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Settling Accounts with Settler Societies: Strategies for Using Australian Women's History in a United States Women's History Class

M. Alison Kibler
Franklin and Marshall College

TRANSNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE APPROACHES to women's history have started to influence the way instructors teach the United States women's history survey course. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki Ruiz, for example, introduce "transnationalism" as a theme of the third edition of Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U. S. Women's History.1 Emphasizing the global context of the United States and the movement of people and ideas across national borders, the editors include articles about gender relations across North American frontiers, the international connections and tensions among female reformers, and the lives of immigrant women in the United States.2 To build on developments like these, women's historians need to discuss further the challenges of integrating transnational approaches into the teaching of United States women's history and to exchange teaching ideas that develop overlapping American and global contexts.3 With these goals in mind, this article offers a strategy for using Australian women's history in a United States women's history survey course. 1
      Mixing some Australian women's history into a United States women's history survey can be a provocative way to explore gender relations in settler societies. As historian Carl Guarnari and others have noted, settler societies, including Canada, Australia, South Africa and the United States, have already been mined for their rich comparative resources.4 Feminist scholars working within a variety of disciplines and national histories have discussed the centrality of gender relations to the establishment and growth of settler societies.5 Historians have explored white women's participation in empire-building through their work as missionaries, anthropologists, reformers and tourists.6 They have debated the extent to which colonial governments undermined the power of indigenous women but have also questioned the characterization of indigenous women as passive victims of white settlement by emphasizing their collective efforts to sustain their cultures.7 Throughout these accounts historians often emphasize the ways that social constructions of sex differences—notions of masculinity and femininity—shape the conflicts and mediations of settlement. As historian Nancy Shoemaker explains, "Cultural constructions of gender had as much influence on the contact experience as economic, political and social interactions."8 2
      To develop the theme of gender relations in settler societies, I recommend using transnational categories, such as gender frontier and settler colonialism, direct comparisons between Australian and American women's history, and a discussion of feminist ideology in international women's organizations.9 Three topics for lecture and discussion develop these concepts and comparisons: the encounter between European and indigenous gender systems, feminist imperialism, and "settler anxiety" in Australian and American suffrage campaigns. These topics emphasize the centrality of gender relations to the history of settler societies, connect gender and race relations and suggest the Pacific region as a focus of women's history. These three topics build on each other to make transnational gender frontiers a significant theme of a United States women's history survey course. 3
      In this essay I hope to show that a series of small changes—refocusing existing lectures, adding a few key readings—can create a significant new transnational theme in a United States women's history survey class. This article offers some of the necessary contextual information for developig this theme, including the histories of Australia and the United States as settler societies, and suggests key readings, discussion themes and in-class exercises. Taken together, these techniques can achieve some of the advantages of a comparative women's history course. They draw students' attention to transnational trends and events that shaped American history and challenge assumptions of American exceptionalism. 4
   

