to 160 acres of surveyed

00:10:03.320 government land. Claimants were required to live on and improve their plot by cultivating the land.

00:10:09.660 Any person, not any man, that's the key here. Now, of course, the person making the claim had to be

00:10:16.080 their head of household, meaning this excluded married women, but single women and widows were

00:10:21.140 legally eligible to make these claims and make them they did. Make no mistake, Congress didn't

00:10:26.820 do this because they had suddenly decided that women were people too. To quote Hannah Hoxgaard's

00:10:31.980 article, Including Unmarried Women in the Homestead Act of 1862, where she writes, 1.00

00:10:37.120 Most congressional members who supported including unmarried women did so because women were a

00:10:41.720 necessary part of empire building. Women were expected to marry, bear children, and engage in 1.00

00:10:47.140 building permanent communities. The most common argument for allowing unmarried women to claim 0.99

00:10:52.080 homesteads was because these women were viewed as potential wives and mothers. In 1852, Representative 0.56

00:10:57.860 Joseph Cable argued for including maidens who shall become wedded once on the frontier. In 1854,

00:11:04.780 Senator William Dawson also explicitly framed the issue as one of procreation. He argued for giving

00:11:10.280 land to every girl in order to increase population by reproduction. In fact, some of the supporters 0.84

00:11:16.580 of allowing women to claim land under the Homestead Act did so believing that women would actually be

00:11:21.820 incapable of successful homesteading. But hey, once the ladies were out west, they would need 1.00

00:11:27.000 husbands. And once they realized how foolish their dreams of homesteading independently were, 1.00

00:11:32.120 they'd probably just get married and settle down to churn out American babies to populate the 0.98

00:11:36.260 frontier. Right? Right? Actually, it turned out that women were kind of better at homesteading 1.00

00:11:43.220 than Congress thought. Possibly better than men, in fact. It's estimated that between 11% and 20% 0.90

00:11:49.280 of homesteaders in nebraska kansas colorado wyoming montana north and south dakota utah and

00:11:55.560 idaho were single women and the rate of gaining title or proving their claim was much higher among

00:12:01.800 women than it was for men who's shocked not me returning to patterson black's article her study

00:12:08.680 of government records found that an average of 11.9 percent of the sample of homestead entrants

00:12:13.760 that she studied were women, and that of those who filed homestead entry, 37 percent of men

00:12:19.400 succeeded in making a final claim to their land, while 42.4 percent of the women succeeded in the

00:12:25.420 same. The majority of homesteading women were young, single, and interested in adventure and

00:12:30.160 the possibility of economic gain, and in search of this they went west, and they left behind

00:12:34.620 documentation, not just of the legal claims they made on property, though there are many of those

00:12:39.560 in the archives as well, but their own recollection of their reasons for homesteading. Florence Blake

00:12:45.220 Smith, a Chicago bookkeeper, wrote that she learned about homesteading from a friend just before he set

00:12:50.120 out for Wyoming. Her response to this was, if he could do it, I could too. Lucy Goldthorpe told how

00:12:56.440 she got caught up in the excitement of the times. Even if you hadn't inherited a bit of restlessness

00:13:01.200 and a pioneering spirit, it would have been difficult to ward off the excitement of the boom.

00:13:06.240 Nellie Burgess, a 31-year-old from Chicago, said that she was persuaded by the call of the outdoors

00:13:11.280 to give up her reporter's job and file a claim in Idaho near the Snake River.

00:13:16.180 Pauline Shoemaker remarked,

00:13:17.880 I've done everything else. I might as well try homesteading. 0.95

00:13:21.700 Louise Carlson was looking for a good investment.

00:13:24.120 When in 1908 I heard about the homestead land one could get, I thought, here's my chance. 0.97

00:13:29.120 Helen Coburn dropped out of college to homestead in Wyoming with a female friend. 0.52

00:13:33.420 They filed on adjoining land and shared a shack that straddled their property line. 0.97

00:13:38.480 Helen was Worland's first schoolteacher until Ashby Howell, owner of the town's general store, courted and wed her. 0.97

00:13:44.920 But many women who homesteaded had no interest in marriage.

00:13:48.160 Alice Newberry wrote to her mother that marriage seemed unattractive because cooking three meals a day, 365 days a year for the term of my natural life for a man is more than I can face.

00:13:59.720 Another South Dakota homesteader told a Collier's reporter that her life had seemed empty when she lived in a spacious home.

