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West Women During The Time Essay

Cather's snapshot of life in the west, and in Nebraska, was colored by her prejudices and experiences as someone who understood the experiences of white women. Most of the issues that arise in Alexandra's life were universal human experiences such as loss and death. The romance between her brother and a married woman show that both men and women suffer from restricted gender roles and norms. There were ways that marriage was inadequate and inappropriate for the needs of men and women, and so, gender was not the only factor restricting people's lives in the west. The lawlessness that reigned in the west was both beneficial and detrimental to people's lives, as it allowed them to be free of intrusions on their lives by foreign officials and eliminated bureaucracy. At the same time, it meant people could take the law into their own lands, and not see justice.

There were many merits of...

Women in the West were strong, courageous, and independent a lot of the time due to their being freed from the fetters of marriages. Social institutions like marriage were not as relev ant when the labor of both men and women was required in building the frontier and tending the lands so that they could provide subsistence agriculture. The labor of women was under-represented, under-valued, and undocumented for the most part, except for many fictional accounts like Willa Cather's novel. In spite of this, or even because of it, this showcases the way that women's roles in society was constrained more by their socio-economic class than their gender, and more by their race or ethnicity than their gender too. Women earned the right to vote in the western states, because those states were more liberal in their attitudes toward half the human population.

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