Pioneer Mother, courtesy of KC Parks By Anne Scheck
To a group of lovely young women at a wedding shower nearly five decades ago, I must have seemed exactly like what the bride-to-be had called me – a Martian. My college chum was dropping out of the university. She had gotten a longed-for marriage proposal from her boyfriend back home who had, as they say, finally sown his wild oats. He’d stolen her heart in high school, then clinched a job in construction, and she’d departed for the campus a few hours away.
But she never seemed happy in the role of co-ed. As we walked along a path between buildings named for historic alumni on those first days of a golden autumn -- kicking up red and yellow leaves that soared like tiny kites in the Kansas wind – she confessed to me that she was homesick, very homesick. I found this hard to believe -- I felt as airborne as the leaves I was liberating skyward, onto a gusty breeze.
“I am so ready to have a home of my own,” she told me. I went quiet, so quiet. Suddenly, the rustling leaves sounded loud. “Everybody seems to understand this but you,” she finally said. “Sometimes I think you’re from Mars.”
Her fiance had recently built a house that he was going to give her as a wedding gift. And when we ooh’d and ah’d over pictures of it during her bridal shower, I must have looked quite disappointed. Someone hissed at me to “knock it off,” that this was no place for a show of envy.
But I wasn’t jealous. I was confused. How did all those messages get lost on me – messages from dressing up Barbie dolls, from seeing Disney movie princesses saved by the hero’s kiss, from viewing endless television commercials on female fulfillment so simply achieved by sparking kitchen sinks and from providing husbands with crisp white shirts free of “ring around the collar”?
After all, I hadn’t yet discovered Gloria Steinem. I’d never read Betty Friedan. I hadn’t even objected when told I had to take Home Ec in high school – all the girls did, and I would have found it absurd not to learn the basics of cooking and sewing.
The conclusion I’ve reached after all these years is that other silent, stronger forces were at play – steady but unconscious influences, a natural response to the legacy of … “the pioneer woman.” There she was, all around me in Kansas, and you didn’t have to look that hard or very far. She was a large part of the history of how my home state came to be: Out there on the prairie by a shanty made of sod, cooking in a kettle, laundering clothes with a washboard, drawing water from a well. How could so many little girls not see her?
She was in our history books and, in some ways, all around us, even in the 1950s and 1960s. She was the doctor’s nurse with all the knowledge, the special teacher with all the answers. She was the woman at the farm stand who could tell you the sweetest ear of corn because she’d grown it. She was the neighbor lady with a wrench in her hand who never needed to call a handyman when the washer went on the fritz or the car needed a new battery.
Singer JP Richardson, aka the “Big Bopper,” may have sung ceaselessly on the radio back then about the pony-tailed girl with a “wiggle in her walk, and a giggle in her talk,” but I certainly saw what made “the world go round” -- and it wasn’t someone dressed in Chantilly lace with a pretty face. Perhaps because I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, these working women were more visible to me.
Later in life, when I had professional colleagues, some told me they had to battle sexism because there was a time when women weren’t employed outside the home; I would counter that maybe they just didn’t see the females who were in the job force. Men were in charge, that’s for sure. But who sold dishware and dresses? Women. Who waited tables at the coffee shop? Women. Who let you sneak a free donut at the bakery or have a taste of cookie batter at the school cafeteria or sold you a tootsie roll at the A & P? Women, that’s who.
In one way, the curse of a childhood on a different side of the tracks can be its biggest blessing, yielding a clearer lens on life. As I grew, I began to be invited to what I call “truly suburban” homes, with high ceilings and sunken living rooms. They had crystal ash trays and shiny pastel drapes. And, almost invariably, they had sad mothers.
I wasn’t wise enough to absorb the cause of this, of course. To me it looked like ingratitude for upward mobility. But something began to seep in. There was the time I showed up to a friend’s house, and her mother was asleep in the middle of the day.
“It’s the medicine she’s on,” my teenage acquaintance explained. “It’s supposed to make her feel better about her life, but it doesn’t.” When I asked why her mother needed to feel better about her life, which seemed superior in all ways to those of parents in small houses behind the highway where I lived, my friend told me in an exasperated voice typical of adolescence: “I don’t know! She wasn’t like this. She had to work behind the counter of a drugstore and then my dad started making some more money and we moved here. It makes no sense!”