American and Australian Settler Societies: Similarities and Differences

 
      Australian and American history are part of a broad pattern of Western European colonization dating from the fifteenth century.10 Australia and sections of the United States began as settler colonies, as opposed to "colonies of exploitation." In colonies of exploitation, the more common form of colonization, a small group of male administrators did not settle permanently, but focused on extracting resources and labor for the colonial power. In settler societies, on the other hand, European migrants gained dominance over indigenous peoples as they established permanent, mixed-sex societies. This interaction between migrant and indigenous populations created heterogeneous populations. Although settler colonies gained political independence from the metropolis, they remained dependent on the mother country as well. 5
      Describing three types of settler societies along a continuum, D. K. Fieldhouse defined mixed, plantation and pure settlements. In mixed colonies white migrants encountered a large native population that was somewhat weakened by population loss because of disease or political fragmentation in relation to settlers. Whites did not devastate the native population in mixed settlements to the same extent that they did in pure settlements, but they did succeed in establishing economic and political superiority. A landlord-peasant form of labor relations usually sustained these colonies. Plantation colonies, in contrast, relied on imported workers, usually some type of slave labor, to produce agricultural staples for the international market. In pure settlement colonies, white settlers annihilated or cordoned off the indigenous population, used a white workforce, and established a firm European cultural identity.11 6
      Historians have argued that Australia and parts of North America fit the model of a pure settler society. The New England colonies of North America resembled the pure settlement type but southern colonies, such as South Carolina and Virginia were plantation colonies, with few European settlers and a large number of African slaves involved in growing crops for export to Europe.12 In pure settler colonies, indigenous populations were decimated and isolated, and European migrants and their offspring (not slaves or other imported labor) were responsible for the population growth and workforce of the society. 7
      Along with understanding the basic definitions of settler societies, students in a United States women's history survey course will need some of the broad outlines of Australian history before delving into the gender relations at the core of American and Australian settlement. While Spanish settlement of the Rio Grande Valley began in the late sixteenth century and the British arrived in Jamestown in the early seventeenth century, European settlement of Australia commenced only in the late eighteenth century. In 1787 the "First Fleet" of convicts and their keepers left Britain for Australia and arrived in 1788.13 British settlers, convicts, and later immigrants encountered communities of Aborigines who had inhabited the land for approximately 40,000 years. Various groups spoke different languages and had both peaceful and antagonistic relationships with each other. They lived in small, mobile communities across the continent and sustained themselves with hunting and gathering. Increasing numbers of British settlers, with superior weapons, wrested land from the Aborigines for pastoralism. Though Aborigines resisted with guerrilla tactics, Europeans occupied most usable land by 1850, leaving many thousands of Aborigines dead from disease or violence. By the mid-nineteenth century colonial administrators and missionaries worked to place Aborigines on reserves, where they were coerced into European lifestyles.14 Despite their differences, the settler societies of Australia and North America share a basic similarity: they are racially and ethnically heterogeneous populations in which European settlers gained dominance over the indigenous inhabitants.15 8
   

The Gender Frontier of Settler Societies

 
      A useful starting point for an American women's history survey is the concept of the "gender frontier." Originally developed by historian Kathleen Brown, a gender frontier is a clash of different gender systems, in which "cultural differences in gender divisions of labor, sexual practices and other signifiers of gender identity such as clothing or hair significantly influenced how European and indigenous peoples perceived each other."16 The gender frontier was a site of misunderstanding, a source of struggle and, in some cases, a common touchstone. The concept of the gender frontier helps students understand the multiple meanings of gender for historical analysis. Gender is the social construction of sex difference which, as comparative women's history demonstrates so well, varies cross-culturally and historically. But gender is also a "primary way of signifying relationships of power," according to Joan Scott.17 For example, gender metaphors underpin other power relations across frontiers. The gender frontier, in Brown's account, created religious, linguistic, and economic exchanges and struggles within colonialism. 9
      The idea of the gender frontier can be introduced by pairing an article about European settlement in New South Wales with an essay on the Anglo-Algonquian frontier: Ann McGrath's essay, "The White Man's Looking Glass: Aboriginal-Colonial Gender Relations at Port Jackson" and Kathleen Brown's "The Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier."18 Students can locate and compare each author's definition of a gender frontier. Brown describes a gender frontier as the "site of creative and destructive processes resulting from the confrontations of culturally-specific manhoods and womanhoods."19 And McGrath similarly explains how two gender systems, "each novel to the other," shaped the interactions between the English and the indigenous people.20 10
      Once the definition of gender frontier is well established, class discussion can then focus on Australian and American encounters. First, the perception of gender differences was used by the colonizers to justify their claims to land and "civilization." In the confrontation between two gender systems, European settlers interpreted indigenous gender relations as backward. British migrants in Australia, for example, criticised Aboriginal marriage customs, including marriage by capture, and saw their own courtship rituals as proof of their superiority. The British in the Chesapeake region also saw gender relations among the Indians as a sign of their inferiority. Indian men were seen as poor providers because women did most of the agricultural production. "Anglo-Indian gender differences," concludes Brown, "similarly provided the English with cultural grist for the mill of conquest."21 11
      Second, sexual encounters across cultural boundaries were both expressions of colonial power and indigenous resistance. In assessing the sexual relationships across the gender frontier, I ask students to consider the agency of indigenous women. Would they describe these women as victims of male settlers? Sexual relationships certainly bolstered colonial masculinity and helped subjugate the indigenous population. Sexual access to native women was assumed to be one of the benefits of colonial exploration and settlement; and colonial standards condoned relations between white men and indigenous women but condemned relations between white women and indigenous men. McGrath shows, for example, that male migrants' sexual relations with indigenous women were accepted while white women who became involved with Aboriginal men were ostracized. But this characterization of sexual relationships is not yet complete. Both Aboriginal and American Indian women may have pursued sexual relationships with white men with the hope of integrating the English into their society or the intention of undermining their power. Brown notes, for example, that Indian women often lured white men to their deaths with the promise of sexual intimacy. 12
   