00:14:05.740 Now I have my 10 by 12 house, my yellow land, and my freedom, and I think that life contains everything. 0.54

00:14:12.780 But it wasn't just young women who were staking their claims. 0.55

00:14:15.680 Many widows, some with children and some without, came West as well.

00:14:19.300 Daniel Freeman has long been hailed in history and written about as the first homesteader to make a claim in Nebraska Territory in 1863.

00:14:27.520 January 1st, the first day the claim office was open.

00:14:31.420 150 years later, some enterprising scholar found the records of Mary Meyer,

00:14:36.240 the first female homesteader in Nebraska, who filed her claim only days after Freeman. 0.87

00:14:42.000 And Mary apparently kicked ass at being a homesteader. 0.99

00:14:45.280 Mary Meyer was a widow, which allowed her to be the head of household on her claim, 0.98

00:14:48.840 and she never remarried.

00:14:50.600 Instead, she successfully proved up her claim in the required five years,

00:14:54.260 and documents show that she had a large 16 by 26 foot house, fruit trees, grape vines, a well,

00:15:00.740 a chicken coop, a corn crib, a corral and livestock, and 35 cultivated acres. One of her documents

00:15:07.260 that verified her homestead improvements was signed by a witness, Daniel Freeman. Their claims

00:15:12.900 were right next to each other. Another widow was Montana's first female homesteader, Gwendolyn

00:15:18.220 Evans, who immigrated from Wales to the United States in 1868 and filed her claim in 1870 on

00:15:24.240 land that would later become the town of Opportunity, Montana. She proved up her claim in

00:15:28.960 1872 and would become one of the territory's first postmistresses. She lived on her homestead

00:15:34.600 until the day she died in 1892. Martha Stoker Norby became a homesteader by the invitation of

00:15:40.840 her brother George. George informed Martha of a trip he was about to take to Pierre, South Dakota 0.96

00:15:45.680 with a group of friends. They planned to look at homestead land with the intention of filing claims.

00:15:50.760 George's letter took Martha by surprise when it invited her to become one of the party.

00:15:55.680 Initially, Martha thought the idea rather interesting, but after giving it more thought,

00:16:00.180 she concluded, what a thrill it would be to own 160 acres of land I had acquired by my own efforts.

00:16:06.920 She would write a memoir in which it becomes clear that she was one of the single women who,

00:16:10.720 unlike her brother, would go on to successfully prove up her claim.

00:16:14.900 At the end of two years, Brother George decided to give up his claim,

00:16:17.960 but I went out in the spring of 1906 to live all by myself. When I started living there,

00:16:22.940 there weren't any single women on claims near there, but single men and women came fast that

00:16:27.700 spring, also married couples. People were curious about me living alone, and the boys called me

00:16:33.000 the freak. My favorite bit from her memoir is this. One morning, I took my cot outside,

00:16:38.840 thought I'd sit there and write to my parents. I got sleepy and laid down and slept. When I awoke,

00:16:44.100 there was a big rattler coiled up on top of the bank of dirt thrown up against the shack,

00:16:48.240 rattling like fury, about 10 or 12 feet away. I was frightened, got up and went outside and loaded

00:16:53.760 my rifle. I took aim and fired, hit it in the middle and how it rattled and hissed. I waited

00:16:59.260 a little while until I was calm and quit shaking and then fired again and blew its head to bits. 0.99

00:17:04.360 I took the hoe and chopped the rattles off. There were nine. I still have them. I never slept 0.97

00:17:09.420 outdoors again after that. In truth, the Homestead Act was not the first act to allow women some 0.84

00:17:15.000 modicum of property rights. The 1849 California Constitution provided that all property, both real

00:17:21.120 and personal, of the wife owned or claimed by her before marriage and that acquired afterwards by

00:17:26.440 gift, device, or descent would remain her separate property, which was already a pretty hefty shift

00:17:32.400 in favor of women's rights. This language in the California Constitution reflected the language of 0.74

00:17:37.540 the Texas Constitution, which had been heavily influenced by Spanish-based legal systems,

00:17:42.380 which I believe I've mentioned in previous episodes, had always tended towards a certain

00:17:46.840 level of fiscal and property rights for women, unlike the English common law, which influenced 0.99

00:17:51.520 so much of the early northern states. Not everyone was pleased by California's decision.

00:17:57.220 One delegate warned against giving women property rights based on what he'd seen living in France.

