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So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America, 1865–1895 by Norton Juster, and: Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1880 by Julie Roy Jeffrey (review)
- Western American Literature
- The Western Literature Association
- Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 1980
- pp. 218-219
- 10.1353/wal.1980.0038
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
218 Western American Literature It is a continuing index of Houston’s growth as a fictionalist that he achieves universality by writing so intensely and well of a particular region. It is also important to note that Houston is one of a number of gifted contemporary writers who are expanding the vistas of western American literature (although it appears that few critics have understood this). His characters are westerners in the West, and in this novel, as in his earlier A Native Son of the Golden West (1971), at least one character has been involved in westering: Leona Doyle is a product of the so-called Dust Bowl migration to California. Houston is much concerned with what the western movement has meant and means, but he is too contemporary a writer to concern himself with traditional subjects of classic western writing. In his work western value systems are tested against today’s dilemmas. While Continental Drift is probably not “the ultimate California novel” that one reviewer suggested, it is an interesting, important work by a writer who may indeed provide that ultimate before he cashes in. GERALD HASLAM, Sonoma State University So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America, 1865-1895. By Norton Juster. (New York: Viking, 1979. 293 pages, $16.95.) Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1880. By Julie Roy Jeffrey. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979. 240 pages, index, $5.95.) “Bom an’ scrubbed, suffered and died.” That’s all you need to say, elder. Jes’ say, “born ’n worked t’ death”; That fits it — save your breath. Fortunately, not everyone has followed this advice on what should be said of women on the frontier. Although their lives were hard ones, they cannot go unnoticed if we hope to have a clear vision of our westering experience. Both Norton Juster’s So Sweet to Labor and Julie Roy Jeffrey’s Frontier Women add to our knowledge of western history by speaking of women. So Sweet to Labor destroys forever any romantic notions we might have about life on the farm. Focusing on “woman’s experience,” it juxtaposes the stereotypes — warm hearths, sweet-smelling kitchens, solace, and sacrifice — with the realities. A farm wife had “a life tied to house and children, lacking in outside contacts. . . , [full of] endless unacknowledged work, [with] little relief from relentless triviality.” Not coincidentally, farm wives made up a high percentage of the number of women in lunatic asylums. Juster wrote Labor for two reasons. The first was to capture the real texture of rural existence. By using letters, poems, recipes, pictures, and Reviews 219 articles of the time and commenting upon them, Juster creates a detailed and lively picture of farmlife. There is a “simple and effective cure for those who may have accidently swallowed a wasp,” and advice on the uses of earwax. Recipes for such things as stove cleaner and “stewed ox palates” give one a feeling for what rural life must have been like. Secondly, Juster found in rural women’s lives a paradigm of contemporary dissatisfactions: “we seem no longer to be participants in the decisions that affect our lives— what we eat, where we live, how we work, what we believe. This appalling condition, if perhaps new to our collective consciousness, has been historically the given condition of women’s lives.” Jeffrey’s Frontier Women is, despite its author’s claim to the contrary, essentially a history text. It augments earlier pioneer histories byadding to the miners, cattlemen, and farmers the women and children whose presence and effect have been minimized. Jeffrey’sbook examines the agricultural, the min ing, and the Mormon frontiers, focusing on the problems women faced as well as on their role in shaping the West. Census data indicate that women were more plentiful on the trail west than one might expect, and their insistence on “acceptable” behavior profoundly influenced social structures on the frontier. Crusading for temperance, for example, women replaced saloons with ice-cream parlors, which in San Francisco alone served “up to three thousand customers a day, ‘lovers and their sweethearts, and husbands and their better-halves.’” Designed for the general reader, Frontier Women is difficult for the scholar to...