It didn’t make sense, and not just because this was taking place in a big house with two cars and a dishwasher, so unlike mine. The hardship of our Kansas past had been drummed into us, and weren’t we lucky it was so far gone?
In local cemeteries across our Kansas plain, there were signs of the tragic plight of the women who came before us: Old gravestones of mothers who lost young children to plague and whose husbands had died long before them. There were archaic photos, too -- women with a hoe in one hand and a baby in the other, looking out from bonnets in the blazing sun. Their diaries, some of which were required reading in elementary school, never seemed to reflect this misery, though. The women wrote of harvests and spring rains and of children getting “good marks” in school. Mostly what they seemed to lack was long-term melancholy.
And if I needed proof that women benefited from work, I had only to read more recent accounts in my Kansas history texts: Amelia Earhart from Atchison was born to fly; Hattie McDaniel from Wichita became the first African American to win an Academy Award; Lyda Conley, of the Wyandot tribe in Eastern Kansas, passed the bar at an impossibly young age, becoming the first female lawyer in the state.
I don’t know how much it helped me to see statues of pioneer women wherever I went in my early years, but it was a good match for the stories of dreamy kitchens, shopping-mall clothes and other promises of the non-stop satisfaction that lay beyond my house, in the far reaches of fancy suburbs.
From the state capitol in Topeka to the flint hills of Council Grove, those early pioneer women stand at so many points, cast in bronze or chiseled from limestone or carved out of wood. They are testament to the state’s motto, Ad Astra per Aspera, “to the stars, through difficulty.” That difficult trail was blazed by women whose hardship never defeated them. They came in search of a better life, and they helped to build it.
So maybe I seemed like I belonged on Mars to my more tradition-minded peers those many years ago, but I was reaching for the stars, not a planet. Even today, I’m inspired by knowing that I’m from pioneer stock, from women who moved so unflinchingly ahead and worked so hard to get there. Pioneer Women, you more than deserve your midwestern monuments.
To a group of lovely young women at a wedding shower nearly five decades ago, I must have seemed exactly like what the bride-to-be had called me – a Martian. My college chum was dropping out of the university. She had gotten a longed-for marriage proposal from her boyfriend back home who had, as they say, finally sown his wild oats. He’d stolen her heart in high school, then clinched a job in construction, and she’d departed for the campus a few hours away.
But she never seemed happy in the role of co-ed. As we walked along a path between buildings named for historic alumni on those first days of a golden autumn -- kicking up red and yellow leaves that soared like tiny kites in the Kansas wind – she confessed to me that she was homesick, very homesick. I found this hard to believe -- I felt as airborne as the leaves I was liberating skyward, onto a gusty breeze.
“I am so ready to have a home of my own,” she told me. I went quiet, so quiet. Suddenly, the rustling leaves sounded loud. “Everybody seems to understand this but you,” she finally said. “Sometimes I think you’re from Mars.”
Her fiance had recently built a house that he was going to give her as a wedding gift. And when we ooh’d and ah’d over pictures of it during her bridal shower, I must have looked quite disappointed. Someone hissed at me to “knock it off,” that this was no place for a show of envy.
But I wasn’t jealous. I was confused. How did all those messages get lost on me – messages from dressing up Barbie dolls, from seeing Disney movie princesses saved by the hero’s kiss, from viewing endless television commercials on female fulfillment so simply achieved by sparking kitchen sinks and from providing husbands with crisp white shirts free of “ring around the collar”?
After all, I hadn’t yet discovered Gloria Steinem. I’d never read Betty Friedan. I hadn’t even objected when told I had to take Home Ec in high school – all the girls did, and I would have found it absurd not to learn the basics of cooking and sewing.
The conclusion I’ve reached after all these years is that other silent, stronger forces were at play – steady but unconscious influences, a natural response to the legacy of … “the pioneer woman.” There she was, all around me in Kansas, and you didn’t have to look that hard or very far. She was a large part of the history of how my home state came to be: Out there on the prairie by a shanty made of sod, cooking in a kettle, laundering clothes with a washboard, drawing water from a well. How could so many little girls not see her?
