Page 36 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

C H APTER ONE

"pioneer and colonizer" that their life stories were "potent . . and inter­
.
esting." As humanizing, refining, and civilizing agents of the frontier,
women were truly the "founders of the Republic." According to Fowler,
"the household, the hamlet, the village, the town, the city, the state" rise
out of their "homely toils, and destiny obscure." He observed that
women must execute their usual moral functions in the West-includ­
ing inaugurating Sunday schools, introducing religion into the "frontier
home," and serving as "unconscious legislators"-since their very pres­
ence rendered "more desirable life, property, and the other objects for
which laws are made." He added that women as a group must also serve
as the "great educator of the frontier " and should work with Indians to
soften the "fierce temper of the pagan tribes."5 9
Like women's rights leaders, a significant number of Anglo women
decided to modifY such traditional advice to serve their own ends. They
kept going, finding ways to appear domestic while doing what they
wanted to do. For example, women who enjoyed the outdoors hiked
and climbed mountains wearing long skirts, corsets, and wide-brimmed
hats. Their one concession was to don boys' boots. Others played sports.
One case was that of Louise Pound, who during the I890S and early
I900s, took up lawn tennis and golf. After she earned a Ph.D. at the
University of Heidelberg and became a professor at the University of
Nebraska, she supported a women's basketball team and founded a
female military company, whose members drilled carrying I880-model
Springfield rifles. Other women entered the professions, especially in the
West where I4 percent of women were professionals as opposed to 8
percent nationally. In I889, for example, Ella L. Knowles passed the
Montana bar exam with distinction, after which she practiced law in
Helena and campaigned for woman suffrage. 6 0 Yet other women of the
era sought autonomy and personal freedom by seeking divorces. The
Victorian Age-despite its emphasis on hearts, flowers, and romantic
love-produced more divorces than any other era or any other nation:
twelve or thirteen out every one hundred marriages ended in divorces,
two-thirds of them granted to women . 6r By the turn of the twentieth
century, the image of the NewWoman struggled with that of the Gibson
Gir1.The term New WcJman applied to those who, like President Theodore
Roosevelt's daughter Alice, smoked in public, or to "strong-minded

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