Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas

3. "ALL WOMEN ARE CALLED BAD": WHAT MAKES A WOMAN IN BLEEDING KANSAS?

58 3 “All Women Are Called Bad” what makes a woman in bleeding kansas? On April 19, 1858, Joseph A. Cody, a recent Kansas settler, penned a letter to his “loving” wife who lived in Ohio. He reported from the battlefields of Bleeding Kansas that “the great mass of people are desperadoes. . . . All manner of evil conjectures are a[float].” He seemed particularly disturbed by the status of women in Kansas: “All Women are called bad, no high minded man would suffer his wife to be poluted [sic] with the odor of this scum of earth, and no Woman that has the least particle of care for the opinions of this society could possibly live here.” He implied that women who lived in the region were involved in criminal activities such as prostitution , noting that “even Mrs. Butts is accused of the worst crimes.” Unfortunately the records do not reveal if Mrs. Cody eventually joined her husband in Kansas, though he wrote to her in 1859, “As soon as my house is ready, I leave for your arms,” perhaps implying that he returned to Ohio to retrieve his wife and bring her to Kansas.1 If Mrs. Cody accompanied her husband to Kansas, she would have confronted a number of challenges to the traditional gender roles that shaped nineteenth-century social and economic relations between women and men. In addition to more typical frontier forces such as crude living conditions and Indian conflict, Kansas settlers confronted political upheaval and the imminent threat of sectional violence; these tensions pushed and reshaped the boundaries of Victorian gender norms. As a result, new gender identities formed as emigrant men and women adjusted their lifestyles to the war-torn border; gender bled as Kansas did.2 Free-state women, those who embraced the antislavery cause in Kansas , experienced the most profound shifts in gender roles. These women actively involved themselves in free-state activities and moved swiftly 59 what makes a woman in bleeding kansas? and gracefully between the public and private spheres, even though proponents of separate spheres ideology argued that women belonged in the home.3 In fact, many female settlers attempted to fashion households reminiscent of those back east, but antislavery women rarely enjoyed the luxuries of a truly private space. Free-state women transformed their homes into antislavery meeting halls, ammunition “factories,” Underground Railroad stations, and safe houses for free-state men fleeing southern aggression . This voluntary infiltration into the “private” sphere was peppered by involuntary invasions from Indians and more often, proslavery men who sometimes ransacked antislavery properties, harassed free-state women and threatened their husbands, fathers, and brothers with murder. Rather than surrender to their fears, however, free-state women mustered the courage to join their husbands and brothers on the metaphorical and physical battlefields of territorial Kansas. When conflicts over slavery ignited the streets and public spaces of territorial towns, free-state women met their proslavery enemies head on, attacking their rhetoric with antislavery speeches, parades, and editorials and violently defending their homes and families if necessary. Because they adopted these new roles as politicians and domestic soldiers, they lent stability and political power to the nascent free-state community. Women’s dynamic involvement in the free-state fight was an integral part of free labor’s triumph over slavery in Kansas Territory.4 The role of proslavery women in territorial Kansas is more difficult to discern. First of all, few women accompanied their husbands in the very early years of proslavery emigration, which was dominated by Missourians . Some men crossed the border only to vote in the territorial elections and thus did not bring their families, whereas others who were “bona fide” settlers chose to leave their wives at home until they established a proper homestead. Southerner Jefferson Buford believed the wilds of territorial Kansas and the sectional violence posed too much danger for southern ladies, and he claimed that part of his mission in Kansas was to secure the area before their arrival. “Women and children should not be exposed there in tents in the spring,” he wrote, “but the husbands should go first and prepare homes.”5 The white southern women who did settle in the territory unfortunately did not leave much documentary evidence of their existence. Unlike some of the literate, middle- and upper-class Virginia women who engaged the antebellum political sphere and documented their actions, many 60 bleeding borders...