Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier (Women's Western Voices)

In Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier, Cynthia Culver Prescott expertly explores the shifting gender roles and ideologies that countless Anglo-American settlers struggled with in Oregons Willamette Valley between 1845 and 1900. Drawing on traditional social history sources as well as divorce records, married womens property records, period photographs, and material culture, Prescott reveals that Oregon settlers pursued a moving target of middle-class identity in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Prescott traces long-term ideological changes, arguing that favorable farming conditions enabled Oregon families to progress from accepting flexible frontier roles to participating in a national consumer culture in only one generation. As settlers children came of age, participation in this new culture of consumption and refined leisure became the marker of the middle class. Middle-class culture shifted from the first generations emphasis on genteel behavior to a newer genteel consumption.

This absorbing volume reveals the shifting boundaries of traditional womens spheres, the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, and the second generations struggle to balance their parents ideology with a changing national sense of class consciousness.