Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950

By Amanda J. Zink

This work provides a compelling explanation of something that has bedeviled a number of feminist scholars: Why did popular authors like Edna Ferber continue to write conventional fiction while living lives that were far from conventional? Amanda J. Zink argues that white writers like Ferber and Willa Cather avoided the subject of their own domestic labor by writing about the performance of domestic labor by “others,” showing that American print culture, both in novels and through advertisements, moved away from portraying women as angels in the house and instead sought to persuade other women to be angels in their houses. Zink further explores lesser-known works such as Mexican American cookbooks and essays in Indian boarding school magazines to show how women writers “dialoging domesticity” exemplify the cross-cultural encounters between “colonial domesticity” and “sovereign domesticity.” By situating these interpretations of literature within their historical contexts, Zink shows how these writers championed and challenged the ideology of domesticity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780826359193

Amanda J. Zink

Amanda J. Zink is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Idaho State University. Her essays have appeared in several publications, including Studies in American Indian Literatures, Studies in American Fiction, and Western American Literature.

Book preview

FICTIONS OF WESTERN AMERICAN DOMESTICITY

Fictions of Western American Domesticity

Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950

AMANDA J. ZINK

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS • ALBUQUERQUE

© 2018 by the University of New Mexico Press

All rights reserved. Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

First Paperback Printing, 2022

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8263-6394-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zink, Amanda J. (Amanda Jane), 1977–author.

Title: Fictions of western American domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo women in print culture, 1850–1950 / Amanda J. Zink.

Other titles: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo women in print culture, 1850–1950

Description: First edition. | Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017027176 (print) | LCCN 2017041994 (e-book) | ISBN 9780826359193 (e-book) | ISBN 9780826359186 (printed case: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Women and literature—West (U.S.)—History. | Women in literature. | Sex role in literature. | Racism in literature. | Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature. | Housewives in literature. | Housekeeping in literature. | American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. | American literature—19th century—History and criticism. | American literature—20th century—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PS152 (e-book) | LCC PS152 .Z56 2018 (print) | DDC 810.9/35640978—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027176

Cover illustration: The Santa Fe Railway and other railroads increased the incidences of contact between white women and American Indian and Mexican American women. This advertisement for the California Limited, a train that took passengers through the American Southwest, depicts such an encounter between a white woman and, presumably, a Pueblo woman in New Mexico. Author’s collection.

Designed by Lisa C. Tremaine

Composed in ITC Baskerville Pro

For Carson and Madilyn

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I often joke, If this professor gig doesn’t work out, I’ll open an interior design business. From my youngest years, my primary preoccupations have been reading books and enhancing spaces. It is no surprise, then, that my first book is also preoccupied with these activities, with the many American women—both fictional and historical—who made it their life’s work to read, write, and teach about the physical and ideological power of domesticity. Thanks to a vast company of encouraging people, reading, writing, and teaching about American domesticity is now part of my life’s work.

First and foremost, this company of encouragers includes professors from the various institutions where I have studied and worked: Becky Belcher-Rankin, Betsy Klimasmith, Susan Tomlinson, Patricia Smith, Jodi Byrd, Stephanie Foote, Ricky Rodriguez, and Robert Dale Parker. I am especially grateful to Bob for his invaluable and tireless guidance on this project, from inception to publication. My gratitude also extends to Nina Baym, who, in her retirement, happily suggested names of women writers of the American West before her most recent book on the subject went to print. I am grateful for the many librarians and curators who have helped me locate materials for this book, including those at the Newberry Library; the Haskell Indian Nations University; the Kansas Historical Society; the Library of Congress; the Smithsonian Institution; Washington State University; the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; the Illinois State Library in Springfield; the University of Iowa Special Collections & University Archives; the Webb Library in Morehead City, North Carolina; the New York Public Library; and the Kansas City Public Library. Special thanks go to the librarians at the following institutions and my students who, at the eleventh hour, helped me locate higher-resolution files of several images reproduced in this book: Laura Griffith and the Multnomah County Library, Tommy Flynn and the Boise Public Library, and Emily Ward and the Special Collections Division at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library. And, though I will always treasure the feel and smell of physical books—especially old ones!—I owe a debt to the tireless, invisible force of librarians that has spent hours and hours scanning texts and making them available digitally. Archival research will never be the same, and in that there’s much to be grateful for.