The Cult of Domesticity and Colonialism

 
      When, later in the syllabus, I cover the "cult of domesticity" of the mid-nineteenth century—the idea that a woman's primary contributions were piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity—I show how the development of this ideal in American religious, political and economic life had transnational implications. It justified women's roles as colonizers and it was the basis of conflict across "gender frontiers," when reformers upheld it as a standard for indigenous women to copy. To address these themes, I ask students to read an article by Patricia Grimshaw, "Colonialism, Gender and Representations of Race," which compares Western impressions of indigenous culture in Australia and Hawaii in the middle of the nineteenth century. Grimshaw chooses this comparison because the Polynesians in Hawaii resemble other native Pacific populations, particularly the Maori of New Zealand, and because Captain James Cook arrived in Hawaii in 1778, only eight years after he had explored Australia, whose native people were very different. 13
      This pairing is useful for drawing distinctions between different types of settler societies.22 For most of the nineteenth century, Hawaii is best characterized as a mixed settler society in which a large indigenous population with complex social organization confronted a small group of settlers. Prior to 1820, only a small number of foreigners lived in Hawaii, and they were not allowed to own land.23 By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, private land holdings, including sugar plantations, were in the hands of American settlers. Three quarters of the arable land was under white control by 1888.24 As in other mixed settler societies, the strong indigenous population of Hawaii was weakened in relation to Europeans by disease and subsequent population loss but was not subjugated to the same extent as native peoples in "pure" settler societies. Native Hawaiians had a greater role in local and national politics than their counterparts on the American mainland. 14
      As part of my introduction of the cult of domesticity in class, I discuss the roles of missionary wives in Hawaii. Along with providing an important context for understanding Grimshaw's essay, this material raises two important questions: To what extent did the wives of missionaries disrupt 'the cult of domesticity' in their own work? Did women play a distinct role in the attempts to assimilate native populations? The cult of domesticity paved the way for missionary wives' public roles. These women were often ambitious and unconventional, pursuing "unusual careers as Christian teachers on a distant, non-Christian frontier."25 But with piety as the basis of their public roles, women could pursue travel and adventure and still find general acceptance for their extension of women's duty in this era. The cult of domesticity also circumscribed their activities as missionaries. Their primary responsibility was housekeeping and child rearing but they also were assigned to instruct Hawaiian women and provide native women with shining examples of domestic virtue. 15
      With this background in mind, students can then discuss Grimshaw's essay—a comparison of colonialism and the "woman question" in Hawaii and Australia. These discussions reinforce the concept of gender frontiers, since missionaries in each setting confronted an unfamiliar gender division of labor among the indigenous population. The depiction of gender differences, in each case, defended the colonial enterprise.26 16
      American missionaries expected to find the harsh oppression of women in Hawaii based on their knowledge that Hawaiian religion defined women as unclean, thus requiring their separation from men. But men cooked for themselves, shared in childcare, and women could dissolve marriages easily and often. Non-elite women held a comparable position to men of their class in relation to production and reproduction.27 Elite men and women dominated ordinary men, and female chiefs were not submissive to men. Missionaries were troubled by the extended family network on which mothers often relied to care for their children, and by the promiscuity of single and married women. Reformers responded to these trends by trying to build up and isolate the nuclear family and to domesticate Hawaiian women within that family structure. They urged them to give up traditional pastimes such as surfing and smoking and to undertake domestic production such as spinning instead; and they advised women to surrender to their husband's authority but advocated a Christian marriage of companionship and mutual respect as well.28 17
      How did missionaries' impression of gender relations among Kooris in Australia compare with the Hawaiian case study? Grimshaw details the white missionaries' depiction of Kooris in the region that became Victoria after 1851. These missionaries were working to segregate the Koori from white settlers, and thus facilitate white expansion, but also to assimilate Kooris into western society. Many missionaries believed that Aboriginal women were degraded by male polygamy, excessive Aboriginal male sexuality, and violence. As one white male observed, "The Women...are generally a most miserable and truly pitiable race of beings, over whom the men exercise a cruel and tyrannical despotism."29 Seeing Aboriginal women only as sexual victims, colonial observers did not understand the planning involved in Aboriginal marriage relationships. In addition, white men usually believed Koori men were not good providers, because women performed much of the labor to feed and sustain families by gathering food and medicinal plants every day with other women.30 These observers did not see that Aboriginal women were also valued for their central role in clan survival. Missionaries in the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century provided some education for Aboriginal children, usually in gender specific tasks, and also attempted to curtail traditional indigenous practices, such as "wandering" to gather food and visit family in favor of a western sedentary lifestyle and work ethic.31 18
      To draw these two examples together, a small group activity can ask students to assess the ways that the "cult of domesticity" shaped two different gender frontiers—in Hawaii and southern Australia. Relying on Grimshaw's article as well as lecture material related to the missionary wives in Hawaii, half of the small groups must imagine that they are Protestant missionaries in southern Australia and the other half wives of Protestant missionaries in Hawaii in 1830. Both are setting up schools for indigenous girls. The questions to be discussed are: What curriculum would they establish and why? What kind of obstacles would they face? After answering these questions the Australian and Hawaiian groups should exchange their findings and write at least two links between the "cult of domesticity" and colonialism. Group leaders should then share these with the whole class for discussion. 19
   

