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Introduction Woman’s Rights, Race, and Imperialism

If rethinking the historical contours of Western racial [and feminist] discourse matters as a political project, it is not as a manifestation of an other truth that has previously been denied, but as a vehicle for shifting the frame of reference in such a way that the present can emerge as somehow less familiar, less natural in its categories, its political delineations and its epistemological foundations.

Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies (1995)

IN THE SPRING OF 1888, the renowned suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), at age seventy-three, presided over an international gathering of women. The meeting was held in part to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first organized meeting of woman’s rights activists in the United States. This was a joyous occasion, a time of celebration and renewed commitment, an opportunity for younger members to pay tribute to older pioneers. Lucy Stone (1818–1893), Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), and Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) all occupied places of honor on the stage. Alongside them sat Frederick Douglass, famous ex-slave, abolitionist, and elder statesman, a longstanding supporter of woman’s rights. Invited by Anthony to say a few words, Douglass expressed his pleasure at seeing Stanton chair such an extraordinary gathering, alluding to how great a change in public reception had occurred since the 1848 convention. Then Anthony singled out of the audience a black Philadelphian, Robert Purvis, for special mention: “Let us hear from the one man who was willing to wait without a vote for twenty years, if need be, that his wife and daughter might vote with him.”1

Anthony was acknowledging the support that these prominent black men, Douglass and Purvis, had lent to the woman’s movement over the past three decades. Yet her words of welcome and praise also concealed mixed feelings about the way in which woman’s rights had become subordinated to civil rights in this era. The issue to which Anthony referred when she spoke of Purvis as “the one man who was willing to wait” was Purvis’s opposition, some twenty years earlier, to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. These amendments had

Newman, Louise Michele. White Women's Rights : The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=273391. Created from washington on 2018-03-26 15:23:45.

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recognized freed male slaves as citizens and provided sanctions against states that excluded African American men from the franchise. But they had made no such provisions for the suffrage of black or white women. In voicing his opposition to the proposed amendments, Purvis had taken an unusual stand among African Americans, most of whom supported the amendments as a first, although incomplete, step to full racial equality.

Anthony’s own decision to oppose these amendments was also a poignant one. She had been an ardent abolitionist in the 1840s and 1850s and had called for the emancipation and enfranchisement of enslaved men and women. Yet, at a moment of celebration thirty years later, Anthony could not help registering the lingering anger she felt over what she and other suffragists called the Republicans’ betrayal of women. Suffragists had actively supported the Republican party during the Civil War and had expected to be rewarded with the franchise afterward. But this had not happened. Despite the growing visibility and influence of the woman’s movement in the 1870s and 1880s, woman suffrage still had not been granted.

In Anthony’s mind, Purvis’s opposition to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments contrasted starkly with Douglass’s support, and she harbored continuing resentment. Several years earlier, in 1884, Anthony had refused to support publicly Douglass’s second marriage, to Helen Pitts, a white woman, telling reporters, “I have but one question, that of equality between the sexes—that of the races has no place on our platform.”2 When Stanton, Anthony’s dearest friend and longtime associate, was considering a statement supporting Douglass’s marriage, Anthony importuned her not to do so: “I do hope you won’t put your foot into the Douglass question, the intermarriage of Races! Only to think of how Douglass threw the principle of Equality of political right to women—overboard—in ’69 & all along—saying himself first and you afterwards! If there were no other reason—you should now let him carry his own burden if he has voluntarily risked such.”3 This remark, made in private and in obvious pique, nonetheless signals the extent to which racial tension between white and black activists lasted for decades and was a crucial part of the context in which the white woman’s movement defined its own interests in the postbellum period. Anthony’s comment serves as a tragic reminder that the possibility for interracial cooperation between the struggles for civil rights and woman’s rights was diminished in the 1870s and 1880s by white women’s feelings that a great injustice had been done them when black men received the franchise ahead of them.4

Moreover, Anthony’s statement to reporters that interracial marriage was a race question and so outside the purview of her suffrage organization was motivated, in part, by a desire to avoid the controversy that interracial marriage raised for a white public. Anthony did not want to consider whether the marriage of Helen Pitts, a white woman, to Frederick Douglass, a black man, might also be deemed relevant to white women’s right to marry at their own discretion. Acknowledging privately to Stanton that Douglass “may be right & general feeling wrong,” Anthony was nonetheless determined to keep white women’s struggle for the franchise separate from this other concern.5 More than just a strategy to keep the woman’s movement focused on a single issue, Anthony’s efforts to avoid this particular controversy reveal how white activists worked to develop specific relationships among race, gender, and equality: that is, to establish the white woman as the primary definer and beneficiary of woman’s rights at a

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time when the country was growing increasingly hostile toward attempts to redress the political, social, and economic injustices to which African Americans were subjected. White women’s expressions of resentment over the enfranchisement of black men and these women’s subsequent decision to keep the movement clear of “race” questions were part of a larger post- Reconstruction retreat from support of racial justice.

On the other hand, expressions of sympathy for the enslaved, which was at the crux of white abolitionist ideology in the antebellum period, had continuing resonance for the white woman’s movement in the postbellum period. In the 1840s and 1850s, white female abolitionists had emphasized the similarities between their own oppressed status as wives and daughters under patriarchy and the debased condition of “the Negro” under slavery. White women, the argument went, could empathize with enslaved peoples because they, as women, experienced a similar oppression due to their sex. White female abolitionists urged white women to engage in political activity on the slave’s behalf: to remonstrate with their own family members, to raise money, to sign petitions, and so forth—in fulfillment of their Christian responsibility to remedy the injustice of slavery.

