Prairie who had settled down with their Indian wives when their term of service with the company was over.
The suffering of the crossing has been recounted over and over. The work of building homes in a wild new country where the family must depend almost entirely upon its own resources for the first hard years was bravely undergone. The woman's side of the great colonizing movement has never been greatly stressed, but in reality, at least an equal share of the subduing of the wilderness fell upon their capable shoulders. The law and order from which civilization springs on a frontier came with the silent, unassuming women with babies in their arms and little children clinging to their skirts. Government must be firmly established if women and children were to live in safety. School and churches must be maintained. The mental and moral welfare of the settlement must be attended to for the sake of the children. Women insisted on this. Women have ever been the civilizing influence.
At first there was a grim hand-to-hand struggle for food, clothing, and shelter, so the women could not give attention to the broadening of their mental horizons, but always the deepseated ambition in the hearts of the mothers was to smooth the path of their daughters, to provide for them more advantages than they had enjoyed.
The dawn of the age of machinery in the next generation brought about the gradual emancipation from the abject drudgery of the household. Spinning, weaving and soap-making were taken out of the home. The invention of the typewriter opened up undreamed-of avenues for the daughters of the family to earn a living. The seeds of ambition planted in the hearts of the daughters of sacrificing pioneer mothers bore fruit in the lives of the next two generations. They began blazing mental and spiritual frontiers.
With the entering of broader fields of labor, changes in the attitude of women toward their work took place. Agitation for equal suffrage was begun and carried on to victory in the West by a daughter of one of Oregon's earliest pioneers; Abigail Scott Duniway was a trail-blazer just as her mother had been before her. Volumes might be written about these heroic women who opened the professions, the arts and the sciences to their sisters. Dr. Owens-Adair and Dr. Mary Thompson took up the study of medicine and practiced in spite of almost unsurmountable obstacles. Mary A. Leonard demanded to be admitted to practice law at the Oregon bar and special legislation was enacted so that she might be ad-
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