Chapter 9 Exercises: Women on the Frontier — Gender, Labor, and Survival in Mountain Communities

Exercise 9.1 — Primary Source Analysis: Estate Inventories

Instructions: Estate inventories — lists of property recorded after a person's death — are among the most revealing primary sources for frontier women's history. The following is a simplified representation of items commonly found in estate inventories from frontier Appalachian counties in the late eighteenth century.

Estate of John McPherson, Augusta County, Virginia, 1789 (simplified):

Questions:

1. Which items in this inventory are primarily associated with women's labor? Which are primarily associated with men's labor? Which could be used by either?

2. The loom (2 pounds) is the most expensive single item in the household after the horse (5 pounds). What does this tell you about the economic importance of textile production? Who would have operated the loom?

3. There are two spinning wheels — a small one (for flax) and a large one (for wool). What does the presence of both tell you about the range of textile production in this household?

4. The inventory lists finished goods (12 yards of linen cloth) alongside raw materials (4 pounds spun flax). What economic activities does this suggest — production for household use, production for trade, or both?

5. Write a short paragraph describing the economic role of the woman (or women) in this household, using only what the inventory evidence supports.

Exercise 9.2 — Comparing Gender Systems: Cherokee and European Settler

Instructions: Read the following paired descriptions and answer the questions below.

Description A — Cherokee Gender System (pre-contact): Cherokee society was matrilineal: clan membership and kinship were traced through the mother's line. Children belonged to their mother's clan. Married couples lived in or near the wife's family household. Women controlled the household, the agricultural land, and the food supply. Women participated in council deliberations and could hold the title of Beloved Woman, which carried political authority including the power to spare condemned captives. Divorce was initiated by either party; the woman retained the house, land, and children.

Description B — European Settler Gender System (frontier period): English common law established the doctrine of coverture: a married woman's legal identity was absorbed into her husband's. She could not own property, enter contracts, or keep her own earnings. The husband controlled the family's land, income, and legal affairs. Women could not vote, hold office, or serve on juries. Widows received a dower right (one-third of the estate for life use). Single women and widows had more legal autonomy than married women.

Questions:

1. In which system did women have greater formal economic power? Cite specific evidence.

2. In which system did women have greater formal political power? Cite specific evidence.

3. European observers of Cherokee society often described Cherokee women's status with disapproval, interpreting it as evidence of Cherokee "backwardness." What assumptions about gender roles would make women's authority appear as a sign of cultural inferiority?

4. The chapter argues that the existence of the Cherokee system in the same mountains, at the same time, "makes patriarchy visible as a system." Explain what this means. Why is the comparison important?

5. As white expansion progressed, missionaries and government agents pressured Cherokee men to adopt European-style gender roles. Why would colonial authorities care about Cherokee gender arrangements? What was at stake?

Exercise 9.3 — The Captivity Narrative as Genre

Instructions: The following are brief descriptions of three actual captivity narratives from the Appalachian frontier. For each, identify the genre conventions at work and consider what the narrative leaves out.

Narrative A: Mary Draper Ingles (1755). Captured at Draper's Meadow, transported to Ohio, escaped and walked 500 miles back to Virginia settlements. Published retellings emphasize her suffering, endurance, and the danger posed by her Indigenous captors. Her son Thomas's 13-year residence with the Shawnee and his resistance to "rescue" are typically minimized.

Narrative B: Mary Jemison (1758). Captured as a teenager in Pennsylvania, adopted by a Seneca family, married a Delaware man and later a Seneca man, had children, and chose to remain in Seneca society for the rest of her life. Her 1824 narrative, dictated to James Seaver, describes her life among the Seneca with complexity and nuance, but was published with editorial framing that emphasized her captivity rather than her choice.

Narrative C: Jenny Wiley (c. 1789). Captured in southwestern Virginia (present-day West Virginia), held for approximately eleven months, witnessed the killing of her children, and eventually escaped. Published retellings emphasize extreme suffering and Indigenous cruelty. Limited attention is paid to the frontier warfare context.

Questions:

1. All three narratives involve women taken captive by Indigenous peoples. What common genre elements do you observe across the three?

2. Mary Jemison chose to remain in Seneca society. How does this choice challenge the captivity narrative genre's core assumptions? How did the genre accommodate her choice (hint: consider the editorial framing)?

3. For each narrative, identify at least one aspect of the historical context that the genre conventions would tend to suppress or minimize.

4. If you were writing a historical account of one of these women today, what would you do differently from the genre conventions? What questions would you ask that the genre does not?

