Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2006
Abstract
With True Women and Westward Expansion, Adrienne Caughfield examines the contributions that Texas women made to the meanings and achievement of U.S. expansion between 1820 and 1860. She argues that they did so in two ways. First, they embraced nineteenth-century ideas of feminine domesticity with which they sought to civilize the wilderness. Second, a select few like Jane McManus Storm Cazeneau, Mary Austin Holley, and Lucy Holcombe Pickens supported expansion with their public writings. ''At its heart," Caughfield explains, "expansionist philosophy closely paralleled domesticity so that adherents to the latter tended to accept the former. The true woman, then, would tend to agree with the rationale behind territorial aggrandizement and, within her separate sphere, work toward it." Indeed, Caughfield finds that these Texas women espoused the same goals as their male counterparts and contributed to the rationalization of expansion through language of domesticity. They were not passive participants, dragged onto the frontier by their husbands and fathers. Instead, many willingly risked their own lives, provided crucial support systems, transformed the wilderness into the garden of civilization, and often endured abject isolation.
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:3 (Summer 2006). Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.