`HARDSHIP AND HOPE': WRITINGS BY WOMEN FROM STATE'S PAST

The writings of two area women from bygone eras are included in a new book about pioneering Missouri women.

One, Marie Watkins Oliver, is known as the designer of the Missouri state flag. The other, Elizabeth Flora Anna Dierssen, is hardly known at all but her diary is a lively reflection of women's changing public roles in the years before World War I.

Titled "Hardship and Hope: Missouri Women Writing about Their Lives, 1820-1920," the book begins with immigrant women struggling with the hardships of pioneer life and ends with a woman whose struggle was to gain for women the right to vote.

Some of the Missouri women in the book are household names: Carry Nation, for instance, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Or writer Kate Chopin, whose 1899 book "The Awakening" shocked some critics and readers unprepared for a woman to write about the desire for freedom and passion.

Others like Elvira Ascenith Weir Scott, a Confederate loyalist during the Civil War, are included because their letters or writings or diaries provide a portrait of women's evolution in society and within their families.

The Civil War was a watershed event for the state's women, says Carla Waal, one the compilation's editors.

"Women had to be very strong and independent because men were away from home very often. They learned how to manage," Waal said by phone from Columbia.

Waal is a professor emeritus of theater at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The University of Missouri Press publication was co-edited by Barbara Oliver Korner, an associate professor of theater at Seattle Pacific University.

The book is based on a series of performances Waal and Oliver Korner gave around the state in which they dramatized the roles Missouri women have played in the progression from statehood to attaining women's suffrage. Thus the dates 1820-1920.

The editors included Marie Watkins' letters to R. Burett Oliver, who became a state senator and member of the University of Missouri Board of Curators, because they illustrate the conduct of a late 19th century courtship.

Oliver was the best friend, roommate and fraternity brother of Charles Allen Watkins, Marie's brother. He began a correspondence after Charles' untimely death in 1874. Many letters were exchanged before Marie and Burett met in October 1876.

The correspondence reveals the carefully nurtured progress of an affection that led to marriage in December 1879.

The Olivers lived in Jackson at first and later in Cape Girardeau.

In one of the letters, Watkins had toyed -- perhaps to keep Oliver's attention -- with the idea of becoming a physician, a notion he promptly dismissed as "ridiculous."

But having a family was Marie Watkins' dream after all.

"A woman might be very capable but her hope was of having a home of her own," Waal said.

Dierssen typed and edited her 300-page diary before donating it to the University of Missouri in 1963. The editors discovered it by searching the Western Historical Manuscript Collection for writings by women.

She titled the diary "Wednesday Club in Person." It consists largely of her impressions about the meetings of the same women's organization which still exists in Cape Girardeau today.

Women's clubs, which began as literary clubs in the 19th century, became a significant source of political influence as the 20th century dawned on America, the editors write.

Dierssen's engaging diary depicts the tug-of-war over women's roles among women themselves at the time and underlines the importance of the clubs as places for women to practice public speaking and leadership skills.

"She also represents accomplishment by a woman in her own right," Waal said.

Dierssen graduated from the Old Normal School and Southeast Missouri State College. She taught English at Gypsy, Zalma, Bernie, Gideon, Thayer and Lowndes before retiring to write and publish books about early Cape Girardeans and family interests. "Steamboat Delight" recalled steamboat travel between Cape Girardeau and St. Louis in the 1920s.

Dierssen died in 1969 in Cape Girardeau.