Tammy Stone

Assistant Professor

Department of Anthropology

University of Colorado at Denver

Denver, CO 80217

tstone@carbon.cudenver.edu.

Within any society, views of rights, obligations, and behavioral expectations associated with gender roles vary to some degree within different segments of the society. While ideal gender roles of the Victorian Era in America are extensively discussed in the literature of the late 1800's, and are frequently thought of today as having been uniformly accepted, many of the ideals of the "cult of domesticity" were not followed outside of upper middle class society in eastern urban centers. For example, a different view of Victorian gender roles can be seen at western homesteads. Despite Victorian proscriptions against women's participation in the public sphere, 18 percent of the homestead entrants in northeastern Colorado were by single women. This paper discusses the excavation of one of these homesteads, the Adelia Wells homestead, dated to the 1890s in Arapahoe County, Colorado and what these excavations indicate about concepts of middle class status and gender roles in the rural west.