Page 20 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

CHAPTER ONE

moral-guardian theory, that assured them they had a moral mission in
lif e, whether it be to f a mily members or to unknown peoples in a region
far f r om their homes.
Y e t a number of questions hung in the air. W o uld westbound
women of the early 1 8 00s carry these values with them or would they
leave them behind like so much refuse as they crossed over the thresh­
old of the old homestead fo r the last time? How would such ideas and
aspirations serve them as they confronted indigenous groups? W o uld
women discover that their customary ways of looking at f e male roles
and at Indian "others" were inappropriate in the less structured world
of the W e st?
The answers are clearer now than they were in the 1 8 00s and early
1900s. To the first query, the answer is yes; fe male migrants did indeed
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carry f e minine value systems with them to their new homes in the e st.
T o the second and third questions, women only gradually replaced parts
of the ideology of domesticity or the tenets of the moral-guardian
theory in f a vor of a more flexible, liberating set of ideals spawned by a
f r ontier environment. I Because these women had been exposed
throughout their lives to assertions and pronouncements regarding the
qualities of white f e males and of Native Americans, it is not surprising
that they took this dogma westward as an integral part of their cultural
baggage. This f a ct that they did so makes it necessary to explore and
understand the climate of opinion f r om which they came.

-- On W o manhood --

Assertions that women should stay in the domestic sphere were hardly
novel sentiments. Ever since the first women migrated to the shores of
British North America, they were regarded as repositories of virtue
and piety , as well as guardians of home and family. As early as 1692 the
noted minister Cotton Mather had summarized and idealized such
thinking in his widely read Ornaments f o r the Daughters of Zion. During
f o llowing decades, numerous other writers reiterated and enlarged
upon Mather's view of American womanhood. In 1 8 14,AbigaiIAdams,

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