Page 21 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

FRONTIER P H I L OSOPHY: AME R I C AN D I SCOURSE

longtime advocate of expanded roles f o r women in the new United
States of America, endorsed the idea of separate spheres f o r men and
women when she wrote: "I believe nature has assigned to each sex its
particular duties and sphere of action, and to act well your part, 'there
all the honor lies.''' 2
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these
tenets gained f o rce so that white women grew up with a set of fe mi­
nine ideals that permeated their very beings. As the century progressed,
so did these social constructions of womanhood gain a hold among
Anglo women. Such sentiments were widely purveyed through a pro­
liferating prescriptive literature increasingly written by women.3 The
very volume of ladies' periodicals, domestic novels, epistolary guide­
books, annuals, gift books, printed sermons, and speeches that appeared
in the middle decades of the nineteenth century-all attempting to
imbue women with the precepts of "true womanhood" and to guide
them into customary fe male fu nctions-suggests a pressing societal need
to allay a growing dissatisfaction with, and questioning of, traditional
gender roles, largely by literate white women.
Even though this literature was heavily didactic, it attracted a wide­
spread and devoted readership among American women. Due to
improved literacy rates, decreasing costs of books and magazines, and
the introduction of specialized literature fo r women and children,
"domestic" literature, as it was called f o r its emphasis on home and
f a mily, boomed. It attracted larger numbers of readers, representatives of
more social classes, and members of more age groups. Although now
fo rgotten and gathering dust on library shelves, many domestic novels
were runaway best-sellers in their own eras. At the same time, many
ladies' periodicals enjoyed varying degrees of success in the new market
created by the increased leisure, money , and education of middle- and
upper-class women. While some of these publications vanished within
a few years, others, such as Godey� Lady� Book, earned fine reputations
and extensive circulations that lasted f r om several decades to over half a
century. Indeed, women's magazines had the widest circulation of all
types of nineteenth-century periodicals.4
By the mid-nineteenth century the concepts of domesticity and
separate spheres approached the status of a cult. In 1843, fo r example, a

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