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Historians estimate that up to 18 percent of homesteaders in Montana were unmarried women. Passage of the Homestead Act of 1862 allowed any twenty-one-year-old head of household the right to homestead federal land. Single, widowed, and divorced women fit this description, and they crossed the country to file homestead claims of 160 acres. After the turn of the century, when the Enlarged Homestead Act doubled the acreage to 320, even more women took up free land in Montana. While not all succeeded, those who did proved that women were up to the task. Gwenllian Evans was Montana's first female homesteader. A widow from Wales, she emigrated to the United States in 1868. Her son, Morgan Evans, was Marcus Daly's land agent and a well-known Deer Lodge valley rancher. In 1870, Gwenllian Evans filed on land that later became the town of Opportunity; she received her patent in 1872. She was one of the territory's first post mistresses and lived on her homestead until her death in 1892.

The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 marked the beginning of Montana's homesteading boom in earnest, and brought many more single women to Montana. Women, like men, homesteaded for a variety of reasons and did not always intend to stay. Grace Binks, Ina Dana, and Margaret Majors homesteaded together in the Sumatra area in Rosebud County in 1911. The three women from Ottumwa, Iowa, along with Dana's mother, came for the adventure. They claimed land, used each other as witnesses for final proof of occupancy, and then commuted their patents by buying their properties. Dana and Binks each paid $200 for their land titles. All three women left their claims after a year. A photo album documents the pride they felt in their accomplishments on the land, details the homes they made, and the neighbors they enjoyed.

Some women homesteaded in partnership with other family members to accumulate large holdings. The Scherlie family claimed land in a desolate area in Blaine County called the Big Flat. Thirty-two-year-old Anna Scherlie filed in 1913 on land adjacent to two of her brothers' claims and three of her sisters'. At that time, women made up about one-fourth of the total homestead applicants in the four surrounding townships.

By 1916, Anna Scherlie had forty acres planted in wheat, oats, and flax. Isolation on the Big Flat led many settlers to winter elsewhere, and Scherlie was no exception. Legend has it that during the winters she went to St. Paul to work for the family of railroad magnate James J. Hill. Over the decades, Scherlie made few changes to her small, wood-frame shack, adding only a vestibule she used as a summer kitchen, storage shed, and laundry. She remained in that shack on her land until 1968.

Many homesteading women came to Montana from Canada, where single women could not claim land until the 1930s. They often filed on claims in Montana, but continued to work in Canada while they proved up. One of these independent women was teacher Laura Etta Smalley, who arrived from Edmonton, Alberta, in 1910. Smalley had a meticulous plan, and luck was with her all the way. Over the long Easter weekend, Smalley packed her bag and boarded the train for Inverness, Montana. She arrived in the middle of the night. The hotel was under construction, but the clerk rented her an unfinished room. The next morning, the land locator took her out to view available claims. Smalley found the land she wanted and took the night train to Havre to file. Because it was not safe for single women to travel alone, the locator's secretary kindly accompanied her. Smalley arrived at the Havre land office on April 1, 1910, the first day a person could file under the new Enlarged Homestead Act. She was the first in line. Within two minutes, many other landseekers were in line behind her. Smalley returned to Canada, finished out the school year, and then returned to Montana. In Havre, she bought a ready-made shack and filled it with furniture and supplies. Men then transported the shack on two wagons twenty-six miles out to her claim and dropped her off. That fall, Smalley returned to teach in Edmonton, but by the opening of the 1911-1912 school year, she had secured a teaching position in Inverness.

In 1914, Laura Smalley married Will Bangs. Smalley moved to her husband's homestead, but kept her own. And that was good thing, since Bangs lost his farm in 1926. The family, which then included four children, moved to Smalley's tiny claim shack and their home grew around it. Laura Smalley Bangs died at eighty-seven in 1973, before she could see her grandson work the land she claimed.

These and other women take their place alongside their male counterparts who came to Montana for the opportunities the land offered. Like their counterparts, not all of them succeeded. But those who stayed, and prospered with their land, like Gwenllian Evans, Anna Scherlie, and Laura Smalley Bangs, made significant contributions to Montana's agricultural history. EB

For more on rural Montana women, see these articles on ranchwoman Nannie Alderson and post-World War II home demonstration clubs.

