Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier
Pioneer Women provides a rare look at frontier life through the eyes of the pioneer women who settled the American West. Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith vividly describe the hardships such women endured journeying west and making homes and communities on the frontier. Their hopes and fears and, most of all, their courage in the face of adversity are revealed in excerpts from journals, letters, and oral histories. Illustrated with a fascinating collection of seldom-seen photographs, Pioneer Women reveals the faces as well as the voices of women who lived on the frontier.
The authors portray a wide variety of women, from those who found liberty and confidence in undertaking "men’s work" to those who felt burdened by the wind, the weather, and the struggle of frontier life.
"This 'patchwork' of women s words and pictures captures the pioneer experience memorably and elegantly. Just as a quilt is made up of many small pieces, this books is based on a multitude of individual stories and a rich range of source material. The authors stitch the pieces together skillfully and unobtrusively, presenting us with an overall picture that is both detailed and sweeping in its design. This is a book to enjoy and learn from. Like an heirloom quilt, this is a book to be treasured." --Susan Armitage, coeditor of The Women s West and Writing The Range
URSULA SMITH and LINDA PEAVY
Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith are independent scholars whose collaborative ventures began in 1978 in Bozeman, Montana. Vermonters since 1994, they've co-authored nine books--including three pictorial overviews of the lives of women and children in the American West, three works for young adult readers, and two works based on the letters of couples who were either temporarily or permanently separated when the husband went west in search of gold, land, or adventure (Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement and The Gold Rush Widows of Little Falls). They've also co-authored numerous articles and reviews for various journals and magazines.
Operating as P.S., A Partnership, the two authors have engaged in a wide variety of women's history projects designed for audiences both within and beyond academe. Known for their trademark tandem dialogue delivery style, they have served on Humanities Speakers Bureaus in Montana, Missouri, Vermont, and New Hampshire and have given hundreds of presentations and workshops on researching, writing, and dramatizing women's lives at university, K-12, and community venues across the United States and Canada. Former co-editors of the Coalition for Western Women's History Newsletter, Peavy and Smith have presented at such professional conferences as Western History Association, Pacific Northwest Historians, Northern Great Plains History Association, Women's West 2000, Film & History Association, and the Berkshire Conference on Women's History.
Peavy and Smith have also been involved in the development of screenplays, dramatic scripts, and musical theater productions, most notably Eric Funk's opera, Pamelia, for which they were co-librettists. And they've worked on documentaries such as Doris Loeser's Pamelia: History into Art and, most recently, Juster Hill Productions' two-hour Alaska Far Away (in process). Senior historical consultants for the PBS reality history mini-series, Frontier House, they joined producer Simon Shaw in writing the companion book for that series. Their work on the PBS project was featured in Making Frontier House, a half-hour Montana PBS documentary.
With the support of 2003 NEH Fellowships, they are currently working toward the completion of a book exploring the experiences of a group of Native American girls from an off-reservation government boarding school in Montana. These young women played the fledgling game of “basket ball” so well they were invited to spend the summer of 1904 in St. Louis, where, as students at the Model Indian School on the grounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, they defeated all challengers to become champions of the St. Louis World's Fair. Peavy and Smith began researching this story in 1997, working in close collaboration with descendants and tribal kin of the players. Their award-winning article on the team, “World Champions: The 1904 Girls' Basketball Team from Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School,” appeared in Montana: The Magazine of Western History (winter 2001).
Linda Peavy holds a B.A. in English from Mississippi College, an M.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and an M.F.A. in fiction writing and playwriting from Washington University in St. Louis. She served as a Montana Arts Council writer in the schools/communities and received a Montana Arts Council Fiction Fellowship. She has also received an AAUW Career Development Grant, a Graduate Teaching Award at Washington University, a Vermont Arts Council Opportunity Grant, and a Vermont Community Foundation Grant. Her fiction, poetry, and drama have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and she has held writing residencies at Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, and Hedgebrook Cottages for Women Writers.
Ursula Smith received a B.A. in history and English from Lone Mountain College (the University of San Francisco), pursued graduate work at San Francisco State University under a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and taught in the San Francisco school system. A member of the Editorial Freelancers Association, she has worked with many trade and university presses over her twenty-year editing career, most notably McGraw-Hill, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, University of Oklahoma, and MIT. With Linda Peavy she has been awarded a Redd Center for Western Studies Independent Research Award, a Smithsonian Short-Term Visitors grant, two non-fiction writing residencies at Centrum, Port Townsend, Washington, and two Paladin Awards for excellence in writing western history.
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