In the fall of 1879, Alice Cunningham Fletcher, a 41-year-old white woman in Brooklyn, found an unexpected new outlet for her feminism. She attended a lecture at Boston’s Faneuil Hall given by Chief Standing Bear, a leader of the Ponca Tribe. He was touring the East Coast with the Omaha translator Susette “Bright Eyes” La Flesche and her brother Francis, aiming to gain support for the Poncas’ plight. Fletcher was struck by Susette La Flesche’s eloquence, grasping that “the door of language could be unlocked and intelligent relations made possible between the two races.”
Alice Fletcher had been a leader of the burgeoning clubwomen scene in New York for a decade. These clubs shattered decorum, bringing “talented, cultivated and beneficent women” together in public at halls and restaurants without the customary accompaniment of men. The clubwomen movement was distinct from other 19th-century movements organized by white women, such as the strident, political activism of Susan B. Anthony and especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the high-handed, emotion-driven patronage of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Clubwomen, by contrast, drew upon white women’s alleged moral authority to carve out a place for themselves in the country’s social and professional institutions. Their societies sought access, not civil rights or social transformation. They had a collective goal, though a highly limited one: to promote the personal and career success of bourgeois white women.
Attending Standing Bear’s lecture expanded Fletcher’s life direction. She became the most prominent white woman activist for Native rights of her era. She did so by positioning Native people as her charges and herself as the benevolent and powerful white mother. “The Indians cling to me like children,” she wrote to her mentor from the Nez Perce Reservation in northern Idaho, “and I must and will protect them.”
What clubwomen like Fletcher found is that U.S. engagement with Native peoples offered white American woman a profound opportunity. In fact, Indian removal forms a significant episode in the history and counterhistory of white feminism. The machinery of civilization threatened to pulverize Native people into mere remnants of the past—and white women would reap many of the profits.
Fletcher shared the civilizing impulse universal to white feminism of her era, though we might call the specific philosophy she and the other clubwomen in Indian reform developed “settler feminism.” Their method was severance: severing Indigenous children from their parents and tribes and severing communally held lands into individual property allotments, subjugating Native people to the patriarchal and monogamous norms of settler life. Meanwhile, the more Fletcher dispossessed Native women and tribes of their traditional social roles, the more she broke through norms herself and gained increased political and social power. She became the first woman to be appointed to a research position at Harvard, a full 85 years before the institution even admitted female undergraduates. Her prolific output made her the most respected and influential woman scientist of the last quarter of the 19th century.