White women writing for their lives: Ann Stephens, Elaine Goodale Eastman and Ruth Benedict vis-a-vis the Native American Other

This dissertation looks to the lives of three women whose collective engagement with the Native American Other spanned over one hundred years (1830s–1940s) to investigate the ways Ann Stephens, Elaine Goodale Eastman and Ruth Benedict engaged the Native American Other to dismantle (and in some cases reproduce) cultural norms of femininity as well as systems of racial domination. These women offer complex examples of how white women have negotiated and manipulated their own tenuous privilege to critique widely accepted imperatives of dominant American culture in fruitful ways: in the mid-1800s, Stephens imagined and articulated new models for female identity and agency via her fictional accounts of Native American women and their white doubles while exposing the destructive nature of race prejudice; during the 1880s, Goodale Eastman used her engagement with Native Americans to transgress figurative and literal boundaries to publicly challenge cultural norms that constructed popular notions of gender and race; and in the 1930s, Benedict turned to the Native American Other to question the widely presumed supremacy of the tenets of dominant Euro-American culture that structured ideals of race, gender and sexuality. Ultimately, this is a study of white women's representations of the American Indian that examines the intersections of cultural representation, cultural appropriation, authorial authority, and self-reflexivity/self-exploration to demonstrate how white women turned to the Native American Other to call into question presumed binaries of race, gender, and sexuality; to present new possibilities of selfhood for white women; and to offer new ways of thinking about culturally constructed hierarchies, particularly those that had devastating affects on Native Americans.