In addition to my professor-readers, I am deeply appreciative of the many anonymous reviewers, editors, and graphic artists whose generous and insightful feedback on various stages of this book’s production made this finished product possible. I can thank one reviewer by name—Siobhan Senier—whose own scholarship, as well as her encouraging and exacting suggestions, made this book better than it would have been without her. I can also thank Elise McHugh, my editor at the University of New Mexico Press, for seeing potential in the manuscript and for guiding me through the process of making it into this book. Additionally, I thank the reviewers who gave feedback on portions of this book that have been published as articles as well as the publishers who granted me permission to reprint them. A portion of chapter 1 first appeared as "Peyote in the Kitchen: Gendered Identities and Imperial Domesticity in Edna Ferber’s Cimarron" in Western American Literature 47, no. 1 (Spring 2012). Portions of chapter 4 appeared as Carlisle’s Writing Circle: Boarding School Texts and the Decolonization of Domesticity in Studies in American Indian Literatures 27, no. 4 (Winter 2015). I reprint both with the permission of the Regents of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

I am so grateful to the artists who entrusted reprints of their work to this project: Cathy Ashworth and her 2015 painting, La Llorona, and Maria Cristina Tavera and her 2014 woodblock print, La Llorona (The Crying Woman), make visible the Weeping Woman who haunts Leti in Felicia Luna Lemus’s Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties (2003). Thanks too, to the Estate of Alberto Vargas, pinup-girl artist extraordinaire, for permission to reprint one of his famous Vargas Girls.

To my department chair and dean at Idaho State University—Jennifer Attebery and Kandi Turley-Ames—and to ISU’s Office for Research, I extend gratitude for support in the form of funding for conference travel and course release time. I also thank Jennifer and Kandi for their encouragement and excitement as they watched me see this project to completion in the first few years of my assistant professorship. I am especially grateful for Bethany Skidmore and Price L. Worrell’s help with indexing this book and for Jessica Hoffman-Ramirez’s feedback on new content I wrote late in the process. I am truly grateful for all of my students—especially those who took my graduate seminar in fall 2014—for helping me articulate more clearly the ideas that make up this book. I am a lucky girl to have landed such a great gig (that I won’t be trading in for my own interior design company!).

Finally, my heartfelt gratitude goes out to the countless friends and family members who have offered support and encouragement over the several years of this project. I offer my deepest gratitude, though, to my wonder-twins, Carson and Madilyn, who have grown up while I have grown into my vocation as a scholar. And to Corey, who, after all, joined me in our own journey west to set up housekeeping here in the Rockies of southeast Idaho.

INTRODUCTION

The Literature of Modern American Domesticity

Throughout the mission fields workers are found using their utmost strength in their endeavors to raise the standards of family life. Home has seldom been a sacred place, and family relations have not been held sacred. Missionaries who have been engaged in teaching have been able to improve conditions to a great extent but if the home, the citadel of family life, is to be permanently strengthened there must be more Bible women, more district nurses, and more settlement workers whose primary duty is to go into the homes. It is a most important work that women be taught to make the home attractive to the men and children of the family, for to the average Spanish American home is the place where he occasionally eats and sleeps. A real home would tend to make husbands more faithful and women’s lot brighter. There are occasional homes that are worthy of the name—the homes of women who have been trained in mission schools.

—Robert McLean and Grace Petrie Williams, Old Spain in New America, 1916

You have your beautiful homes filled with many treasures, ordered households where courtesy reigns; food of the best, served graciously…. I say this: Seek the Americano officials who have influence and invite them to your homes and entertainments. Show them that we have much to give them in culture, that we are not the ignorant people they take us to be, that to remain as we are will neither harm nor be a disgrace to their union of states. They are far too well acquainted with the lowest of the Mexicans and not at all with the best.

