Ah for the old west. Where men were men. And women were schoolmarms.
As familiar to us as the stereotypical gunslinger is the stereotype of the Western schoolmarm, says Joyce Kinkead.Kinkead is herself a schoolmarm, if you can stretch the definition to include an English professor at Utah State University. She says there is renewed scholarly interest in schoolmarms these days.
Modern authors like Larry McMurtry ("Lonesome Dove") and Ivan Doig ("This House of Sky") went beyond the stereotypes to explore the lives of common people. So, too, scholars around the United States are taking a new look at what life was really like in the West - for ranchers, farmers and schoolteachers.
Kinkead was recently awarded a grant from the Utah Endowment for the Humanities to continue compiling diaries of early LDS schoolteachers for an anthology she hopes to publish soon.
In doing research for the collection, Kinkead learned the fiction written about Western schoolmarms rarely corresponds with the facts. She also learned that Utah schoolteachers were different from other Western women who taught.
"They were so singular," Kinhead says. "So uncommon. And such good role models, so active in social issues."
Oh, they are like their Western counterparts in some respects. For example, most schoolmarms were nurturing, selfless and self-reliant, says Kinkead.
But Mormon women - members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - were unique in several ways, ways that Kinkead says people from other states will want to read about.
-Mormon schoolteachers were less isolated than other Western female schoolteachers. They were part of a "strong sisterhood of Mormon women," says Kinkead.
She believes the sisterhood was strong in Utah because there were more female converts to the LDS church than male converts and because of polygamy and the nature of their faith and of their cooperative methods of homesteading.
-"Unlike the Eastern schoolteachers who came West for one purpose - to teach school," Kinkead writes, "Mormon women functioned in a variety of roles.
"Mormon women on the frontier did everything from successfully storing the community wheat to overseeing ranches and farms to teaching school - often performing these tasks simultaneously."
-At least some local schoolmarms were able to teach in schools that rivaled anything in the East. Salt Lake City became "the crossroads of the West" within just a few years of its settlement.
That, says Kinkead, plus the fact that Brigham Young believed strongly in a classical education, meant that schools in the city were fairly well-supplied.
In rural Utah, schoolmarms led a more typical life.
"In Round Valley (now Scipio) . . . Ann Clark Martin - `School Ma'am Martin,' as three generations of scholars called her - each morning took two heavy bedsteads down and stood them, with the ticks, against the wall in order to make room for benches. One of her students noted that, even though Martin had eight children of her own, the school routine was not appreciably interrupted."
-Utah schoolmarms became aware of how unique they were, according to Kinkead, in the late 1800s, when Prostestant missionaries/teachers set up schools in Utah.
Presbyterian and Methodist schoolmarms were expected to quit their jobs when they married. The newcomers were shocked to see married women teaching. They were even more shocked to see Mormons dancing and producing plays; sometimes these "sinful" activities were carried on right in the schools.
-The most important difference, for Kinkead, between local schoolteachers and teachers in other Western territories was that Mormon women were much more likely to keep a diary.
Kinkead will quote from more than 20 diaries, most ofwhich she found in LDS Church archives.
She says the diaries show their authors had the ability to "find beauty even in pain and to transform rage into spiritual acceptance."
"Keeping a diary in Utah in 1847 could not have been an easy task. Paper and ink were scarce (Cox wrote on cedar bark), and just keeping warm and fed took up much of each day."
Kinkead concludes, "Because they took the time and trouble to write their lives, these women opened a door to dialogue with contemporary women and made sure that their `pens would never be silent.' "
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"THE GAPS IN WHAT we know about women in the West are beginning to be filled," says Kinkead.
For more insight into the lives of Western women, she suggests reading the following autobiographies, journals and collections of letters:
"Letters of a Woman Homesteader," by Elinore Stewart
"No Life for a Lady," by Agnes Morley Cleaveland
"Recollections of a Handcart Pioneer of 1860," by Mary Ann Hafen
"Diaries of the Westward Journey," by Lillian Schlissel
"Pioneer Voices," by Joanna Stratton
"Women of the West," by Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell