Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey is an amazingly interesting book, with a few drawbacks that may or may not take away from its importance. I'll let you decide.
This book is essentially tracing the women's journey across the midwest to California and Oregon using the diaries that these women kept and left behind. Schlissel uses 96 diaries to defend her conclusions, and as one can expect that the journey wasn't entirely different for these women. There are some differences, as the circumstances of women differed--being married with children, newly wed without children, being older with children back home, etc, but the scenery doesn't change that much. This is where I find the drawback--the book is really repetitive. I understand why, but it can still be tedious. But once you overlook this, there's a lot of important information to be found. And a lot of questions that you can ask about women living on the road and those things that we women have to deal with that men will probably never understand.
Even with the repetitiveness, it's a very quick read--I think I spent 3 hours reading 150 pages before class, not sure how much time I've spent since to finish it. And it's a very visual book--you should be able to vividly picture the world that these women traveled through.
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