A dry, wry farmer was hired to look after exhibits at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. A central figure in the exhibits was a female form composed of grasses and grains, a picture of fertility. The farmer was attending to business when a smart aleck Hoosier from Indiana came up and said, “I say, pardner, this ’ere show is great. You must have a rich country for grains out there in Dakota; but I don’t see no exhibit from your divorce courts.”
Pointing with his thumb over his shoulder, the attendant responded, “I don’t know about that; we’ve got a grass widow over there.”
This story made the rounds and was a pretty good joke in 1893, but to understand it, you need to know two things. First, you have to know that in the 1890s, on account of lenient legislation as to residency requirements, Fargo was the divorce capital of America. Second, you need to know what a “grass widow” is, or was considered to be at the time.
I confess that for years I was conscious of the term, but thought little about what it meant. I sort of presumed it had something to do with the cattle industry, like maybe a grass widow was the widow of a stockman, left to hold down the ranch on her own.
Centuries ago (for the term is first known to have appeared in writing in 1528) “grass widow” was a pejorative phrase referring to a woman with a child conceived otherwise than in a marital bed — not to get too coarse about it, but the reference was to a roll in the hay.
By the late nineteenth century the usage had evolved to label any woman who had a husband or mate, but whose man was, perhaps unaccountably, absent; she was on her own. Also, various authorities on language (always vaguely cited) had fashioned new interpretations of the phrase.
They said the correct usage, claiming French or Latin antecedents, was “grace widow,” connoting a woman living on the grace of the community. Etymologists today say this was a ruse, an attempt to make nice of a sordid usage. Popular idiom retained a sense of the unsavory, or at least risque, often humorous. Like in the joke from the Chicago Exposition. The Emmons County Record in 1899 offered this definition: “The widow’s husband has been buried, but the husband of the grass widow has merely been mislaid.”
Too, given the fluid social situation of the frontier — not to mention the plethora of divorcees or soon-to-be divorcees in Dakota — the West was understood by the rest of the country to have more than its share of grass widows. One joke about Fargo specifically was that homeowners had been compelled to post signs reading, “Keep off the grass.”
If a man exhibited symptoms of hay fever, his cronies would accuse him of consorting with grass widows. The editor in Cooperstown declared in 1883 that his information about the prospects of settlement in Dakota Territory was “as eagerly sought after as are grass-widows at hugging socials.” His counterpart in Bottineau in 1903 claimed his news columns were “as full of sensation as the life of a grass widow.” A merchant in Jamestown sold a candy bar called “The Grass Widow.”
Beyond the humor, grass widows, even more so than bachelors, were often considered a negative, or at least awkward, element in prairie society. They were watched, and their doings reported in the press. I’ll go on to tell you about that, because it informs us about the culture of the time and place.
