This thesis examines how white, middle class, Protestant American women and their allies transported the East coast’s leading nineteenth-century value system – domesticity – westward and enlisted it in a settler colonial project between 1849 and 1900. By linking home building and benevolent labour to discourses of race, empire, and civilization, it reveals the crucial role reserved for women and concepts of ‘womanhood’ in ‘Americanising’ a Far Western city that was largely populated in early years of U.S. rule by a heterogeneous, homosocial, and often unruly male population. San Francisco’s isolation from established Eastern communities led to an adjusted, pliable version of domestic ideology developing in the West that has received little scholarly attention. In a gendered inversion of Frederick Jackson Turner’s infamous and male-dominated 1893 frontier thesis, this is termed ‘frontier domesticity’.
The thesis sheds light on the transformation domestic ideology underwent as, like thousands of hopeful settlers, it travelled across recently annexed lands to San Francisco. Employing ideas about women, womanhood, and homes in efforts to reform what I term the anti-domestic orders of miners and sailors – and violently exclude California’s Chinese – reveal San Francisco’s ‘Americanisation’ hinged on understandings of the city’s private sphere, alongside the better-known public realm of politics and mass culture that have predominantly been scholars’ focus. Domesticity is treated as a protean discourse which, while resting on the idealisation of pure white womanhood, proved malleable enough to justify ambitious schemes for female emigration, women’s interventions in debates over men’s work and play, and racist assaults on immigrant enclaves. Its class, race, and religious limits, though, made advocates of transplanting domesticity to the West prone to contradiction. The thesis encourages historians to conceptualise women’s efforts in domestic reform in San Francisco and the wider West as an important component of the nation’s imperialist and expansionist vision.
