Review of Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life (original) (raw)
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Review of Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman\u27s Life
2004
At the end of her memoir, Moving Out, Polly Spence assesses all the little ironies of her life and concludes, [each] time everything seemed just right, each time I thought I\u27d found it all—the work, the love, and the ideal way to live—something brought change to me. Change is a central motif in her narrative, reflected in a title that underscores movement and mobility, not settlement. Spence\u27s Nebraska life provides a toehold on the slippery surface of twentieth-century culture in America
Book Review: Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman\u27s Life
2004
At the end of her memoir, Moving Out, Polly Spence assesses all the little ironies of her life and concludes, [each] time everything seemed just right, each time I thought I\u27d found it all-the work, the love, and the ideal way to live-something brought change to me. Change is a central motif in her narrative, reflected in a title that underscores movement and mobility, not settlement. Spence\u27s Nebraska life provides a toehold on the slippery surface of twentieth-century culture in America. The many changes in her life reflect the changeable decades from the 1920s to the 1970s in which many Americans moved from agrarian to urban lives
Drawn to the Land: Life Course Consequences of Frontier Women’s Settlement
Social Science History, 2013
We introduce a life course, multimethod approach to examine the living arrangements of middle-aged and older American Indian and European women living on the rugged North Dakotan settlement frontier around 1910. Our model suggests that women's later life circumstances reflect the long arm of institutional forces and their ethnicity/ nativity, which anchors resource advantages and disadvantages (access to land, rail, and markets) and confers gender socialization (norms and practices) that reproduce gendered social roles. Drawing from primary and secondary sources, we find that European and American Indian women were selectively drawn to or (re)located on frontier spaces unevenly by ethnicity/nativity via timing and place of settlement effects. Old-age living arrangements then directly reflected county of location resources and women's own adoption of family roles and gendered life events, such as parenthood and widowhood. Overall, rather than finding homogeneous settler versus colonized identities constituted by the "otherness" of each group involved, we find great diversity within and across ethnic/nativity groups. This does not preclude grievous social and ethnic inequalities.
Making Themselves at Home: Strategies of Self-Representation in Pioneer Women’s Autobiographies
2009
This dissertation explores narrative strategies of self-identity in autobiographies by six pioneering women writers, each of whom lost what has traditionally been woman’s place: her home. The accounts of emigration, expatriation, and exile by Anna Brownwell Jameson, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Ada Cambridge, Isak Dinesen, and Alyse Simpson illustrate the implications of this loss, as each woman struggled to recover a sense both of home and of grounded identity. The writings span more than a hundred years, from the 1830s to the 1950s, and tell of lives lived in locations as different as Canada, Australia, and British East Africa (now Kenya), places that variously proved to be confining and/or liberating. By narrating the ways in which identity adapts to and is transformed by a new environment, these texts provide access to the construction and alteration of the self in relation to place. This study probes this process by using the concept of place, rather than the more conventional one of time, as the dominant category of analysis. My readings are both intertextual and interdisciplinary: they rely on theorizing by sociologists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between place and identity, studies on the same subject by literary scholars, and formulations by women’s autobiography theorists. My investigation reveals, among other discoveries, that the gender-specific aspects of the process of adaptation persistently centre on the notion of homecoming and that they are articulated with reference to the figure of the mother.
Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies, 2017
In recent years, the memoir boom has left publishers searching far and wide for new material. As part of this trend and the immense demand for anything Amish, non-professional writers have seized the opportunity to make their voices heard. While there is a wealth of scholarship on the Amish, the often trauma-filled narratives of the ex-Amish have neither been widely accessible to the public, nor the subject of much academic scrutiny until recently. This article explores the memoir, its genre conventions, and current debates. Furlong's debut memoir, Why I Left the Amish (2011), is a powerful narrative about a desperate struggle for self-determination. She breaks the silence on mental illness as well as physical and sexual abuse among the Amish while also providing readers with cultural information and alternative perspectives on Amish traditions and values. At the same time, Why I Left the Amish raises a few ethnical concerns. In the second installment to her serial memoirs, Furlong explores the challenges of beginning a new life in an unfamiliar environment and coming to terms with her trauma-filled past. Bonnet Strings: An Amish Woman's Ties to Two Worlds (2014) is a more polished memoir, in which Furlong critically reflects on her first memoir, narrates her struggle to build interpersonal relationships, as well as continues to forge her own intersectional identities.