Haksgaard: Including Unmarried Women in The Homestead Act of 1862
In Including Unmarried Women in The Homestead Act of 1862, Hannah Haksgaard (University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law) presents the legal, historical context for the inclusion of unmarried women in The Homestead Act of 1862 through an in-depth analysis of statutory history beginning in 1843. While Haksgaard’s article focuses principally on the often-untold history of women homesteaders through an analysis of Congressional debates, she also addresses the fact that by exceeding Congress’s expectations, women homesteaders played a significant role in the nation’s history.
While the Act was seemingly inclusive on its face—including immigrants, people of color, and unmarried and widowed women in its qualification clause—the goal of inclusivity was to continue building the American empire through settlement and expansive population growth and migration. By unpacking Congress’s debates while drafting the Act, Haksgaard demonstrates how including unmarried women was not an accident or an effort to progress women’s rights, but rather a deliberate choice to further the goal of the empire, as Congress assumed these women would marry, raise families on their homesteads, and contribute to permanent communities.
Haksgaard rounds out her article by addressing three critical implications of including unmarried women in the Act: (1) women were willing, able, and successful at homesteading; (2) homesteading provided women with independence that planted the seeds of early suffrage; and (3) eventual marriage provided an opportunity for homesteaders to double their patent.
While Congress did not intend to promote women’s rights, the Act provided unmarried or widowed women with a political right that Congress had yet to afford women in American history. As Haksgaard states, “[t]hese women interacted directly with the federal government, having no male intermediary.” They procured one hundred and sixty acres of public land to prove up and eventually claim fee title. Haksgaard’s historical exploration of the Congressional debates surrounding the enactment of The Homestead Act of 1862 opens the narrative of landowning women in the American frontier, providing an opportunity to reclaim this historical moment from the Jeffersonian ideal of male farmers.
This digest was written by Christian D. Rush, MA, JD, a recent graduate from the University of Nebraska College of Law headed to private practice in Omaha, Nebraska. This digest was prepared as part of Professor Jessica Shoemaker's Rural Lands Seminar.