Women's Rights and Empire

 
      My lectures on the campaign for woman suffrage now look outside of the United States to develop two themes: feminist imperialism in international organizations and "settler anxiety," which Pat Grimshaw defines as the fears about the racial composition of the new nation or territory. The feminist imperialism of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and settler anxiety shaped the early suffrage victories in the Pacific region, including the American west, Australia and New Zealand.32 The Anglo-American leaders of the WCTU espoused feminist imperialism, though they were often ambivalent about it, and the WCTU also played a leading role in the early suffrage victories in the American West and outside of the United States. 20
      The importance of the WCTU for the American suffrage campaign is well known. The largest American women's group in the late nineteenth century, the WCTU developed a wide reform agenda, including woman suffrage, to reach its primary goal—curbing men's excessive drinking. Their arguments combined moral expediency (the notion that women's votes would clean up politics) with claims of social justice, and their grass roots organizing helped them reach many more women than purely suffrage groups, which were usually based in larger towns.33 The WCTU believed women would be united in a worldwide sisterhood when they recognized their common oppression as women. Their search for "sisterly solidarity" led to pioneering cross-cultural efforts but also stalled in the face of American racism and empire.34 21
      The influence of this organization reached well beyond American borders. Frances Willard established the World's WCTU (WWCTU) in 1883 with Lady Henry Somerset of the British Woman's Temperance Association. Willard had been interested in international work since 1875 when she planned the Woman's International Temperance Convention. The Methodist focus on foreign missionary work also contributed to her international commitment. The WWCTU sent missionaries to Australia and New Zealand in the 1880s, and by 1920 there were forty national affiliates.35 Thirty-four women were commissioned between 1888 and 1925 as round-the-world missionaries; another thirty-four American women traveled to other countries as missionaries and organizers from 1876 to 1928.36 22
      By looking at how the WCTU worked inside and outside of the United States, students can get a strong impression of the fragile unity of women in the WCTU. Ruth Bordin and Glenda Gilmore have shown that the WCTU both upheld and challenged racism in its structure and rhetoric. For example, in the late nineteenth century, North Carolina's WCTU was, according to Gilmore, pioneering in its interracial cooperation. "Under the heat of temperance fever, racial boundaries softened ever so slightly."37 Although the WCTU organized white and black women in segregated local unions at approximately the same rate in the South, the segregated local unions were integrated into the same state and national WCTU organizations through the 1880s. Willard, whose abolitionist parents had participated in the Underground Railroad, spoke to white and black audiences when she toured the South.38 Nevertheless, with inconsistent support from the WCTU, the organization of northern black women, often undertaken by African American women, proceeded unevenly and there were only a few examples of racial integration in the administration of the overwhelmingly white northern unions. The WCTU was, therefore, an overwhelmingly segregated organization, in which black activists were "junior partners" who reported to white women.39 Willard, for example, made inflammatory remarks about the importance of protecting Southern womanhood, which supported the traditional justification for lynching.40 23
      Just as racism ultimately overshadowed the WCTU's efforts to create interracial bonds among women within the United States, imperialism also deterred its search for an international sisterhood. WWCTU missionaries tried to liberate women from other cultures along with themselves. They sought the excitement of travel and careers and often criticized practices that they believed harmed women, such as foot binding in Asia.41 But the WWCTU's international work focused on the Anglo-American world and its colonial extensions, including Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. WWCTU missionaries largely believed that Anglo-American women were the most advanced, while nonwestern women suffered on the lower rungs of civilization. Clara Parrish, a WCTU organizer who had spent many years in Asia, expressed this sense of superiority well when she said, "Japan is not a civilized country yet, although it may have put on some of the outward forms of civilization...Only Christianity and Christian Temperance can ever make it such."42 24
      Historian Ian Tyrrell has shown, however, that the WWCTU's cultural imperialism was mitigated by several factors. Drawing on their cross-cultural experiences, many missionaries realized that Europeans had brought liquor to other cultures, and that other religions already upheld temperance principles. Sara Crafts, a WWCTU officer, remarked, "The one great virtue of the Mohammedan religion is prohibition."43 Some also proclaimed the respect due to all people, regardless of race or religion, and denounced Chinese exclusion from the United States. As Mary Leavitt remarked after a trip around the world, "I have conversed with persons of every colored race on earth who were as well fitted by native ability, by education, by manners, by elevation of character and purity of life to take the title of gentleman or lady as any white person in the United States."44 25
