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Better Morals Make Better Maids: Tohono O’odham Women between Worlds
| “Better morals make better maids” so wrote Minnie M. Estabrook, a Bureau of Indian Affairs Outing Matron working with the Tohono O’odham in Arizona in 1914. But whose morals and to what ends? As the twentieth century approached, the curriculum for female students BIA schools focused less and less on academics and more and more on the production of suitable servants for middle class white households. Both the homes of Outing Matrons and middle class whites were to serve as models for Tohono O’odham acculturation, but an acculturation that understood that the Tohono O’odham were naturally less capable than their white middle class brethren. Furthermore, Outing Matrons also saw their role as one of protecting naïve Tohono O’odham girls from exposure to the wrong sorts of people, especially Mexicans and lower class whites, and their backward cultures. This paper examines the experiences of female Tohono O’odham day school graduates who entered the homes of middle class whites in the early twentieth century and the attempts by BIA officials to arrange marriages for those maids who became pregnant. In doing so, it explores the ways in which they resisted the assimilative goals of their white benefactors even as they sought out their help in attaining paid work in affluent white homes. It also scrutinizes their continued involvement in the very Mexican, Catholic, and Tohono O’odham cultural practices from which Outing Matrons were trying to glean them.
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