Long Vistas: Women and Families on Colorado Homesteads

Long Vistas describes an era before and after the turn of the century when women and families homesteaded the grasslands of northeastern Colorado. With Congress's passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, women as well as men were entitled to claim 160 acres of the nation's hinterlands. What the act's supporters had not anticipated, however, was the effect homesteading would have on women. For the first time, in a nation whose founders linked land with wealth and political power, large numbers of women had access to landownership and to a taste of the empowerment that it could bring.Long Vistas presents the stories of women who claimed land, and of other women who helped earn patents on land claimed by their husbands and fathers. Regardless of whose name appeared on a land claim, homesteading required the cooperation of family and neighbors. Women, men, and children worked, prayed, and played together. Mingling freely, homesteaders lowered barriers of age and gender, undermining time-honored hierarchies governing family and community life. The presence of landowning women reinforced this easy sociability by demonstrating a fuller range of options for what women and girls could do and be.Drawing on reminiscences and never-before published oral histories, personal papers, and land records, historian Katherine Harris takes a fresh, sometimes controversial, look at the impact of homesteading on gender roles and the distribution of economic power between women and men.