Making Home Work

“The steady theme that unites the book . . . illuminates this period and topic in a new and exciting manner.” — American Historical Review

“A valuable scholarly work that would be engaging to readers interested in nineteenth-century disputes in the American West over women’s labor, gender roles, indigenous cultures and assimilation, and attitudes toward housework and home.” — Western American Literature

“Presents a useful summary of the way non-Native women related to Native women during the industrializing years of 1860-1910, a period in Indian history that needs much more research.” — CHOICE

“Highly engaging. . . . A stunning example of making 'new' western studies work.” — Great Plains Quarterly

“A bold, multifaceted, and well-documented study of a newly surprising old American West.” — Legacy

“An absorbing study of the material culture of domestic imperialism and a cogent synthesis of the literature on several important topics. . . . An impressive body of ideas on many facets of these gendered cultural encounters [that] offers intriguing suggestions for how to think about women’s work at the turn of the century.” — H-AmIndian

“An innovative study of women’s work and social hierarchies in the West.” — Journal of American History

“Simonsen’s adept handling of many complex examples and issues, and especially the contextualization of domesticity in wider nineteenth-century intellectual currents, is extremely valuable.” — Western Historical Quarterly

“This is a wonderful contribution to scholarship that integrates Native content and experiences into American history in order to enrich and expand our understandings of American colonial and cultural development.” — K. Tsianina Lomawaima, University of Arizona

“Gracefully written, imaginatively conceived, impressively researched, and interdisciplinary to its core, this book promises to significantly enhance our understanding of the home as a site for cultural work as well as a place of domestic labor.” — Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara