Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life: Women in the West

Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life is the autobiography of Polly Spence (1914–98) and an intimate portrait of small-town life in the mid–twentieth century. The descendant of Irish settlers, Polly spent her first fifteen years in Franklin, a village with conservative, puritan religious values in south-central Nebraska. Although Polly's relationship with her mother was tense, she loved and admired her newspaperman father, from whom she inherited her love of learning and the English language. In 1927 her family moved to Crawford, a tough but relatively tolerant cow town in northwestern Nebraska. Polly vividly contrasts the cultural differences between Franklin's prudishness and Crawford's more liberal attitudes. Though not raised on a ranch, she came to love helping her husband feed his cattle, deliver calves, and cook for logging crews. She also found innovative ways to attract visitors to the ranch, which she turned into a thriving guest operation.
Despite her devastation following several personal hardships, Polly displayed remarkable resilience and determination in her life, and when intractable problems arose in her marriage she exercised the options of a modern woman. In Moving Out she intertwines the events that characterized her time and place—the Great Depression, the intolerance that breathed life into the Ku Klux Klan, and the end of the Old West—with the love, death, and sorrow that touched her family.