Page 10 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

INTRODUCTION

During the two decades since 1984, scholarship regarding wester­
ing women, Native Americans, and the interrelations of racial and social­
class groups has exploded. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the
University of New Mexico Press has extended to me the opportunity
to prepare a second edition of VlIOmen and Indians that combines the first
volume's extensive research and emphasis on gender with recent findings
and theory, which gives a slightly different twist to the revised edition.2
Now titled Confronting Race: VlIOmen and Indians on the Frontier, 1815-1915,
the study demonstrates that in spite of white women's changing atti­
tudes toward Indians, women remained solidly colonialist in outlook
toward all other groups. The new version remains accessible to general
readers, including teachers, students, and laypeople interested in under­
standing the legacy of white expansionism in the W e st and gathering
information to aid in present-day problem solving.
The underlying argument also remains the same: that women who
migrated westward-after lifetimes of listening to popular and often
prejudicial discourse-carried with them certain deeply ingrained
images and preconceptions of themselves as nineteenth-century
women, as well as racially based expectations of the indigenous groups
they would meet. As on other colonial f r ontiers, Anglo women
responded to Indians, at least initially, in the ways expected of properly
indoctrinated white women of the literate classes.3 As Anglo women
discovered their own resilience in the f a ce of the harsh demands imposed
on them by the western environment, they rethought some of the con­
ventional wisdom that said that women were passive, weak, and silly
creatures who would certainly quake at the mere mention of the word
"Indian." Moreover, as Anglo women realized their own strength and
courage, many were able to view Indians not just as dangerous enemies,
but as real human beings.
Because these women were somewhat educated, they gave voice to
their thoughts and experiences in diaries and journals, which were
seldom written f o r publication. Rather, they were personal records of
daily events of significance to a particular woman or perhaps to her
f a mily "back East" or in Europe. She had no reading public to please
other than herself or her immediate f a mily and f r iends. Except f o r
memoirs and reminiscences, a woman's writing mirrored her immediate

2