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The placement of Indigenous girls and young women in white homes to work as servants was a key strategy of official policy and practice in both the United States and Australia. Between the 1880s and the Second World War, under the outing programs in the U.S. and various apprenticeship and indenturing schemes in Australia, the state regulated and constructed relations between Indigenous and white women in the home. Such state intervention not only helped to define domesticity in a modern world, but was integral to the formation of the modern settler colonial nation in its claims to civilizing authority in the United States and Australia. In the context of settler colonialism, domesticity was not hegemonic in this period, but rather was precarious and uncertain. By prescribing and demanding from employers demonstrations of domesticity, the state was engaged in perfecting white women as well as Indigenous women, the latter as the colonized, to be domesticated, and the former as the colonizer, to domesticate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deals with the colonial history of indigenous people and slaves in Australia, Latin America and the United States (U.S.). Similarity between the indigenous people in Australia and the U.S.; Details on the racial discrimination experienced by American Indians and Afro-Americans; Discussion of postcolonial Brazil's 19th century imperial era.