Page 28 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

C H APTER ONE

be written by women who were, after all, the moral shapers of society.
Hale often said that impressionable children should be taught only by
women rather than by the " other sex." She also thought that the poor
and destitute should be aided by women through charity organizations,
and that the heathen of the world should be rescued by women serv­
ing as missionaries.3 1
Thus, to Hale, women's duties included writing, teaching, com­
munity volunteer work, and missionary endeavors far from home. She
never suggested, however, that women leave the domestic realm to enter
such male affairs as business and politics. Although Hale herself was a
successful career woman, she always wore black, an unmistakable sign
that she was a widow who had to work for pay. At the same time, she
warned women against getting caught in the "the ocean of political life"
that heaved "with the storm of partisan passions among the men of
America." Instead, Hale wrote in 1850 that women, the "true conserva­
tors of peace and goodwill," should spend their time cultivating " every
gentle feeling" and avoiding participation in the political "reforms of
the day."3 2
Hale believed, however, that women were indispensable to the
moral movements of the era, although it would naturally be improper
for women to play leadership roles. Hale thus supported a fifth trope,
that women should actively engage in reform even if it took them out­
side their homes.As early as the 1830S and 1840s, women had been called
upon to exert their influence against the evils that had crept into
American life. Because so many women were economically dependent
on fathers and husbands, the growing opposition to the overconsump­
tion of alcohol seemed a natural cause for women to support. A woman
who was the daughter or wife of an alcoholic was urged to fight his
"perversity " with all the moral power at her command . Unmarried
women were advised to shun the "society " and refuse "the addresses"
of men who drank. Since men could not do without the society of
women, the thinking went, they would "take the jewel [a woman] and
throw away that [alcohol] which makes so many miserable outcasts." 3 3
In one of the most popular novels of the 1850s, Ten Nights in a Barroom
(1854), the male novelist T. S. Arthur supported the idea of women as
temperance reformers. Arthur's protagonist was caught between the

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