The
author "has gathered documents on more than 300 women to tell
the story of those who claimed land on the Great Plains in the late
19th and early20th centuries. {According to Lindgren}, modifications
of the 1862 Homestead Act and relaxed government requirements encouraged
nontraditional settlers, including single women, to claim land.
This changed policy coincided with increased immigration from Scandinavia,
Southern and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East." (Choice)
Index.
Land is often known by the names of past owners.
"Emma's Land," "Gina's quarter," and "the
Ingeborg Land" are reminders of the many women who homesteaded
across North Dakota in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Land in Her Own Name records these homesteaders' experiences as
revealed in interviews with surviving homesteaders and their families
and friends, land records, letters, and diaries. These women's fascinating
accounts tell of locating a claim, erecting a shelter, and living
on the prairie. Their ethnic backgrounds include Yankee, Scandinavian,
German, and German-Russian, as well as African-American, Jewish,
and Lebanese. Some were barely twenty-one, while others had reached
their sixties. A few lived on their land for life and "never
borrowed a cent against it"; others sold or rented the land
to start a small business or to provide money for education.
"The homesteaders represented a group of adventurous women
from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. Many of the women
in Lindgren's study were immigrants or daughters of immigrants;
a few were African American. Most combined their homesteading with
paying jobs, 'working out' as teachers, nurses, domestics, and seamstresses
to support their land. Lindgren has provided a marvelously detailed
appendix with information on the women's ethnicity, their age at
the time of the initial land transaction, their marital status,
and the location of their claim. As an added bonus, the book is
chock-full of illustrations--photographs of the homesteaders and
their 'shacks.' For students of women's history and Western history,
and for general readers as well." - Choice.
"Lindgren gives the public domain a compendium of primary material
testifying to the vigorous, independent engagement of women in frontier
settlements in North Dakota. She includes a wealth of photographs
synchronized well with her text. I severely fault Lindgren's editors
for lax demands in documentation of original sources. Often endnotes
fail to specify time/place context or to indicate whether a reference
originated in a letter, a diary, a memoir, a past interview, or
a current interview. Document repositories are often unidentified.
Such neglect flaws what could otherwise stand as a strong seminal
work in women's studies, history, and the sociology of the North
Dakota frontier." - The Journal of American History.
