Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950 by Amanda J. Zink (review)

When the proud town councilors of fictional Osage, Oklahoma, in Edna Ferber’s Cimarron (1929) commission a popular sculptor to portray Sabra Cravat as a pioneer, they follow a popular early twentieth-century myth that white women in sunbonnets, not white men with rifles, were the real force that “tamed” the West. In Fictions of Western Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950 (2018), Amanda J. Zink exposes the damage done by this conviction, common in Cimarron and other popular fiction, that “white women need to teach nonwhite women how to be American” (12). Claiming that “modernist domesticity is distinctly colonial ... [and] inextricably linked to the publishing market” (13), Zink argues that, like all colonialists and missionaries, white women persuaded themselves that they promoted scientific housekeeping purely for the benefit of the Native American and Mexican American women that they sought to convert. Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, white women characters in magazine serials, advertisements, newsletters, and other forms of print culture blithely offloaded to nonwhite women the drudgery of cooking, washing, cleaning, childcare, and other household tasks. Under the guise of educating Native American and Mexican American women, they could retain their class status and claims to womanly domesticity without actually having to perform its functions. What they ignored, as Zink notes, was that “American Indian and Mexican American women have been raising children and keeping house on this continent far longer than any Euro-American women” (99). Fictions of Western Domesticity shows how American Indian and Mexican American women writers insisted on this truth through multiple strategies of resistance, including adapting, satirizing, or subverting white models of domesticity as they wrote back against these “broader mainstream efforts to homogenize American culture” (67).

Organized as a series of “textual conversations ... between Euro-American women, Mexican American women, and American Indian women” (23), the four principal chapters recount the outlines of the white colonialist paradigm promoted by print culture (“Delegating Domesticity”) before analyzing resistance to it in writing by Mexican American women (“Dialoging Domesticity”), Native American children’s books (“Regulating Domesticity”), and Native American writing for adults (“Practicing Domesticity”), even in texts that some have dismissed as too “contaminated by whiteness to be read as Indian literature” (199). Noting Audre Lorde’s famous warning that “the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house,” Zink shows that when those tools include the discourses of sentimentalism, domesticity, and models of American womanhood (republican, true, and new womanhood, respectively), they can be effectively deployed by women of color to mimic but subvert conformity and thereby counter the repressive ideologies of the oblivious white women who sought to enforce them.

In each chapter, Zink places in conversation well-known writers with those whose writings are as yet relatively undiscovered. For example, “Delegating Domesticity” pairs Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) with the lesser-known Elinore Cowan Stone’s The Laughingest Lady (1927). Surrounded by travel advertisements that exoticized the land and people of New Mexico, Death Comes for the Archbishop is a “colonizing text about colonialism” (54), with Father Latour’s domestic efforts as part of a broader ideology that sought to codify and homogenize American identity. Stone’s The Laughingest Lady, like Cather’s novel, reinforced the progressivist ideals of cleanliness and domestic efficiency through what Zink terms “colonial domesticity” (77): its teacher-heroine, Katherine Nevin, confidently instructs her Mexican pupils and their families in principles of domestic cleanliness and order, yet like other white women, she never “actually keeps her own home” (75), instead delegating the work to women of color. As Zink demonstrates, The Laughingest Lady circulates in the context of magazine articles about “Better Babies” campaigns and scientific motherhood, which promoted a eugenicist agenda.

However, as Zink shows, women of color fought back in subtle and overt...