The Corseted Frontier - The perpetual constraints of the Western pioneer myth on white American women

By Paula Read

The American West and its colonising settlement during the 19th century conjure familiar images, many of them formed by movies and television over the past hundred years. But heroic representation of these events as historical fact, i.e. the historicising of this period (as seen in Fig. 1), was concurrent with the process of settlement itself. No matter how diverse the actual western frontier was or how short the actual time span of that era might have been, [1] the much longer era of historicising has been overwhelmingly white and male. This Manifest Destiny [2] of pioneer settlement has not just been the stuff of fiction, it has been used as a means of reinforcing the justification for a particular history, a particular kind of land ownership, a particular identity for white colonising settler descendants and those who aspire to that identity, and a particular vision for the past, present, and future.

Figure 1 Leutze, E. Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. 1861, United States Capitol Building.

White women, for their part, have been portrayed and portrayed themselves as a civilising force. This has been extensively described by historians and writers, among them the in the works of Angela Davis [3] and Jane E. Simonsen [4], as the imposition of white Euro-American cultural norms (and as time went on, white American norms) on societal expectations for women of all backgrounds, and judging women who did not conform to these expectations. This portrayal has been called the Sunbonnet Myth [5]. You might recognise it from most Westerns in the form of the bonneted ‘little lady’ at the side of the hero, the damsel in distress who needs some saving, or in the presumptive rebel like Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Little House on the Prairie books and TV series [6]. (Fig. 2)

Figure 2 Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983). Lionsgate Home Entertainment.

My great-great grandfather took a ship to California and walked to Oregon in the 1840s; my great-great grandmother made the westward crossing in a covered wagon around 1850 along the Oregon Trail. I have the hand-sewn quilt she made on that months-long journey. By the late 1890s, both of my parents’ white European-American ancestors had settled in Washington State. White American history has been dominated by stories of white men arriving and doing big things as they crossed and took possession of the American continent, then white women coming along behind them, baking bread, bearing children, and doing the work of instruction in Euro-American culture in schools and at home. 

Figure 3 Koerner, W.H.D. Madonna of the Prairie (1922).

Jumping ahead by a century, Glenda Riley, in one of her first works [7] to reframe women’s role in the West, outlined what she called the ‘mystique’ of the feminine “frontierswoman” by western historians. There’s the 1921 description by Emerson Hough of the “chief figure of the American West” as a “sad-faced woman sitting on the front of a wagon, following her lord where he might lead, her face hidden in the same ragged sunbonnet—that was the great romance of all America” [8] (see Figure 3 for a haloed pioneer woman) Riley quotes the perpetual draw of this mystique, from Dee Brown’s 1958 book, The Gentle Tamers, which stated that “The Wild West was tamed by its petticoated pioneers,” [9] to Richard Bartlett’s 1974 social history of the American frontier that described, “the new country woman…wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, tied on her sunbonnet, cradled the youngest babe in her arms, and pointed her face West.” [10] Figure 4 shows a West-facing pioneer Madonna of the Windmill as the glorification of this woman, just a few years after the frontier had been declared closed.

Glenda Riley and other feminist historians were concerned with claiming women’s spaces in a male narrative from the 1970s and onward. [11] Starting first with a re-examination of women’s roles, they began mostly with white women. What didn’t change over the years was the centering of the white Sunbonnet Pioneer as the normative point of departure against which other narratives were told, those of women who were not necessarily wives, or mothers, or white, as if they were forever the anomalies. 

Figure 4 Schyuler, R. Madonna of the Windmill (1910/1915).

What kind of worlds have these narratives built in literature and in real life? If we are unconsciously limited by a narrow vision of the past, how does it limit our ability to envision the future? The Sunbonnet Myth is a lens that shows how feminist iterations of the myth have actually reinforced that very same perspective as a defining narrative of American womanhood. Recognising our own mechanisms of reinforcing this myth is one method of overcoming its influence. 

Without denigrating earlier feminist histories or personal settler histories - along with their profound relevance to the identities of many people, including people of colour - a de-centering of white pioneer women’s histories might be a good point of departure. As white writers and researchers, a narrative of identity needs to be a practice of getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.

