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Paula Mitchell Marks, True Women & Westward Expansion, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 1, June 2006, Pages 214–215, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486118
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In True Women & Westward Expansion, Adrienne Caughfield explores women's involvement in the American expansionism of the early and mid-nineteenth century, focusing on Texas as “an excellent [venue for] study” in this regard (p. 5). She examines the concept of “manifest destiny” that accompanied this expansionism, looking at how both images of women and women's own words and actions reflected the idea that Americans had “the divine sanction of Providence” to spread a “Western, civilized lifestyle” (p. 13).
As her title suggests, Caughfield begins with a review of the tenets of nineteenth-century “true womanhood,” demonstrating how the “true woman” (an Anglo-Protestant homemaker) was to be an instrument of expansionism in the performance of her role, even if that simply meant a willingness to move into new territory: “By their presence, emigrants demonstrated their faith in the American claim to the continent” (p. 15). Caughfield then turns to the situation in Texas leading up to and during the Texas Revolution, the conditions that emigrant women faced, and the role gender played in their perceptions and challenges. She notes the presence and ideas of politically aware women such as Jane Long and Mary Austin Holley (and later Jane McManus Storm Cazneau) and the actions of less-privileged or less-outspoken women, actions such as helping provision men engaged in revolution or filibustering.
