Kathleen L. Nichols

Although many writers have advanced the idea that the
American consciousness was shaped, in part, by the frontier ex-
perience, western literature too often focuses on only half of
the story-namely, the male side of the western experience.
However, Agnes Smedley's autobiographical novel, Daughter of
Eartb ( 1929), can provide us with part of the other half of the
story-the effect of the western experience on women's lives, as
viewed by a woman who attributed her feminist attitudes to the
corrosive effects of growing up female on the disappearing
frontier at the turn-of-the-century.

The West that Smedley introduces is a Hamlin Garland
world of struggle, poverty, and oppression. In particular, Smed-
ley looks at the oppression experienced by poor women in the
West, delineating in her fictional counterpart, Marie Rogers, the
damaging effects these negative role models had upon the de-
veloping consciousness of a young frontier girl. Yet in the lives
of these doubly oppressed western women struggling to survive
economic hardship along with their men, as well as sexist exploi-
tation by the western male, Smedley also locates the values of
loyalty, courage, and dedication which would later form the
basis of her political beliefs and, during the 1930s, take her to
revolutionary China, where she became a world-famous political
activist.

Smedley's novel begins with the adult Marie Rogers "at the
end of one life and on the threshold of another." Having recent-
ly sacrificed her marriage to the exigencies of her husband's
political career, and planning to leave America forever, Marie
faces an uncertain future numbly wondering whether her new
political work "that is limitless in its scope and significance" will

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