Women Traveling West

Women traveling in wagon trains expanded their roles beyond domestic duties, taking on tasks like gathering fuel, driving oxen, making bullets, and caring for the injured.

Image/Public Domain

The Oregon and California trail experience had a lasting impact on the Women's Right's Movement and helped shape the culture of the West. Women on a wagon train showcased a wider range of skills then traditionally allowed. The Suffrage Movement was impacted by the encouragement for women to move West.

In the early 1840s Americans began heading west in large numbers, many traveling in family groups. One classic study of gender and work on the overland trails argues that, with each night on the trail, women stepped further outside their traditional domestic duties; while they remained responsible for food and laundry, they also gathered buffalo chips for fuel, drove teams of oxen, made bullets, and cared for the sick and injured.

The Homestead Act, passed in 1862, allowed “any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years” to claim land for themselves. in the first 50 years of the Homestead Act, women accounted for one third of all homestead claims. The Morrill Act, also passed in 1862, pushed many states and territories in the West to establish land-grant colleges that were more accepting of female students. By 1872 the American West boasted 67 of the nation’s 97 coed schools.

In 1869, the Territory of Wyoming became the first American territory or state to grant women the right to vote—despite not having an organized suffrage movement like many places in the eastern United States. Supporters of the bill argued that women’s suffrage would entice good, stable families to move to Wyoming; in fact, the territorial secretary said that women had received the right to vote “solely for advertising purposes.”

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Tags: california national historic trail, oregon national historic trail, 19th amendment, womens suffrage, national trails, historic trails, women's history, voting rights, suffrage, oregon trail, california trail, women's history month