Indian women, domesticity, and liberal state formation: The gendered dimension of Indian policy reform during the assimilation and allotment eras

Abstract

The question this thesis asks is: How have non-Indian conceptions of masculinity and femininity shaped federal Indian policy during the late nineteenth-century? The answer to this question lies, I will argue, in the process of liberal state formation itself; a process which necessarily involves the continued reproduction of gender hierarchies and systems of male power that privilege men and masculinity over women and femininity. This public/private dichotomy, and the system of gender relations it supports, restricts women's social role to within a highly circumscribed private sphere separate and distinct from the public sphere of economy and state occupied by men. Therefore, as a reflection of the overall process of liberal state formation, the process of incorporating Indian peoples into the American social, economic, and political mainstream undertaken during the assimilation and allotment eras, necessarily entailed the reproduction of Euroamerican gender hierarchies within Indian societies.