Page 99 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

FRONTI E R P H I L OSOP HY: EUROPEAN D I SCOURSE

to play , and to speak in council."203 According to Hodgson, "the women
were hard at work, digging the ground, pounding Indian corn, and car­
rying heavy loads of water from the river, while the men were either
setting out to the woods with their guns, or lying idle before doors."204
European onlookers concluded that the domestic toil performed
by Indian women placed them in the category of an animal or a slave.
In 1 8 n , English botanist John Bradbury thought that the plight of native
women was so dire that he concluded that mothers who performed
infanticide on deformed or ill babies actually destroyed their fe male chil­
dren, "alleging as a reason, that it is better they should die than lead a
life so miserable as that to which they are doomed . . also it is said that
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suicide is not infrequent."The negative interpretation ofIndian women
continued in later decades. "The women are fo rced to do the hardest
work, and are treated like slaves," one author stated in 8 45.205 "The wife
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of an Indian is his marketable animal; traveling, or in a campaign, she
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carries the burden of his baggage on her back," another added in 8 49.206
During the 8 50s,John Xantus was shocked to discover that women "do
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everything, even the most degrading tasks we would be embarrassed to
ask our servants to do in Europe. "207
European novelists reinforced these unhappy images of American
Indian women by representing them as drudges and their men as
"haughty" husbands who "amuse themselves with hunting, shooting,
fishing."208 Authors f r equently characterized Indian men as indolent,
lazy tyrants who smoked and chatted while their women labored their
lives away.209 Only Karl May rejected this interpretation in f a vor of an
enlightened Indian hero who vowed to make his wife " a lady of the hut
and the tent, as the women of the palefaces " 2IO Perhaps May could not
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bear to present his f r iends, the American Indians, as complete tyrants.
Or perhaps he suspected that such a depiction of the roles of Indian
men and women was too extreme in its dimensions to be totally accu­
rate. At any rate, he elevated an Indian man to the " civilized" level of
white men by having him swear to make his wife a white-style lady.
There were, of course, reasons f o r these European perceptions of
Indian women. Because of their attitudes regarding the limited roles and
inferior position of women in European society, it was difficult f o r them
to grasp many native groups' concept of men and women as separate

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