Page 41 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

FRONTIER P H I L OSOPHY: AME R I C AN D I S C OURSE

old, hoping to recreate it in a newer and purer form. Thus, women's
aspirations were lofty ones indeed.
Dime novels, written by male and female authors, played an espe­
cially important role in defining women and Indians 7 4 In a 19II dime
.
novel, the only apologist for and defender of what the author described
as "fanatical and cruel redskins" was a woman who claimed "there are
some good Indians that are not yet dead."75 Such sentiments had a ripple
effect-reaching working-class and homebound women through
excerpts in newspapers, tracts, pamphlets, sermons, speeches, street plays,
their children's school and personal books and periodicals, chapbooks,
jokes, folklore, and other manifestations of popular thought. These direct
and indirect exhortations to women to provide moral direction and oth­
erwise aid American Indians put Anglo women in opposition to the
more natural, freer world of Indians. Moreover,Anglo women put them­
selves at odds by envisioning themselves as harbingers of civilization and
seeing Indians as representative of primitive and inferior culture.
Convinced of one basic fact, that the American Indian was a savage,
women tended to see Indians as contemptible objects, salvageable only
through women's civilizing influence. That many women believed they
indeed could overcome the supposedly savage nature of Indians was
demonstrated by the avowed eagerness of so many of them to venture
into western areas as missionaries to American Indians.7 6
At the same time that women planned to minister to Indians, their
number-one fear of migrating to the West was American Indians.
Women had been taught to view themselves as weak and helpless, and
thus very likely to be victims. As they were reminded of the strength of
their morality, they were also lectured on the weakness of their physi­
cal being. Because men were physically strong, they were the doers, but
because women were physically weak, they had to seek male protectors.
Women's dependence upon men was thus seen as a product of their
.
own physical inferiority 77
These ideas accosted women from every side. During the mid-
1830s, in lectures to Emma W i llard's T r oy Seminary students, educator
Almira Phelps emphasized women's' physical deficiencies. The
"delicacy " of women's nervous systems, she warned, "subjects her to
agitations to which man, favored by greater physical strength and more

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