However, new realities had to be addressed as a result of emancipation (1863–1865) and the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (1868–1870). Legal recognition of black male citizenship meant that white women could no longer claim a shared political status (disenfranchisement) with black men. White women’s social identities had to be reconstituted to reflect the changing relationship of “woman” and “the Negro.” Where antebellum suffrage ideology often emphasized a common victimhood, postbellum suffrage ideology stressed white women’s racial-cultural superiority to newly enfranchised male constituencies—not just black men, but also naturalized immigrant men. “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung,” Stanton proclaimed in 1869, “who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who can not read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling-book, making laws for Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose and Anna E. Dickin-son.”6 From Stanton’s perspective, the proposed Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments threatened to introduce a new gender-based hierarchy that overlooked distinctions of education, virtue, and refinement, qualities that Stanton believed existed in greater degree and preponderance in white women because of the more advanced development of their race. “If the Fifteenth article of [the] Constitutional amendment ever gets ratified … it will have one good effect,” Stanton declared, her anger and pain palpable. “Woman will then know with what power she has to contend. It will be male versus female the land over. All manhood will vote not because of intelligence, patriotism, property or white skin, but because it is male, not female.”7

Anthony refrained from discussing her feelings of anger and resentment in public and overcame them sufficiently to form political associations with African American leaders, including Ida B.Wells (1862–1931), Booker T. Washington, and Frances W. Harper (1825– 1911).8 Indeed, upon their deaths, Anthony and Stanton were remembered by African American reformers as devoted friends of the race.9 Perhaps focusing on the earlier days and conveniently forgetting the later tensions, Robert H. Terrell, a black justice of the municipal court in Washington, D.C., would recall having heard in his boyhood, just after the Civil War ended, that Stanton, Anthony, and Julia Ward Howe had “devoted all their efforts toward

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obtaining the ballot for the Negro, even to the neglect of their own dearly cherished cause.”10 During the renewed suffrage battles of the 1910s, Terrell argued that it was the duty of “every man with Negro blood in his veins” to support woman suffrage, as a way of paying back a debt to those white women who had supported abolition and black male suffrage.11

In the decades from 1870 to 1920, however, despite moments of interracial cooperation, the woman’s movement remained largely segregated.12 Many white leaders dismissed the concerns of black women—such as miscegenation, interracial rape, lynching, and their admittance to the all-women cars on the Pullman trains—as “race questions,” irrelevant to the woman movement’s foremost goal of “political equality of women.” For instance, Alice Paul, president of the National Woman’s Party, refused to allow Addie Hunton, a black field secretary for the NAACP, to address the National Woman’s Party in 1921 about the disenfranchisement of southern black women, because Paul considered it more appropriate for this problem to be taken up by a racial rather than a feminist organization.13 The refusal of white reformers to address black women’s specific experiences of gender oppression meant that the white woman’s movement would remain mostly white, even when individual women of color were invited to become members of white-dominated women’s groups.

Anthony’s way to respond to the political complexities of black women’s intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender was to slot black women into norms and roles delineated for white women. In 1900, for example, she urged the National Negro Race Conference to “include women of color,” arguing that ever since the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments recognized black men as citizens, “from that hour [on] the colored wife owed service to a husband instead of to a slave-owner, so that legally she simply exchanged a white master for a colored one who controlled her earnings, her children and her person.”14 Anthony was adopting the decades-old argument that white women had used to articulate their criticism of patriarchy, an argument they created in the 1840s to validate their own sense of subjection to husbands by comparing their suffering to that of slaves. Black women, however, rarely formulated such arguments in expressing their resistance to political oppression, since they generally considered black men their allies and protectors against a racist culture. Most black women supported the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which they considered advantageous to the black race as a whole and thus to themselves, even though their own rights to citizenship went unaffirmed.

Instead, black women protested the ways in which white culture sexualized and victimized them, exposing the unstated but implicit racism in the ideology of true womanhood, which stigmatized women of color as incapable of chastity, purity, and moral virtue.15 Finding that white women’s organizations often refused to take action on their behalf, black women formed national organizations of their own, such as the National Association of Colored Women and National Council of Negro Women, in which they worked to gain for themselves the respect, safety, and physical freedom that society routinely accorded white middle-class women.16

The woman’s movement was never entirely segregated, however, and dialogues between white women and women of color took place in public forums. In May 1893, for example, six black women addressed the delegates at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, a

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mostly white convention that assembled as part of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and spoke to the ways that African American women were struggling to redress racialized forms of gender oppression. Yet, as Hazel Carby reminds us, “the fact that six black women … addressed the World’s Congress was not the result of a practice of sisterhood … but part of a discourse of exoticism…. Black Americans were included in a highly selective manner as part of exhibits with other ethnic groups which reinforced conventional racist attitudes of the American imagination.”17 Carby’s perspective is not merely the wisdom of hindsight. White visitors to the Chicago Exposition were acutely sensitive to this discourse of racial exoticism that linked blackness with primitivism and used such moments to define and position themselves in relation to primitive peoples in an ongoing process of national identity formation. One white woman wrote home:

[After seeing] man in his primitive state … black, half-clad, flat-headed, big-nosed, protruding lips, a perfect type of brutality and heathenizm [sic] … it occurs to you—why—you are the only race not “on exhibition—” & the whole exhibition is evidently for you—& you are the crowning glory of it all. You are [aware] how vastly superior is the light of our Christian civilization to the dark and semi-darkness of other lands, how our race in intellect stands towering above other races, & how grateful one feels that their [sic] lot has been cast in such an enlightened clime—& not in the lands that have got it all yet to go through before they catch up.”18