The Scherlie Homestead is featured on the WHM Places page!
Sources
Bangs Farm, Centennial Farm and Ranch Program. Montana History Wiki at http://montanahistorywiki.pbworks.com/w/page/40438395/Bangs%20Farm.

Baumler. Ellen. "Celestia Alice Earp." In Ellen Baumler, Beyond Spirit Tailings: Montana's Mysteries, Ghosts and Haunted Places, 65-68. Helena: Montana Historical Society, 2005.

Carter, Sarah. Montana Women Homesteaders: A Field of One's Own. Helena: Farcountry Press, 2009.

Cederburg, Leon, and Nellie Cederburg. Anna Scherlie Homestead Shack, National Register of Historic Places Nomination, Montana State Historic Preservation Office, Helena.

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Historians estimate that up to 18 percent of homesteaders in Montana were unmarried women. Passage of the Homestead Act of 1862 allowed any twenty-one-year-old head of household the right to homestead federal land. Single, widowed, and divorced women fit this description, and they crossed the country to file homestead claims of 160 acres.

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The main page of this website features over 100 articles on Montana women, from activists and artists to pilots and politicians. The majority of these essays have now been pulled together into a 336-page book, Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women's Stories, published by the Montana Historical Society Press in April 2016.

You can order your copy today from the Montana Historical Society Museum Store or your favorite local or online store.

Though this site is no longer being updated, the essays will also remain available here for those who prefer online reading. You can also use the tabs at the top of the page to access bibliographies (current through 2014); over 130 articles published in Montana The Magazine of Western History; and to find educator resources, information on selected historic places, and resources specifically related to the suffrage campaign.

In 2009, the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) honored Minnie Eder Two Shoes of Fort Peck with an award for journalistic excellence. A cofounder of the association, Two Shoes was known for her journalistic integrity and her hallmark sense of humor. Two Shoes worked as writer, assistant editor, and columnist for the Wotanin Wowapi of Poplar. She served as an editor for Native Peoples; as an editor, writer, and producer for Aboriginal Voices, a Canadian magazine and radio show; and as a contributor to News from Indian Country. As a journalist, she helped reinvestigate the 1975 murder of AIM member Anna Mae Aquash. Throughout her career, Two Shoes blended humor with serious inquiry into matters affecting Indian Country.

Born Minnie Eder in Poplar in 1950, Two Shoes began her career in 1970 as a publicist for the American Indian Movement. Founded in 1968 as an advocacy organization for American Indian prisoners, AIM coordinated several highly publicized protests in the early 1970s, including the nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969-71, the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C., in 1972, and the occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973. Continue reading

| Tagged AIM, American Indian Movement, Assiniboine Sioux, Fort Peck Indian Reservation, Minnie Two Shoes, Montana, Native American Journalists Association, Women |

World War II represented a turning point for women's employment in the United States. While women, especially unmarried women, had increasingly taken jobs outside the home since the turn of the century, most worked in service and clerical positions. In the early 1940s, however, wartime production combined with labor shortages to open new opportunities for women in high-paying industrial jobs.

Many of these jobs required moving to the Pacific Coast, but Montana did have its own version of "Rosie the Riveter" laboring in the smelters of Anaconda and Great Falls. Working in production and industrial maintenance positions for the first time, these Montana Rosies broke economic and social barriers. Their gains, however, were short-lived. Considered a temporary expedient rather than a permanent workforce, women were quickly pushed out of industry after the war, and their experiences foreshadowed the conservative gender expectations that women encountered in the 1950s. Continue reading

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The main page of this website features over 100 articles on Montana women, from activists and artists to pilots and politicians. The majority of these essays have now been pulled together into a 336-page book, Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women's Stories, published by the Montana Historical Society Press in April 2016.

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The 1930s have been called a "golden age for spinsters." In the 1920s and the 1930s some women, especially college-educated women, chose to remain single. These women expected to find spiritual and emotional-perhaps sexual-fulfillment from other women. The decision to remain single was often part of a commitment to a career in social reform, academic life, or a profession.

