Moving out : A Nebraska Woman's Life

Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life tells the compelling life story of Polly Spence (1914-1998).

The descendant of Irish homesteaders raised on the plains of Nebraska in the early decades of the twentieth century, she was an ordinary, yet in many ways remarkable woman.

Spence's insightful, poignant, and often humorous descriptions of her childhood in rural Franklin County, of her tumultuous years as a college student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln during the 1930s, and of her experience running a tourist ranch in northwestern Nebraska in the 1950s offer revealing glimpses into the lives of farmers, ranchers, and city dwellers during a little-discussed period in the state's history.Moving Out is also a very personal account focusing on a young girl's struggle to form an independent identity amidst the pressures of small town life, puritan religious values, and sexist assumptions about a woman's place.

From this life marked by both hardship and disappointment-death, deprivation, and divorce-emerges a woman of great substance, who, after a failed marriage, courageously sets out to establish a new life for herself outside the Midwest.

In the far away cities of New York and Los Angeles she encounters new challenges and yet continues to reflect upon the people, places, and events that shaped her life and helped form her identity.

This engrossing portrait of Spence reveals a woman who took chances and as she put it, "chose life above all else."The son of Polly Spence, Karl Spence Richardson has served in many capacities for the American Foreign Service Office and is currently the American representative for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization.

He also spends several months per year at his family's ranch in Nebraska.