View source for 426--Week 11 Questions/Comments--Thursday

== Comments about Tuesday's Article ==

I really found it funny that the guys did not want to plant a little house garden, or even really thought about it because it was 'women's work.' It was also kind of sad that they did not think of it and were malnourished because they weren't eating a good and healthy variety of food. --Ashley Wilkins


I also thought that part was funny. The men were getting scurvy because they felt like planting gardens was a woman's job. I loved the part about the "domestic triumphs," like when the one guy finally learned how to make good pancakes. This reading gave me the impression that men did not want to do women's work because they didn't know how to do it and they felt like they would suck at it, not because it was demeaning or embarrassing.  -- Rebecca

== Chapter 3 ==
What pressures did Intermarried couples face?--Joyce

Riley listed several pressures facing intermarried couples in the West, most of which were related to the family, the community, or legislation. Some of the more specific pressures were related to religion and differences in cultural values. When each individual ascribed too very different ideas about faith, children, and even methods of communication, problems easily resulted. Yet, I believe that on some level, every couple, intermarried or otherwise, had to make concessions or discuss some issues on which they differed. I don't think one can assume that simply because two people come from the same culture or race they shared the exact same values or customs. To be sure, intermarried couples had more differences and hurdles to overcome but I think that every couple would have faced at least a few of the same pressures and challenges. --Sarah Gardner 

I agree with Sarah.  Religion was a major stress factor in interracial families, perhaps the biggest.  In a time when religion was all some people had to hold onto, sharing a relationship with someone who did not necessarily hold your religious beliefs must have been hard and started many arguments (what church is the kid going to be baptized in? what church are we going to be married in?) particularly when there are already cultural differences between interracial couples–Andrew B


What advantages did intermarried couples have?---Joyce

Many Native American and Spanish women married Anglo men for economic and social reasons.  Anglo men were more economically stable than Native American and Spanish men and the women would therefore have a higher status in society than if they were to marry someone of their own ethnic group. It was also advantageous for Anglo men to marry Native Americans and Spanish because the women knew their native language and culture and therefore was beneficial for trade. -- Kari W.

I'd have to agree with Kari.  In a much more broad characterization, people of modest income or less stood to gain the most in economic and social-class improvement through intermarriage. Riley also explains that the demand for minimal adjustment in an intermarriage was an advantage to an Irish Anglo marrying a German Anglo.  --Joe C.

== Pictures on Pages 102-111==

I was amused with picture number 18 because I thought the idea that someone would post an item like this, along with a reward for the wife's return.  It makes you wonder why she left, if he was able to offer an award their finances might not have been all that bad.  Maybe he was abusive, cruel, or something else? -- Ashley Wilkins

Like Ashley, the Reward poster is what caught my eye.  It took me a glance or two to realize it was a man in search of his wife who had run away.  As we talked about on Tuesday, life on the frontier was difficult, but I didn't realize that women would just run away.  To me, it would be the man who would give up and run away rather than face the emasculating fact that he couldn't support his family or was a wife-beater.  It makes you think about where the women would run be it home (too obvious?) or somewhere much father away and risk not surviving.  Crazy situations.  -Kelly W.  

I think these photographs really show the diversity that the previous chapters talked about, even more than the last set of pictures.  You can also see how Anglo culture was imposed on many of the other residents of the west. Particularly in the clothing that they are wearing in the images which for the most part is not their native costume. -Lacey

I posted about this on Tuesday thinking that everyone had just looked at every picture in the book.  But I really thought picture 18 was odd.  It was like a wanted poster.  Like the woman was a criminal.  “Any information leading to her recovery.”  what was he going to do with her after he recovered her? the whole situation seems odd to me.  –Andrew B

I was a bit surprised to see that there was a picture of that poster, because the author seems to talk more about how men left their wives and family, and how the wife with sufficient amount of income created a "Wanted" poster to locate her husband.  I was hoping that in the case of Walter L. Davis's missing appearance that the wife was able to deduce that the husband had probably not been kidnapped and was using that as a scapegoat to leave his family out West.  -- Joe C.