00:18:02.540 I have lived some years in countries where the civil law prevails and where a separate right

00:18:06.940 of property is given to the wife. If there is any country in the world which presents the spectacle 0.95

00:18:11.540 of domestic disunion more than another, it is France. There, the husband and wife are partners

00:18:16.560 in business, raising the wife from head clerk to partner. The very principle is contrary to nature 0.83

00:18:22.140 and contrary to the married state. Nice. We don't care. Not that supporters of giving women property 0.99

00:18:29.000 rights were complimentary to women, either. We are told, Mr. Chairman, that a woman is a frail being, 0.96

00:18:35.040 that she is formed by nature to obey and ought to be protected by her husband who is her natural

00:18:39.380 protector that is true sir but is there anything in all this to impair her right of property which

00:18:44.940 she possessed previous to entering into the marriage contract i contend not thanks i guess

00:18:52.080 and that's not to mention the one dude who basically said there aren't enough women here

00:18:56.280 so i can't find a wife and we need to convince women to move here so i can get laid it's not 1.00

00:19:00.740 the most egalitarian reason in the world to give women property rights but sometimes we have to 1.00

00:19:04.860 take what we can get. The West offered a new opportunity to women, regardless of why the men 1.00

00:19:10.200 reluctantly extended that opportunity, and women took full advantage of it. Under the Morrill Act 0.95

00:19:16.080 of 1862, for instance, it became possible for states to establish public colleges funded by

00:19:21.160 the development or sale of associated federal land grants. Many states and territories in the West

00:19:26.600 began to establish land-grant colleges, which specialized in practical pursuits like agriculture.

00:19:32.440 Land-grant colleges like Oregon State, Utah State, and the University of Nebraska

00:19:36.800 would become some of the very first public schools in the world to promote co-education of both men and women.

00:19:43.200 By 1872, the American West boasted 67 of the nation's 97 co-ed schools.

00:19:50.000 It was the women of the Wyoming Territory who would be the first to gain the right to vote,

00:19:53.760 and prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment, 0.71

00:19:56.320 many of the states that already offered women the right to vote were found in the West. 0.96

00:20:01.000 The West gave us the first woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, 0.97

00:20:04.660 Jeanette Rankin from Montana,

00:20:06.460 the first female governors, Nellie Taylor Ross of Wyoming and Miriam Ferguson of Texas,

00:20:11.860 and the first woman mayor of a major city, Seattle's Bertha Knight Landis. 0.98

00:20:16.960 Homesetting women created an atmosphere where ideas about women's rights could flourish. 0.91

00:20:21.100 For all the wrongs of westward expansion, at least something good came of it. 0.99

00:20:25.660 Though, looking at America today, I have to wonder how much we've really progressed since then.

00:20:30.080 After all, most politicians still think of women as just baby-making factories,

00:20:34.080 so not much has changed in America.

00:20:37.040 I guess I'll have to take a page from the memoir of Martha Stoker Norby

00:20:39.940 and keep a loaded rifle around.

00:20:41.980 Just in case.

00:20:43.040 You know, for rattlesnakes, that's all. 0.96

00:20:54.480 Thank you for tuning in once more to hear me bitch about history.

00:20:57.680 I've had two proposals to present research at conferences next year accepted.

00:21:02.060 I'm very excited about it.

00:21:03.540 If you're interested in helping me fund my trips to these conferences in March and April,

00:21:07.440 there's a link on the Bitchy History sub-stack to a fundraiser I'm running.

00:21:11.000 I have to say a huge thank you to the first listener to donate,

00:21:13.840 which happens to be my dear friend Dr. Stormer from Johns Hopkins,

00:21:17.280 who has been a huge supporter of my work and research.

00:21:20.080 He's an absolute star.

00:21:21.760 Today is the last day of the semester, and I'm almost entirely caught up on grading as well,

00:21:26.180 which is spectacular and almost never happens.

00:21:29.480 I'll be spending much of my winter break

00:21:31.400 prepping for a new course for next semester,

00:21:33.800 American History 1945 to Present,

00:21:36.120 which makes me all the happier that I did this topic now

00:21:38.940 as I foresee more 20th century history

00:21:41.200 featuring on the podcast for the next few weeks. 1.00

00:21:43.960 See you back here on Thursday for more bitchy history. 1.00

00:21:56.180 Amen. 1.00

Bitchy History - December 14, 2023

Season 2, Episode 9： Women and the Homesteading Act of 1862

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