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"A Schoolmarm All My Life" Personal Narratives from Frontier Utah JOYCE KINKEAD, EDITOR Paperback. 300 Pages. / 1-56085-083-3 / There were typically two kinds of teachers in territorial Utah: single, cloistered women of the Presbyterian mission schools and Mormon polygamist wives. Neither had exceptional educational training. Yet as they developed their own fledgling intellectual skills, they proved equal to their frontier circumstances. The restrictive environment pushed them toward liberal thinking. The primitive conditions--cedar bark and slate sometimes being substituted for paper--not only taught them to improvise but added to their determination to make real schools out of their makeshift accommodations. The community's ambivalence toward education heaped fuel on their passion, and their first-hand narratives demonstrate just how strong-willed, resourceful, and quietly subversive such pioneer educators could be.
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Joyce Kinkead, associate dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Utah State University, is the author of Literary Utah: A Bibliographic Guide and of "A Schoolmarm All My Life": Personal Narratives from Frontier Utah. She is the co-author of Collaborative Writing: Essays in Process; the four-volume Houghton-Mifflin English; A Student's Guide to Writing; Writing Centers in Context: Twelve Case Studies; and Computers, Computers, Computers! She has been a reviewer for Oxford University Press and has served on the editorial board of the National Council of Teachers of English and on the Fulbright review board.