Today’s Homemaker

My husband and I are both a bit obsessed with the old west and frontier times. Yesterday he read this passage aloud to me and I have been thinking about it non-stop since:

Even allowing for nostalgia, women still remembered their first frontier homes with affection and proudly recalled their accomplishments in making them more homelike. Despite the scarcity of materials, women found ways to “make do” with what they had and added little touches to brighten their homes. One girl recalled how her mother made mirrors by “taking an old black shawl and tacking it smoothly over a board” and placing a pane of “some of the presious [sic] window glass” in front of the shawl. Another woman, “longing for a change from the look of the grey sage brush,” set up a small willow branch outside her front door and “used artificial flowers I happened to have to make blooms on the little tree.” Mary Hallock Foote used her husband’s geological survey maps to decorate her cabin, much to the amusement of the other engineers who “thought it peculiarly feminine…to stick up old Sirulian and the Tertiary deposits for the sake of their pretty colors!” Other women made curtains for the windows (often of paper when cloth was unavailable), whitewashed the walls or covered them with muslin, canvas, or newspapers, braided rag carpets for the floors, and stretched clean canvas across the ceilings. As one Oklahoma woman described the homemaking process:

I had 58 yards of new rag carpet and we used that to put up around the walls on the inside of the house to make it more comfortable in the wintertime; we also sewed sheets together & tacked up to the joists as a ceiling for the house…We used dry goods boxes for a cupboard & for a bureau, and used newspapers for window curtains.

Making a new house more “homelike” was only one of the many jobs with which frontier women had to contend. Whether they lived in tents or cabins, temporary shelters, soddies, or dugouts or had fairly comfortable houses, there were still meals to be cooked, the washing to be done, clothes to be made and mended, children to be cared for, and a myriad of other chores which had to be done and done under new and unfamiliar circumstances. Housekeeping on the frontier, like housekeeping on the trail, required a good deal of ingenuity. Just as men struggled to learn new farming techniques and modified existing economic institutions to meet new conditions, women had to devise new domestic techniques to meet the challenges of frontier living. Moreover, they had to do this with few of the basic tools and conveniences to which they were accustomed.

The book is Westering Women and the Frontier Experience 1800-1915 by Sandra L. Myres (link goes to Amazon; if you buy through this link I receive a small percentage, which I will put back into the site).