Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West (review)

Jane Simonsen’s Making Home Work is the kind of project Amy Kaplan made possible with her essay “Manifest Domesticity” and her reframing of the discourses of domesticity as complicit in and actually even partly constitutive of US imperialism. Simonsen looks at the interactions between white and Native American women on the western frontier as they labor together and apart to develop newly transformative notions of “home” and “work.” For most of the white women discussed in the text, the crucial work of this time included civilizing “the Indian” while simultaneously ennobling domestic labor. The same concerns were no less key for the native women discussed, who either sought to promote this white-driven civilizing project or, conversely, who wanted to preserve indigenous traditions and shore up native economic power. Whether they chose to comply, like Arikara field matron Anna Dawson Wilde, or rebel, as did Winnebago artist Angel DeCora, these tribal women were well aware of the domesticating imperative and they used that knowledge to promote their own agendas.

Simonsen notes that the first half of her book “explores how white, middle- class women exported domesticity to the West through literature, science, and the ideal of the model home” (14). She looks particularly at Caroline Soule’s The Pet of the Settlement and at the later Iowa-based periodical, the Woman’s Standard. One of the conflicts Simonsen uncovers in this chapter is the vexed question of what exactly these writers gained by equating the work of housewives with that of wage laborers, particularly in light of the racial issues dredged up by such an equation. In fact, a key clarification throughout Simonsen’s text is how dependent ideas of racialized savagery were upon notions of white “civilized” homes. But even as Simonsen uncovers the interdependence of these discourses—of race, class, and gender—her use of a wideranging set of sources from material culture is at once the book’s strength and weakness. In an analysis of Marianna Burgess’s novella Stiya: A Carlisle Indian Girl at Home, for example, Simonsen brushes past the sticky question of genre when she critiques the fictional text and the photographs used to illustrate it. Surely lines are being blurred, perhaps intentionally, when a writer uses photography to illustrate her fiction, but Simonsen doesn’t address this choice, despite its intriguing critical possibilities. In fact, the wide range of primary texts Simonsen uses in her book—fictional and factual accounts of events, photographs, buildings, periodicals—is what makes the book so interesting and what risks muddying its argumentative waters.

The second part of the book focuses on the responses individual women had to what Simonsen describes as “the labor relationships embedded in these definitions and displays of domesticity” (14–15). These chapters are without doubt the book’s center of energy. Simonsen’s treatment of the endlessly fascinating E. Jane Gay and her Alice B. Toklas-like land-allotting companion, Alice Fletcher, opens up a huge can of worms for critics, given Gay’s complex, even postmodern response to the work “she” did as “Cook”—literally, the feminized cook for the camp—and what her textualized masculine self did as “Photographer.” The images Simonsen includes here are absorbing but need more theoretical context fully to do them justice; I kept wishing for some Judith Butler to rein in the discussion. Certainly Simonsen is right to bring Gay and Fletcher’s work into her argument, but doing so raises so many issues about sexuality, the body, photography, and gender performance that they threaten to burst the borders of the chapter’s argument. Despite—or because of—this threat, the chapter is a great read.

Another chapter follows about the discomforting force of Anna Dawson Wilde, an Arikara woman educated at the Hampton Institute in Virginia who went on to become a particularly intriguing field matron for her tribe...