Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937 - Hardcover

Ellinghaus, Katherine

9780803218291: Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080321829X ISBN 13: 9780803218291

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2006

Taking Assimilation to Heart examines marriages between white women and indigenous men in Australia and the United States between 1887 and 1937. In these settler societies, white women were expected to reproduce white children to keep the white race “pure”--hence special anxieties were associated with their sexuality, and marriages with indigenous men were rare events. As such, these interracial marriages illuminate the complicated social, racial, and national contexts in which they occurred.

This study of the ideological and political context of marriages between white women and indigenous men uncovers striking differences between the policies of assimilation endorsed by Australia and those encouraged by the United States. White Australians emphasized biological absorption, in which indigenous identity would be dissolved through interracial relationships, while white Americans promoted cultural assimilation, attempting to alter the lifestyles of indigenous people rather than their physical appearance. This disparity led, in turn, to differing emphases on humanitarian reforms, education policies, and social mobility, which affected the social status of the white women and indigenous men who married each other.

Shifting from the personal to the local to the transnational, Taking Assimilation to Heart extends our understanding of the ways in which individual lives have been part of the culture of colonialism.

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About the Author:

Katherine Ellinghaus a Hansen Lecturer in History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy (Nebraska, 2017) and coeditor of Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of Identity.

Review:

“Ellinghaus’s study offers insights on racism and prejudice within the United States and Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how public policy and private lives were affected by these phenomena. . .. This book is valuable for its illuminating transnational analysis and for the opportunity it provides for Australians and Americans to reflect on their own histories of treatment of their indigenous population.”—Christine Choo, American Historical Review (American Historical Review American Historical Review 2008-05-01)

“This book makes a major contribution to scholars’ understanding of the interrelationship between assimilation policies and interracial marriages. . . . The brilliance of this book lies in the way it underscores what is distinctive about each national context without diminishing what is similar. . . . What makes this book so extraordinary is Ellinghaus’ ability to move back and forth between these different levels of analysis and between the two nations: showing us how larger discourses about assimilation, racial difference and ‘miscegenation’ affected people’s understandings of their marriages (and vice versa). In short, this is a beautifully crafted book, full of nuance and complexity—comparative history at its best.”—Australian Historical Studies
(Australian Historical Studies 2008-05-23)

"Taking Assimilation to Heart demonstrates the efficacy of the new, wide-lensed thinking being applied to studies of colonialism and imperialism. With its comparative settler-colonising framing, this book helps illuminate gendered histories operating on both the intimate and national level, and with ripples both local and global."—Ann McGrath, Aboriginal History (Ann McGrath Aboriginal History)

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