Page 32 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

CHAPTER ONE

to the entire city of New York, which had not even provided police
protection.4 6
Women's rights leaders also recoiled in shock at learning that a large
number of American women opposed the idea of women's rights. As
early as 1844, when reformer and editor of Y a nkee, John Neal, gave a
r
public lecture supporting i ghts for women, some of his most vehement
critics were women. One called Neal's ideas "insane crudities" and his
suggestions "characteristic absurdities."4 7 A number of female writers
also weighed in against women's i ghts by creating "assertive" heroines
r
who lost their lovers, received rebukes from relatives, hastened parents'
deaths, and ended their lives in insane asylums, all because they had
worked for women's rights.4 8 In 1850, this controversy spurred one
female poet to write:
It is her right to watch beside
T h e bed if sickness and pain;
. . . to train her sons
So they may Senate chambers grace
. . . to be admired
By every generous, manly heart,
What would she more, than to perform
On earth, life's holiest, sweetest tasks?
When you a perfect woman find
N o other rights than these, she asks. 9
4
Obviously, the argument for women's sphere and their effectiveness
as moral guardians of home and family had taken too great a foothold
in American thought. Although domesticity had expanded to include
areas ranging from teaching to missionary work, significant numbers of
Americans were not ready for women's rights. Having given women
the domestic realm, they wanted women to remain in it.
For women turning their faces toward the trans-Mississippi West,
the divisiveness in thinking regarding women's issues was in some ways
unfortunate. They heard as much or more about their moral powers and
responsibilities than they did about their prerogatives. Rather than being
encouraged to seize rights in the unsettled, flexible milieu of the West,
women were reminded that, as carriers of Christian civilization, they