Matrons and Maids: Regulating Indian Domestic Service in Tucson, 1914–1934

7. “Mrs. Taylor calls it ‘messenger work’”: Gracie Taylor, 1932–1934

134 7 “Mrs. Taylor calls it ‘messenger work’” Gracie Taylor, 1932–1934 When Gracie’s mother died and her preacher father went away, her brother and sister were only little children, and she was not much older. Taken in by their Quaker grandparents in northern Michigan, the children stayed there until young Gracie married Aaron Taylor, a widowed poultry merchant, thirty years her senior, who was prepared to take on his new bride’s teenage siblings, too, alongside his own son. For that kindness and care, Gracie was perpetually grateful. When Aaron became too old to work in 1915, she took a position as a teacher in the Indian Service, hoping she might eventually secure a field matron position where Aaron might be permitted to join her. Despite the policy against appointing field matrons “with home ties,” she eventually wound up as the field matron at a village on the San Carlos reservation in southeastern Arizona, her elderly husband in tow. Widowed in her mid-40s, and restless at isolated Bylas, in 1929 Taylor tried for various outing matron jobs, including the one at Tucson, just as it was promised to Light, before finally landing the new position replacing Amanda Chingren at Phoenix in October 1930.1 The Phoenix outing matron position had been vacant for a month. The Rhoads administration may have been unsure about continuing it, but with the help of Taylor’s niece in Pennsylvania, who was a member of the same congregation of Friends as the new assistant commissioner, J. Henry Scattergood, Taylor had secured the position and a new title. At a time when skeptical glances were being cast at Gracie Taylor, 1932–1934 135 the outing system, and retiring matrons were being replaced either by field nurses or college graduates with employment qualifications, Taylor was designated a “senior placement matron.” Taylor was flummoxed on her arrival at Phoenix—ladies “clamoring” for girls, summer students returning to school, other girls “scattered about over the city,” and Taylor without a clue how to find them—but she valiantly set about to make a success of it, and by the time she learned that she was to go to Tucson in June 1932, she had settled in comfortably enough and did not want to leave.2 But all the time Taylor had been at Phoenix, significant changes were taking shape at the Indian Office headquarters in Washington, DC. Legislation and funding to establish a new national Indian “employment agency” were secured at the end of 1931. Commissioner Charles J. Rhoads then appointed a full-time director of Indian employment in 1932, Ernest R. Burton, with the responsibility to organize the “more effective coordination” of adult placement services with the educational program, and to coordinate Indian Service employment activities with public employment offices around the country. At Burton ’s request, the youth and student employment was delegated to Assistant Director of Education Mary Stewart, in effect leaving her in charge of the employment of girls and women, and of the outing matrons. Stewart immediately established a system of appointed assistant guidance and placement officers to take the place of the outing matrons, both to develop educational and training opportunities for Indian girls and boys, and to manage their employment.3 In April 1932, at the same time as she investigated the Tucson situation, Stewart had asked Taylor, who was then working out of her residence as Chingren had always done, for her thoughts on setting up a formal employment office for women in Phoenix. Taylor’s labored response revealed her to be out of step with the reformist inclinations of the administration. “Very few” of the Indians she dealt with in Phoenix were capable of work other than housework or positions in the boarding schools, according to Taylor, and even those who were could earn better money in domestic service. With employment opportunities disappearing all around, private domestic service was the only viable option for girls that Taylor could see. “The protection, influence and training that the girls get in the home is what most of them need,” she asserted, and the supervision of the chapter 7 136 Indian Service would be needed “for a long time to come. If turned loose, so large a percent of them would become prostitutes that people would be afraid to take any of them into their homes.”4 It was possibly at this juncture that it occurred to Stewart...