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The Great Depression affected women and men in quite different ways. The economy of the period relied heavily on so-called "sex-typed" work, or work that employers typically assigned to one sex or the other. And the work most directly associated with males, especially manufacturing in heavy industries like steel production, faced the deepest levels of lay-offs during the Great Depression. Women primarily worked in service industries, and these jobs tended to continue during the 1930s. Clerical workers, teachers, nurses, telephone operators, and domestics largely found work. In many instances, employers lowered pay scales for women workers, or even, in the case of teachers, failed to pay their workers on time. But women's wages remained a necessary component in family survival. In many Great Depression families, women were the only breadwinners.

An important corrective to a male-centered vision of the Great Depression is to note that while men's employment rates declined during the period, women's employment rates actually rose. In 1930, approximately 10.5 million women worked outside the home. By 1940, approximately 13 million women worked for wages outside the home. Even so, women's work continued to be less than well regarded by American society. Critics, over-looking the sex-typing of most work opportunities for women, lambasted laboring women for robbing men of much-needed jobs. Even women's colleges formally charged women not to pursue careers after graduation so that their places could be filled by men.

Federal law stood consistently with this conservative position regarding women workers. Laws in effect between 1932 and 1937 made it illegal for more than one person per family to find employment within the federal civil service. Despite the protestations of Eleanor Roosevelt, the New Deal program the Civilian Conservation Corps, developed in 1933, had a formal policy against hiring women. Many New Deal job programs cast women in traditional housekeeping roles. Camps operated by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) specifically for young women taught household skills. FERA work relief projects employed women in producing such goods as canned foods, clothes, and mattresses for distribution to needy families. Women were employed as housekeeping aides to families in need of household help. The housekeeping aides project kept to traditional racial stereotypes as well as gendered ones, as most of its employees were African-American women. Other federal agencies paid women much less than men or gave preferences to male job seekers over female ones.

Women of minority groups faced particular difficulties. Employers preferred white men, and then white women, over black or Hispanic women in most instances. Relegated to domestic work and farm work through centuries of racism and misogyny in the job market, most African-American women found themselves left out of new laws passed to ensure worker safety. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, with its minimum wage and maximum hour provisions, did not apply to domestic or farm workers. Given the pressures of the economy, many women-white and black-were willing to work in domestic positions, but fewer households had the extra income to hire help. Many cities developed specific locations where prospective domestic workers would stand outside and wait for wealthier women to hire them for a day's work. Given that those seeking employment were most often black and given the low wages one would earn in such arrangements, the process and the area of town associated with it became known colloquially as a "slave market." The casual nature of the oral contract between employer and employee in this hiring system meant that many women were inadequately paid for their labors.

Women in professional careers lost gains made in earlier, more stable periods. Fewer women found positions in business in the Great Depression than in the 1920s. Losing ground in the traditional male sphere, some men also entered into jobs heretofore relegated to women. This trend occurred even in the very female bastion of teaching. The teaching profession grew slightly less female during the Great Depression; women had constituted 85 percent of teachers in 1920, but by 1940 they constituted only 78 percent.

The federal law's refusal to champion women workers occurred even with the unprecedented presence of women of considerable power in Washington, D.C. Frances Perkins became the first female member of a presidential cabinet when she assumed the post of Secretary of Labor in 1933. Mary McLeod Bethune, head of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration and acting head of Roosevelt's informal group of black advisors or "black cabinet," became the highest-ranking African-American woman in government. Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady from 1933 to 1945, fought the public policies when it came to women on several fronts and led Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency more to the political left than it would have otherwise been. The New Deal did not outwardly target women's issues. Eleanor Roosevelt did, however, provide some moral support to American women in the troubled 1930s. Her newspaper column, "My Day," in national periodicals reached an eager audience. Although Eleanor Roosevelt was the mother of five children, the first lady was nonetheless not known for her housewifery skills initially. As a young mother Roosevelt had even once hung her daughter Anna outside her bedroom window in a box with wire sides so that the child could nap in fresh air; the child's cries had significantly scared the neighbors. Yet during the Depression Eleanor Roosevelt inspired less-famous Americans with her earnest example, as when she served Franklin Roosevelt seven-cent meals in the White House.

