Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier by Joanna L. Stratton (review)

Reviews 325 seducers or mockers, clowns or conformists — are defined primarily by their actual and potential oppressors.” Some relief from oppressive stereotyping, Pettit finds, occurs in films, particularly since World War II. In fact, the various derogatory images of the Mexican American — the greaser, the unmanly male, the brown seduc­ tress — are generally less offensive on screen than in print. John Steinbeck is a case in point. Tortilla Flat, Pettit says, is guilty of “ethnically based distortions” ; the persons in Monterey, happy but poor, yet never rational or industrious, unconcerned about family ties, appear as an ethnic norm in Steinbeck’s book. In Viva Zapata!, however, we have “a monument to what Hollywood can accomplish in social biography.” Images of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film is a real contribu­ tion to scholarship and, more broadly, to an understanding ofAmerican ethni­ city. Thanks to Dennis E. Showalter, it is also a remarkable act of friendship. Arthur Pettit died of cancer in 1976. Showalter, a fellow faculty member at Colorado College, not only edited the manuscript that Pettit had nearly completed by the time of his early death but also brought it up to date, adding many references to materials appearing since 1976 — all while giving complete credit to his departed colleague. To Dennis Showalter, as well as to Arthur Pettit, students of western American literature owe real debts. WILLIAM A. BLOODWORTH, JR. East Carolina University Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier. By Joanna L. Stratton. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. 139 pages, $16.95.) Several years ago, in her grandmother’s Topeka home, Joanna Stratton found the collection of over 800 biographies of Kansas pioneer women that her great-grandmother had collected in the 1920’s when history writing was a popular pastime among Kansas women. From these stories, some auto­ biographical and others written by kin and acquaintances, the author, while a Harvard graduate student, compiled this account of Kansas frontier life. The chapters, roughly chronological, cover settlement, hardships, daily life, community life, the Civil War and women’s crusades. Selections from about 300 of the narratives are connected by historical explanations. The women’s tales provide exciting accounts of Indian kidnappings and vivid descriptions of more mundane tasks such as making lye soap and living in a crowded dugout. The stories are full of everyday details that researchers have begun to search out in the past few years, although there is little here that has not been treated more vividly and in more detail in middle western literature. 326 Western American Literature When the narratives are long enough, they provide some insight into the prevailing attitudes about popular literary style and sentimental tone in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Middle West. The work has more weaknesses than strengths, however. The appendix of all 800 accounts does not tell us where the subject lived, or when she arrived. There was evidently no attempt to corroborate these stories: the accuracy of these fifty-year-old tales is evidently assumed. The immigrant population is conspicuously missing, perhaps because the original sources were middle class “club women.” The immigrant community included is most atypical — the English gentleman’s colony of Victoria — with no mention of the Germans who followed and succeeded when the English colony failed. More serious than these omissions is the author’s lack of knowledge and sensitivity to the variations in the state. The accounts in each chapter vary widely in place and time without acknowledgment of differences that would occur. In the chapter on sod houses and dugouts, the author fails to men­ tion that these were intended to be only temporary shelters. Location and terrain should be factors in the accounts of crop failures, searching for water and resorting to buffalo chips for fuel, but the author often fails to men­ tion a location, and when she does, she seems unaware of its significance. The author’s style contributes to this lack of precise distinction in time and place. She relies on secondary sources and resorts to general descriptions. Oversimplification too often leads to inaccuracy. The patchwork nature of the work results in lack of clarity. Books designed for general readership, as...