      Group work in class can reinforce the connections between domestic racism and feminist imperialism. For this purpose I have adapted an assignment from the Binghamton University's "Women and Social Movements" web site: "The Willard-Wells Controversy" <http://womhist.Binghamton.edu/teacher/wctu2.htm>. I have small groups in class read one of four documents (available at this web site) related to the debate between Ida B. Wells and Frances Willard about lynching.45 Each group must present a summary of its assigned article to the class, paying attention to the identity and political persuasion of the publication. Then the whole class addresses several questions suggested on the web site, including: "What was Willard's view of African Americans? and "Why was Ida B. Wells critical of Willard's position?" I also ask students to compare Willard's position on race relations in the United States to her missionary work with women in other countries. The documents related to the Wells-Willard controversy expose both Willard's racism and her pioneering work organizing African American women. My lectures on Willard's international work reveal a similar mixed legacy: women in the WWCTU sometimes supported, and sometimes times questioned feminist imperialism. 26
      An investigation of the WCTU also brings the Pacific region into focus as a site of early victories for woman suffrage. In all the sites of early woman suffrage victories, the WCTU was the largest voice for woman suffrage, and in some cases, it was the only voice.46 For historians of American women, early suffrage victories in the western states usually do not receive much attention in a survey class, and the concurrent victories in the Australian colonies, the Commonweath of Australia, and New Zealand might warrant only a curious footnote, at best. But the suffrage victories in the Pacific region can become a powerful focal point for a discussion of race, gender and politics in these outposts of settler societies. In turn, a consideration of victories in Australian and New Zealand can add new clues to the ongoing puzzle of western women's suffrage in the United States. 27
      Can we define a regional pattern for victories, or is each achievement of suffrage for women a result of unique local circumstances? When Wyoming and Utah achieved statehood in 1890 and 1896 respectively, woman suffrage was already part of their state constitutions after it had been legalized by the territorial legislatures. Political leaders in Wyo-ming hoped that becoming the first territory or state to pass woman suffrage would bring positive publicity to counter the reputation of violence associated with Wyoming. The territory believed it had recruited more families to the area because of woman suffrage, and retained this right for women when it became a state in 1890. In Utah the complex issue of polygamy played a major role in passage of woman suffrage, as Mormons hoped that women's votes would show outsiders that they actually supported polygamy. When Utah's women received the vote in 1870, they did uphold polygamy.47 28
      The British colonies of South Australia and Western Australia, both with semi-independent governments, also ratified woman suffrage in response to the urging of temperance advocates in 1894 and 1899 respectively. The new Commonwealth government of Australia faced a problem because women in some states already were exercising their right to vote, while women of other states were barred. To resolve this quandary the Commonwealth granted all women the right to vote, but also excluded Aboriginal men and women from citizenship rights. 29
      Although these areas have diverse histories and each suffrage win was, in itself, complicated, it is useful to draw out some of the similarities of the locations of early suffrage victories. Three elements of frontier life in these settler societies may have contributed to the passage of woman suffrage. First, the message of the WCTU may have resonated more on the frontier than in urban areas because the dangers of male drinking were perhaps heightened on these "male dominated frontiers of white settlement."48 In addition, the relationship between these frontier settlements and the metropolitan centers created two strains of political thought that helped support women's voting rights. On the one hand, the remote areas attempted to set themselves apart from elites of the East coast, or their colonial homelands, by supporting social reform movements.49 Political liberalism, or support for democratic reforms, enunciated by the labor movement in Australia and the Populist party in Idaho and Colorado contributed to women's suffrage achievements.50 This liberalism and the absence of a strong conservative elite, in contrast to metropolitan centers, helped these communities carve out an identity. On the other hand, an alternative strain of settler identity contributed to women's suffrage as well—settler anxiety about white power over the indigenous populations. White settlers had recently subjugated native populations, and claims for white women's voting rights often emerged as a defense of "mothers of the white race, which would populate and dominate these new lands."51 30
      These examples reveal how different phases in the development of settler societies framed key moments in women's history: frontier expansion, cross-cultural contact, and suffrage campaigns. The "woman question" was bound up with the comparison between settler and indigenous women and with the establishment of a hierarchy of nations. The broad outline of settler societies thus provides a framework for the local intersections of Australian and American women's history in colonial contact, missionary projects, and suffrage campaigns. The transnational and comparative approach that I have outlined points students to the common gender frontiers in these societies, while raising questions about particular national and local developments as well. 31


