The Princess and the Squaw: The Construction of Native American Women in the Pictorial Press

Abstract

The two most important nineteenth-century illustrated weeklies, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly, represented Native American women largely through familiar racial stereotypes. In words and pictures, Indian women were depicted as idealized Indian princesses or as downtrodden squaws. Young, “civilized” Indian women were represented as good mothers, like white women, but other women—“squaws”—were identified by the hardships of their lives, especially at the hands of Indian men. Other Indian women were portrayed as silly or foolish. Over time, some Southwestern Indian women were depicted as craft workers, a category that emphasized their exoticism and cultural “otherness.” Both newspapers followed the ethnocentric prejudices of the era, constructing Native American women as symbolically useful outsiders, alternatively alluring or repulsive, but always contained within the ruling ideology of Euro-American culture.