Jacobs, Margaret D. “Maternal Colonialism: White Women and Indigenous Child Removal in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940” Western Historical Quarterly 36 (2005), 453-76.

Summary
This article recasts women’s involvement in the removal of indigenous children into an international context that links the history of 'women and gender in the American West was part of a larger story of gender and settler colonialism around the world'. She argues that white women, in both the American West and Australia, worked as reformers, teachers, and administrators in 'promoting, carrying out, and some times challenging the removal' of American Indian children to boarding schools. In addition, white women also contributed to the racilialized and gendered representations of Indians peoples that made such policies possible. Women saw the opportunity to participate in a colonial project as a means of over overcoming their own marginalized status. “Middle class white women … justified their public activism” for assimilation policy “by invoking their traditional roles or potential capabilities as mothers,” an ideology broadly defined as maternalism. The “mother voice,” they argued, needed to be extended beyond the home and into society. Yet, at the same time that they promoted the scared state of motherhood and used it for political action, they also represented indigenous women as unfit mothers. These maternalistic politics, which professed a concern and sisterhood with all women, did not promote quality between women and often reaffirmed class, racial, and religious hierarchies.