A Woman’s Work

Life on the frontier was hard.

Life on the frontier was especially hard on women. The men spent their days working in the fields or hunting and the women spent theirs cooking, washing, taking care of the kids—and often doing so while pregnant. From the 1840 diary of Mary Walker, mother of eight children: “Got my housework done; baked six more loaves of bread; cooked a kettle of mush; put my clothes away; set my house in order—at 9 pm was delivered with another baby.”