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

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Summary: For every woman navigating life changes
Review: If you have ever had to look at your life in perspective and ask: "What about ME?" then this is the book for you. In a very matter of fact way the author reviews her life from child hood through to mature adult. She eloquently describes the typical woman of her era. But as she ages, she becomes less and less typical and more her own person. I was greatly taken with her desciptions and obvious love for the land and the people. But that alone could not hold her there. Although she is describing her own life journey, many readers will certainly identify with her along the way.

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Summary: Loneliness and triumph in a portrait of rural America
Review: Polly Spence begins her Nebraska memoir with a brief discussion of early pioneer days and "the ghastliest death of all - the death that is the leaking away of life without love or warmth or closeness to another human being." Loneliness is the one aspect of life that hasn't changed with roads and telephones and TVs. And it's what led her to leave her husband and "everything familiar" to make an urban life at age 56.

Born in a small town in 1914, Polly Spence grew up among fine people with conservative, narrow-minded values. She tells of the coming of the Ku Klux Klan and her newspaperman father's public outrage, she tells of her mother's complacency when the ladies' club blackballed a less conventional woman. In 1927 her family moved further west to cow country where ranchers were affronted by a locked door, and your private life was your own affair. "Political attitudes are conservative, personal attitudes are loose and relaxed." She describes hard times and storms, pigheadedness and kindness, friends and work and parties and the stories of old relatives. She gives one woman's perspective on the Great Depression, the aftermath of one war and the coming of another, and the changing face of a rural land.

All this and more is the backdrop and fabric of a life. In lively, reflective, anecdotal prose, Spence fleshes out her family, from her beloved father and older brother to her tempestuous relationship with her mother, her early joyous years as a rancher's wife, the coming of babies and the long, slow decline of her marriage. Spence packs a lot of life into this slim, captivating volume.