Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life

by Polly Spence, Karl Spence Richardson (Introduction)

Moving 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.
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.

Genres: Nonfiction

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 9, 2002

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this well-written memoir is misleading. It's less about moving out than it is about staying put and doing the best you can with what you've got. The author's moving out (leaving a marriage of 40 years) occurs in the closing chapters, after she has lived a life as wife and mother, married to a rancher in the northern Nebraska Panhandle.

Polly Spence (1914-1998) grew up in Franklin, Nebraska, the daughter of a small-town newspaper editor and of Irish immigrants. This is Willa Cather country and you can recognize the kind of shallow social world found in Cather's "One of Ours" and Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street," a place where small minded men dress up in white robes and the city fathers have to confront an insurgence of the KKK.

In her senior year, the author's family moves suddenly to western Nebraska, where she meets the man she marries - both of them just out of high school. The year, 1929, marks the beginning of a long hard-won struggle to make a go of it, both as ranchers and as a family, as she becomes the mother of three boys in quick order. Determined, strong-willed, and independent, Spence eventually faults herself for being too much like her mother - rigid in her beliefs and unyielding in her temper. Yet, given the circumstances of her life, it's hard to see how she might have lived it differently.

There are moments of sudden and terrible personal loss in her story that will leave readers stunned, even if reading between the lines you can see them coming. (I didn't.) Finally, hers is the account of a life lived with a kind of courage that confronts obstacles without flinching. The account of her later years in Los Angles is something of an epilogue to the achievements of her life raising a family in the isolated grasslands of high plains Nebraska.

Thanks to the University of Nebraska Press for seeing this find book into print. Also recommended reading: Judy Blunt's "Breaking Clean."

[Roxanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not the type of book I normally enjoy. It's definitely an autobiography rather than a memoir, and I would ordinarily read the first tale of homemade jam gone wrong and toss the whole thing into a donation pile. There was something about this story that grabbed me, though, and so I'm forced to say I liked it. This woman straddled two worlds: born before suffrage or the Depression, she lived in the realm of men being the kings of their ranches but still managed to leave her unhappy marriage in middle-age and earn her own living in the big city. She seems almost nonchalant about her life, as though she's telling you all that so she can get to the good part.