ABSTRACT
Many of the non-Indian participants in the controversy were white women who, in an era in which gender roles and female sexuality were in flux, used the controversy to voice their anxieties, their hopes, and their visions regarding new roles and sexual standards. White women who debated Indian dances, depending on their orientation toward changes occurring in white society, invested Pueblo women with either their greatest fears of sexual degeneration or their greatest hopes for sexual liberation. Beginning in the late 1870s, some middle-class Protestant white women had taken an active interest in reforming federal Indian policy. Moral reformers’ usage and condemnation of concepts current in white debates reveals the extent to which they projected their concerns about white sexual mores onto Pueblo Indians. As changing sexual mores in white American society became a topic of great controversy in the 1910s and 1920s moral reformers suddenly discovered rampant sexual immorality among Pueblos.
