Synopses & Reviews
Review
"A bold, multifaceted, and well-documented study of a newly surprising old American West."
Legacy
Review
"A valuable scholarly work that would be engaging to readers interested in nineteenth-century disputes in the American West over women's labor, gender roles, indigenous cultures and assimilation, and attitudes toward housework and home."
Western American Literature
Review
"The steady theme that unites the book . . . illuminates this period and topic in a new and exciting manner."
American Historical Review
Review
"Highly engaging. . . . A stunning example of making 'new' western studies work."
Great Plains Quarterly
Review
"Presents a useful summary of the way non-Native women related to Native women during the industrializing years of 1860-1910, a period in Indian history that needs much more research."
CHOICE
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Jane E. Simonsen is assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies at the University of Central Arkansas Honors College.