—Jovita González and Eve Raleigh, Caballero: A Historical Novel, 1996

In Cimarron, Edna Ferber’s best-selling novel (1929) turned blockbuster film (1931), Sabra Cravat finds herself in Oklahoma Territory with an often-absent husband, a newspaper that needs running, and a household that needs keeping. Raised in the American South and accustomed to having servants (i.e., slaves), Sabra eventually realizes that, as her husband is frequently away for increasingly long periods of time and the work of editing and printing the newspaper falls to her, she needs someone to help clean the house and mind her two children, a redistribution of labor that pleases her (210). Her parents’ youngest servant, Black Isaiah—who was as much her slave as though the Emancipation Proclamation had never been (64)—had been a stowaway member of their westward journey, but he was more useful to Sabra for outside chores. So she hires Arita Red Feather, a fifteen-year-old Osage girl who had been to the Indian school and had learned some of the rudiments of household duties (210). In addition to Sabra’s annoyance that Arita had to be told everything over again, daily, this hire has disastrous consequences. Arita and Black Isaiah fall and love and have a baby, and all three are one morning found dead in the desert, having been brutally murdered by, presumably, other Osages.¹ Because there was no other kind of help available, Sabra soon employs another Osage housekeeper, Ruby Big Elk. To avoid repeating the hideous experience of Arita Red Feather and Black Isaiah, she is careful to hire an older girl (288). But an event transpires that, to Sabra, is even more hideous than the terrible deaths of Arita and Isaiah: her own son, Cimarron, falls in love with, marries, and has children with Ruby Big Elk.

Conventional narratives of American modernism tell us that most women writers at the turn into the twentieth century abandoned the themes of domesticity and true womanhood that typified the writings of their nineteenth-century foremothers. On the contrary, as I show in this book, white writers sometimes drew characters that use domesticity to colonize American Indian and Mexican American women, as if to enable and legitimize their own public activities. As can be seen in the example of Cimarron, this transfer of domesticity is not without physical and ideological threat, and the exchange of cross-cultural influence goes both ways, in lived history and in literary constructs. Further, this book shows how Indian and Mexican American women writers manipulate domestic colonization and rhetoric to assert a syncretic domesticity that negotiates resistance and assimilation in sophisticated ways. Interpreting memoirs, novels, Indian boarding school narratives, Mexican American cookbooks, and the visual culture that surrounds their publication, I demonstrate that such responses were in no way isolated or exceptional, nor were they merely responses. American Indian and Mexican American women collectively rewrite colonial domesticity and write their own domesticity.

As I use it in this study, domesticity indicates an ideology centered on the household and is characterized by a particular devotion to home life. Many literary scholars have discussed and defined the conventions of domestic or sentimental fiction. Donna Campbell provides a useful summary of the genre, citing such features as a heroine’s quest to master herself and her desires, her struggle to navigate social pressures and personal passions, and her ability to endure suffering at the hands of abusers of power before establishing a network of surrogate kin (Domestic). The plots often feature two main stories: the heroine successfully navigates the pitfalls of coming of age, and the heroine marries at the end, either reforming a corrupt man or returning to the stalwart man. But in the literary texts I consider in this book, domesticity becomes an ideology and a set of rituals that white heroines transfer to nonwhite women, ostensibly so the latter might master a particular brand of American femininity. The social pressures these heroines must learn to navigate are far more complex than those the typical sentimental heroine deals with. In addition to pressures regarding sexual purity, for example, Indian and Mexican American sentimental heroines both withstand the nearly crushing pressures of American racism and colonialism and learn to redirect these social forces for their own benefit. Euro- and Anglo-American women writers and thinkers, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, worked to legitimize, politicize, professionalize, organize, and proselytize the rhetoric, values, and rituals of domesticity. These women—particularly Protestant missionaries, federal agents, and relocated artists—preached a gospel that made sacred the domestic labors of American women and propagated a political platform that made domesticity the very definition of American femininity, what Barbara Welter describes as the cult of true womanhood and Linda Kerber discusses as republican motherhood. As I show, Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, Elinore Cowan Stone, and Evelyn Hunt Raymond fictionalized the ways white women colonized western women of color by creating characters who brought the right ways of living to the Other women in their western adventures.

