Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A s FA L L 2 0 1 5 38 38 GRACE STONE COATES (1881-1962), e Frontier's assistant edi- tor under Merriam, is best known for her novel, Black Cherries. During the 1920s and 1940s, she wrote stories ("Wild Plums" her best known), poems, and another novel, Clear Title, from her home in Martinsdale. Her work explores with psychological acuity the stark realities of homestead life amid the beauties of the natural world. In "Portalucas in the Wheat," from the same- named collection, she tells how a child discovers "a marvel in the wheat…Blossoms! A myriad of them, flaming silk/Of colors flaunted by the sun!" just as the harvest combines are about to descend. Her father instructs the combines to mow around them, "while driver muttered, brothers jested, gay/unstricken blossoms bravely cupped the sun." GWENDOLEN HASTE (1889-1979) edited the Scientific Farmer out of Billings with her father. Born in Illinois, Haste graduated from the University of Chicago in 1912 and won e Nation's poetry prize in 1922. Her selected poems, (published by Ahsahta Press in 1976) cast a harsh light on women's lives on ranches. Her poem, "Ranch in the Coulee," describes the desperate loneliness of the woman in the "ranch house down a little draw" where she can see "an auto swirling dusty through the heat,/Or children trudging home on tired feet." Finally, she must keep the "highroad always within sight" and if it is empty long, she "beat upon the pane and cried with fright." When Helena native FRIEDA FLIGELMAN (1890-1978) gradu- ated from the University of Wisconsin in 1907, she returned home to picket for women's suffrage. Her step-mother told her not to come home that night if she was going to continue her unladylike behavior. Fligelman continued and spent the night at a hotel, charging it to her father. After attending graduate school at Columbia, she worked as a sociologist before return- ing to Helena in 1948. In her poem, "Hall Bedroom Scholar," from Notes for a Novel: e Selected Poems of Frieda Fligelman, she writes of a new kind of pioneer, a woman scholar, roaming among her bookshelves "like a pioneer gazing on/broad prairies/ sees the clean-laid furrows of/plotted fields/As ripening grain." Grace Stone Coates Gwendolen Haste Frieda Fligelman

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