The Role that Women Played in Frontier History

She is especially interested in the design that wo custody played in frontier history, a role that has often been overlooked by male historians studying a male-dominated society. She writes, "The conventions of the Victorian world decreed that [a muliebrity] live sedately amongst children, teacups, and servants, an dramatise to one man and his home, pleasant to look at solely no longer really necessary for the survival of the family in the brash Industrial Age" (vii).

Yet McLeRoy points out that the difficulties of subsidence what was still a raw frontier during this period demanded the efforts of soused individuals, including strong women. Her deem is an attempt to show that women were just as important as men in the job of cave in the American frontier. She uses eight examples to prove her thesis, women who "typify the energy and sagacity of the era's frontier" (vii) and who have been largely ignored by received historical accounts of the Red River region's history, yet who made epochal contributions during the latter(prenominal) part of the 19th century.

She puts forth her argument almost alone by example. In eight chapters she profiles eight lives, ranging from Lydia Starr McPherson, the first woman newspaper publisher in Texas, to Olive Ann Oatman Fairchild, whose most significant accomplishm

ent was surviving to talk publically about her ordeal as an Indian slave. These accounts are to each one chronological, sometimes beginning with the subject's ancestors and, where appropriate, concluding with some posthumous information, much(prenominal) as a fairly big history of the Kidd-Key College and conservatory after the death of founder Lucy Ann Thornton Kidd-Key.

Each chapter is followed by an extensive series of footnotes, some of which add interesting fragments of information to the subject's story, such as the note at the end of McPherson's portrait that a (female) historian, writing in 1928, "presumed that [an article signed Mrs.] L. S. [McPherson] had to be a man, since women in this period did not write for newspapers" (60).

However, in many an(prenominal) cases she gives remarkably little attention to a potentially deep source of the record that might strengthen her thesis and make her light but very readable book more engrossing. Many of the women about whom she writes kept diaries or were interviewed, often extensively or on several different occasions, yet McLeRoy seems to be reluctant to quote them at length. When she does quote her subjects at all, she provides taunt glimpses of the real women about whom she writes. One of the longest quotes in the book is from a letter by Lucy Petway Holcombe Pickens, observing that "the best of men . . . are selfish and incapable of sacrifice" (83). This excerpt allows the endorser to see Pickens as a human being, rather than the purely historical figure that many of the other
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