Women, Gender, and the West

The Women's National Indian Association (WNIA) was a volunteer organization of middle- and upper-class white women that grew out of Philadelphia's First Baptist Church's Home Missionary Society in 1877. The WNIA initially served as a reform association until the Indian Rights Association took over much of its political work, enabling members to return to their missionary roots and fund more than sixty mission stations across the country. It lasted until 1951. Although most often viewed as simply an Indian reform association, WNIA members also engaged in broad philanthropic and humanitarian non-Indian work and were at times able to rise above Indian reformers' negative assimilationist policy and fund modern reservation hospitals, promote Native arts, purchase homes for landless Indians of Northern California, and establish a missionary station actually requested by a small Mission Indian group. The leading expert on the WNIA, Valerie Sherer Mathes rigorously documents their progressive efforts to present a balanced history of the organization, ensuring their legacy alongside other volunteer groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the National Woman Suffrage Association, the American Woman Suffrage Association, and the General Federation of Women's Clubs.

In 1815, in the Spanish settlement of San Antonio de Béxar, a dying widow named María Concepción de Estrada recorded her last will and testament. Estrada used her will to record her debts and credits, specify her property, leave her belongings to her children, make requests for her funeral arrangements, and secure her religious salvation. Wills like Estrada's reveal much about women's lives in the late Spanish and Mexican colonial communities of Santa Fe, El Paso, San Antonio, Saltillo, and San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala in present-day northern Mexico. Using last wills and testaments as main sources, Amy M. Porter explores the ways in which these documents reveal details about religion, family, economics, and material culture. In addition, the wills speak loudly to the difficulties of frontier life, in which widowhood and child mortality were commonplace. Most importantly, information in the wills helps to explain the workings of the patriarchal system of Spanish and Mexican borderland communities, showing that gender role divisions were fluid in some respects. Supplemented by censuses, inventories, court cases, and travelers' accounts, women's wills paint a more complete picture of life in the borderlands than the previously male-dominated historiography of the region.