These women's fascinating accounts tell of locating a claim, erecting a shelter, and living on the prairie. Their ethnic backgrounds include Yankee, Scandinavian, German, and German-Russian, as well as African-American, Jewish, and Lebanese. Some were barely twenty-one, while others had reached their sixties. A few lived on their land for life and "never borrowed a cent against it"; others sold or rented the land to start a small business or to provide money for education.

For this paperback edition, Elizabeth Jameson's new foreword situates the homesteading experience for women within the larger context of western history.

"(A) richly patterned, well-written, engrossing account of the homesteading experience.... The women's voices and abundant photographs evoke a qualitative sense of people, place, and lived experience rare in social histories.... For western women's history, it is an extremely useful case study". -- Western Historical Quarterly.

"The photos and copious quotations from the homesteaders' letters, diaries, and reminiscences make this a particularly vivid book, as if one were sitting with these indomitable women, looking at their photograph albums and hearing their stories of the... shanties on the plains". -- Montana, The Magazine of Western History.

"Thisis a delightful book with an almost encyclopedic coverage of the process of homesteading on the prairie.... No account of the homesteading process will be complete in the future without reference to Land in Her Own Name". -- Kansas History.