American women found the task of homemaking increasingly challenging in the face of the sharp cuts in the family budget due to the nation's economic crisis. Women continued to supervise the feeding and clothing of their families during the period but needed increased creativity to complete these tasks. A common saying of the time explained how to stretch one's household dollar: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without." Although the 1920s had introduced more convenience goods into the mainstream kitchen, housewives in the Great Depression returned to money-saving techniques like canning fruits and vegetables. Women sewed more of the family's clothes. "Outwork," or performing labor for wages at home, became a popular way to add to the family income. For instance, many women opted to take in the laundry of others for a fee. Even with these creative choices, malnutrition and disease became the results of extended poverty for some families.

Relations between husbands and wives grew strained because of financial insecurity. The financial downturn disrupted the husband's traditional role as breadwinner added space for the family, leading to increasingly rancorous marriages. Tight budgets in families led to the end of simple pleasures like leisure-time activities and further added to stress. The rate of husbands deserting their families rose during the period. Couples delayed marriages or even decided not to marry at all given the financial constraints of setting up new households. Childbearing rates decreased, and more couples utilized contraception to limit family size. Extended families, including multiple generations, also decided to share housing to cut costs.

In the face of a collective mood that championed women's domestic ties and disparaged working women, the feminist ideals that had grown during earlier periods lost momentum. Already waning during the 1920s, feminist sentiments faltered further during the Great Depression due to the pressing economic concerns. Groups that had supported women's rights, including the radical National Women's Party and the educational body, the League of Women Voters (formed out of the former National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1920), remained in the political background during the 1930s. The momentum of feminism would not be rediscovered until the late 1960s. Women did, however, take part in labor's struggle to take advantage of the legal changes that made organizing workers more possible. Women become a vital part of the labor movement during the era of the Great Depression. For example, a particularly spirited group of women took part in the Women's Emergency Brigade of the United Autoworkers and helped support the lengthy sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, that brought the General Motors Company to sign a contract with the union in 1937.

Delving into women's experiences in the Great Depression period leads us to a much broader understanding of the time. While men faced major unemployment, and the disruption of typical bread-winner roles, women maintained employment or even took on new paid labor in order to support their families. While feminism as a concept was not nourished during the economically tumultuous period, women around the nation did become politically and economically active because of the pressures of the time. The societal role of women came under increasing examination during the period, out of the impetus of such factors as the increased numbers of national female leaders, and the absence of substantial places for women in new deal legislation.

See Also: GENDER ROLES AND SEXUAL RELATIONS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; MEN, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt: 1884-1933. 1992.

Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 2, The Defining Years. 1999.

Dubofsky, Melvyn and Stephen Burwood, eds. Women and Minorities during the Great Depression. 1990.

Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. 1997.

Hapke, Laura. Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s. 1995.

Melosh, Barbara. Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater. 1991.

Palmer, Phyllis. Dirt and Domesticity: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945. 1989.

Scharf, Lois. To Work and to Wed: Female Employment, Feminism, and the Great Depression. 1980.

Sternsher, Bernard and Judith Sealander, eds. Women of Valor: The Struggle against the Great Depression as Told in Their Own Life Stories. 1990.

Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience: A Concise History. 1996.

Youngs, J. William T. Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life. 1985.

Lisa Krissoff Boehm

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impact of the great depression onthe great depression affected women and men in quite different ways. the economy of the period relied heavily on so-called "sex-typed" work

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or work that employers typically assigned to one sex or the other.

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Women, Impact of the Great Depression on

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WOMEN, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ONThe Great Depression affected women and men in quite different ways. The economy of the period relied heavily on so-called "sex-typed" work, or work that employers typically assigned to one sex or the other. Source for information on Women, Impact of the Great Depression on: Encyclopedia of the Great Depression dictionary.

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User account | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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The Great Depression (1929–1939) was an economic shock that affected most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States.[1] The economic contagion began around September 1929 and led to the Wall Street stock market crash of 24 October (Black Thursday). It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century.[2]