This book builds on the foundational scholarship of Jane Tompkins, Mary Kelley, Gillian Brown, Ann Douglas, Lora Romero, and others who broke new ground by encouraging scholars to see the public and political qualities of a nineteenth-century genre previously thought only private and personal. I use Amy Kaplan’s concept of Manifest Domesticity to help characterize the white characters in the texts I discuss here, a concept that seems to shape the particular politics that the characters—and perhaps their authors—espouse. Starting with but pushing past the nineteenth century, this book shows how American women writers carry the literary conventions of sentimentalism and domesticity into the twentieth century and, thinking along with Lauren Berlant, probes the persistence of sentimentality as a mode for engaging public life. Taking as a given that the personal and private is also political and public—an individual’s spheres of influence are not, as Cathy Davidson (1998) points out, entirely separable—and running with Kaplan’s argument that literary domesticity works to naturalize the internal foreigner, this project shows how the politics of modernist sentimentalism are distinctly colonial. To make a profession out of spreading this domestic gospel, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white women subjugated their own performance of domestic labor to writing and speaking about the performance of domestic labor by Others.

A double standard regarding American domesticity was then born; someone had to perform the actual labors of domesticity, and Euro-American speakers and writers needed pupils who presumably required lessons in domesticity. African American, Mexican American, and American Indian women living within the political borders of the United States served as these students. Woven through the arguments of this book is the zigzag narrative of domesticity. What promises to be a pathway to power (i.e., republican motherhood, true womanhood) for women turns out to be another means of oppression for women who are not white and/or middle class. White women reformers disavowed domesticity for themselves but then displaced it onto women of color. It might be argued that Harriet Beecher Stowe and her incredibly and lastingly popular sentimental novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), is the first example of such duplicitous domesticity. Louise Michele Newman, for example, asserts that Stowe—and other white female abolitionists such as Angelina Grimké—used abolition as a thinly veiled guise for her primary agenda: gaining a public platform for (white) women’s rights. Stowe constructs the character of Mrs. Shelby, who is adored as an American domestic goddess and enjoys all the rights and privileges of a true woman but does not perform domestic labor. Rather, like historical plantation owners’ wives, Mrs. Shelby passes off this labor to her female black slaves, thereby teaching them how to perform American femininity, even if these black women primarily labor in their mistresses’ homes. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mrs. Shelby helps Eliza escape slavery to raise her child in freedom not only because Eliza’s complexion is light enough for her to pass as white, but also because Eliza’s sacrificial motherhood signifies that she passes the tests of American femininity. Presumably, Mrs. Shelby trusts Eliza to implement her lessons of domesticity—regarding motherhood, housekeeping, and religious education—with her own son and in her own home.

As Brian Dippie and others discuss, Helen Hunt Jackson fancied herself the Harriet Beecher Stowe for Indians and hoped her books, A Century of Dishonor (1881) and Ramona (1884), would influence federal Indian reform the same way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin contributed to the abolition of slavery (156). Ramona is perhaps the most-discussed example of white women—historical authors and fictional characters—who take up the cause of uplifting Indian and Mexican women through the civilizing, evangelizing, and Americanizing tenets of domesticity. Indeed, Siobhan Senier argues that Jackson’s reform work and writings reveal how the desire for self-authorization erupted into the political projects of white reformers who claimed to speak for Indians (Voices 30). Jackson, like Stowe, uses the rhetoric of domesticity in ways that domesticate the nonwhite female characters in Ramona and show that they are already well versed in the art of housekeeping. Even though she treats Ramona cruelly, Señora Morena runs a meticulous and mannered household, and Jackson carefully crafts the señora’s scenes to connect her with the physical spaces of the house. And even though Ramona and Alessandro are on the run during their entire marriage, Jackson describes in great detail how Ramona keeps an amazingly clean and well-appointed home. See, Jackson seems to argue, Indians know what they’re doing—they’re either domesticated already or quick studies in domesticity.

