Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West

Abstract

May Wing, who spoke these words, was born in Leadville, Colorado, in 1890. The daughter and wife of miners, she lived her life in Colorado mining towns. I am not certain that she would recognize herself in much of the scholarship on western women, which has been influenced by the assumptions of traditional western history and of the Victorian Cult of Womanhood.2 Assuming that men's and women's worlds were separate, that men were public and women were private, that men were active and women were passive, historians have created a number of polarized images of western women. Common stereotypes divide them into good and women-the genteel civilizer and the sunbonneted helpmate, and the hell raiser and the bad woman.3 Some recent history is distinguishing class divisions within prostitution and providing a more complicated sense of bad women's lives and options,4 but our understanding of all women's roles has been shaped by prescriptions for female respectability in Victorian America, and I want to concentrate here on interpretations of the majority of western women, who were married and were thus good. Understandings of their history have been influenced by the images of the genteel civilizer and the helpmate. The civilizer was projected from Victorian prescriptive literature, which reflected the cardinal virtues of True Womanhood--piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness to male authority. Women were to shape national morality from the privacy of their family hearthsides, leaving public action to men. The assumption that women behaved as they were told influenced early works on western women, beginning with Dee Brown's The Gentle Tamers in 1958.5 The image of western women he created was that of the reluctant pioneer, who, while her man tamed the physical world, gently and passively tamed him and brought civilized culture to the frontier. This passive image was countered by emphasizing the hard work women did and their active roles in community building, but this approach led to equally one-dimensional views of the heroic feats and stoic endurance of oppressed women. Both images can be found in recent works.6 These dichotomized images are rooted in the presumed separation of public spheres for men and private spheres for women. This presumption posed an important question in the West, where women were enfranchised before their eastern sisters. By 1914 women could vote in the Territory of Alaska and eleven states, all but Illinois west of the Mississippi. In Canada suffrage was first won in three western provinces. Influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, which suggested that the West was a liberating and innovative environment, historians accepted the belief that the frontier liberated women, and then debated whether men gave women the vote because they valued women's civilizing influence or because they recognized women's contributions as workers. Recently, feminist historians like Julie Roy Jeffrey have questioned the significance of suffrage, pointing out that political