Women Pioneers

Maria Watkins Stevenson
Image courtesy of the Historic Arkansas Museum

Women are a highly visible presence in today's work force in Arkansas, but they have always played a vital role in helping to maintain the economic viability of the family. In the nineteenth century, they cultivated kitchen gardens and tended chickens to augment the family's sustenance; they spun cloth to make the clothes the family member's wore; and they tended to the sick in the absence of physicians. Many women in frontier Arkansas transcended the roles ascribed to women and helped till the fields, doing much of the hard physical labor connected to cultivating and harvesting a crop.

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