Item Detail
-
12467
-
1
-
0
-
English
-
The Search For Female Moral Authority : Protestant Women and Rescue Homes in the American West, 1874-1939
-
Stanford University
-
Ph.D. diss.
-
"This dissertation examines three rescue homes for women--the Chinese Mission House for Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco, the Industrial Christian Home for polygamous Mormon wives in Salt Lake City, and the Colorado Cottage Home for unwed mothers in Denver. The campaign to establish female moral authority of which these rescue homes were a part was nurtured by tension between men and women in the developing cities of the American West in the 1870s and 1880s and sustained by the gender prescriptions of Victorian society, which equated women with morality and sexual purity. Using local histories, biographical sources, institutional records, and Protestant mission publications, this study traces the rise and fall of Protestant women's campaign to establish female moral authority in cities of the American West. In particular, it focuses on complex dynamics of the relationships between rescue home matrons and inmates. Protestant women called their institutions "woman's work for woman" and believed in the existence of bonds between women across barriers of race, class, and culture, yet the maternalistic attitude they took toward rescue home inmates was shaped by white middle-class Victorian prescriptions for women. Within the institutions, the matrons' ideology of female moral authority was met and often challenged by the needs of inmates, who entered rescue homes with their own goals in mind. In cases where matrons found ways to reconcile these divergent aims, as they did in two of the three institutions considered here, rescue homes remained in operation for over half a century. When, however, Victorian values were subjected to significant challenge in the 1920s, Protestant women subsumed their gender-conscious ideology of female moral authority under a more general campaign to enforce morality. Shortly afterwards, the rescue homes closed. In the past two decades, historians of the "social control" school have used reform institutions to develop a sophisticated critique of the class and racial prejudices of moral reformers. However, even as they pointed out the need to examine the relationship between cultural authority and attitudes about race and class, they neglected to analyze attitudes about gender with the same careful scrutiny. This study of rescue homes for women, along with the work of recent historians of women's institutions, suggests that consideration of gender significantly alters the picture of moral reform presented by social control theorists." [Author's abstract]