who helped to make this state; of the wise and the unwise who made and
unmade her laws--but with all my writings I have felt that there is
something omitted, something left out of the story. And that something
is the part women played in the making of Iowa.

History is largely made up of the visible deeds of man. It omits the
invisible deeds of women. What wives and mothers suffered and endured
and achieved in the seclusion of their homes did not always find its way
into the narratives. The pioneer women did as much as the pioneer men.
They ventured as far and often they hazarded more. By so much as their
bodies were weaker and their souls more sensitive, by that much they
suffered more. If the labors of men and of women differed in kind, yet
were they equal. Men's labors were sometimes done, but those of women
were unceasing. Mothers were busied with their household cares while men
dozed before the fires, or slept in their beds. And what the women
contributed to the future, was as much, or more. They were the
conservators of the traditions of the human race and the perpetuators of
the things that are in all times the holiest. If the men made the farms
and built the cities, the women made the homes and re-created the race.
And so I have thought, and I am still thinking, that anything that I may
write about my own mother may stand as a tribute to all the pioneer
women of Iowa.

In many books that have been written about pioneer life in the middle
west, it has been pictured as petty and monotonous, and as steeped in
melancholies of isolation and despair, but while it often partook of
such qualities, there was much more in it. Pioneer life had a sweetness
and a nobility of its own. It was vast in visions for those who learned
to love it, and who by that love were reconciled to its hard labors. But
it was worse than misery for those who despised their surroundings and
who quarreled with their fate. Its hardships were indeed many, and its
discouragements were multitudinous. There were dismal days in summer and
stormy ones in winter. Drizzling rains and driven snows found every leak
in the roofs and every crevice in the walls of the cabins. In a few
cramped rooms the women had to carry on the interminable work of living.
Cooking, washing and sewing and sleeping had to be done in a few rooms,
and often in only one. Broods of children had to be cared for, and there
must always be a welcome for even the stranger. But for the best of them
and for the noblest, labor was love, and love was labor. In such
surroundings and so hampered, even the golden threads of romance were
woven into the textures of life, although the romance might be of their
own thoughts and of the future. At least I like to think this was true
of the mother of whom I am writing. Over her memories of the past in
Iowa there always seemed to linger the scent of roses, of faded petals
in a beautiful jar.

The mother of whom I am writing was not born, nor was she reared, in the
West. The blood of the movers did not course in her veins. To her a home
was not something on four wheels; it was a fixed place where year after
year the same flowers bloomed like familiar faces returned, and where
year after year the same birds came to nest and sing. She belonged to
one of the oldest and proudest civilizations of Europe. She came out of
surroundings that were ages old, to live in those that were ages young.
If the new things thrilled her, the memories of the old must sometimes
have depressed her. She was often bewildered. She spoke of wandering out
into the prairies like a child lost in a strange land. They seemed so
wide and the sky stood so high over them. At night their stillness
broken by the howlings of the wolves made her think of death. And when
the winds moaned through the grasses by day their billows reminded her
of the seas she had crossed.

I never understood what she told me about such feelings and impressions
until many years afterwards when for the first time I heard Dvorak's New
World