O Pioneers! Still relevant in the Twentieth Century?

O Pioneers! is a classic book about the immigration of the 1800s and the quest to make a name for oneself. This included owning land, earning a living, and eventually becoming rich. It involves the Bergson’s family’s hard times and how they make things work out eventually for themselves. It also has a much deeper meaning in relation to those times and even the twentieth century. There are many aspects of the twentieth century involved with this nineteenth century book but I, like most other women writing about it, am going to focus on the feminist point of view and discuss the character of Alexandra Burgess.

At a young age, Alexandra had a mind for learning and knew the land she lived and worked on better than her younger brothers. Her father did something quite unheard of when he was sick. He told his sons that it would in fact be his only daughter, Alexandra, who would continue as the head of management for the farm. He urged them to listen to her and do as she says because she had a way of knowing, through research, what was indeed right for the farm. “Boys, I want you to keep the land together and to be guided by your sister.””Alexandra is the oldest, and she knows my wishes. She will do the best she can. If she makes mistakes, she will not make so many as I have made.”(O Pioneers! Page 16). At that current time in history, it was still a male dominated society and women hardly ever were given work outside of cleaning the house, cooking food for the family, planting gardens, and sometimes working the fields.

As Alexandra grew older throughout the book, she took on more and more conflicting ideas with
the current society. She housed an elder man, Ivar, who was thought to be crazy. She even stood up for him to her brothers Oscar and Lou when they suggested she send him to a psychiatric hospital. Women were not supposed to have many single men, or men in general for that matter, living in their homes at once. It complicated the fact even more so due to the fact that Alexandra was still a single woman. She did not get married because the love of her life, Carl, was forced to move away when his family’s farm could no longer survive during the harder years. She managed and ran the farm by herself. The accounting books were even done by her which was rare for a woman to do because it was usually the man’s job to handle the money. “While Emil and Carl were amusing themselves at the fair, Alexandra was home, busy with her account books, which had been neglected of late.”(O Pioneers! Page 84). This quote leads me to my next point which is that older woman were not generally getting married. Alexandra’s long time friend and romantic interest, Carl, comes back and it causes a commotion among her family when they realize that they are beginning to fall in love. Alexandra had been considering that marriage was the logical next step and Oscar and Lou began to pick up on that. They claimed that he was after her money and would not allow it. “Alexandra! Can’t you see he’s just a tramp and he’s after your money? He wants to be taken care of, he does.”(O Pioneers! Page 85). When Alexandra questions why she should not share and give her money to Carl, it makes them even more furious. “Didn’t all the land come out of the homestead? It was bought with money borrowed on the homestead, and Oscar and me worked ourselves to the bone paying interest on it.” (O Pioneers! Page 85). To me, it seemed like they had been greedy since they were introduced in the novel with their children at a family dinner. The fact that they had been the ones that worked the farm is true. However, one can also argue that the farm would never have prospered without Alexandra’s intuitiveness and skill with the land management. She took on new ideas such as keeping the hogs clean so they wouldn’t get sick as well as planting alfalfa which later began to have a larger profit margin. The fact that she did all of this and the brothers weren’t acknowledging it shows not only that they were greedy and wanted the land for their children, but also that they didn’t agree with a woman having so much control and power over the land. Women of her age were supposed to be cleaning the house and working in the kitchen while raising a family. Due to her wealthy status, Alexandra was able to hire other people to do those things and she was left to continue expanding and making her farm better. The fact that she wasn’t married wasn’t about to slow her down. Generally, as women grew older, they stayed with their son’s or daughter’s new families and did the same types of general housework. Lou’s wife’s mother was one example of that in the novel. She was constantly told to keep a neat appearance and to not act out of line. She basically had no free will. I think that this character was introduced to show a contrast of what Alexandra’s life could have been as a woman.

The way she portrayed Alexandra shows Willa Cather’s mindset as she was writing the pieces of this novel. The novel was published in 1913, which was a few years before most women’s rights even existed. Alexandra was written as a strong, independent woman in the generally male-dominated society of the West. She is indeed what most women of the 20th Century aspired to be socially and economically. Women of the 20th century didn’t want to be controlled by the men in their life. They wanted to be able to climb the social ladders with their own name. They wanted to make a living of equal standards to a man doing the same work. Throughout the 20th century, the women’s movement grew and those rights were given along with things such as the right to vote in 1920 when it was ratified by Congress. Gender inequalities still exist today, but we have come a long way since the 20th century and the 19th century-based world of O Pioneers!.

Works Cited:
-Cather, Willa. O Pioneers!. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003 (originally 1913).
-Barber, E. Susan. "One Hundred Years toward Suffrage: An Overview". National American Woman Suffrage Association. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/naw/nawstime.html.