The Reality of a Woman’s Life on the Kansas Frontier
Grady Atwater
The pioneer women who helped to settle Kansas were a tough lot who worked daily to care for their families in their day-to-day lives, which involved a grinding sequence of hard, physical labor. Laundry, for instance was a chore that took all day. A woman would most likely do laundry outdoors if the weather permitted, pouring hot water heated in kettles over a fire in sinks that were hollowed out logs and doubled as scrubbing boards. Women would use chunks of soap to clean the clothes, and scrub each piece of clothing by hand on a scrubbing board that was a part of the log that served as the sink. This tiresome task would take all day, and was done
once a week.
Regardless of what work a woman on the Kansas frontier was doing, she had to prepare meals for her family. Meals were all prepared from scratch, and were prepared for the most part over an open hearth fire place, which had its own difficulties. First, as the fireplace was usually the source of heat for the small cabins and homes on the Kansas frontier, the entire family was milling about the room while women worked to prepare meals. Women cooked over a bed of hot coals, with multiple pots and pans boiling, frying and baking while she leaned over this hot assemblage to prepare meals. If a woman cooked over a wood stove, she had to contend with the
fact that the only real temperature for the stove was hot, which led to the saying “slaving over a hot stove”.
Families would dig their wells close to their houses for convenience sake, which created a problem. The well was also close to the barn, the pigsty, and the outhouse and the combined effluent from all the pollutants of the farm seeped into the well water. Women had to cook, clean and bath and care for their families with this polluted water, creating health problems
that led to much heartache for the women who settled Kansas.
Winter was a particularly trying time for the women who settled Kansas during the state’s early years. Generally cabins did not have wooden floors, so women had to contend with the fact that the chill that froze the ground outside also froze the dirt floor in their cabins. Fire places sent most of the heat up the chimney, and precious little into the cabin. Frontier women huddled with their families near the fire place, sleeping there to stay as warm as they could. However, most fireplaces were inefficient heaters, and in most cabins during winter, it was as cold inside as it was outside. Quilts were not decorative elements on the Kansas frontier; they were necessary items for survival to keep the family warm in winter.
The heroic daily struggles of women to care for their families on the Kansas frontier made a valuable contribution to the state’s founding and early years. Women helped to build strong families, and their legacy is the strong families that exist in Kansas today.
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