ABSTRACT
The agenda of the activities grew out of the field matron program’s mission: helping Native American women adopt Victorian Anglo-American standards of womanhood. Native American women constituted roughly 13 percent of the total field matron corps and 8 percent of those employed between 1895 and 1927. By offering other Native American women accessible role models, they materially contributed to the Office of Indian Affairs’s (OIA) effort to end tribalism and replace traditional culture with Anglo-American culture. Congress created the field matron program in 1890 to bring both the women and their domestic world the benefits of modernity and Anglo-American culture. Ethnocentrism, gender role redefinition, redirection of duties, and changes in Anglo-American personnel made up the backdrop to Native American participation in the field matron program. The OIA hoped to attract young, well-educated, single women to the field matron program. Both Anglo-American and Native American appointees usually deviated from this personnel profile.
