The Constant Cause of Friction: Maud Mosher and Gendered Authority in the Indian Service and at Ellis Island

This thesis focuses on the federal career of Maud Mosher, who, from 1893 to 1907, worked as an Indian Service boarding-school teacher, then a matron at Ellis Island. By analyzing Mosher’s extensive, complaint-driven correspondence and personnel files, as well as an unpublished memoir, I claim that her grievances represent a rare form of agency available to women in maternalist roles at Progressive Era federal agencies. Though Mosher’s superiors branded her complaints trivial, the substance of them reveals gendered hypocrisy and institutional contradictions inside two federal institutions dealing with racialized populations. In both the Indian Service and the Immigration Service, Mosher had to combine care, discipline, and what each institution defined as moral judgment. Maternalism enabled her employment within the federal government but limited her autonomy and authority once there. When Mosher drew attention to employee misconduct or questioned governmental policy, her superiors labeled her insubordinate and ultimately dismissed her from the Civil Service altogether. By placing Mosher at the center of the story, this thesis demonstrates how maternalism simultaneously expanded women’s access to state power and narrowed the boundaries of acceptable dissent on the federal frontlines.