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

6. “A worthy, industrious people”: Libbie Light, 1929–1932

107 6 “A worthy, industrious people” Libbie Light, 1929–1932 To say Libbie Light was gratified when she got the news of her transfer to Tucson would be an understatement. Light had been waiting for years for such a position, well before her husband, a former superintendent at the Truxton Canon agency in northern Arizona, even began to contemplate retirement from the Indian Service. When the long-awaited letter arrived, she was on unofficial furlough, impatiently biding her time at Phoenix and fending off transfers elsewhere, until either Amanda Chingren or Janette Woodruff retired. Mrs. Light was not so much happy as hugely relieved and, no doubt, very pleased with herself to find that all her complicated strategies with the Indian Office had finally paid off. The Tucson position was especially ideal, because the couple’s cherished youngest daughter was enrolled at the university in town. At sixty-two years of age, Light still had enough time, too, she calculated, to get Bettie through to graduation and clock up enough years to retire on the top pension level. All around, it was most satisfying.1 The middle child of a large Irish-American family from the foothills of the Ohio Appalachians, and a devoted wife and mother, Light had more in common with Lydia Gibbs than with either of the previous outing matrons. But she was cannier than Gibbs, whom Light happened to know personally. By 1929, Gibbs was a poor widow, having been forced to retire without a pension entitlement—by none other than Light’s husband—when her own husband retired, and chapter 6 108 pathetically and futilely begging the Indian Office for any kind of work to support herself.2 Libbie Light, who in 1895 had started work in the Indian Service earlier than any of the others, Gibbs included, was a survivor. Light took up her appointment at Tucson just as the administration of the Office of Indian Affairs entered a new, reformist era. A commission into Indian affairs led by Lewis Meriam had submitted its very critical report to the secretary of the interior in February 1928, published the same year as The Problem of Indian Administration. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles H. Burke resigned, and he was replaced by Charles J. Rhoads in April 1929, on the promise from President Herbert Hoover that the president would back the reform program outlined in the Meriam report.3 Light’s appointment to the Tucson position had been one of the last acts of the outgoing administration. Rhoads and his new assistant commissioner, J. Henry Scattergood, would work together to implement many of the reforms recommended in the Meriam report. While Rhoads backed away from land reforms, he did follow through on other recommendations on education, health, and welfare, and his new director of education, Dr. W. Carson Ryan Jr., was one of the Meriam report’s authors.4 The Meriam report had been ambivalent on the outing policy for girls. As it presently operated, outing was “mainly a plan for hiring out boys for odd jobs and girls for domestic service, seldom a plan for providing real vocational training.” Nevertheless, a modified outing system might be useful, if administered by technically trained “guidance and employment” professionals, as part of an integrated program of training, placement, and supervision in the workforce. Domestic service was a “dead end” if a “not necessarily degrading” occupation for women, but the report conceded that it was likely to continue to feature in girls’ education and employment. The government , then, should provide outing girls with opportunities for marriage, providing housing in “a comfortable building with a house mother,” where they could entertain and get to know young men “in wholesome ways.” These facilities could then be made available to other unmarried Indian servants working in the city. On the subject of the outing matrons, the Meriam report was noncommittal . The authors supported the current policy of “eliminating” Libbie Light, 1929–1932 109 the field matron position by filling vacancies with trained nurses and recommended that the school matrons should be replaced altogether, doing away with the lack of qualifications and low salaries associated with these positions. The authors allowed that some “good work” was being done by the outing matrons: the Indian girls in service “have a friend to whom they can turn, in the supervising matron, with whom their relations seem in most cases to be cordial.” None of...