Judy Blunt’s Breaking Clean begins with the neighbour boy squatting over a bottle of whiskey with her Father on the front porch while they negotiate for her hand in marriage. With land and cattle at his disposal he is accounted a good catch despite being 12 years her senior. Her side of the bargain would be to birth and rear his sons, keep house, tend the home garden, and attend to his needs. The fact that she might have had other aspirations like a college education did not enter the negotiations. When the marriage started falling apart 12 years later the husband when asked how often he’d told his wife he loved her stated on the day he married her, he never took it back. Clearly the two had differing expectations. It is instructive that all three of her children chose to remain with their Mother.
What follows is an all-too-familiar story of her Montana Prairie Homesteading childhood. Large families in cramped shacks with outdoor plumbing, one-room schools, howling winter blizzards, spring prairie grass fires, mud in spring and fall, summer droughts, hoppers and the privations of mind, body, and spirit. Told from the perspective of a woman capable of breaking a horse, riding the range, and slinging bales of hay with the best of them she balks at the inequity of being consigned to the sole preserve of women’s work.
A world where women’s names occupied equal status on ranch deeds but all important decisions were made by husbands. The lesson is learned early when younger brothers get to do men’s work and older sisters women’s. Biology plays girls an ugly trick and this one spends an entire year attempting to conceal her budding breasts even attempting to lance them like the cow’s cankers she helped her father treat.
Once the book leaves the ranch and descends into feminist manifesto it loses some of its appeal. Barely into her teens the author learns that no matter what her contribution to the family farm it will be her brothers who get to take it over, daughters have no rights. When, at 18, she marries a man nearly twice her age she discovers that although the farm and ranch house have been turned over to her husband, her father-in-law still expects to manage the day-to-day operation of the family business. Her contribution is the management of the home, the house garden, the children, and the preparation of daily meals for her family, the hired hands who live in the bunkhouse, and even her father-in-law. She is expected to keep her nose out of the running of the farm--the hired hands do not take orders from her, and she cannot write cheques on the family business account. Worse, her mother-in-law arrives daily to rearrange the dishes and pots and pans in her cupboards and oversees her grocery bills with disdain.
Dealing with a critically ill child and managing a home when roads can be impassable for months at a time due to mud and snow drifts further isolates a woman beyond the reality of living 50 miles from the nearest small town and 30 from the nearest community, almost as far from the nearest neighbour. If you had any notions of the romantic nature of homesteading on the prairies this book will take the micky out of them.
What follows is an all-too-familiar story of her Montana Prairie Homesteading childhood. Large families in cramped shacks with outdoor plumbing, one-room schools, howling winter blizzards, spring prairie grass fires, mud in spring and fall, summer droughts, hoppers and the privations of mind, body, and spirit. Told from the perspective of a woman capable of breaking a horse, riding the range, and slinging bales of hay with the best of them she balks at the inequity of being consigned to the sole preserve of women’s work.
A world where women’s names occupied equal status on ranch deeds but all important decisions were made by husbands. The lesson is learned early when younger brothers get to do men’s work and older sisters women’s. Biology plays girls an ugly trick and this one spends an entire year attempting to conceal her budding breasts even attempting to lance them like the cow’s cankers she helped her father treat.
Once the book leaves the ranch and descends into feminist manifesto it loses some of its appeal. Barely into her teens the author learns that no matter what her contribution to the family farm it will be her brothers who get to take it over, daughters have no rights. When, at 18, she marries a man nearly twice her age she discovers that although the farm and ranch house have been turned over to her husband, her father-in-law still expects to manage the day-to-day operation of the family business. Her contribution is the management of the home, the house garden, the children, and the preparation of daily meals for her family, the hired hands who live in the bunkhouse, and even her father-in-law. She is expected to keep her nose out of the running of the farm--the hired hands do not take orders from her, and she cannot write cheques on the family business account. Worse, her mother-in-law arrives daily to rearrange the dishes and pots and pans in her cupboards and oversees her grocery bills with disdain.
Dealing with a critically ill child and managing a home when roads can be impassable for months at a time due to mud and snow drifts further isolates a woman beyond the reality of living 50 miles from the nearest small town and 30 from the nearest community, almost as far from the nearest neighbour. If you had any notions of the romantic nature of homesteading on the prairies this book will take the micky out of them.
