Drawn to the Land: Women's Life Course Consequences of Frontier Settlement over Two North Dakotan Land Booms, 1878-1910

Abstract

We introduce a life course, multimethod approach to examine the living arrangements of middle-aged and older American Indian and European women living on the rugged North Dakotan settlement frontier around 1910. Our model suggests that women's later life circumstances reflect the long arm of institutional forces and their ethnicity/ nativity, which anchors resource advantages and disadvantages (access to land, rail, and markets) and confers gender socialization (norms and practices) that reproduce gendered social roles. Drawing from primary and secondary sources, weflnd that European and American Indian women were selectively drawn to or (re)located on frontier spaces unevenly by ethnicity/nativity via timing and place of settlement eßects. Old-age living arrangements then directly reflected county of location resources and women's own adoption of family roles and gendered life events, such as parenthood and widowhood. Overall, rather thanflnding homogeneous settler versus colonized identities constituted by the '^otherness " of each group involved, weflnd great diversity within and across ethnic/nativity groups. This does not preclude grievous social and ethnic inequalities.For nearly a century chroniclers of the nineteenth-century West detailed trans-Mississippi settlement from the perspective of men-and men as if bereft of families-even though about half of the settlers were women and children (Jeffrey 1979). Early scholarship detailed men's experiences, espe-

Women in Frontier Arkansas

“…Our gendered life course approach focuses less on the unique biographical accounting of individual women’s lives than on uncovering commonalities and differences in women’s lives as shaped by personal and social factors, life events, and historical social institutional forces (Elman et al, 2013; Hareven 1996). Both classical frontier and settler colonial paradigms are limited for this purpose.…”

“…Less visible, however, in both paradigms, are the historical Black actors who settled in mid-to-late nineteenth century Trans-Mississippi frontiers. We address this gap by fusing a racial state (James 1988; James and Redding, 2005; Jung and Kwan, 2013) to a gendered life course framework (Elman et al, 2013; Hareven 1996; Moen and Chermack, 2005) to examine Black and White women’s settlement in post-Civil War Arkansas: as a borderland, a frontier, and yet, more.…”