Page 22 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

CHAPTE R ONE

popular American ladies' magazine exhorted its readers that women's
"more delicate sensibility is the unseen power which is ever at work to
purify and refine society."5 Supporters of domesticity and its associated
values routinely proclaimed that a woman's influence was "the all­
mighty principle in order of social economy."Women, they maintained,
were not only to "refine the tastes, ennoble the principles, and soften
the asperities of man," but were also to fu lfill the "noble charge of train­
ing the youthful mind in the paths of virtue and true happiness."6
These lofty and somewhat abstract pronouncements were intended,
at least in part, to answer the issue of women's inequality in an era that
was becoming increasingly committed to a democratic ideology of equal
rights. W o men could hardly help but notice that as opportunities f o r
white males increased, their own roles became more circumscribed.
Even the growing throngs of mill girls who flocked to new textile f a c­
tories as "operatives" of spinning jennys and power looms knew f r om
their wages that their work was worth less to American society than
men's. W o men were reassured that equality was a moot issue because
men and women operated in different spheres, each gender being
equally important within its prescribed domain. These spheres were sup­
posedly determined by the unique physiology and intellect of men and
women. According to the male novelist T. S. Arthur's 1848 guidebook,
Advice to Y o ung Ladies, the very shape and size of women's heads indi­
cated the development of brains and minds different in approach and
f u nction f r om men's. Because of these obvious differences, Arthur
believed that men made decisions according to intellect and women by
love. It then f o llowed that men and women were in a strange sense equal
because each acted within their own capabilities, limitations, and of
course, spheres.7
Domesticity, designed also to give meaning to the lives of the newly
leisured middle- and upper-class women, f u rther argued than such
women had not become superfluous. Instead, it maintained that these
women were absolutely crucial as guardians of morality and virtue fo r
a capitalistic society. Advocates of these doctrines preached that women
should adopt passive, or "feminine," ideals to balance the capitalistic or
"male" standards that were allied with economic growth, industrial and
territorial expansion, and urban development. As defenders of home and

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