Economic Impact

Timeline

The Past

• The homestead years
• Farm structure
• Crops
• Farming techniques
• Marketing
• Public Policy
• A hard life
• Women's work

The Present

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The People

Resources

A Hard Life
The farm wife's work is never done.

The pioneer farm woman played an important role in the success of the farm. She sometimes worked in the field and milked the cows. She took care of the animals and garden along with her household work and making her family's clothing and food. Farm wives sold eggs and butter to others to supplement the family income. Some manufactured soap and candles, spun wool into yarn, knitted stockings and mittens. At threshing time the women would be up most of the night preparing food for the hungry threshing crew, making dozens of pies and loaves of bread.

Historical accounts depict the farm woman's life as one of poverty, isolation and lack of labor-saving devices. The toil of the farm wife did not decrease as farms became more mechanized. One agricultural historian said farm wives "recognized that without hard work from every family member the family and the farm might not survive."

"All suffered from such hardships, but the women endured more than the men. They suffered not only from the spectacular hazards of fire, storm, and flood, but also from the whole round of life on the prairie frontier - from living in drab, homely sod houses or log cabins with dirt floors and leaky roofs, from an endless round of pressing tasks in feeding hungry men and caring for ill children when a doctor was beyond reach, from bearing babies with only the aid of a neighbor woman, from listening to the ceaseless wind and the ceaseless talk of crops, and perhaps above all from sheer loneliness. Many times, especially in the first years, the wife and children would be left alone for days and even weeks at a time while the husband was away. He might be working on a railroad construction crew or on a bonanza farm; he might be cutting ties for a railroad or cordwood for a steamboat; or he might be making a trip to town. There were always long trips to be made with slow-moving oxen - to a river for wood, to town for lumber and supplies, to market with grain. Under such pressures many women broke down and became old and stooped before their time. Guy Divet believed that the ‘crushing burdens of the prairie frontier’ contributed to the early death of his mother….." from History of North Dakota by Elwyn Robinson, 1966.

The Letters of Effie Hanson, 1917-1923:
Farm Life In Troubled Times.
Edited by Frances M. Wold

Effie Hanson led a life all too common among the hard-working settlers of the prairie back breaking labor, grinding poverty, and the calamities of weather. The letters written by one pioneer woman give a glimpse into the life of a turn-of-the-century homesteader on the plains of Dakota.