White women in the movement formulated their views on equality in the context of such highly charged debates on race and were acutely sensitive to the racial dimensions and implications of their ideologies and practices. Proclamations of white racial superiority were everywhere around them, justified in lynchings, performed in minstrel shows, and celebrated in fairs and expositions. It is not surprising, then, that white activists had a heightened racial consciousness of themselves as civilized women, contributing to and reinforcing dominant religious, scientific, and cultural ideologies that attributed to them unique moral and political roles on the basis of this identity. Blending religious conviction (the ideal of Christian evangelical benevolence) with science (social evolutionary theories) and political ideology (progressivism), white proponents of woman’s rights helped create new roles for themselves that explicitly maintained the racial hierarchies that were based on the presumption that Anglo- American Protestants were culturally, as well as biologically, superior to other peoples. By 1900, as Joan Jacobs Brumberg has demonstrated, white women had become fully conversant with the newly emerging languages of evolution and ethnology and had developed “an entire vocabulary that implied the degradation of [nonwhite, nonwestern] women: zenanas and harems; the seraglio and the bagnio, female infanticide and suttee, concubinage and polygamy; bride sale; foot-binding and ear and nose boring, consecrated prostitution and sacrifice;

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bastinado; child marriage and slavery.”19

Like other white reformers, white woman’s rights activists measured the (lack of) “social progress” of non-white races in terms of their (lack of) conformity to Anglo-American Protestant middle-class gender relations. One of the most profound ironies of this history, then, is that at the very moment that the white woman’s movement was engaged in a vigorous critique of patriarchal gender relations, it also called for the introduction of patriarchy into those cultures deemed “inferior” precisely because these cultures did not manifest these gender practices. White leaders’ critique of the cult of domesticity—as too restrictive and oppressive when applied to themselves—went hand in hand with their defense of domesticity as necessary for the “advancement” of “primitive” women.

The implications of this paradox were far-reaching in U.S. society and race relations. First, it limited the critiques white women could offer of the racism and sexism within their own culture because in the end they had to acknowledge that patriarchy had been key to their own racial advancement. Second, white women’s belief in their own race-specific trait of moral superiority permitted them to view other cultures with condescension, if not outright disrespect, enabling a Sinophile like Donaldina Cameron, for example (who spent most of her adulthood living happily among the Chinese women she “rescued” from prostitution in San Francisco), to lament that “the Chinese themselves will never abolish the hateful practice of buying and selling their women like so much merchandise, it is born in their blood, bred in their bone and sanctioned by the government of their native land.”20 Such reasoning made it possible for white women to overlook the ways in which white culture was implicated within the systems of oppression that governed the lives of nonwhite women. White women often scapegoated the purportedly less enlightened men of “primitive” cultures as the worse perpetrators of abuse, when the problems were much more complex. (In the Chinese case, U.S. immigration law made it difficult for Chinese men to bring their wives and families to this country, and states forbade intermarriage between Chinese men and white women.)

Most significantly, white women’s use of this discourse to empower themselves as central players in civilization-work during the late nineteenth century helped consolidate an imperialist rhetoric that delegitimized dissent from nonwhite and non-Christian women. Civilization-work encompassed all activities intended to “elevate” a “lower race,” including converting “savages” to Christianity, “Americanizing” immigrants in settlement houses, “uplifting” Negroes for the Freedmen’s Bureau, and “bringing civilization” to Indians on reservations. (See fig. 1-1 in chapter 1.) Although white women frequently expressed feelings of sympathy and solidarity with non-white, non-Christian others, these pronouncements also served to increase their own authority, both in relation to other groups of women, who had to uphold Christianity as a superior religion in order to gain access to the sisterhood, and in relation to white men, who were slowly having to acknowledge white women’s claims to greater effectiveness in civilization-work.

The evolutionist discourse of civilization also had profound significance for women of color, who had to demonstrate that they too were “true women” (pious, virtuous, genteel, refined, soft-spoken, well-dressed) in order to certify that their race already was or could soon

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become civilized. Black women reformers offered themselves as models of black womanhood to prove to white racists that there was nothing inherently inferior about the black race. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a leader in the National Association of Colored Women, declared, “Too long have we been silent under unjust and unholy charges [that black women are immoral and unchaste]. We cannot expect to have them removed until we disprove them through ourselves…. Now with an army of organized women standing for purity and mental worth, we in ourselves deny the charge.”21

As the personal and political struggles of Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell suggest, civilization, racial progress, and woman’s protection within the home were interconnected in ways that made it impossible for black women to repudiate altogether the prevailing ideologies of the cult of domesticity and true womanhood. Like their white counterparts, black women reformers also used evolutionist discourses of civilization to justify their own social activism. They asserted their duty to “elevate” and “uplift” the masses of black women, upholding the values of domesticity, chastity, temperance, and piety that the white middle classes considered to be evidence of a civilized race.22 Olivia Davidson (Booker T. Washington’s second wife) declared, “We cannot too seriously consider the question of the moral uplifting of our women, for it is of national importance to us. It is with our women that the purity and safety of our families rest, and what the families are, the race will be.”23

Black women’s desire for and advocacy of bourgeois respectability, which mandated conformity to the norms of patriarchy, was not so much evidence of their class conservatism, however, as it was of their commitment to taking responsibility for racial uplift. Racial uplift entailed self-help, racial solidarity with black men (rather than criticism of them), temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, as well as acceptance of patriarchal authority.24 As this list suggests, there was some commonality of goals between black and white woman’s movements, particularly with regard to temperance, purity and suffrage. But these common commitments were not sufficient to override the social and political divisions between black and white women that derived from the material differences in their lives and that were exacerbated by nineteenth-century discourses.