In my work at the University of Bristol, I ask how my own choices been channelled by a narrative of white pioneer womanhood, as blinkered as a woman in a sunbonnet. Given my grandmother’s work as a journalist [12] and her love of facts, I had taken her version of family history as a given. Passed down with the recipe for apple butter and instructions on how to stitch. How true were the stories I was told, the ones upon which our identities were constructed? As it turns out, historical embellishment is not just something that happens in fiction. Our personal family history leveraged photographic evidence like the May family home in Figure 5 as a basis to glorify our pioneer settler credibility beyond the facts.

Figure 5 Dwelley, H.M. family archive. The May Home, Thorn Hollow, Dayton, Washington (c. 1880).

Centring the Sunbonnet Myth to what it means to be an American white woman before discussing ‘other’ women’s narratives maintains the ‘other’ stories as forever the Other. The entitlement granted by this identity is as limiting as any sunbonnet. From Harriet Jacobs to Sojourner Truth to to Angela Davis to Kimberlé Crenshaw, Black feminists have been saying it for centuries, but it is not the task of anyone but us to do this work. De-centring this story might be perceived as a side-lining of identity. In this case, it should be viewed as even more imperative to examine why this might appear to be a threat. 

It is one approach to stop the re-telling of the same old histories that lead to the same old futures. Sharing visions is the only means towards sharing more viable, equitable, and sustainable visions for the future.

Paula Read

University of Bristol

Dr Paula Read does research and creative writing investigating the connection between the American pioneer narrative and white feminism. This post is based on a paper presented at the Womanhood(s) in the United States conference, May 2022, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris.

References:

[1] The Westward Migration is generally considered to have been the period between the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and 1890, when the frontier was declared closed by the U.S. Census superintendent. Even this timeline, however, has been the subject of mythologising and dispute, as per Gerald D. Nash, “The Census of 1890 and the Closing of the Frontier.” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, vol. 71. No. 3 (1980), pp. 98–100. JSTOR, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40490574>. [Accessed 13 April 2023] 

[2] The idea of Manifest Destiny appears to have been specifically articulated in the 1840s as “the right…to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government […] The God of nature and of nations has marked it for our own…” with ‘us’ ostensibly referring to white American colonising settlers.

See Julius Pratt, “The Origin of ‘Manifest Destiny.’” The American Historical Review, vol. 32. No. 4 (1927), pg. 796. JSTOR, <https://doi.org/10.2307/1837859>. [Accessed 13 April 2023] 

[3] Angela Davis, Women, race and class, 9th ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2019, repr. 1981).

[4] Jane E. Simonsen, Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919, (Chapel Hill, USA: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bristol/detail.action?docID=880414 (Accessed 21 April 2022).

[5] Dee Brown, The gentle tamers: women of the old Wild West, (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1958, repr. 1981), Ch. 1. Brown’s is one of the first uses of the term Sunbonnet Myth to define and centre white Euro-American women. 

[6] Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie book series was first published from 1932-1943 and as of 2018, were still included by TIME among the Best 100 YA Books of All Time. The television series based on the book series ran from 1974-1983 and was highly successful both in terms of viewing rankings and awards received. The television series has been in syndication and on streaming platforms ever since.

 [7] Glenda Riley, 'Images of the Frontierswoman: Iowa as a Case Study', The Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 8. Issue 2 (1977), 189-202. 

[8] Emerson Hough, The Passing of the Frontier: A Chronicle of the Old West, 1st edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), Project Gutenberg <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3033/3033-h/3033-h.htm> [Accessed 13 April 2023] 

[9] Dee Brown, The gentle tamers: women of the old Wild West, (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1958, repr. 1981), Pg 2. 

[10] Richard A. Bartlett, The New Country: A Social History of the American Frontier 1776-1890, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) as cited in Riley, 1977. 

[11] A few examples:

-          Susan G. Butruille, Women’s Voices from the Western Frontier (1995);

-          Kenneth L. Holmes, Covered Wagon Women, Volumes 1-11 (1983-1995);

-          Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (1992).

A notable exception to this white centred approach was by Susan Armitage, The Women’s West (1987), an early example of a white historian de-centring her own family history in favour of editing a collection of work by historians of colour, and approaching the West from the perspective of the West Coast rather the from the East Coast.

 [12] Helen May Dwelley co-edited an historical collection of pioneer writing for Washington State pioneer historical societies in the 1970s, Skagit Memories (1979). In her personal memoir, she described our family legacy based on family lore and documented applying for pioneer status for our family based on the presence of her ancestors prior to Washington statehood in 1889.