Page 23 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

FRONTIER P H I L OSOPHY: AMERICAN D I S COU S E
R
hearth, women would protect traditional values, yet they were not to
interfere in any essential way with the developments that were cata­
pulting America toward prosperity and power.
It may seem odd that women accepted doctrines that had obvious
limitations, but there were many reasons f o r them to do so. It would
have been f a lse of women to naysay the importance of wifehood, moth­
erhood, and f a mily care in their lives. After all, they lived in a time when
marriage and childbearing were believed to be women's top-ranking
goals. Nor could they reject the belief that women were more moral,
pure, and virtuous than men, f o r this not only gave them a modicum of
power in their homes, but established their authority over men con­
cerning domestically related matters. Also, interpreted and applied in
certain ways, domestic teachings offered women the hope of f m ding
meaning in a world radically altered fr om that of their grandmothers­
or even of their mothers-where a woman's labor often had been crit­
ical to f a mily survival. For mill girls who had fo llowed women's work
of spinning and weaving fr om their homes to f a ctories, domesticity
assured them that they had not lost significance as wives and mothers.
For middle- and upper-class women, seemingly devoid of purpose and
trapped in their homes while the menfolk left to labor in another part
of the city, domesticity justified their very existence. Consequently , even
"intellectual" women such as Margaret Fuller, editor of the
Transcendentalist journal The Dial and author of rtOman in the Nineteenth
Century, who railed in her 1852 memoirs against the limitations of
women's "sphere," could see potential usefulness in the concept of sep­
arate spheres fo r men and women.8
Because progressive thinkers concerning women's roles, such as
Adams and Fuller, accepted the potential of the separate-spheres con­
cept, it is unsurprising to discover that many other American women
also adopted the notion. W o men were beginning to see that the phi­
losophy known as domesticity held out certain attractions. Even women
who intended to move westward saw merit in domestic ideals. Like their
sisters, they were open to the possibility that their otherwise subordi­
nate f e male roles would earn status, respect, and esteem as women's
moral impact upon society was amplified and idealized.
The implications of domesticity f o r women's roles and status could

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