A Companion to American Women's History

Nancy A. Hewitt, Anne M. Valk, Nancy A. Hewitt, Anne M. Valk

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119522652
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The most important collection of essays on American Women's History

This collection incorporates the most influential and groundbreaking scholarship in the area of American women's history, featuring twenty-three original essays on critical themes and topics. It assesses the past thirty years of scholarship, capturing the ways that women's historians confront issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This second edition updates essays related to Indigenous women, slavery, the American Revolution, Civil War, the West, activism, labor, popular culture, civil rights, and feminism. It also includes a discussion of laws, capitalism, gender identity and transgender experience, welfare, reproductive politics, oral history, as well as an exploration of the perspectives of free Blacks and migrants and refugees.

Spanning from the 15th through the 21st centuries, chapters show how historians of women, gender, and sexuality have challenged established chronologies and advanced new understandings of America's political, economic, intellectual and social history.

This edition also features a new essay on the history of women's suffrage to coincide with the 100th anniversary of passage of the 19th Amendment, as well as a new article that carries issues of women, gender and sexuality into the 21st century.

• Includes twenty-three original essays by leading scholars in American women's, gender and sexuality history
• Highlights the most recent scholarship on the key debates and future directions of this popular and contemporary field
• Substantially updates the first edition with new authors and topics that represent the expanding fields of women, gender, and sexuality
• Engages issues of race, ethnicity, region, and class as they shape and are shaped by women's and gender history
• Covers the breadth of American Women's history, including Native women, colonial law and religion, slavery and freedom, women's activism, work and welfare, culture and capitalism, the state, feminism, digital and oral history, and more

A Companion to American Women's History, Second Edition is an ideal book for advanced undergraduates and graduate students studying American/U.S. women's history, history of gender and sexuality, and African American women's history. It will also appeal to scholars of these areas at all levels, as well as public historians working in museums, archives, and historic sites.

Chapter One
Native Women in the Americas to 1800

Camilla Townsend

Over the course of the past twenty years, an enormous shift has occurred in the study of indigenous women in the Americas during the colonial era. Hints from Native American women artists and writers over at least a century have at length borne fruit in the world of academia. Examples of these hints are legion, but two will suffice. In February 1893, poet Pauline Tekahionwake Johnson (Mohawk) published the short story, “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” in Dominion Illustrated. In it, the main character leaves her white husband, despite the fact that he truly loves her, because of his condescension and judgmental attitudes. In 2012, director Elle‐Maija Tailfeathers (Blackfoot of the Kainai First Nation) released a ten‐minute short film also called A Red Girl’s Reasoning, in which an assaulted indigenous woman learns that the white world will not help her and decides to take action herself and render vigilante‐style justice. College professors of history now routinely teach such material, and their scholarly research has also come to reflect the understanding that Native American women’s history must engage with “red girls’ reasoning.” Only by taking indigenous women’s experiences, cultural expectations, and hopes seriously can we successfully expand the parameters of human wisdom and hence capacity for empathy.

On Paradigm Shifts

In the 1960s, scholars of history and anthropology created the field of “ethnohistory,” or Native American history, in the context of a world newly cognizant of European colonists’ historic abuse of native peoples. In 1969, Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux) became a bestseller, and in 1970, Dee Brown’s historical work, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, took the broader reading public by storm. Five years later, Francis Jennings grabbed the attention of colonial historians with The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. The latter two books were studies of victims, and of the cold, calculating white settlers who destroyed whole peoples. They were also largely studies of men. As women’s history came into its own in the ensuing decades, and people of color inserted themselves into the national dialogue (in the case of Native Americans, through the actions of such groups as AIM, the American Indian Movement), the study of ethnohistory before 1800 changed markedly. The field became increasingly dedicated to demonstrating not victimhood but survival. Power was understood to have been negotiated, not lost. By the end of the 1990s, Richard White’s term, “the middle ground,” became the watchword of the day. This was equally – perhaps even especially – true among historians of women’s and gender history, who, as we shall see, saw native women’s frequent role of mediator as central to the history of the colonial era. Indeed, historians were so eager to embrace notions of compromise rather than agony that during the first decade of the 2000s, Native American scholars would find it necessary to remind their academic colleagues of certain bottom lines, as evident in titles such as Conquest: Sexual Violence and Native American Genocide (2005) by Andrea Smith (Cherokee ancestry)¹ and Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (2006) by Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone).

