howsomever, for it sint, an' never kin be, wimmins spear to rite for the
papers, an' they allus make a mess on't if they try. But I've been thinkin' o'
givin' in a few o' my ideas, which I'm sure'll prove a sort o' eye opener to
these misguided sistern. I, for one'd just like to go back to the good old days
when wimmin knowed their place. ⁴¹

Juxtaposed against the rhetoric of Allen, Garside, McCormick, and
the others, and even against Lathrop's home kindergarten, old
Zacharian's ideas were "eye-opening" indeed!

Efforts of Kansas woman's rights advocates to gather support for
woman suffrage were partly successful. The state legislature placed
a suffrage referendum on the ballot for the 1894 election. In June of
that year, the People's party of Kansas drafted a platform plank sup-
porting the amendment. That action sparked a flurry of prosuffrage
activity in the Farmer's Wife. But Populist victories in the elections
of 1890 and 1892 in Kansas had been accomplished through coopera-
tion or "fusion" between Populists and Democrats, for whom
woman suffrage was anathema. When the Populists declared for
woman suffrage in 1894, the Democrats walked out of the coalition.
As a result, Kansas Republicans swept nearly every race, and the
woman suffrage amendment was rejected. With that defeat, the
Farmer's Wife ceased publication.

Nevertheless, the Farmer's Wife stands as an interesting and il-
lustrative case study of the effort of farm women to gain equal rights
in the nineteenth century. Their efforts to raise a prairie conscious-
ness represented a distinct application of consciousness-raising
strategies. Through the articles, essays, speeches, and letters pub-
lished in the Farmer's Wife, woman herself became proof of the
claims she raised. She enacted the role that was her primary aim:
personhood. She became an advocate, capable as any man. She ar-
gued for woman suffrage and woman's rights. By linking her natural
rights as a person and a citizen to the cause of Populism, she pro-
duced discourse unique to the woman's rights movement on the
prairie. The Farmer's Wife filled a gap left by the mainstream suf-
frage press. Both argued for suffrage and woman's rights. But the
Farmer's Wife adapted those arguments to the particular needs of
frontier farm women.

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