Fictions of American domesticity: Indigenous women, white women, and the nation, 1850-1950

Conventional narratives of American literary history lead us to believe that most women writers at the turn into the twentieth century abandoned the themes of domesticity and true womanhood that typified the writings of their nineteenth-century foremothers. On the contrary, as this dissertation argues, white writers often drew characters that use domesticity to colonize Indian and Mexican women, usually to legitimize their own public activities. Moreover, I show how Indian and Mexican-American women writers manipulate domestic rhetoric to assert a syncretic domesticity that negotiates resistance and assimilation. Interpreting memoirs, novels, Indian boarding school essays, Mexican-American cookbooks, and the visual culture that surrounds their publication, I argue that such responses were in no way isolated or exceptional, nor were they merely responses. Native and Latina women collectively rewrite colonial domesticity and write their own domesticity.