Page 35 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

F R O N T I E R P H I L OSOPHY: AMERICAN D I S C OURSE

plethora of additional issues. A significant number argued for their right
to vote and hold political office. 5 6 Many wanted to control childbear­
ing; some used abortion to that end. Some wanted separate women's
prisons. Others hoped to see more female ministers. Huge numbers of
farm women joined the Farmer's Alliance and the Grange, or Patrons
of Husbandry. Urban women founded clubs and service organizations.
And so many women committed- themselves to the cause of temper­
ance that the Women's Christian T e mperance Union, founded in 1874,
became the largest women's organization in the nineteenth century
with, its officials claimed, a branch in every county in the nation. 57
One might expect all this furor to result in the timely death of
domestic ideals and the moral-guardian theory, yet this was not to be.
Instead, the furor caused insecure Americans, who had not yet recov­
ered from the Civil War and Reconstruction, to cling to the past.
Consequently, domesticity not only lived on, but gained momentum.
At the same time that energetic women left their homes for a portion
or all of a day, articles and books about domesticity and womanly virtues
grew in number and vehemence. Stay home, authors told women, for
your own good and that of your family. W h en Catharine Beecher and
her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe formed a partnership in 1870 to write
Principles if Domestic Science, they repeated the same old shibboleths. In
this and subsequent editions, they described women's profession as the
care and nursing of the ill, the training of children, and practicing econ­
omy in their domestic pursuits. By adding that women's duties included
the instruction and training of servants, the sisters revealed their social­
class bias; they still wrote for middle- and upper-class white women.
Their support was not on behalf of women's rights or woman suffrage,
but for better domestic training. If, they wrote, women received prepa­
ration for their duties as men did for their trades and professions, domes­
tic labor would no longer be "poorly paid, and regarded as menial and
disgraceful." 58 Although proponents of new home-economics programs
agreed, most women's rights leaders were determined to push hard until
their status changed appreciably.
A similar traditional view of westering women also hung on. In the
1880s, old ideas reached their zenith in a popular work titled Woman on
the Frontier. Its author, William Fowler, counseled women that it was as

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