Notes

1. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U. S. Women's History. 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000). The articles addressing transnationalism include: James F. Brooks, "This Evil Extends Especially to the Feminine Sex': Captivity and Identity in New Mexico, 1700–1846," Antonia I. Casteneda, "Gender, Race and Culture: Spanish Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California," Alice Yang Murray, "Ilse Women and the Early Korean American Community: Redefining the Origins of Feminist Empowerment," and Ellen Carol DuBois, "Woman Suffrage around the World: Three Phases of Suffrage Internationalism."
      Other excellent textbooks place less emphasis on the global context of American women's history. The editors and authors do not introduce transnationalism as a theme of their textbooks, as Ruiz and DuBois do, but their books do discuss contrasting gender relations among European settlers and native Americans, immigration, and the impact of Revolutionary War, World War I and World War II on American women. And some also address the influence of English suffragettes on American campaigns for women's voting rights. Thomas Dublin's and Kathryn Kish Sklar's Women and Power in American History covers gender relations across the "Anglo-Algonquian" frontier, various phases of immigration, and women's work during World War II [Dublin and Sklar, Women and Power in American History, vols. I and II , second edition, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002)]. Nancy Woloch's Women and the American Experience begins with a discussion of Mary Rowlandson's captivity to explain women's roles in the encounter between native Americans and European settlers. Along with addressing immigration and women's roles in war and as peace activists, she also notes the influence of English suffragettes on the American campaign [Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 3rd ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000): 357]. Sara Evans' Born for Liberty covers similar global themes [Sara Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, 2nd ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1997)].
      Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron DeHart's Women's America also includes an excerpt from Sara Evan's Born For Liberty about the perceptions of women's roles in European and Indian societies in early America. This textbook also looks at immigrant women and various aspects of World War II, from prostitutes in multicultural Hawaii to the internment of Japanese American women. [Kerber and DeHart, Women's America Refocusing the Past, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)].
      Part of the impetus for this article comes from my experience as an American women's historian who lived in Canberra, Australia from 1997 to 2002. During this time I began to look for ways to connect American women's history to the Australian context.

2. For examples of comparative research, see: Mary Jo Maynes, Ann Waltner, Birgitte Soland and Ulrike Strasser, eds., Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History (New York: Routledge, 1996) and Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris and Jane Lewis, eds., Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States and Australia, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); and Desley Deacon, "Politicizing Gender," Genders 6 (Fall 1989) 1–19.

3. For an excellent example of these efforts see Carl J. Guarneri, America Compared: American History in International Perspective vol. 1 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997) viii; and Guarneri, "Out of Its Shell: Internationalizing the Teaching of United States History," Perspectives, 35.2 (February 1997) 1, 5–7.

