Page 101 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

FRONTIER P H I L OSOPHY: E U R O P E AN D I SCOURSE

fe male British novelist stressed the existence among the Huron Indians
of an elected governing council of matrons who ruled coequally with
the council of elders. 220
Opposition also came f r om f e male traveler Fredrika Bremer, who
pointed out that a native woman could achieve power "from her mys­
tical, witch-like attributes, when she is possessed of a powerful charac­
ter."221 In her 1850 travel letters, Bremer critiqued the usual European
view of American Indian women as degraded savages. After watching
Native American women in St. Paul, visiting them in their homes, and
commenting upon their heavy workloads, she was moved to write,
"With inward wonder I regarded these beings, women like myself, with
the spirit and f e elings of women, yet so unlike myself in their purpose
of life." She added that as she "thought of hard, gray, domestic life in
the civilized world . . . hedged in by conventional opinion, with social
.
duties . . with every prospect of independence, liberty, activity, and j oy
closed, more rigidly closed by invisible barriers than these wigwams by
their buffalo hides," she concluded that the Indian woman's life was hap­
pier. She also thought it more healthy: "There they sat at their ease,
without stays or the anxiety to charm, without constraint or effort, those
daughters of the f o rest."222 Bremer's remarks also suggest that the posi­
tion of the white f r ontierswoman was not really very liberated, despite
the tendency of many Europeans to paint it in rosy hues. Hemmed in
by social convention, treated unequally in almost every area oflife, and
committed to a lifetime of low-status domestic labor, white fr ontier­
swomen did in f a ct f a ce a great number of restrictions and problems.
Y e t most Europeans did not see the situation that way. Compared to
the tradition-bound circumstances and limited status of European
women, Anglo fr ontierswomen at least appeared to be fr ee and equal.
And as inhabitants of the wonderfully progressive New W o rld of the
American fr ontier, white women were often assumed to be recipients
of humanitarianism and equalitarianism.
Conversely , Indian women, who symbolized opposition and chal­
lenge to white expansion across the W e st, had to be viewed as primi­
tive and savage. While they could occasionally be credited with a spark
of beauty, warmth, or creativity, in the last analysis they had to be
grouped with their men as poor, degraded fo lks meant fo r extinction.

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