Page 42 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

C H APTER ONE

firmness of nerve, is exempt." In an 1836 tract titled Female Improvement,
Elizabeth Sandford added that there was "something unfeminine in
independence." Because women had to rely on help f r om men, she
explained, they should encourage men's protective instincts by acting
"dependent" and " grateful." In 1848, a male guidebook writer explained
that men and women resembled two halves of a circle: the man possessed
physical strength, the woman sensibility and patience.7 8
Codey's f r equently reiterated such interpretations of women's
"natures" to their readers. In the "Editor's Table" in 1851, Sarah Josepha
Hale declared that women were not mechanical, inventive, or strong
because God had given those characteristics to men. Instead, God had
granted women "moral insight or instinct, and the patience that endures
physical suffering."Thus, Hale reasoned, women would not advance by
"becoming like man, in doing man's work, or striving f o r the domin­
ion of the world." Rather, women worked best through "obedience,
temperance, truth, love, piety."7 9
Novelists also stressed the idea of women's inferiority in matters
requiring physical strength. Domestic novelist E. D. E. N. Southworth's
1856 novel Retribution presented a heroine who at one point exclaimed,
"Talk of woman's rights, woman's rights live in the instincts of her pro­
tector-man." It was not only women's, or domestic, literature that
advocated these views of women. Popular novelists such as James
Fenimore Cooper characterized women as weak, passive, docile, and
submissive, rewarded in the end by the prize of a hero, tailor-made to
her needs and desires. Although Cooper occasionally created an atypi­
cally strong heroine, she always ended up unhappy. In 1848, inJ a ck T i er,
f o r example, Cooper's heroine, deserted by her husband, disguised her­
self as a man and f o llowed him to sea f o r several years. She was totally
"unsexed" by the experience. Cooper pointed out that Molly Swash
desexed herself because she chose to act on her own behalf rather than
accept the actions and decisions of the male. In 1856, one of Cooper's
characters in The Sea Lions added another argument: if women realized
how much power their "seeming dependence" gave them with men
they would refuse to tolerate those "who are f o r proclaiming their inde­
,,
pendence and their right to equality in all things. 8 0
In response to these social constructions, women about to go west

3 4