We have an unfortunate tendency to let motherhood eclipse all aspects of a person’s identity—and then to turn around and call motherhood a faulty aspiration. Luckily there are moms like Antonia Malchik who write anyway, and implore us to remember moms like Elinore Pruitt Stewart, who ventured out onto the Wyoming frontier with her daughter:
Why is work like Thoreau’s lauded and the writings of Stewart hardly known? Compared to Thoreau, Stewart’s independence was both more progressive and more radical, even discounting the daughter she raised on the frontier. Yet it is his books that are taught in school while her existence remains obscure. Has Letters of a Woman Homesteader been relegated to forgotten history simply because Stewart was a woman, a mother like me? Will my work be blotted out for the same reasons?