This book also engages histories of colonial domesticity by Margaret D. Jacobs, Jane E. Simonsen, Peggy Pascoe, Laura Wexler, Anne McClintock, Cathleen D. Cahill, and others who document the lives of white women reformers. The white heroines in Cather’s, Ferber’s, Stone’s, and Raymond’s novels can be read as caricatures of the historical female missionaries, teachers, and reformers who lived among Indian and Mexican women of the West in efforts to civilize and Americanize them. Fictional reformers both represent and complicate the lived histories of female reformers at the turn into the twentieth century who left the confines of domesticity but brought it with them and enforced it on the Other women they encountered in their travels. The first epigraph to this chapter offers a prime example of the ways Euro-American women moved and lived among indigenous women of the southwestern states. Surely fueled by what they believed to be the best intentions—evangelism and uplift—these white missionaries viewed Indian and Mexican domesticity through their own cultural lenses, which, not surprisingly, led them to erroneous conclusions. The authors of the epigraph, Robert McLean and Grace Petrie Williams, are but two such missionaries and Old Spain in New America is but one such tract that reports the status of America’s nonwhite internal foreigners. In addition to Old Spain, the Council of Women for Home Missions (CWHM) published several other field reports, including From over the Border: A Study of the Mexicans in the United States; In Red Man’s Land: A Study of the American Indian; From Darkness to Light: The Story of Negro Progress; Comrades from Other Lands: What They Are Doing for Us and What We Are Doing for Them; Mormonism: The Islam of America; and Christian Americanization: A Task for the Churches. See figures I.1–4 for propagandistic images published in these texts.

As the titles imply, the writers of these missionary reports signal the Protestant Church’s agenda for Americanization-through-Christianization. The directors of the CWHM apparently targeted for conversion a wide variety of the groups living in America that were not considered WASPs: Mexicans, Indians, blacks, Slavs, Mormons, and Muslims. Many of the writers are women, and most tracts include sections on conversion efforts that were the particular province of women—namely, training in domesticity and religious education. Female missionaries, however, did not practice the domestic message they preached. They were not spending most of their time keeping house or raising children or teaching school—comfortably acceptable roles for women under the auspices of domesticity—but were writing and speaking about domesticity to women who presumably lacked such feminized knowledge. Indeed, white women writers such as these missionaries might be illustrative of Cathryn Halverson’s paradigm of western housekeeping as play instead of labor, as playing house instead of keeping house. For Halverson, whose 2013 Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives, 1839–1987 focuses on life narratives instead of fiction, playing house is at once a symptom of estrangement and a manifestation of agency. If play can be defined as a form of conquest and an active mastery of a situation,then narratives of western housekeeping distance narrators and protagonists from the domestic work they do and the identity it connotes. They appear not as ‘housekeepers’ but as women playing the role of such (4). Following this logic, one could ask what this play at housekeeping conquers and what situation are these writers mastering? Halverson’s answer is: glossing over American Indian dispossession and seemingly oblivious to class and racial privilege, these writers do not acknowledge as a ‘legacy of conquest’ the western experiences that absorb them, seeing in their emphasis on disruption authors who little resemble ‘gentle tamers,’ women bent on extending civilization’s reach (12). But it seems that glossing over American Indian dispossession is an act of imperial privilege, regardless of how unaware of such privilege these women writers might be, and even if some writers do not seem to align themselves with the project of oppressing nonwhite others (13). After all, missionaries and reformers would not have described their own westering as exercises in colonial oppression or conquest but as endeavors in philanthropy.

FIGURE I.1 Present Day Warriors. Two warriors defend the border of Red Man’s Land. Courtesy Eli M. Oboler Library, Idaho State University, Pocatello.

FIGURE I.2 Indian Homes (Best of the New Type) and Ojibway Tepees (Typical of the Passing Old Life). Encapsulating the Euro-American preoccupation with indigenous homes, these photos tell the master narrative of the Vanishing Indian. Courtesy Eli M. Oboler Library, Idaho State University, Pocatello.

Historical missionaries were not the only white American women to escape the confines of domesticity only to enforce it on or celebrate it in nonwhite women’s cultures. Cather and Mary Austin are often paired as prime examples of early twentieth-century American writers who abandoned practical and literary domesticity. In her autobiography, Earth Horizon (1932), Austin compares the purely objective domesticity of her childhood home, where her mother was an efficient housekeeper, to the moral implications of how an American household is adorned and organized that, for her, symbolized the repressive conventions hedging femininity on every side (108, 124, 115). But even Austin does not altogether abandon literary domesticity; she praises primitive Indian domesticity in The Basket Maker and ridicules repressive Euro-American domesticity in Santa Lucia, a Common Story (1908). Newman writes,

FIGURE I.3 New Citizens from Over the Border. Women for Home Missions attempted to override the authority of Mexican mothers by teaching Mexican children to be American. Author’s collection.

FIGURE I.4 Mexicans? No! They Are Americans in the Making! The original caption on this photo of Mexican children metaphorically abducts Mexican children and renames them American. Author’s collection.

