Freedom in the West?

The early women writers of the West, like their male counterparts, grappled with the question of how to represent the frontier—was the West a blissful garden or a barren, crude wasteland? Did the West represent new freedom and new opportunities or hardscrabble labor and stifling isolation? Life on the Prairies. Many Midwestern women writers, including Catherine Stewart, Rebecca Burlend, and Catherine Soule, found the prairies as beautiful and joyful as they had hoped. In 1843 Stewart published New Homes in the West, describing her travels and the "fine farms, with substantial houses and barns, good fences" she found there. For Stewart the West had "all the indications of comfortable living." Burlend, an immigrant to Illinois, recorded her impressions of life there in her True Picture of Emigration, or Fourteen Years in the Interior of North America...