Ideologically and materially, theories of social evolution raised specific problems for African American women that were not present for white middle-class women. How could black women stay at home and have husbands support them, when the conditions of their lives required that they contribute to family income? How could they maintain the submissiveness and sexual purity demanded of the “true woman” when white men could rape black women at will? How could black women take part in a white woman’s movement that believed in the myth of the black male rapist and persistently declared that blacks were mired in animalism? Evolutionist theories helped placate white women who were dissatisfied with their own social roles by suggesting that they were much better off than were African American (and Asian American and Native American) women in their own cultures. But evolutionist discourses called into question the status of black women, who had to devote their efforts to proving that blacks were as civilized as whites.

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In sum, evolutionist discourses limited and prescribed the social positions, political ideologies, and utopian visions of “Negro” and “Anglo-Saxon” women in very different ways. White women’s determination to transcend the limits of the domestic sphere, which they accomplished by proclaiming themselves central to civilizing missions, enabled them to imbue themselves with social authority at a time when their access to more formal, public, institutional forms of power was severely circumscribed. Black women’s analogous claims that they too were central to their race’s social progress meant that they had to disavow their cultural past, adopt patriarchal gender norms, and celebrate white cultural practices. The strictures of social evolution required that black women ascribe to that which white women were beginning to reject (domesticity, protection, patriarchy). In the end, the argument that black women might also act as civilizers (or uplifters) of the more “lowly” among their race, as Kevin Gaines has argued, “implicitly faulted African Americans for their lowly status” and “replicated the dehumanizing logic of racism.”25

This book, then, begins by exploring the particular precepts of evolutionist theories concerning social progress, woman’s nature, and racial difference that Anglo-American Protestant women used to empower themselves. Although Anglo-Protestant elites often argued that physical differences (especially in reproductive organs, psychology, and mental functioning) distinguished “man” from “woman,” they did not think that men of different races shared the same masculine nature, or that women of different races shared the same feminine nature. Rather they believed that different races were gendered in different ways, or that gender was race-specific. White woman’s rights activists thought of themselves as widely different from white men in sexual terms yet fundamentally similar to white men in racial- cultural terms. They believed that “primitive” men and women exhibited far fewer sexual differences between them than did “civilized” men and women. Sex differences both accounted for, and were the product of, the development of higher civilizations; to eradicate sexual differences between civilized men and women would mean the de-evolution of civilization back into a less advanced society.

In other words, evolutionist discourses specified that the sexual differences between (white) women and (white) men were both the cause and effect of bourgeois patriarchal gender practices and the key to white racial advancement. (White) women’s physical frailty, emotional sensitivity, and moral superiority were presumed to be the evolutionary consequences of those patriarchal practices that characterized middle-class gender relations among (white) Christians: (white) men purportedly shielded (white) women from hard labor, protected them in a domestic sphere, and loved and cared for them within patriarchal, nuclear families. In 1875, the young physician and labor reformer Azel Ames succinctly summed up the significance of evolution for woman’s status when he proclaimed that “[woman] has been, in all time, man’s companion and helper … degraded with the savage, lightened in her burdens and raised to higher dignities with each step of man’s advance.”26 Evolutionist theories construed the social condition of the (white) woman as both a measure and consequence of the advanced development of her race within the superior Christian civilization of the United States.

I have used parenthetical modifiers here, and will do so throughout this book, to signal how Newman, Louise Michele. White Women's Rights : The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=273391. Created from washington on 2018-03-26 15:23:45.

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nineteenth-century discourses used universalizing language to make generalizations about the “race,” “woman,” or “man,” while intending these generalizations to apply only to people of Anglo-Saxon (or Euro-Protestant) descent. Nineteenth-century discourses conflated race, class, culture, religion, and geographic origin, so that “Anglo-Saxon,” “American,” “white,” “civilized,” “Caucasian,” “Christian,” and “Protestant” frequently served as interchangeable terms, with each of these categories encompassing the others.27 I have chosen the term “white” as a convenient abbreviation, but I am using it in the nineteenth-century sense to refer to those Americans of European descent who in this period were designated as members of the white middle class.

In addition to delineating class and racial boundaries, social-Darwinian thinking also proscribed religious hierarchies. Catholicism, although recognized as part of the Christian tradition, was considered to be less evolutionarily advanced than Protestantism.28 For example, throughout the nineteenth century, the subordinate and impoverished economic status of Irish Catholics as laborers in the United States testified to their cultural-racial-evolutionary inferiority. Later, at the end of the nineteenth century, when Irish Catholics gained political power in urban areas like New York and Boston, their supposed antirepublican forms of municipal government, purported susceptibility to bribery, and alleged close associations with organized crime, offered further evidence of their status as a not-quite-civilized race. Social evolutionary theory also reinforced dominant beliefs that Jews (Hebrews) were a heathen race, but here interesting exceptions were made for those wealthy Jewish Americans who could trace their ancestry in the United States back to the eighteenth century, and who thereby presumably had benefited from their contact with the civilizing influence of Christian culture. Upper-class Jews who could establish the requisite social pedigrees were granted their own legitimate forms of “civilized” culture and history.

