Perspective

Author Joanna L. Stratton stumbled upon hundreds of accounts from pioneer women in her grandmother's attic. These accounts had been collected by her great-grandmother, Lilla Day Monroe, suffragist and lawyer, who intended to make them into a book. Stratton has fulfilled the desire of her great-grandmother, then, with this volume, which intermingles history with personal accounts of life on the Kansas frontier.

Though traditional history (Civil War battles, legislative acts, etc.) find their way into Pioneer Women, Stratton is chiefly interested in the lives of those history may have forgotten, the everyday frontier family, and its day-to-day struggles. These seemingly ordinary aspects of life are Stratton's object of interest, and it is clear she wishes to make a case that the "ordinary" can be in fact "extraordinary," and may in fact tell us more about history than more traditional accounts. And particularly within this family, Stratton concentrates on...