Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919Univ of North Carolina Press, 2006 M12 8 - 288 pages During the westward expansion of America, white middle-class ideals of home and domestic work were used to measure differences between white and Native American women. Yet the vision of America as "home" was more than a metaphor for women's stake in the process of conquest--it took deliberate work to create and uphold. Treating white and indigenous women's struggles as part of the same history, Jane E. Simonsen argues that as both cultural workers and domestic laborers insisted upon the value of their work to "civilization," they exposed the inequalities integral to both the nation and the household. Simonsen illuminates discussions about the value of women's work through analysis of texts and images created by writers, women's rights activists, reformers, anthropologists, photographers, field matrons, and Native American women. She argues that women such as Caroline Soule, Alice Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, Anna Dawson Wilde, and Angel DeCora called upon the rhetoric of sentimental domesticity, ethnographic science, public display, and indigenous knowledge as they sought to make the gendered and racial order of the nation visible through homes and the work performed in them. Focusing on the range of materials through which domesticity was produced in the West, Simonsen integrates new voices into the study of domesticity's imperial manifestations. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Native American History and the Future of the West in Caroline Soules The Pet of the Settlement | 17 |
Class and Race in the Married Womans Home | 43 |
Domesticity on Display in Native American Assimilation | 71 |
Unsettling Domesticity in E Jane Gays Choupnitki | 111 |
Anna Dawson Wildes Home in the Field | 151 |
Domestic Production and Cultural Survival | 183 |
The Map and the Territory | 215 |
Notes | 223 |
| 243 | |
| 261 | |
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Common terms and phrases
allotment argued artists assimilation attempts authority believed building called Carlisle century Christian civilization claim Cook crafts created culture Dawson Wilde DeCora designs developed display domestic labor economic efforts equally Euro-American exhibit fact feminists field matrons Figure Fletcher forms Gay’s gender girls groups Hampton helped household housework husband idea ideal identity Indian indigenous industrial influence Iowa Jane kinds labor land less letters living looking material middle-class mission moral museum Native American natural Nez Perces notes novel object Omaha past performed photographs political practices present production professional progress race racial reformers regarded relations reports represented reservation Ripley role seemed sentimental shows social society Soule space Standard status stories suggested tion traditional turn wage West western white women wife Wilde’s wives WNIA woman workers writers
References to this book
Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824-1932 Joshua David Bellin No preview available - 2008 |