Expansion was the fever of the early nineteenth century, and 
women burned with it as surely as men, although in a different 
way. Subscribing to the "cult of true womanhood," which valued 
domesticity, piety, and similar "feminine" virtues, women 
championed expansion for the cause of civilization, even while 
largely avoiding the masculine world of politics.

    Adrienne Caughfield mines the diaries and letters of some 
ninety Texas women to uncover the ideas and enthusiasms they 
brought to the Western frontier. Although there were a few 
notable exceptions, most of them drew on their domestic skills 
and values to establish not only "civilization," but their own 
security. Caughfield sheds light on women's activism (the flip side 
of domesticity), attitudes toward race and "civilization," the tie 
between a vision of a unified continent and a cultivated wilderness, 
and republican values. She offers a new understanding of not only 
gender roles in the West but also the impulse for expansionism 
itself.

    In Texas, Caughfield demonstrates, "women never stopped 
arriving with more fuel for the flames [of expansionism] as their 
families tried to find a place to settle down, some place with a little 
more room, where national destiny and personal dreams merged 
into a glorious whole." In doing so, Texas women expanded not only 
American borders, but their own as well.

_________________________________________________________

ADRIENNE CAUGHFIELD, who holds a Ph.D. from Texas Christian 
University, is director of Academic Programs at the Heritage 
Farmstead Museum in Plano, Texas.


Number Twenty-four: Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West 
and Southwest