One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

One Thousand White Women reimagines history at the intersection of two oppressive 19th-century realities: the United States’ contradictory Indigenous policies and the institutional confinement of women. The novel is set during the 1870s, a period when the US government pursued a dual strategy of military annihilation and forced assimilation. President Ulysses S. Grant’s official “Peace Policy,” implemented in 1869, aimed to “civilize” Indigenous Americans by relocating them to reservations managed by Christian denominations (11). Fergus’s fictional “Brides for Indians” program serves as a covert extension of this policy, proposing intermarriage as the ultimate tool of assimilation.

This governmental experiment provides a narrative framework to explore the concurrent social practice of marginalizing women who defied patriarchal norms. The protagonist, May Dodd, is committed to Lake Forest Lunatic Asylum for her “promiscuous behavior” (17), reflecting a historical reality where women were institutionalized for challenging expectations regarding sexuality, marriage, and class. As documented in studies like Jeffrey Geller and Maxine Harris’s Women of the Asylum (2012), vague diagnoses such as “hysteria” or “moral perversion” were often used to control female autonomy. The novel links these two forms of subjugation by having the government recruit its “brides” from “jails, penitentiaries… and mental institutions” (11), cynically solving one social “problem” by deploying it against another.