White woman’s rights activists measured the (lack of) social progress of non-white races in terms of their (lack of) conformity to Anglo-American Protestant middle-class gender relations. One of the most profound ironies of this history, then, is that at the very moment that the white woman’s movement was engaged in a vigorous critique of patriarchal gender relations, it also called for the introduction of patriarchy into those cultures deemed inferior precisely because these cultures did not manifest these gender practices. White leaders’ critique of the cult of domesticity—as too restrictive and oppressive when applied to themselves—went hand in hand with their defense of domesticity as necessary for the advancement of primitive women. (7–8)

As reformers lived it and writers fictionalized it, then, modern American domesticity—or as Suzanne Clark dubs it, sentimental modernism—is remodeled into a colonial enterprise. Clark traces the ways modernist women writers both deny and recuperate the sentimental (13), but though she touches on questions of race when she briefly discusses womanist fiction and Alice Walker, she does not explore the colonial underpinnings of modernist domesticity. As I show in the chapters to follow, white women writers indeed brought the conventions of domestic sentimentalism with them into modernism. Building on the histories of women reformers by Jacobs, Simonsen, and others, as well as the makeover of American modernism by Clark and others, this project explores another layer of texts motivated by reform efforts: popular magazines and popular culture events such as fairs and contests, boarding school publications, children’s books, and novels. The archive for this project consists of materials that use domesticity as a common platform—a modernist domesticity that is also decidedly colonial.

The central questions driving this project—where and how do white writers fictionalize colonial domesticity? how do indigenous women write about colonial domesticity?—led me to amass an unconventional, materialist archive of primary sources that includes advertisements in magazines, pamphlets and circulars printed by fair organizers, scorecards and award medals produced by fair judges, and illustrations in children’s books. In this way, the illustrations this book includes do not serve merely as visual representations of the textual argument. Rather, the book’s illustrations offer their own, distinct, material-cultural argument. Devising a method that follows the lead of American print culture scholars and innovative archivists such as Janice A. Radway, Carl F. Kaestle, Trish Loughran, Ronald and Mary Saracino Zboray, Terence Whalen, David M. Henkin, Robert Dale Parker, and others, I examine texts and read extra-textual spaces to uncover ways that texts engage cultural discourses and circulate cultural ideologies. Part of what makes domesticity modernist in the early twentieth century is the myriad of forms this traditional content takes. In addition to the usual suspects one looks for when embarking on a literary project—novels, stories, nonfiction prose, poetry—I show instances when American print culture moves away from depicting white women as angels in the house and instead propagates a doctrine that seeks to persuade Other women to be angels in their houses so they can be American and so white women can get out of the house. The sheer volume of stories and images circulating in popular print sources that feature Great White Mothers uplifting poor, ignorant black, brown, and red mothers (even Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published in a newspaper) suggests attempts to normalize the ideas that domestic labor is not for white women but for nonwhite women and that white women need to teach nonwhite women how to be American.

American novels—both canonical and noncanonical—and other popular print sources are treasure troves of colonial domesticity. It is no secret among Cather scholars that, in a review in the Lincoln Courier on November 9, 1895, she harshly disparaged modern print culture, touting her conviction that journalism is the vandalism of literature. It has brought to it endless harm and no real good. It has made art a trade. The great American newspaper takes in intellect, promise, talent; it gives out only colloquial gossip. It is written by machines, set by machines, and read by machines (Cather 272). But whether financial hardship or change of opinion influenced her later publishing decisions, most of Cather’s novels were, in fact, serialized in popular periodicals, both highbrow and middlebrow. Exploring the enmeshed state of fiction and advertising between the 1890s and 1910, Ellen Gruber Garvey asserts that fiction does not emerge from some pure sphere of literature where it can remain untouched by the commercial nexus within which its writers live and work but instead constantly if uneasily reflects on its place within commerce (5). Aleta Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves argue that, since the 1830s, American women writers have used periodicals to reinforce or subvert prevailing or ideal models of and for American femininity. If modernist domesticity is distinctly colonial, it is also inextricably linked to the publishing market, making popular novels and magazines another frontier of capitalism as well as colonialism.

