Page 29 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

F R ONTIER P H I L OSOPHY: AMERICAN D I S C OURSE

moral influence of his wife and daughter and the power of wickedness,
symbolized by a rum seller. 34 T o combat the problem of alcoholism
women formed temperance societies, held temperance conventions, and
encouraged wives of alcoholics to desert their husbands.35 By acting as
if overdrinking was exclusively a male disorder, female reformers
expanded women's moral powers over men in yet another area.
Other reform movements embraced women as well. For instance,
whether there would be peace or strife in the country seemed to depend
on women.3 6 They not only organized peace groups, but supposedly
displayed peaceful behavior in their own lives as examples to the larger
American society. Charitable work outside of the home also became
part of women's province. As early as I836, the social observer Elizabeth
Sandford explained that such demands were justifiable because women
not only had more leisure time than men, but were particularly suited
to caring for the destitute and ill. In I842, the social commentator
Margaret Coxe insisted that Americans could reasonably expect women,
who were sympathetic and caring, to take charge of such people.
Throughout the I840S and I850s, Hale mounted a crusade for the hold­
ing of Ladies' Fairs to raise money for institutions devoted to training
female nurses and to provide funds to female "visitors of the sick and
the poor." In I852, Hale pushed the connection between women and
medical care by proposing that female physicians be trained for the care
of sick women and children. 3 7
Hale received little support for either female nurses or female physi­
cians, but her plea for female missionaries fared better. By mid-century,
most mission boards, which were all male, had accepted the proposition
that women's mandate to help the "poor and ignorant" included carry­
ing Christianity throughout the world. 3 8 As early as I836, the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent as missionaries
Narcissa W h itman and Eliza Spalding to the far-flung Oregon territory,
thus opening the way for other women missionaries-such as Mary
Richardson Walker-to go west. According to poet Lydia Sigourney,
female missionaries were quite fitting, for they were the "stewards of
"
God. 3 9 Other writers eulogized women missionaries, lauding them as
more courageous than medieval knights. A typical appeal to women
during the I840S explained that teaching others Christianity allowed

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