ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I consider the ways in which reformist rhetorics can be, unwittingly, complicit with hegemonic cultural values by examining a nineteenth-century children's history text, The First Settlers of New England, written in 1828 by Lydia Maria Child, a white activist for American Indian rights and abolition. I describe two related rhetorical strategies Child uses in her revisionist history to establish a claim for white women and American Indians as public citizens: (1) the appropriation and subversion of republican discourse, and (2) the creation of a female jeremiad to condemn American society and call for social change. I argue that efforts, like Child's, to use rhetoric to intervene in a dominant nationalist discourse were partially successful in redefining the public sphere to include white women, but that those efforts failed to recognize or to resolve the specific material, cultural, and national concerns of American Indians.
