The Social History of American Women: Reading Response Notes

“Maternal Colonialism: White Women and Indigenous Child Removal in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940” Margaret Jacobs “White women, primarily as reformers, but also as teachers and administrators, were integrally involved in promoting, carrying out, and sometimes challenging the removal of American Indian children to boarding schools. They also contributed to the racialized and gendered representations of Indian peoples that made such policies possible. White women reformers in the American West, however, were not alone in promoting the removal and institutionalization of indigenous children.” (454) “Studying white women’s involvement in the removal of indigenous children in a comparative, international context offers an opportunity for recasting the history of women and gender in the American West as part of a larger story of gender and settler colonialism around the globe.” (454) Historical Intervention/Difficult Topic to Discuss: “An emphasis on white women as agents of colonial control in the American West may also be jarring in a field that has been so focused on western white women’s triumphs and tribulations. Yet failure to examine white women as more than hearty pioneers, innocent bystanders to colonial conquest, has left the field of western women’s history.” (455) “Moreover, unlike more masculine terrains of colonialism, removal and institu- tionalization of indigenous children was largely a feminine domain, defined primarily around mothering, particularly targeted at indigenous women, and implemented largely by white women.” (456) “Thus, perhaps it is not surprising that although the United States and Australia were truly on opposite sides of the world, they nevertheless both turned to the removal of indigenous children as a primary means to control indigenous populations.” (460) this speaks to the roles in which disrupting families were the primary way that white women and people could disrupt indigenous lives “In the United States in 1879, these white women established the Women's National Indian Association (WNIA), which played an influential role in persuading the government to adopt an assimilation policy, and they co ntinued to ca mpaign for Americ an Indian women well into the twentieth centurv.” (461) New “Feminist” lens on motherhood to justify advocacy: “To counter notions that women should remain within the home, middle-class white women often justified their public activism by invoking their traditional roles or potential capabilities as mothers, an ideology that many women's historians have dubbed"maternalism.':" Missionary as well as feminist publications at the turn of the twentieth century are filled with paeans to motherhood.” Use of this lens of “motherhood” for agency in their spheres, not dissimilar to readings from previous weeks where women in the Confederacy used their roles for authority or DAR women: “Maternalists contended that white women were better suited to carry out such "women's work for women" than their male counterparts.” (462) “Since white women reformers regarded motherhood as a sacred institution and the mother-child bond as a holy relationship, one might expect to find such women in opposition to removing indigenous children to institutions.” (462) Construction of indigenous women as deviant, in addition to bad mothers, to rationalize taking them: “White women reformers also commonly portrayed indigenous women as sexually immoral. In a typical comment, Amelia Stone Quinton, the WNIA's president, claimed that Navajo women were promiscuous and therefore "good morals are next to impossible. For children from such homes, the day school can do far less than the boarding school/'" Ernestine Hill, a journalist in Australia, asserted: "The black woman understands only sex, and that she understands fairly well. She is easy for the taking." Hill added that an Aboriginal woman "has no moral ethics whatever’”(463) “They also assert that what reformers identified as sexual immorality was in fact indigenous women exerting greater control over their own bodies and sexual- ity.4o Nevertheless, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, reformers' representations held sway and contributed to justifying state policies of indigenous child removal.” (464) Religious connotations/extensions of colonialism, but in the women’s sphere: “This shared commitment to maternalist reform and its colonialist orientation in both the American West and Australia seems to have emanated from an Anglo- American women's internationalism that began in the late-nineteenth century and spread across English-speaking nations and colonies th rough the activism of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU), women's foreign missionary societies, and the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA).” (465) “Australian women reformers seem to have had a more adversarial role with the state than American women. They often complained that the maternal voice they offered was ignored in policy-making and that women's influence was precisely what was needed when it came to indigenous affairs. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s they engaged in a sustained campaign for female protectors of Aboriginal women and children.” (466) “This campaign revealed another way in which Australian women con- flicted with state authorities on Aboriginal policy; they generally objected to policies of racial absorption, of "breeding out the colour," because they believed it encouraged extramarital and interracial sex and sanctioned male sexual privilege.” (466) “While it is beyond the scope of this article to trace this development, I contend that it was only after they had abandoned maternalist politics, and its atten- dant views of indigenous women as "daughters" in need of uplift, that white women activists were able to develop a straightforward opposition to indigenous child removal. Maternalist politics, though professing a concern and sisterhood with all women, did not promote equality between women, but reaffirmed class, racial, and religious hierar- chies. Ironically, white women maternalists who sought to use their association with motherhood to gain greater power in society were simultaneously engaged in dispossess- ing indigenous mothers of their children. In challenging the ascendancy of maternal- ism, women such as DuBois and Bennett became fierce critics of the colonial policies and practices of their governments and identified the ways in which colonialism had invaded even the most intimate spaces of indigenous people's lives. Western women's historians have the opportunity to follow the lead of DuBois and Bennett: to develop a critical analysis of maternalism and to examine the intricate workings of gender and colonialism in the intimacies of empire.” (476) Peggy Pascoe, “Configuring Race in the American West,” in What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford University Press, 2009): 77-108. Oregon Miscegenation Law of 1866 “One of five miscegenation laws passed by western legislatures in the 1860s, all of which names more than whites and blacks” (79) “The wording of these laws grouped African Americans, Asian Americans, Indians, and native Hawaiians together in a manner that suggested equivalence between them, as if they were parallel threats to the virtuous White families who stood at the symbolic center of the imagined community of post-Civil War America.” (80) “Wyoming’s law was proposed and passed by an entirely Democratic legislature over the veto of a Republican governor who objected because the bill failed to include ‘Indians.’” (82) SIMILAR ARGUMENTS FOR INDIGENOUS TO CHINESE MEN: “In anti-Chinese rhetoric, the supposedly virtuous homes and families built by Anglo-Saxon men were contrasted to alarming possibilities that echoed the distinction between legitimate marriage and illicit sex.” (83) White Slavery Scare: “... as in the rhetoric about labor competition reducing white working women to prostitution.” (83) “Images of deviant heterosexuality proved just as potent as images of sexual danger in fueling the sexualization of miscegenation laws, since both served to associate interracial relationships with illicit sex and to distinguish them from legitimate marriage.” (83) “Scandalous stories incited angry citizens to express moral indignation, which then required stern public officials to ride to the rescue, embodying the moral of the story: the preservation of white purity through the protection of white womanhood.” (86) “The images that animated miscegenation dramas were also highly sexualized, but their special power to provoke turned on the notion that interracial sex might lead not to rape or prostitution but to marriage. In this sense, miscegenation drama function by endangering marriage -- and the respectability, property, and civilized values that were attached to it -- using the race and gender paring of white women with nonwhite men as lightning rods for the entire social order.” (86) Hypocrisy/Sexual Dynamics of Indian Immigrants: “But when the partners to an Indian custom marriage were a white man and an Indian women, recognizing the marriage slowly but surely brought couples under the jurisdiction of American state laws … these decisions then used marriage to confirm the land and property of White husbands.” (95-96)