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Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919 (Gender and American Culture) - Softcover

Book 44 of 95: Gender and American Culture

Simonsen, Jane E.

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9780807856956: Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919 (Gender and American Culture)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0807856959 ISBN 13: 9780807856956
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006

Synopsis

During the westward expansion of America, white middle-class ideals of home and domestic work were used to measure differences between white and Native American women. Yet the vision of America as "home" was more than a metaphor for women's stake in the process of conquest--it took deliberate work to create and uphold. Treating white and indigenous women's struggles as part of the same history, Jane E. Simonsen argues that as both cultural workers and domestic laborers insisted upon the value of their work to "civilization", they exposed the inequalities integral to both the nation and the household. Simonsen illuminates discussions about the value of women's work through analysis of texts and images created by writers, women's rights activists, reformers, anthropologists, photographers, field matrons, and Native American women. She argues that women such as Caroline Soule, Alice Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, Anna Dawson Wilde, and Angel DeCora called upon the rhetoric of sentimental domesticity, ethnographic science, public display, and indigenous knowledge as they sought to make the gendered and racial order of the nation visible through homes and the work performed in them. Focusing on the range of materials through which domesticity was produced in the West, Simonsen integrates new voices into the study of domesticity's imperial manifestations.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Jane E. Simonsen is assistant professor of history and gender/women’s studies at Augustana College.

From the Back Cover

During the westward expansion of America, white middle-class ideals of home and domestic work were used to measure differences between white and Native American women. Treating white and indigenous women's struggles as part of the same history, Simonsen argues that as both cultural workers and domestic laborers insisted upon the value of their work to "civilization," they exposed the inequalities integral to both the nation and the household. Includes analysis of texts and images created by writers, women's rights activists, reformers, anthropologists, photographers, field matrons, and Native American women.

From the Inside Flap

During the westward expansion of America, white middle-class ideals of home and domestic work were used to measure differences between white and Native American women. Treating white and indigenous women's struggles as part of the same history, Simonsen argues that as both cultural workers and domestic laborers insisted upon the value of their work to "civilization," they exposed the inequalities integral to both the nation and the household. Includes analysis of texts and images created by writers, women's rights activists, reformers, anthropologists, photographers, field matrons, and Native American women.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date
2006
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0807856959
ISBN 13 
9780807856956
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
284
Rating
  • 3.89 out of 5 stars
    9 ratings by Goodreads