This new frontier—this juncture of domesticity, sentimentalism, modernism, capitalism, and colonialism—provides the setting, the rhetoric, and the opportunity for indigenous women of North America to write back to the empire. Cane and Alves argue that while

many white women writers from the middle class sought to expand the opportunities for American women within the context of the dominant social norms, others—white women of the working classes, Mexican American, Native American, and African American women writers—urged the expansion of American readers’ consciousness of countries and cultures beyond and within this nation’s borders. (11)

Through their sentimental educations in boarding schools and with federal field agents and Christian missionaries—as well as their mundane exposure to mainstream American print culture—American Indian and Mexican American women learned the feminized discourse of domesticity so well that they too could manipulate its principles.

Thus, while I use historical categories of and models for American womanhood (republican motherhood, true womanhood, new womanhood) and theoretical concepts or generic conventions for women’s writing (domesticity, sentimentalism) as if they are stable, the work of this book is to destabilize these categories, models, concepts, and conventions.² This book deconstructs historical, gendered structures that white women (and men) built on the backs of women (and men) of color—Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and, though I do not discuss in depth their history or literature in this project, African Americans—to expose the fragility and pliability of these seemingly monolithic, approaching divine, ways of organizing and policing American gendered life. The historical and literary white women reformers featured in this book were themselves invested in the stability of these categories, using terms and concepts as tools to police women of color but also to police their own anxieties about their choices to move outside these categories. Even as their reform efforts seemed to bolster the constancy of gendered ideals, they also belie the shakiness of such constructs. As this book shows, the gendered categories some white women clung to were always already empty signifiers defined on other women’s bodies. White women spent decades trying to fill these signifiers as true women or new women, but saying that they have passed through them—that they are now free to pursue other more diverse and more public activities—lays bare the vacuity of the signifiers. The irony, then, is that, knowing (at least unconsciously) that the constructs might crumble if they could abandon them, white women still imbued the categories with enough meaning as to pass them on to Other women.

If the goal of republican mothers or true women or even new women was to be a best version of American femininity while influencing people around them to be the best Americans they could be, it follows that the ultimate work of domesticity would be to use its tenets to Americanize women who haunted the periphery of American femininity. In English and Anglo-American literature of feminist individualism in the age of imperialism, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asserts, what is at stake is precisely the making of human beings, the constitution and ‘interpellation’ of the subject. Spivak shows how these stakes play out in two registers: in domestic-society-through-sexual-reproduction cathected as ‘companionate love’ and, most relevant to the argument of this book, in the imperialist project cathected as civil-society-through-social mission (Three Women’s Texts 244). Domesticity and sentimentalism, both literarily and historically, attest to be the sites all women must traverse in order to claim subjectivity and Americanness, even when the sites are but empty markers on the way to fuller participation in American public and political life and even when, as Spivak argues, the ‘native female’ is excluded any share in these categories.

This emptiness, though, allows for a refilling of the signifiers of domesticity in ways that best serve whoever is now doing the filling. Anticipating Spivak’s rhetorical question, Mexican American and American Indian women writers show that the subaltern do indeed speak. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, Mexican and Native women in the United States had at least some access to the same print outlets as did Euro-American women. Many scholars have documented a literary history of subaltern interventions in the discourses of domesticity and sentimentality, showing how colonized writers negotiate colonial pressures in ways that cannot be categorized simply as assimilative or resistant and are not evidence of selling out to dominant cultural ideologies. A caveat: to include as subaltern the Mexican American women writers interpreted in this study is to engage a complex scholarly debate. The women who had access to print from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries were typically from landed families who identified more with their Spanish ancestors than with their indigenous Mexican heritage.

But it is on this point that this debate becomes complex, since the best way to refer to any group of people is to use the term they call themselves. In this book, I name tribal affiliations as often as possible. When speaking of collectives, I use the inept but inevitable catchall terms European and Anglo settlers invented to categorize indigenous peoples and use them interchangeably: American Indian, Native American, Indian, Native. Similarly, when discussing Hispanic (Spanish-speaking) writers, I avoid using the now popular catchall term Latina/o because the writers I discuss were mostly Spanish Mexicans. They often use the term Spanish American to describe themselves, privileging their Spanish heritage over their indigenous Mexican heritage. I sometimes use that term in chapter 2, but for the most part I use Mexican American, or sometimes