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

This is a compelling exploration of the efforts made by US government field agents in the last quarter of the 19th century to "domesticate" Native Americans: to teach them how to live and work Euro-American style, in nuclear rather than extended families, in square houses rather than round teepees, and within patriarchal gender relations and divisions of labor.The really interesting thing is that these field agents were very often women, for whom the value of "women's work"--its economic as well as its moral value--occasionally became destabilized even as they insisted upon native adoption of it for its "civilizing" influence.Simonsen gets at all of this (and more) by examining an array of evidence: popular domestic literature of the time, photographs taken by ethnologists and amateurs alike, and model homes run by graduates of such Indian schools as Virginia's Hampton Institute.A terrific, must-read for anyone interested in the history of domesticity, of labor relations among American whites and natives, and of western settlement.

Product Description
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. Simonsen 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.



Click Here to see more reviews about: Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919 (Gender and American Culture) (Hardcover)