A Gentile Account of Life in Utah's Dixie, 1872-73

Gentile Account, Profile of Elizabeth Kane xxiv

commission by President Abraham Lincoln to form a regiment from the northwestern Pennsylvania mountain community. He left his family with his aunt, Ann Gray, in Philadelphia, where a third baby, Evan was born. After serving courageously during which he received wounds and suffered intermittently with poor health, he was honorably discharged after a heroic performance at Gettysburg. Released from service, Major General Kane resumed his interest in the McKean and Elk [counties] Land and Improve- ment Company in northwestern Pennsylvania. The Kanes began a settlement later named Kane by the Pennsylvania Railroad in McKean County. Their first fall and winter at Kane, the family lived in their stable while building a house. It was at this time Elizabeth first practiced her textbook-learned medicine on her children and her husband. She was also both secretary and accountant to the land business, finally using the mathematics her father-in-law had urged her to study. During this increasingly active and busy time of her life, pre- occupied with family, home, and business, Elizabeth neverthe- less spent much time and energy developing and systematizing her ideas about women-their responsibilities to themselves as well as their husbands, relationships between men and women, and women's natural, i.e., Christian, place in Society. Her jour- nal of 1870 shows much thought on this subject, which was finally crystallized into an essay explicating her "Theory." Some main tenets of her theory included her belief that women's current sexual feelings and sex life reflected a fallen state, influenced and corrupted by men's more polygamous, less chaste desires. She felt that typical relationships nurtured by society become xxiv