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Clark, Laurel A.. "Taming the Territory: Women and Gender on the Florida Frontier," George Washington University, Seotember 2007. Advisor: Teresa Murphy
Taming the Territory: Women and Gender on the Florida Frontier, argues that gender constructions shaped American expansion into Florida in the early nineteenth century. I argue that representations of women shaped US policies in the Florida territory, and that women negotiated with those policies in ways that benefited them and supported national expansion. Women’s contribution to expansion in Florida was not only in dominating and acquiring more land, but replicating American homes on that land. White women created and symbolized domesticity on this frontier, and the men around them knew the value of this role. Although Florida is rarely included in scholarly discussions of U.S. expansion, my research substantiates that land-grant policies and innovations in women’s property law implemented in territorial Florida had long-lasting effects on later westward expansion. My evidence includes census, land, and court records; official correspondence about US military and land policy; popular texts such as broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers; and manuscript letters and diaries. As I chart larger representational and policy shifts, I also follow individual women in Florida during this period, as they took advantage of government aid and free land programs. Twenty years later the Homestead Act would institute a land policy almost identical to that implemented in territorial Florida, based on its success there. Significantly, it was written to allow women to claim land despite a continuing emphasis on the ideal of the hardy male settler. Such policies, designed to attract settlers with federal aid and land, and the discourse of domesticity and civilization that supported them, had developed and been proven in Florida.
Manifest destiny has been understood for some time as a racial ideology, but the superiority of white homesteaders lay not only in their race; their family structures and social order relied upon gender as well. In the society that Americans hoped to install in Florida, gender constructions - specifically, proper domesticity and civilized masculinity - signified American racial and cultural superiority. While women’s labor has been recognized as important in frontier communities, the ideological significance of their presence has been under-theorized, particularly in the early nineteenth century. Women’s history tends to focus on women’s negotiations with the Cult of Domesticity without recognizing the significance of “the home” in the context of territorial expansion. Thus, this project intervenes in histories of expansion and the American West, and in women’s history, by illuminating how women as historical actors, and representations of women, shaped Manifest Destiny.
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