Review of The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains.

You\u27ve seen her in a hundred books, movies, and television programs: the madonna of the prairie. But how much of the image of the frontier woman is accurate, and how much is the product of a curious alliance between Victorian ideals of womanhood and the public relations rhetoric of booster-minded Midwestern hamlets? In The Female Frontier, Glenda Riley seeks to unveil the true frontier woman of the prairies and the Great Plains; and although her book is not consistently satisfying, it does much to correct the most persistent myths of the frontier woman while pointing to areas for further research