In general, then, social evolutionary discourses in the late nineteenth century treated race as a stable, although not entirely inflexible, biological and cultural entity. A person was born with his or her race predetermined by ancestry, and the consequences of this inheritance was of great import. To be identified as a member of a specific race (Anglo-Saxon or white; black, Negro, or African; Hebrew; Italian; Celt or Irish; Slav; Chinese; Indian; Malay; etc.) designated the individual as an inheritor of specific cultural and religious practices. For the individual, little could be done to transcend this racial identity in his or her lifetime, although education and upbringing could temper the original racial inheritance. Yet within a generation or two, for Euro-Americans at least, the cumulative effects of climate, geography, education, upbringing and acculturation could dramatically “improve” or “advance” a race. In fact, in less than a century, the racial identities of certain Euro-American groups would be entirely redefined. In the 1890s, for example, the Irish and Italian Catholics, as well as Jews of East European origin, were each considered separate races, distinct from Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and definitely not white. But by the mid–twentieth century, the descendants of these groups were assimilated as part of a newly defined white race and were reclassified as “Caucasians.”29

As historian Anne McClintock has pointed out in relation to Britain, nineteenth-century discourses used race, class, and gender as analogies for one another: “the rhetoric of race was

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used to invent distinctions between what we would now call classes,” while “the rhetoric of gender was used to make increasingly refined distinctions among the different races,” and “the rhetoric of class was used to inscribe minute and subtle distinctions between other races.”30 In other words, the Zulu male could be termed the gentleman of the black race; the white race figured as the male of the species, and the urban poor likened to savages. (White) women were considered inherently less advanced than (white) men, akin to black peoples, primitives, and apes. In the words of the famous French psychologist Gustave Le Bon, “All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man.”31

Out of such ideological frameworks specific questions arose for white reformers. How much room was there for transcendence of or escape from these evolutionary categories? Could individuals of specific races, classes, and sexes be modified by education and upbringing to such an extent that they would then transmit to their own offspring racial-cultural- sexual traits that were different from those they had inherited from their parents? Northern Europeans, who had had a Protestant tradition in their native homelands before emigrating to the United States, had proven their capacity for “Americanization,” but what about the Irish and Italian Catholics, or East European Jews? Were Africans, Indians, Filipinos, and Chinese similarly civilizable? If so, what might be done to accelerate the evolution of these purportedly lower races? How could they be assimilated into, without slowing down, the evolution of white Christian civilization? Specifically, what should be done to reform Native American men who had multiple wives and refused to give up their “savage” practices? Would permitting the immigration of Chinese women help instill Christianity among Chinese men, or would the increased numbers of Chinese women merely accelerate the propagation of a heathen race? By way of answering these questions, Anglo-Protestant women forged a new identity for themselves as experts on racial questions and “protectors” of vulnerable peoples (See fig. I-1).

With the best of intentions and in the name of “sisterhood,” white women urged each other to enlarge their sympathies and expand their understandings of the “woman question” so as to be able to address the various social, economic, and political circumstances of nonwhite and non-elite groups of women. As part of their civilizing mission, white women organized their own separate organizations to pressure the U.S. government to change its Indian policies and outlaw lynching. They also created home missions and settlement houses to introduce patriarchal domesticity to other races and “Americanize” immigrants. For example, in 1874, Presbyterian women organized a Chinese Mission Home in San Francisco as a refuge for Chinese prostitutes.32 In 1886 a branch of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (NWCTU) established the Colorado Cottage Home to care for unwed mothers in Denver. That same year, Angie Newman founded the Industrial Christian Home in Salt Lake City for Mormon women who wanted to leave polygamous marriages.33 Jane Addams established the first settlement house for immigrants in Chicago in 1889, creating an organizational model that would soon be adopted in other urban areas.

Much suffering was alleviated by these efforts, and many success stories could be told of Newman, Louise Michele. White Women's Rights : The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=273391. Created from washington on 2018-03-26 15:23:45.

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individual women who received higher educations, became able to support themselves, left abusive marriages, or escaped prostitution to lead much happier lives. One might suppose that such successes would have led white women to question their belief in their own imputed racial and class superiority, as nonwhite and working-class women demonstrated that they could be as intelligent, virtuous, chaste, pure, religious, and home-loving as white middle- class women. But these individual successes only proved to white women that their faith in social evolutionary processes was justified—that such processes did have the power to advance women of “lower” races and classes. White women continued to base their own resistance to patriarchy and to protest their exclusion from the franchise on the grounds that they were effective civilizers, every bit the equals of white men because of a shared evolutionary history.

FIGURE I-1 Racial uplift and the supplicant slave. Lincoln Centennial Souvenir. Postcard, 1909. White women appropriated and transformed the ideology depicted here—of a white male liberator—into an ideology of the white female civilizer during the second half of the nineteenth century.

On the one hand, evolutionist discourses enabled the United States to subsume that which was problematic and contested—white middle-class women’s emergence as public actors— within a utilitarian ideology of white racial progress. On the other hand, the multiple ways in which white woman’s rights activists made use of evolutionist racism—in their responses to scientific and medical literature, in their travel writing and ethnographies, in their fiction, poetry, essays, and letters—assisted the United States in carving out an identity as an imperial nation in an age of empire, allaying the nation’s doubts about its rightful place in the “civilized” world. Colonialism took shape around the Victorian invention of patriarchal domesticity, as the middle-class home became a space for the display of imperial spectacle.34 Imperialism, in turn, suffused domesticity and woman’s rights ideology with ideas about evolutionary progress and white racial superiority. Anglo-American female activists proudly took credit for the importance of the domestic sphere (even as they critiqued it as too restrictive), using it as a locus from which to demand an expansion in political rights for themselves.