== Chapter 4 ==

I thought that is was an interesting chapter but it didn't seem to fit with the rest of the book. While the other sections seemed to rely more on the notion of cultural layering, this section didn't seem to mention differences in cultural practices except for a few mentions of differing cultural practices at the very beginning. Rather, it seem to focus more on economic influences and differences in gender in relation to rates of divorce. --Sarah Gardner

I was really struck by the first part of this chapter. Riley talks about how the idea of divorce fit really well with ideas of change, western democracy, individualism, and the pursuit of personal happiness, ideas which were all really popular in the West. This is not the first time we have seen really big social ideas shape family structure. It reminds me of how ideas from the Revolution shaped families, and how ideas of Republican motherhood shaped expectations for moms. -- Rebecca

Kind of going off of Sarah's point, I didn't really think this chapter belonged here, or at least should have tied itself in more with the rest of the book.  Riley spent a lot of time in the Introduction discussing cultural layering and then developed that point as she progressed through the other chapters discussing different practices and traditions, but this chapter seemed to focus most on one culture.  I think if Riley wanted to make cultural layering such a big focus in the book she should have elaborated on the various cultures in terms of divorce and separation as opposed to the economics of divorce and the logistics behind how it was possible for some and not others.  -Kelly W.

== Epilogue ==

I was surprised that the book ended with a petition to fix the problem of divorce in the West today.  Are the concentrations of divorce as high  there today as they were in the 19th Century?  I also understand her call to teachers.  But as a future teacher (who understands the need to influence students positively) I don't know how realistic is to have this expectation.  She writes that we need to include courtship practices and marriage customs in multicultural education.  Well, we don't teach about that for the "American"/Anglo culture.  Parents wouldn't like it.  It's too personal (with the variety of diverse family backgrounds today) and frankly beyond the scope of curriculum for our schools.  How can we teach children, during school, that divorce is wrong, when some of them might come from broken homes?  I felt the jump from the last chapter to the epilogue was a little jolting.  I don't know how we can stop the western divorce rate, but I think it's a widespread problem.  One thing for sure is that it's not a question we can solve easily.  After all though, this is America, and you can marry (almost) whoever you want, and the same goes for divorce.--Amanda


I agree with Amanda's comments. This epilogue was a little weird. Riley says that legislation is necessary that would make marriage harder to get (she mentions waiting periods and mandatory counseling). This is a strange idea to me. I don't think it is the place of the government to try to prevent failed marriages. That seems like a personal thing. I guess this gets at one of the reoccurring themes in this class: when is family a purely personal thing, and when is it a social building block that should be regulated and defined for the good of society. -- Rebecca

The epilogue appears extremely out of place and inappropriate for her work. I personally struggled throughout the book to understand her argument about divorce. Within her own work she criticized the sources available particularly census and marriage records pointing to the difficulty of identifying people’s ethnic or religious background as well as the fact that only fragments remain. The lack of this type of information made it more difficult to identify intermarriage divorce as well as divorce rates in general (ch.3). As Amanda and Rebecca said the transition to present issues of divorce was awkward and did not fit in with the rest of the book. Her conclusion unfortunately came off more like a rant than backing up her work. – Mary Beth 

== Mintz and Kellogg ==
I felt that Mintz and Kellogg kind of sensationalized the struggles that these people went to, particularly those moving out west.  I feel that if there continued to be people who made the decision to go out west the risks couldn't be as completely insurmountable as Mintz and Kellogg make them out to be. It just goes back to many of our previous statements that they overgeneralize, I guess. -Lacey

I agree with Lacey that Mintz and Kellogg often speak too broadly and generally in this section. Something that Mintz and Kellogg do not mention in their brief discussion of American families on the western trail is that, in spite of their attempts to "maintain a firm sexual division of labor," they were often unable to do so. Women often drove wagons and men had to cook when their wives were ill or unable to do so. --Sarah Gardner

This sectioned mentioned how the main thing pioneers relied on while they were traveling westward was their family.  Their family had to work together in order to survive.  While this focus is on the nuclear family, it is more about a sense of community with their family rather than the growing individualism seen in the east.  The environment a family was in determined how that family reacted to each other. -- Kari W.  

== Any other Questions/Comments about the readings from Tuesday or Thursday ==

I like this reading (Riley) because of its straightforwardness.  Question: What explains the high divorce rate in the West?  Answer: Cultural layering and changing courtship/ marriage practices due to the cultural layering.--Amanda