Determined Homesteader's Wife

Travelers in the backcountry often reported that women and men routinely shared the heaviest manual labor. Both sexes worked together in the fields, not merely at harvest time but through the entire growing season. Women not only tended the livestock but did the slaughtering of even the largest animals. Travelers were often startled to observe delicate females knock down beef cattle with a felling ax, and then roll down their sleeves, remove their bloody aprons, tidy their hair, and invite their visitors to tea.
Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer

A Determined Homesteader can't do it alone, no matter how stubborn he may be. He needs an equally determined wife. At least in fiction, the Determined Homesteader's Wife is usually a strong-willed woman who's handy around the cabin and fields, and probably knows how to load and shoot a gun. And if she doesn't have those capabilities at the beginning of the story, she soon will have. Especially when those skills are required to protect the Determined Homesteader's Children.

The "prairie romance" subgenre of Romance Novel will often have the protagonist becoming one of these, either from the beginning of the homestead, or as a mail order bride.

Has a tendency to become the Determined Widow if the main character of the story is The Drifter or The Gunslinger.

A variation of this which may be called "determined captain's wife" existed along the Atlantic coast. The wives of America's old nautical aristocracy would have influential posts in seaports because their husbands were away at sea. Some went to sea with their husbands and became medics or de facto ships' officers. They had the same sort of determination and resilience as their Western sisters though they didn't have homesteads per se and even though at first glance they often seemed prim and delicate from their high breeding. West or East, they raised 'em tough then.

Examples of Determined Homesteader's Wife include:

Film

  • There's Nell McLaughlin of Flicka who talks some some sense into her stubborn, horse rancher husband.

Literature

  • Ma Ingalls of the Little House on the Prairie series.
    • Her daughter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, becomes this in The First Four Years and the sequel series about her own daughter.
  • Emily "Auntie Em" Gale of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz book.
  • Sarah, Plain and Tall was the mail order bride subtype.
  • Robert A. Heinlein loved the uber version of this trope for female leads in space frontier settings. The ideal frontier wife, to roughly paraphrase, "should be able to fire a gun, pilot a ship, navigate by stars in space and on planets, skin and gut animals, build cabins and solve quadratic equations in their head while raising children." See, for example, Time Enough for Love.
  • Claire Fraser becomes one of these (while retaining her status of ginormous Badass) in the later books in the Outlander series. 18th Century American wilderness? Pssh, it can be beaten. (It helps that she has all the medical expertise of a 20th century medical doctor and a good set of vaccinations.)
  • Sabra Cravat of the Edna Ferber novel Cimarron and its two subsequent film adaptations. She settles in Oklahoma with her husband during the land rush and toughs out many years on the frontier, then takes over the family newspaper business when her husband leaves her due to wanderlust. She ends up becoming an important frontier figure in her own right.
  • Marianne in Cloud of Sparrows was one of these before dying.
  • An example of the "determined captain's wife" variant: British Sea Captains in the Napoleonic Wars would have their wives with them, as the Admiral and Mrs Croft show in Persuasion.

Live-Action TV

Oral Tradition, Myths and Legends

Music

  • An old record of Alaska songs that tells of one sourdough's idea of a dream mail order bride: "If she can mush through ice and snow when its 45 below, hurry up and send me the lady... If she can pitch a tent at night, don't need matches for a light when howling winds do blow... if she's like her photo looks... hurry up and send me the lady."

Tabletop Games

Web Original


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