She was in our history books and, in some ways, all around us, even in the 1950s and 1960s. She was the doctor’s nurse with all the knowledge, the special teacher with all the answers. She was the woman at the farm stand who could tell you the sweetest ear of corn because she’d grown it. She was the neighbor lady with a wrench in her hand who never needed to call a handyman when the washer went on the fritz or the car needed a new battery.
Singer JP Richardson, aka the “Big Bopper,” may have sung ceaselessly on the radio back then about the pony-tailed girl with a “wiggle in her walk, and a giggle in her talk,” but I certainly saw what made “the world go round” -- and it wasn’t someone dressed in Chantilly lace with a pretty face. Perhaps because I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, these working women were more visible to me.
Later in life, when I had professional colleagues, some told me they had to battle sexism because there was a time when women weren’t employed outside the home; I would counter that maybe they just didn’t see the females who were in the job force. Men were in charge, that’s for sure. But who sold dishware and dresses? Women. Who waited tables at the coffee shop? Women. Who let you sneak a free donut at the bakery or have a taste of cookie batter at the school cafeteria or sold you a tootsie roll at the A & P? Women, that’s who.
In one way, the curse of a childhood on a different side of the tracks can be its biggest blessing, yielding a clearer lens on life. As I grew, I began to be invited to what I call “truly suburban” homes, with high ceilings and sunken living rooms. They had crystal ash trays and shiny pastel drapes. And, almost invariably, they had sad mothers.
I wasn’t wise enough to absorb the cause of this, of course. To me it looked like ingratitude for upward mobility. But something began to seep in. There was the time I showed up to a friend’s house, and her mother was asleep in the middle of the day.
“It’s the medicine she’s on,” my teenage acquaintance explained. “It’s supposed to make her feel better about her life, but it doesn’t.” When I asked why her mother needed to feel better about her life, which seemed superior in all ways to those of parents in small houses behind the highway where I lived, my friend told me in an exasperated voice typical of adolescence: “I don’t know! She wasn’t like this. She had to work behind the counter of a drugstore and then my dad started making some more money and we moved here. It makes no sense!”
It didn’t make sense, and not just because this was taking place in a big house with two cars and a dishwasher, so unlike mine. The hardship of our Kansas past had been drummed into us, and weren’t we lucky it was so far gone?
In local cemeteries across our Kansas plain, there were signs of the tragic plight of the women who came before us: Old gravestones of mothers who lost young children to plague and whose husbands had died long before them. There were archaic photos, too -- women with a hoe in one hand and a baby in the other, looking out from bonnets in the blazing sun. Their diaries, some of which were required reading in elementary school, never seemed to reflect this misery, though. The women wrote of harvests and spring rains and of children getting “good marks” in school. Mostly what they seemed to lack was long-term melancholy.
And if I needed proof that women benefited from work, I had only to read more recent accounts in my Kansas history texts: Amelia Earhart from Atchison was born to fly; Hattie McDaniel from Wichita became the first African American to win an Academy Award; Lyda Conley, of the Wyandot tribe in Eastern Kansas, passed the bar at an impossibly young age, becoming the first female lawyer in the state.
I don’t know how much it helped me to see statues of pioneer women wherever I went in my early years, but it was a good match for the stories of dreamy kitchens, shopping-mall clothes and other promises of the non-stop satisfaction that lay beyond my house, in the far reaches of fancy suburbs.
From the state capitol in Topeka to the flint hills of Council Grove, those early pioneer women stand at so many points, cast in bronze or chiseled from limestone or carved out of wood. They are testament to the state’s motto, Ad Astra per Aspera, “to the stars, through difficulty.” That difficult trail was blazed by women whose hardship never defeated them. They came in search of a better life, and they helped to build it.
So maybe I seemed like I belonged on Mars to my more tradition-minded peers those many years ago, but I was reaching for the stars, not a planet. Even today, I’m inspired by knowing that I’m from pioneer stock, from women who moved so unflinchingly ahead and worked so hard to get there. Pioneer Women, you more than deserve your midwestern monuments.