Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life is the autobiography of Polly Spence (1914–98) and an intimate portrait of small-town life in the mid–twentieth century. The descendant of Irish settlers, Polly spent her first fifteen years in Franklin, a village with conservative, puritan religious values in south-central Nebraska. Although Polly's relationship with her mother was tense, she loved and admired her newspaperman father, from whom she inherited her love of learning and the English language.

In 1927 her family moved to Crawford, a tough but relatively tolerant cow town in northwestern Nebraska. Polly vividly contrasts the cultural differences between Franklin's prudishness and Crawford's more liberal attitudes. Though not raised on a ranch, she came to love helping her husband feed his cattle, deliver calves, and cook for logging crews. She also found innovative ways to attract visitors to the ranch, which she turned into a thriving guest operation.

Despite her devastation following several personal hardships, Polly displayed remarkable resilience and determination in her life, and when intractable problems arose in her marriage she exercised the options of a modern woman. In Moving Out she intertwines the events that characterized her time and place—the Great Depression, the intolerance that breathed life into the Ku Klux Klan, and the end of the Old West—with the love, death, and sorrow that touched her family.

Karl Spence Richardson, Polly Spence's son, was an American diplomat for thirty years, serving mainly in East Asia. He divides his time between work for an international organization in North Korea, his home in Colorado Springs, and his family ranch in northwestern Nebraska.

"Nebraska housewife tells the story of her life with the lucidity of a Plains State Stendhal. The idea that the Midwest is a reserve of puritanical cornshuckers disguises a more complicated truth, one compounded of many lonely acts of will. . . . [Spence's] son, editing this manuscript after his mother's death, justifies its publication, in his afterword, as a 'picture of rural America.' It's also a small work of art from the plains."—Kirkus Reviews

"The life Spence captures embodies the American woman's world pre-Feminine Mystique, a woman's magazine world where females struggled 'to create the perfect marriage.' . . . Spence's story is a cornucopia of vivid scenes, including images of frontier destiny, the Klan, church suppers, barn building and rattlesnake killing that will appeal to a . . . wide . . . audience. The retelling of how Spence's aunt got into her nightclothes in front of a young Spence without revealing any nakedness combines lightness with weighty implications about women's lives, as does her recollection of the long hours women spent in the kitchen. Spence renders these moments unsentimentally, yet with emotional depth, richly informative detail and noteworthy balance. To the deluge of memoirs by 'ordinary' people, Spence contributes one that is much more than a nice remembrance for her grandchildren."—Publishers Weekly

"Not only does Spence relate her own story, but also the stories of people around her, making Moving Out a collection of humorous and touching narratives."—Utah Historical Society

"Stylish, organized, self-possessed, Polly Spence was SOMEBODY. Gracefully written, without self-pity but with enormous intelligence, she tells us exactly who that someone is."—Western American Literature

"In lively, reflective, anecdotal prose, Spence fleshes out her family, for her beloved father and older brother to her tempestuous relationship with her mother, her early joyous years as a rancher's wife, the coming of babies and the long, slow decline of her marriage. Spence packs a lot of life into this slim, captivating volume."—Lynn Harnett, Portsmouth Herald (NH)

"In lesser hands, Spence's life would seem ordinary. In hers, it is a work of art, by turns tragic, warm, enraged and insightful. . . . The book is a story of self-discovery, a woman coming to terms with her own life, learning to make her own decisions. This human level of the story sets it apart from lesser memoirs, and makes the reader regret that Spence is no longer here to write another book."—Nebraska Life

"Compelling reading. . . . Spence is an astute, thoughtful writer."—Great Plains Quarterly