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Woman’s Rights and Imperialism

From 1870 to 1920, the period encompassed by this study, U.S. society was undergoing massive and unprecedented social and economic changes that were sparked by the Civil War, a cataclysmic event that left deep scars in the country’s collective consciousness. Articles appearing in such periodicals as the National American Review, Nation, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s depict a nation struggling to overcome political divisions between north and south, economic divisions between capital and labor, and racial divisions between whites and blacks, native-born and immigrant, Anglo, European, African, and Indian. Although political reconstruction of the South formally ended in 1877, the North remained focused on the “Southern Question” and worried that the South might regain its political ascendancy over New England by creating a political alliance with the West. Whites throughout the country remained obsessed with the Negro Question, arguing over what to do about the ever-growing numbers of lynchings and incidents of vigilante violence. Growing concern with the “woman question”—that is, white women’s increased visibility in the public sphere and their demands that they be granted equal political rights with white men—occurred simultaneously with these other developments. Observers at the time linked these various phenomena, viewing the drop in white women’s fertility in relation to the demographic increase in the populations of non- white peoples. They drew connections between what they interpreted as white women’s refusal to have babies and an increase in the availability of higher education for women, between demands for suffrage, mounting immigration, and continuing pressure on urban wages.

By the late 1890s, the country also found itself faced with the question of whether it should colonize Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines. The Spanish-Cuban-Filipino-American War of 1898–1902 precipitated vociferous debates about the United States’ decision to annex the Philippines. These debates revolved around the question of whether assimilationist policies that had been created in the years immediately following the Civil War to deal with Negroes, Indians, the Chinese, and other immigrant groups residing within the United States would be effective in addressing the situation of “primitives” residing in the tropical climates of foreign lands. Those opposed to annexation argued that assuming the government of foreign territories was in violation of the Monroe Doctrine and went against democratic principles, especially the principle of government by consent35 and that benign forms of colonization would be ineffective and harsher forms too brutal to have the desired effect of “uplifting” savages.36 Opponents of annexation often invoked the domestic “Negro problem” to warn the United States against embarking on the “deluded” mission of trying to assimilate foreign “primitives.” The outlook of Mrs. Jefferson Davis was characteristic:

[T]he President probably has cogent reasons for conquering and retaining the Philippines. For my own part, however, I cannot see why we should add several millions of negroes to our population when we already have eight millions [of them] in the United States. The problem of how best to govern

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these and promote their welfare we have not yet solved…. The question is, What are we going to do with these additional millions of negroes? Civilize them?37

Other anti-imperialists, like Carl Schurz, believed that assimilation had been partly successful at home, but they doubted that assimilationist policies would succeed if implemented abroad: not only would Anglo-Saxons fail to “civilize” the primitives of the Philippines, but in the process of trying, it was feared that whites would lose their own distinctive racial traits, as the enervating effects of the climate would be too great for Anglo- Saxons to withstand. The Protestant work ethic would disintegrate; adherence to democratic principles would deteriorate; and, most worrisome for anti-imperialists like Schurz, bourgeois Victorian sexual morality and gender relations would dissipate.38

To make an overseas civilizing mission both theoretically possible and politically appealing, certain reconceptualizations of white men’s roles in the evolution of civilization needed to take place. The supposed superior adaptability of the Anglo-Saxon male, previously understood as an advantageous trait in a so-called “empty” American wilderness, was considered a drawback when it came to colonizing what were recognized to be fully inhabited foreign lands. The adaptability of the Anglo-Saxon male and the inflexibility of the primitive other had to be partly reversed for imperialism to make sense. Anglo-Saxon civilizers had to be able to retain their whiteness, while primitives had to be able to modify their blackness, for the spread of white civilization to occur. White men either had to resist the temptations toward miscegenation (which they clearly had not done in the U.S. South) or if they succumbed, then somehow it had to be shown that an increase in a mixed-race population would not jeopardize the future development of white civilization. (See fig. I-2.)

Important theoretical developments occurred from the late 1880s through the 1910s that addressed these concerns. First, social theorists like Edward Ross and Thorstein Veblen reconceptualized racial and sexual traits in new evolutionary terms, with the result that the Anglo-Saxon male colonialist was no longer seen as so adaptable as to be in danger of losing his racial distinctiveness while residing in the tropics.

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FIGURE I-2 Sexual dangers of U.S. colonialism. A Test of Disipline. Postcard, c. early 1900s. For anti-imperialists, one of the greatest dangers of colonizing primitives was the threat of miscegenation.

Second, white women, who previously had been seen by evolutionists like Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as inferior to white men—and thus held responsible for retarding the progress of white civilization—were suddenly transformed by theorists like Lester Ward, Otis Mason, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman into “racial conservators.” White women now supposedly provided the racial stability that ensured the nation’s future “racial progress,” so the country could proceed with its imperial projects. This theoretical redefining of white women’s role meant that white men were more free to cross the color line sexually, without there being any risk of white racial degeneration, as long as white women kept having adequate numbers of white offspring. Any decline in white women’s fertility, however, was interpreted as a tremendous social problem, leading to “race suicide.” (See figure 1-1 in chapter 1.) Miscegenation between white women and black men was deemed to be so threatening to whites’ racial future that many whites found it inconceivable that white women would voluntarily have sex with black men. White women’s traditional role as “mothers of the race” along with their new role as conservators of the race made them crucially important to the successful carrying out of U.S. colonial projects.

Woman’s Rights Historiography

This study is part of a thirty-year tradition in women’s history scholarship that has concerned itself with the ways in which white women have responded to and manipulated racial ideologies in their quest for gender equality. Ever since the publication of Aileen Kraditor’s The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement in 1965 and Ellen DuBois’s Feminism and Suffrage in 1978, women’s historians have understood that beliefs in white superiority

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Conclusion Coming to Terms

Compared to their sisters in the rest of the world, American women have it pretty easy. Just listen to the stories coming out of the Fourth UN Conference on Women. Parents killing their babies for being born female. Genital mutilation of pre-teenage girls. Brideburning. Forced abortions. Mass rape.

Louise Kiernan, Chicago Tribune (1995)

It would be a mistake to ask which comes first in the process of conceptual transformation—the “excess” of daily life, or the introduction of a different discursive repertoire … [because] the line of causality mov[es] in both directions.

Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters (1993)

THIS BOOK HAS OFFERED A HISTORY of the woman’s movement that rejects the premise that feminism, in any of its late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century incarnations, was an egalitarian movement. Instead I have argued that the discourse we call woman’s rights was shaped by the turbulent debates over race during the 1870s through 1890s and must be understood in relation to the nation’s civilizing missions and imperial projects, both at home and abroad. The creation of early feminism was intricately connected to specific terrains of social struggle and transformation: enslavement, emancipation, evangelicalism, expansionism, immigration, and empire. Feminism developed in conjunction with—and constituted a response to—the United States’ extension of its authority over so-called “primitive” peoples, and feminism was part and parcel of the nation’s attempt to assimilate those peoples whom

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white elites designated as their racial inferiors. I have also argued that white women used evolutionist discourses—unintentionally at

times, at other times very purposefully—to expand the range of their political and social authority. White women’s ability to become more powerful and visible as political agents was facilitated by their success in combining Victorian ideologies of patriarchal domesticity with ideologies of social evolution as they addressed the increasingly momentous questions of citizenship and empire. Excluded from positions of leadership in church and government, yet intent to offer a feminine alternative, white middle-class Protestant women formed their own organizations dedicated to applying the principles of woman’s separate sphere and Christian civilization to the lives of Native Americans, formerly enslaved blacks, immigrant groups, and colonized peoples in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. Increased political power and freedom for white women was, in a material as well as ideological sense, dependent on asserting the racial inferiority and perpetuating the political subordination of nonwhite others. Paradoxically, elite white Anglo-Protestant women like Alice Fletcher and May French- Sheldon personally subverted the ideological juncture of domesticity and protection to escape the confinement of patriarchal homes themselves, only to export civilizationist patriarchy to those whom they racialized as primitives. In arguing for women’s higher education, protective labor legislation, temperance, suffrage, and missionary activity, white women drew on an entrenched patriarchal tradition that made moral claims valuing the domestic sphere as the locus of white women’s racial superiority. By century’s end, white middle-class women’s separate sphere, conceptualized initially as the antithesis of politics and a transcendent moral realm, had become synonymous with a political activism that was of critical importance to the nation in its efforts to colonize others.

Women’s social-biological role as mothers and homemakers, white woman’s rights activists often claimed, made women’s unique experiences indispensable to their communities, to society, to politics, to civilization, and, finally, to outposts of primitivism in newly acquired colonies. The argument was often phrased just this way, without reference to race, but the racial dimension of the claim was apparent to all: white women, by virtue of their social evolutionary development, asserted themselves as the best qualified to reform the nation so that colonizing need not be so brutal. Assimilation and civilizing missions were conceived as humane alternatives to the violence and coercion that male politicians had condoned in whites’ dealing with the so-called primitive groups of Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Filipinos. (See fig. 1-2.)

The Indian Reform movement was a crucial arena in which white women tested out the discourses of social evolution and civilizing missions—an arena in which social evolution reached its territorial limits before being exported to Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines. Indeed, by asserting their authority to act as peaceful agents of civilization, white women contributed a discursive innovation that was useful to those calling for the United States to embark on a more ambitious imperialist project—to eliminate “savagery” not just within the borders of the United States but throughout the world. In 1899, Harriet B. Bradbury justified the United States–Philippine war as “a necessity of evolution,” a war fought in “defense of the weak.”1 A male apologist for annexation declared, “I believe in imperialism because I believe

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in foreign missions,” explaining that subjugation of the Philippines was “not for domination but for civilization.”2

For feminist theorists in the early twentieth century—women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge—assimilation appeared to have been remarkably effective in closing the gap between “the civilized” and “the primitive.” Both Gilman and Coolidge interpreted this fact as evidence that society and the state might take the same attitude toward white women, that is, acknowledge that their nature was mutable, and that white racial advancement could be engineered by educating, enfranchising, and employing white women outside the home in cooperative industries. Gilman reassured her audience that the abolition of sexual differences would not bring about white racial degeneration, since sexual differences were an archaic vestige of primitivism, not the product of civilization. Gilman’s insistence that (white) racial progress was not dependent on the maintenance of woman’s separate sphere freed white women to take part in those activities defined as “masculine” without having to fear that they were jeopardizing “the race.” This was indeed a radical critique of patriarchy, but one that placed responsibility for patriarchal oppression squarely on the primitive. Rather than subvert existing racial hierarchies that privileged white elites, Gilman strengthened them: she made the racial distinctiveness of civilized whiteness the foundation of her claim that white women were the equals of white men.

After 1920, Margaret Mead rejected evolutionary theories’ racial hierarchies. But despite this rejection, Mead and other modern feminists retained certain nineteenthcentury ideas about the cultural superiority of the United States as a Western, civilized society: notably, the idea that its advocacy of political democracy, free speech, freedom of choice, individual rights, and (ironically enough) woman’s rights granted this superiority. The idea that white woman could serve as protector, or mediator, for vulnerable peoples was retained by feminist social scientists in the 1930s and 1940s: (white) woman’s experience of sexism purportedly enabled her to sympathize with nonwhite peoples’ experiences of racism and colonialism; her experience of freedom, liberalism, and democracy supposedly transformed her into a model of emancipation for women all over the world to look up to and follow.

