Introduction

As Midwesterners know all too well, Americans who live in other parts of the United States frequently refer to the Midwest as "flyover country." For many travelers, the vast twelve-state region is simply a geographic impediment between themselves and their ultimate destination. An airline passenger suffering through an uncomfortable flight might even curse the Midwest's very existence: "Why does New York have to be so damned far from Denver, anyway?" Before air travel became commonplace, however, Americans both inside and outside the Midwest viewed the region very differently. Far from being a place to fly over, it was a place to come together. Historically, the Midwest was the nation's crossroads, a place where people of diverse backgrounds were on the move and crossing paths. First traveling on the region's waterways and trails and later its railroads and highways, Indigenous fur traders, White farm families, enslaved Blacks and their descendants were among the varied groups who spent time in the Midwest. Even those who merely passed through the region without becoming permanent residents developed a very different perspective from today's air passenger. Their on-the-ground interactions with persons from different locations and cultural backgrounds had an impact on the ways travelers and residents in the Midwest thought about themselves, their communities, and their relationships with the midwestern landscape. As the articles in this special issue of the Middle West Review demonstrate, women were particularly affected by their experiences at the nation's crossroads.

Building on important studies that have emerged in the past two decades, the articles in this issue center on the experiences of women of diverse backgrounds as they lived, worked, and traveled in the Midwest. In addition to issues of cultural diversity and geographic mobility, a third major theme surfaces in these articles: political engagement. The politics of historical memory, women's educational and economic rights, women's citizenship, and racial justice receive significant examination in this issue.¹

As Cynthia C. Prescott notes in the issue's opening article, Midwesterners initially failed to commemorate the diversity of their region even as they celebrated its identity as the nation's crossroads. In the late nineteenth century, when Midwesterners began to tell their history in the form of public sculpture, they remembered it almost exclusively as the story of White families crossing the region on their way to the Far West or perhaps settling to farm in the Midwest itself. Sculptures reflected the era's manifest destiny ideology as well as its White gender role prescriptions. Sculptors typically portrayed male figures as active conquerors of the frontier and women as docile helpmates and mothers. Examining sculptural tributes to midwestern history throughout all corners of the region, Prescott records the greater accuracy of commemorative statues in the twenty-first century. In contrast to public artwork of an earlier period, today's monuments are more likely to portray women of color—particularly Native American women—and to represent midwestern women as active participants in the history of their region.

Following Prescott's overview of the midwestern landscape and its sculptural representations of women's history, Jenny Barker-Devine takes readers to a particular place and time in midwestern history—Jacksonville, Illinois, in the 1830s and 1840s. Here, middle-class Northeasterners promoted women's education as a means for controlling the chaos of frontier life. Like Prescott, Barker-Devine focuses her essay on the themes of movement and transition. She notes that White women from New England and the Mid-Atlantic initially sought to maintain their Yankee identities and values when they relocated to the former Northwest Territory. Over time, however, their educational mission in the Illinois wilderness caused them to adopt a distinctive new guise. They increasingly defined themselves as midwestern women.

In her contribution to the special issue, Debra A. Reid reminds readers that midwestern women's history took place in cities as well as on the region's open prairies and plains and in its small towns. Reid examines the experiences of women who sold food at the central market in nineteenth-century Detroit. With its strategic location on the Detroit River and ready access to...