Peggy Pascoe
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“The American West offered a cultural arena where Victorian missionary women . . . could valorize ‘women’s values’, celebrate “female moral superiority” and give women’s moral judgments authority in societies that largely ignored or dismissed their concerns –Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Pascoe’s Points:
1.) The romanticized theme of “white women civilizers of the West.” Although Victorian women intended to “clean-up” the “Wild West” and maledominated cities, frontiers, mining camps, ranches, and other locales, they encountered (and often depended upon) male institutions that wielded the real power and limited their success.
2.) The ethnocentric and class-based idealization of Anglo-Protestant “civilization.” The Anglo-American gender frontier also confronted crosscutting currents of race and class. Working-class white women, as well as Native-American, African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and mixed-race women embraced their own perceptions of female morality and “womanhood.” Such Victorian reform intended to “liberate” and “enlighten” women, could also involve systems of social control.
3.) Although the West offered opportunities for Victorian missionaries to exercise their moral authority and attain some political power and social influence, it also reinforced one facet of “womanhood” and entrenched women within this model. Ultimately, this rigid definition of the “true woman” limited society’s tolerance of the types of careers and activities women could engage.
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~history/faculty/pascoe.htm
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