In other words, racism was not just an unfortunate sideshow in the performances of feminist theory. Rather it was center stage: an integral, constitutive element in feminism’s overall understanding of citizenship, democracy, political self-possession, and equality. Feminism offered race-specific ideas about gender, citizenship, social development, and racial progress that enabled white women to fashion moral arguments for altering (white) “woman’s nature” and for bringing about radical change in gender relations, not just among whites but also between whites and those they deemed primitives. Feminism was a discourse about the evolutionary advantages that accrued to white women because of their race, and a demand that power should be reconfigured in U.S. society to take account of this fact. Beatrice Forbes- Robertson Hale, a selfproclaimed feminist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s generation, put it most succinctly when she wrote, “It is necessary, then, to understand Feminism as an evolutionary development.”3 Or, as Elsie Clews Parsons explained in 1916, “the main objective of feminism is … the defeminisation, the declassification of [white] women as women.”4

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So how are we to come to terms with a history as disheartening as this one? Could feminists have specified a different relation to those they posited as racial others, in which “Africans,” “Indians,” and “primitives” would have been allowed their own distinct cultural projectories, their own forms (or absence) of patriarchy? Was it a problem of limited vision? Of good intentions but inadequate analysis? Of false exclusions or false inclusions?

Recently, similar questions have emerged in the debates within the National Organization for Women (NOW) over Tammy Bruce’s comments in reference to the racism exhibited in the O. J. Simpson trial, about which she purportedly said, “We don’t have to teach our children about race; what we have to teach them about is violence against women.”5 When Denny Blackwell, a black community leader in Los Angeles, protested that Bruce’s remarks “somehow give domestic violence a priority over racism,” Bruce was adamant that the two issues required ideological and political separation: “I’m an advocate for women,” Bruce, at that time the head of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, retorted. “What I work on is to try to improve the quality of women’s lives.”6 As feminists noted at the time, Bruce’s remarks left women of color out of the picture altogether, figuring neither as victims of domestic violence (in Bruce’s usage, “women” meant white women) nor as victims of racism. How different in their effects, we may wonder, are Bruce’s statements from the one that Susan B. Anthony gave to the press in 1884 when asked to comment on Frederick Douglass’s marriage to Helen Pitts? “I have but one question, that of equality between the sexes—that of the races has no place on our platform.”7 Perhaps we can take some heart in the fact that NOW’s board of directors, one- third of whom are women of color, issued a resolution censoring Bruce, while Patricia Ireland, the president of NOW, gave interviews in which she discussed the reasons for the reprimand. “[Bruce] violated very directly NOW’s position that says we do not create a hierarchy and say that one type of oppression is more important. We consider that it’s every bit as important to rid the world of Mark Fuhrmans as it is those nameless, faceless police officers who did not respond appropriately … after Nicole Simpson called 911.”8 NOW tried to get Bruce to recant, but Bruce refused to do so. She saw herself as representing a constituency of white women who were concerned that the issue of “violence against women” (read white women) was being set aside and subsumed into the issue of police misconduct against black men. We may remember that we have been down this road before: Abby Kelley rebuked Elizabeth Cady Stanton for her decision to fight against the Fourteenth Amendment, and Stanton’s response, like Bruce’s, was to create a new organization—one that would focus solely on “woman” and not on “race.”

The problem facing NOW, however, is much larger than refusing to “create hierarchies” of oppression. Rather it is one of effective management of the irresolvable tensions that emerge because women experience oppression along multiple, intersecting, and competing axes. There is no singular “woman,” no abstract “person” representing us all—only embodied subjects whose lives are governed by ever-shifting axes of power that are aligned and fragmented along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and so forth. Universal principles of human rights, equality, and freedom are espoused as if these axes do not exist. But they do, and thus implementation of universal principles will always bring to the surface the conflicts and contradictions that the principles themselves are designed to cover over.

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Clearly, this is not a problem for feminists alone but for all groups committed to social justice. Managing these kinds of tensions is required in every cultural and political arena: in “objective” reporting of the news; in the composing of nonethnocentric ethnographies; in the filming of documentaries; in representing “accurately” another’s history; in forging political alliances between First World and Third World, Western and non-Western peoples; in protesting forms of patriarchal abuse that take place outside the borders of the United States. What the future holds depends on our learning to undo feminism’s historical complicity with racism and imperialism; in subverting the unproblematic construction of the West as morally superior to the nonWest because it treats its women better (i.e, “the West is best” reflex). In the previous chapter, we saw how such constructions of the “West is best” informed one journalist’s representation of breast-feeding debates in the United States. Similar constructions also permeate the media’s reporting of the UN women’s conference at Beijing (“Compared to their sisters in the rest of the world, American women have it pretty easy”) and shape public discussion of the patriarchal abuses in Third World countries (e.g., the wearing of the bourqa in Afghanistan; the ban against women driving cars in Saudi Arabia; the practice of female genital mutilation in Egypt, etc.).9 In short, feminists must find ways to challenge patriarchy without reinscribing discourses of Western domination or white superiority.

Unfortunately, there is a great deal of confusion (and purposeful obfuscation) of the inevitable conflicts among feminist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, and antiracist discourses. But we must not make the mistake of assuming that multiculturalism, post-colonialism, antiracism, and Western feminism are hopelessly at odds. Multiculturalists want to protect the cultural heterogeneity of U.S. society and so battle against the assimilationist impulses of conservatives, liberals, and others. Postcolonialists work to identify and address the long- lasting and insidous effects of imperial domination, even while understanding that colonialisms have so insinuated themselves into their “host” cultures that to purify the latter of the former is a herculean task. Antiracists challenge structures of racial domination, and feminists struggle to expose and subvert the patriarchal hierarchies that oppress women, whatever their cultural manifestation and geographic location. In their broadest formulations, feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and anticapitalism (the list could be expanded infinitely) share a vision of a world free of domination, and thus the potential for interalliances is real and compelling. But we must first come to terms with the past in order to develop new strategies for the future, so that such a vision of social emancipation can be realized.

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