Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939. Questo articolo non è disponibile.Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939

In the 1870s, a group of Protestant mission women, appalled by the heavily masculine atmosphere of the cities of the American West, came together to construct a dominion of female authority. Creating a network of mission-sponsored homes, the Protestant women maintained what they called `women's work for women', in virtual freedom from male authority. The author presents a sophisticated treatment of the interaction of the Protestant women with women from different ethnic backgrounds, raising some interesting questions about culture and assimilation.

In this study of late nineteeth-century moral reform, Peggy Pascoe examines four specific cases--a home for Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco, California; a home for polygamous Mormon women in Salt Lake City, Utah; a home for unmarried mothers in Denver, Colorado; and a program for American Indians on the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska--to tell the story of the women who established missionary rescue homes for women in the American West. Focusing on two sets of relationships--those between women reformers and their male opponents, and those between women reformers and the various groups of women they sought to shelter--Pascoe traces the gender relations that framed the reformers' search for female moral authority, analyzes the interaction between women reformers and the women who entered the rescue homes, and raises provocative questions about historians' understanding of the dynamics of social feminism, social control, and intercultural relations.