Summary

Fraser begins this chapter by describing Laura Ingalls Wilder's response to women receiving the right to vote in 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment. She was wary of women taking men's jobs and believed that women's work at home was "the very foundation upon which everything rests" (265). While she personally endorsed women's independence and removed the phrase about obeying her husband from her wedding ceremony, she believed that such matters were personal and did not write about them in her column.

Laura began to receive letters that conveyed that her mother, who was in her 80s, was in failing health. Caroline lived in De Smet with Mary, while Carrie had married a miner named David Swanzey in 1912 and moved to the Black Hills town of Keystone. Grace Ingalls, married to a farmer named Nate Dow, lived near her mother in Manchester. While Laura...