4. See, for example, George Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) and Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism and Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: California and Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
      Dolores Janiewski writes that "[a]lthough an emphasis upon 'American exceptionalism' has led many American scholars to avoid consideration of the United States as a 'settler society', it can, nonetheless, be usefully compared to other examples of settler colonialism" (132). Dolores Janiewski, "Gendering, Racializing, Classifying: Settler colonization in the United States, 1590–1990," Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class, edited by Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, (London: Sage, 1995) 132–160.

5. Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, "Introduction: Beyond Dichotomies—Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class in Settler Societies," Unsettling Settler Societies, 13–16.

6. See, for example, Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), Angela Woollacott, To Try her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (New York: Oxford University press, 2001); and Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989).

7. See, for example, Theda Perdue, "Cherokee Women and the Trail of Tears," Journal of Women's History 1 (1989) 14–30; and Katherine Osburn, "'Dear Friend and ex-Husband': Marriage, Divorce and Women's Property Rights on the Southern Ute Reservation, 1887–1930," Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, edited by Nancy Shoemaker (New York: Routledge, 1995) 157–175.

8. Nancy Shoemaker, "Introduction," Negotiators of Change, 20.

9. In this way I follow Carl J. Guarnari's proposal that "international connections, transnational categories as well as direct comparisons between nations" need to be interwoven into the U. S. history survey. Carl J. Guarnari, America Compared: American History in International Perspective vol. 1 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997) viii.

10. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London and New York: Cassell, 1999) 25–26.

11. D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires from the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1965) 11–12.

12. George Fredrickson, "Colonialism and Racism," The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988) 221, 224–5. See also Janiewski, "Gendering, Racializing and Classifying" 133.

13. Captain James Cook is remembered as the father of Australia because of his 1770 exploration of the southern coast of the continent. But prior to Cook's expedition, Spanish and Dutch sailors had also landed briefly in Australia.

14. Patricia Grimshaw, "Maori Agriculturalists and Aboriginal Hunter-Gatherers: Women and Colonial Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Aotearoa/New Zealand and Southeastern Australia," Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, edited by Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) 23–26; and Jackie Huggins and Thom Blake, "Protection or Persecution: Gender Relations in the Era of Racial Segregation," Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, edited by Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (Sydney: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1992) 4.
      These two settler societies are also intertwined historically. The American colonies' break from Britain spurred the settlement of the first Australian colony, New South Wales. The first fleet of British convicts and their keepers was commissioned after the American colonies had won their independence from Britain, thus shutting off one stream of convict settlement.

15. Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, "Introduction: Beyond Dichotomies—Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class in Settler Societies," Unsettling Settler Societies, 2–3.

16. Kathleen Brown, "Brave New Worlds: Women's and Gender History," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series, vol. L, no. 2 (April 1993) 318.

17. Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) 42.

18. Ann McGrath, "The White Man's Looking Glass: Aboriginal-Colonial Gender Relations at Port Jackson," Australian Historical Studies, 24.95 (October 1990): 189–206. Kathleen Brown, "The Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier," Negotiators of Change 26–48. Brown's essay is the first article in Dublin and Sklar's textbook, Women and Power in American History. For more Australian background, see Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation: 1788–1990 (McPhee Gribble, 1994), especially chapter 8, "Gendered Settlements," and Donald Denoon and Philippa Mein Smith, with Marivic Wyndham, A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford and New York: Blackwell Publishers, 2000).

19. Brown, "The Anglo-Algonquian Frontier" 27.

20. McGrath, "The White Man's Looking Glass" 189.

21. Brown, "The Anglo-Algonquian Frontier" 36.

22. Modern Hawaii, according to Haunani-Kay Trask, is a settler society, "like its colonial parent, the United States." Trask, "Settlers of Color and Immigrant Hegemony: Locals in Hawaii," Amerasia Journal 26.2 (2000) 2.

23. John Whitehead, "Hawaii'i: The First and Last West," Western Historical Quarterly 23 (1992) 158.

24. Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1993) 8.

25. Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Mission Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989) 5.

26. Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May, "'Inducements to the Strong to be Cruel to the Weak": Authoritative White Colonial Male Voices and the Construction of Gender in Koori Society," Australian Women: Contemporary Feminist Thought, edited by Norma Grieves and Aisla Burns (Allen and Unwin: Sydney, 1994) 102–116. See also Grimshaw, Paths of Duty.

