Out here in the West, we like our women strong and competent

Sgt. Mom writes,

I have always had the sneaking feeling that circumstances peculiar to the Western frontier significantly enabled the successful American struggle for female suffrage.

There was simply no earthly way for a woman traveling in a wagon along the Platte River, pushing a hand-cart to Salt Lake City, living in a California gold-rush tent city, or a log house on the Texas frontier to achieve the same degree of sheltered helplessness thought appropriate by the standard-bearers of High Victorian culture. It was impossible to be exclusively the angel of the home and hearth, when the hearth was a campfire on the prairie and anything from a stampeding buffalo herd, a plague of locusts or a Comanche war party could wander in. Life on the frontier was too close to a struggle for bare survival at the best of times. No place there for passengers, no room for the passive and trimly corseted lady to sit with her hands folded and abide by the standards of Boston and Eaton Place. The frontier was a hard place, the work unrelenting, but I have often wondered if some women might have found this liberation from the stifling expectations of the era quite exhilarating.

I have also wondered if the men of the West – who had quite enough on their plates already, in just surviving – didn’t find it a relief to deal with a woman who was strong and competent and could hold up her end, rather than a bundle of simpering, fluttering helplessness in crinoline.

Curiously, the very first American female law officer was a westerner. The first few licensed female doctors gravitated to the frontier west, where the relative rarity of trained medical talent made for a less picky clientele and the first state to grant women the right to vote was Wyoming … in 1869. Later, the struggle for women to gain the right to vote did not meet the fierce resistance in America as it did in Britain. Perhaps the concept did not rattle the masculine cage or arouse a backlash nearly as vicious in Cheyenne as it did in Westminster. Which is curious, since the American west is supposed to be the high holy of aggressive masculinity.