That intervention lay in the future, however. In the meantime, the majority of scholars who worked on gendered ethnohistory in the colonial era moved from embracing victims to embracing survivors. The earliest studies depended on the most readily available sources – that is, white settlers’ observations of and commentary on indigenous women. An early article by Rayna Green (Cherokee), “The Pocohantas Perplex” (1975), quickly became a classic and was reprinted multiple times. It demonstrates that the fear and loathing often associated with the image of the native woman who symbolized America was eventually replaced by affection for a sweet and genteel “princess” who was happy to help white men. This shift in the white male imagination occurred as the colonists attained more power over real indigenous people and thus experienced less fear in their dealings with them. Even then, however, as Green demonstrates, the image of the “squaw” whore remained vibrant in songs and ditties. In the 1990s, Karen Kupperman, a key figure in colonial history more generally, took up the subject of white impressions of indigenous peoples, including women and gender relations, in such works as “Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American Self‐presentation in the Early Years of Colonization” in the William and Mary Quarterly (1997). In her now classic 2000 book, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America, she argues that the English envisioning of Indians should not be understood to have consisted merely of hostility, for Indians served an important role in their conception of America. Many others worked on more specific aspects of this issue: Karen Robertson, for instance, documented how English people responded to Pocahontas’ visit to London in “Pocahontas at the Masque,” published in Signs. In short, the study of images of the Other in the white mind played itself out in this field as in others (Fischer 2002). Ultimately, of course, such studies highlighted Europeans, not Indians, but they nevertheless provided tantalizing fragments of indigenous perspectives that inspired further work.

At the same time, more mutualistic studies of indigenous–European contact zones and frontiers entered their heyday. This was true in a general sense, not merely in studies of gender relations, as exemplified in the popularity of Richard White’s famous 1991 volume, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region. But it was perhaps even more true in studies of women’s history. Through mutual kidnapping and captivity in wartime and interracial relationships and marriages in peacetime, women were very much at the heart of colonial‐era interactions between natives and newcomers. Clara Sue Kidwell (White Earth Chippewa and Choctaw) put the case effectively in a famous 1992 article in Ethnohistory, “Indian Women as Cultural Mediators,” and Frances Karttunen shortly afterward published a highly accessible collection of life stories, Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides and Survivors (1994). Fine studies of women at the crux of interethnic negotiations proliferated in the ensuing years (Miller 2002). Scholars who theorized the importance of women as negotiators of change included, among others, Kathleen Brown in her 1995 article, “The Anglo‐Algonquian Gender Frontier,” and Susan Sleeper‐Smith, the author of extensive work on indigenous women’s relationships with French fur traders and those relationships’ political and economic ramifications. Sleeper‐Smith’s monograph, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (2002), incorporates her central arguments, which she builds on in her most recent book, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 (2018).

In the mid‐1990s, scholars working on the interactions between natives and newcomers were still concerned that the majority of colonial scholars were not taking up their work. Indeed, some dominant figures in the field continued to study communities of white settlers, ignoring the native peoples they displaced or brutalized. In the William and Mary Quarterly, Daniel Richter wrote, “Although the subfield some call ethnohistory and others the New Indian History continues to flourish on its own terms, laments proliferate about its scant impact on larger areas of scholarship” (1993: 380). Gwen Miller, in the first Companion to American Women’s History, worried that although historians of the West seemed eager to address cultural interactions, “scholars of New England” still resisted “a multicultural palette” (2002: 44). In time, however, the change these two commentators sought certainly did occur. For example, in 2014, Susannah Shaw Romney set out to study women in Dutch America and found she needed to devote whole chapters to their ties with African and Native American women. Today, very few graduate students interested in the colonial era anywhere in the Americas plan studies based on a vision of racially homogeneous worlds, and even fewer who are interested in gender do so.

If there was a problem with the plethora of excellent work suddenly available around the year 2000, it was that it did not often focus on ind...