"Squaw"

[Edward Callary]

>From William Bright's "Sociolinguistics of the S-Word:"

"[Rayna] Green ... notes that nineteenth century American writers tended to classify Indian women either as 'Indian princesses' or as 'squaws,' the latter routinely characterized as ugly and whorish. Thus James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 novel THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS refers to 'the crafty squaw ... the squalid and withered person of this hag. ... In 1882 the memoirs of Lt. James W. Steele ... referred to 'the universal "squaw" * squat, angular, pig-eyed, ragged, wretched, and insect-haunted.'"

Bright cites Crowell's Dictionary of English Grammar (1928) where the definition of "squaw" includes "a contemptuous name."


Edward Callary

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