27. Grimshaw, Paths of Duty, xvii.

28. Grimshaw, Paths of Duty 161–78.

29. As quoted in Grimshaw and May, "Inducements to the Strong," 101; originally, J. C. Symons, Life of the Rev. Daniel James Draper, Melbourne, 1870, p. 356. Grimshaw and May include other passages as well: "The Government of the Aborigines is strictly Patriarchal" (W Thomas, "Brief Remarks on the Aborigines of Victoria, 1838–9, " La Trobe Library, Victoria, MS 7838, 10 ) and "As regards the females, they must obediently serve their masters in every season and under all circumstances" (R. B. Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, 2 vols, Melbourne and London, 1878, 46). For a brief summary of missionary influence in Australia, see Jackie Huggins and Thom Blake, "Protection or Persecution? Gender Relations in the Era of Racial Segregation," in Gender Relations in Australia, 3–58. Huggins and Blake note early missionary outposts in Parramatta in 1815 and Lake Macquarie in 1825. New South Wales, on the other hand, did not encourage missionary developments (43).

30. Nancy Williams and Leslie Jolly, "From Time Immemorial? Aboriginal Societies Before White Contact," Gender Relations in Australia, 15–17. See also Annette Hamilton, "A Complex Strategical Situation: Gender and Power in Aboriginal Australia," Australian Women: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Norma Grieve and Patricia Grimshaw (Melbourne and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 69–85.

31. Grimshaw, et. al., Creating a Nation 140–143.

32. Tyrrell explains that WCTU activists were feminists "attempting to expand the area of opportunities for women, however complicated and compromised that process might have been." Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) 9. Leila Rupp uses the term "feminist orientalism" instead of feminist imperialism to convey the hierarchical relationship that feminist internationalists set up between the backward East, in which women were degraded, and the civilized West. See Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

33. Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire 222–4.

34. Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire 6.

35. Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire 2.

36. Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire 83.

37. Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) 49.

38. Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981) 82–84; and Bordin, Frances Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986) 216–218. Gilmore also notes Willard's abolitionist parents (Gender and Jim Crow, 49).

39. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow 49.

40. Angela Scheuerer, "Why Did African-American Women Join the Woman's Christian Temperance Union between 1880–1900?" < http://womhist.Binghamton.edu/wctu2/intro.htm >. For other discussions of the connections between domestic racism and imperialism, see Kristin Hoganson, "'As Badly Off as the Filipinos': U. S. Women's Suffragists and the Imperial issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Journal of Women's History 13.2 (Summer 2001) 9–33; and Rosalyn Terborg Penn, "Enfranchising Women of Color: Woman Suffragists as Agents of Imperialism," Nation, Empire, Colony 41–56.

41. Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire 82.

42. Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire 103; originally in WWCTU, 6th cov., 1903, p. 72.

43. Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire 100.

44. Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire 101

45. The selections on this website are: Interview with Frances Willard, "The Race Problem," The Voice, 28 October 1980, p. 8; Ida B. Wells, "Mr. Moody and Miss Willard," Fraternity, May 1894, pp. 16–17; "Frances: A Temporizer," Cleveland Gazette, 24 November 1894, p. 2; and "Words with Christian Women," 20 October 1895.

46. Grimshaw, "Women's Suffrage in New Zealand Revisited: Writing from the Margins," Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, edited by Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (New York: New York University Press, 1994) 34.

47. Gayle Gullett, "Women's Suffrage," Encyclopedia of the American West, edited by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1996) 1771–2. See also Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My own": A History of the American West (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991) 355–359. John Putnam, "A Test of Chiffon Politics: Gender Politics in Seattle, 1897–1917," Pacific Historical Review 69.4 (November 2000): 595–616 Sarah Barringer Gordon, "'The Liberty of Self-Degradation': Polygamy, Woman Suffrage and Consent in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of American History 83.3 (December 1996) 815–847.

48. Patricia Grimshaw, "Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples, and Women's Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, 1888 to 1902," Pacific Historical Review 69.4 (November 2000) 558.

49. Gullett distinguishes between the significance of these social movements and the widely discredited argument that "Western culture...was more democratic than Eastern culture" (1771).

50. Gullett, "Women's Suffrage," 1772.

51. Grimshaw, "Settler Anxieties," 556.

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