5. The captivity narrative was one of the most popular literary forms in colonial and early national America. What psychological needs might it have served for its audience? Why would readers find these stories compelling?

Exercise 9.4 — Women's Labor Audit

Instructions: Using the categories of women's work described in Chapter 9, create a labor audit for a hypothetical frontier Appalachian household. Assume a family of six (husband, wife, four children ages 2-12) on a small mountain farm in the 1790s.

Part A: List every category of women's labor described in the chapter (agriculture, home production, healthcare, childcare, food preservation, textile production, etc.). For each category, describe at least two specific tasks the woman of this household would perform and estimate the time each task required (daily, weekly, seasonal).

Part B: Now list the categories of men's labor described or implied in the chapter (land-clearing, hunting, defense, construction, etc.). Note which of these are seasonal or episodic versus year-round.

Part C: Compare the two lists. Which gender's labor was more constant (required year-round, daily attention)? Which was more episodic (intense periods followed by less-demanding periods)? What happened to the household's functioning when the man was absent for extended periods? What happened when the woman was absent?

Part D: Write a short essay (300-500 words) arguing that the standard narrative of the frontier as a male enterprise cannot survive contact with the actual evidence of labor distribution. Use your audit as evidence.

Exercise 9.5 — Herbal Knowledge Investigation

Instructions: This exercise connects Chapter 9's discussion of women's herbal knowledge to modern research.

Part A: Select three plants from the Appalachian herbal pharmacopoeia discussed in the chapter or case study (e.g., ginseng, goldenseal, black cohosh, sassafras, boneset, witch hazel, yellowroot, bloodroot). For each plant:

1. Describe the traditional Appalachian use(s) as documented in the chapter.
2. Research whether modern pharmacological studies have investigated the plant's active compounds. What have they found?
3. Assess: does the modern research tend to support, partially support, or contradict the traditional use?

Part B: Reflect on the epistemological question. The women who used these plants did not know about chemical compounds, clinical trials, or pharmacological mechanisms. They knew that certain preparations, applied in certain ways, tended to produce certain outcomes. Is that knowledge? If a remedy works consistently but the healer cannot explain why it works in biochemical terms, is the healer practicing medicine or guessing?

Part C: Many of the plants in the Appalachian pharmacopoeia were originally Cherokee medicines adopted by settler women without attribution. Research the concept of biopiracy — the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge for commercial purposes without consent or compensation. Is the modern supplement industry's use of black cohosh and ginseng an example of biopiracy? Write a 200-word argument for or against.

Exercise 9.6 — The Invisible Economy

Instructions: Chapter 9 argues that women's home production constituted a form of "import substitution" — producing locally what would otherwise have had to be purchased from distant markets. This exercise explores that argument.

Part A: Estimate the cash cost of the following items if purchased from a merchant in the late eighteenth century (use the price levels in the estate inventory from Exercise 9.1 as a rough guide):

• 20 yards of linen cloth (enough for basic clothing for a family of six for one year)
• 50 pounds of butter (one year's household consumption plus trade surplus)
• 100 pounds of soap (one year's household consumption)
• 4 blankets

Part B: Now consider that on a typical frontier farm, the annual cash income from crop sales, livestock sales, and men's wage labor might total 5-15 pounds. What percentage of the household's total consumption was women's home production substituting for market purchases?

Part C: If women's home production were counted as economic output (as modern GDP accounting would count it if it were performed by a business), how would this change our understanding of the frontier economy? Write a paragraph explaining why the exclusion of home production from economic accounting has made women's labor invisible to historians.

Exercise 9.7 — Whose Story Is Missing?

Instructions: This is a recurring exercise throughout the textbook. For Chapter 9, consider the following:

1. This chapter discusses free white women, enslaved Black women, and Cherokee women. Are there other groups of women on the Appalachian frontier whose stories are missing from this chapter? (Consider: free Black women, women of mixed Indigenous-European heritage, women from non-English-speaking settler communities.)

2. For one group you identified, speculate about what sources might survive that could tell their story. Where would you look? What obstacles would you face?

3. The chapter acknowledges that "there is no evidence that frontier women across racial lines recognized their shared experiences or formed alliances based on gender." Why not? What structural factors prevented cross-racial solidarity among women who shared many of the same labor burdens?

4. Write a 300-word reflection on the relationship between evidence and silence in women's history. When the historical record is silent about a group of people, what can we conclude? Is silence evidence of absence, or evidence of erasure?

Exercises for Chapter 9: Women on the Frontier. See the Answers to Selected Exercises appendix for guidance on selected questions.