Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919

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 va...