True Women and Westward Expansion

True Women and Westward Expansion is a welcome addition to the small but growing collection of scholarly monographs that address the history of Texas women. With this study, Adrienne Caughfield places the experiences of Texas women during the nineteenth century within the context of national socialparadigms. Specifically, Caughfield examines the ways in which Texas womenparticipated in westward expansion and uses gender to add nuance to our understanding of the concept of Manifest Destiny. Here Texas women are viewed as contributors to the national expansionist impulse and participants in the American "cult of true womanhood."

As the topic demands and as sources dictate, this study is primarily limited to literate white women who migrated to Texas from the United States. And, as the author freely acknowledges, the ideal of domesticity was largely associated with the white middle class. Within the limits of the subject group, Caughfield has ferreted out some interesting conclusions about the intersection of domesticity and manifest destiny in the lives of Texas women. However, it should be noted that the degree to which most Texas women adhered to such concepts is debatable, particularly given the prevalence of southern, agricultural backgrounds among Texas settlers.

The author argues that nineteenth-century women participated in the public arena of politics more often than we might expect and that this statement is true especially when it comes to expansionism. She uses examples of the ways frontier women participated in the Texas Revolution and promoted patriotic fervor as evidence of their belief in the appropriateness of expansion and their desire to spread civilization and American republicanism. Caughfield also points to women like Mary Austin Holley and Jane Cazneau, who actively and publicly promoted Texas immigration. The visible roles of women such as Holley and Cazneau were exceptions, to be sure. Nonetheless, their examples demonstrate the outer limits of respectable female activity and the degree to which women's advocacy of a political or social cause might have been taken seriously in a public forum.

Yet it was from within the domestic sphere that the Texas women most strongly demonstrated their adherence to the philosophy of manifest destiny. Church activities, temperance goals, education endeavors, and other attempts to establish comfortable and safe communities were outgrowths of their dictate to spread civilization through domesticity. Unfortunately, the evidence for this argument is less tangible than the written words of Holley and Cazneau, and much of the conclusions are implicit rather than explicit. We can indeed surmise that the effects of women's activities helped promote the social concepts associated with American expansionism that were rooted in the assumption of Anglo-Christian superiority. And it is reasonable to assume that women no less than men accepted these ideas. Drawing direct links, however, between the intentions behind women's community activities and their direct desire to promote manifest destiny is problematic. Nonetheless, the author has done an admirable job of bringing our attention to the often silent half of Texas history and of conceptualizing Texas women's history within the larger paradigm of United States history.