WH I TE

WOM EN ’S
RI GH TS
 WHITE
WOMEN’S
RIGHTS

The Racial Origins
of Feminism
in the United States

LOU I SE MI CH ELE N EWMAN

New York • Oxford

Oxford University Press

1999
 Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta
Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul
Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai
Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Toyko Toronto Warsaw
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1999 by Louise Michele Newman

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Newman, Louise Michele.
White women’s rights : the racial origins of feminism in the United States /
Louise Michele Newman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-508692-9; ISBN 0-19-512466-9 (pbk.)
1. Feminism—United States—History. 2. Women’s rights—United
States—History. 3. Racism—United States—History. 4. White
women—United States—Social conditions. 5. Minority women—United
States—Social conditions. I. Title.
HQ1410.N475 1998
97-53286

135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 Acknowledgments

I BEGAN TH I S BOOK as a graduate student in the American Civilization and History

programs at Brown University over a decade ago, and my greatest debts are to the
faculty and graduate students there who befriended and supported me while I was
writing my dissertation. Most important, I want to thank Professor Mari Jo Buhle for
the extraordinarily generous and incisive criticism she gave me year after year, draft
after draft, and for the unobtrusive way she provided for all my academic needs. I also
benefitted greatly from the careful readings of Professors Jack Thomas, James Patter-
son, and Mary Gluck, each of whom contributed substantially to my development as a
historian. In addition, I would like to express my appreciation to Naomi Lamoreaux,
who encouraged me at a crucial stage in the formulation of the topic, and to Tony
Molho, whose compassion sustained me at a critical juncture. I also benefitted im-
mensely from the discussions held by the Pembroke Seminar, under the direction of
Karen Newman and Elizabeth Weed. Moreover, a number of scholars outside my
graduate institution treated me with great kindness and respect, bolstering me when I
was feeling discouraged. I am especially grateful to Hazel Carby for her expansive
commentary at my first professional conference; to Nancy Hewitt for validating my
work at a very early stage; and to Gina Morantz-Sanchez for adopting me as one of her
graduate students, even though she already had plenty of her own. Finally, I had the
unbelievable good fortune to be surrounded by a remarkable community of vibrant
young scholars, whose work has been the inspiration of my own. To these friends and
colleagues, I offer my love and gratitude: Kevin Gaines, Matt Jacobson, Gail Beder-
man, Bob McMichael, Lyde Cullen Sizer, Todd Gernes, Linda Grasso, Oscar Campo-
manes, Ann duCille, Tricia Rose, Suzanne Kolm, Lou Roberts, Elizabeth Francis, Ruth
Feldstein, Lauri Umansky, Donna Penn, Michael Topp, Yardena Rand, Harry Williams,
 VI • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Bruce Dorsey, Roseanne Camacho, Jim Cullen, Krista Comer, Jane Gerhard, Jessica
Shubow, Bill Hart, Joanne Melish, Nan Boyd, and Melani McAlister.
I also would like to express my gratitude to my former colleagues at Harvard Uni-
versity, who welcomed me into their community and expressed genuine interest in
my work, especially Liz Muther, Jan Thaddeus, Chris Appy, Jim Engell, Pat Palmieri,
Meredith McGill, John Norman, Bob Lamb, Mark Dolan, and Laurence de Looze; and
to my current colleagues at the University of Florida who have taken me under their
wing and challenged me in many ways: Bob McMahon, David Colburn, Ron
Formisano, Bert Wyatt-Brown, Bob Zieger, David Chalmers, Jeff Adler, and Tom Gal-
lant. Special thanks to Susan Kent, Carol Lansing, Maria Todorova, Betty Smocovitis,
Sue Rosser, Elizabeth Langland, Pat Miller, Jeff Needell, Eldon Turner, and Maureen
Turim for their loving mentorship and helpful criticism of my work. I also would like
to acknowledge Kathryn Burns, Fitz Brundage, Fred Corney, Jay Tribby, Mark
Thurner, Sheryl Kroen, and Alice Freifeld, colleagues-in-arms, for their sincere enjoy-
ment of my work and to thank them, as well as Arun Agrawal and Rebecca Karl, for
the exquisite pleasure of their intellectual company. Finally, I want to express my deep
appreciation to Betty Smocovitis, Matt Jacobson, and Rebecca Karl for their thorough
perusal of my manuscript. Betty saved me from many embarrassing errors, Rebecca
compelled me to fill in (some of) the logical gaps, and Matt assured me that the
manuscript was ready for publication. There is no question that this book would have
been much the worse without their interventions.
In addition, I feel a great debt of gratitude to Marcia Dambry of Harvard’s History
and Literature program, Sybil Mazor of Brown’s American Civilization program, and
Betty Corwine and Kimberly Yocum of the University of Florida’s History Depart-
ment, for taking such good care of me, far in excess of what our professional relation-
ship requires. I have also been blessed to have had many wonderful students, and I am
truly grateful for their interest and support. I want especially to thank Andrew
Chancey, James Wilson, Matthew Franks, Carol Giardina, James Thompson, Andrew
Frank, Lisa Tendrich Frank, Wendy Beauchamp, Julian Chambliss, Donna Jacklosky,
Adam Lifshey, Rebecca Walkowitz, James Forman, Jr., Jace Anderson, Ben Wizner,
Ryan Schneider, and Linda LeCraw.
Scholars can not do good work without great librarians, and I have been fortunate
to have had the assistance of some of the best. Elizabeth Coogan and Beth Beretta-
Wendt in the interlibrary loan division of Brown’s John D. Rockefeller library worked
tirelessly to furnish many crucial sources. Karen Lamoree, during her tenure as the
Farnharn archivist in the Hay Library, shared with me many of her discoveries of pre-
viously unknown materials. John Van Hook at the University of Florida has proven to
be a resource beyond measure. Moreover, I will be forever grateful to the American
Council of Learned Societies for believing in this project enough to grant me a year-
long fellowship, and to the University of Florida for providing financial assistance in
the summer of 1994 and release time from teaching in 1995–96.
I would also like to express my respect and gratitude to the staff at Oxford Univer-
sity Press. In particular, I want to thank my editor Thomas LeBien, who has had faith
in me from the start; Susan Ferber and Robert Milks, who have taken care of all the
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS • VII

nagging details with extraordinary patience and grace; and my copyeditor, Martha
Ramsey, whose dedication to perfection has made this a much better book.
Finally, I want to thank my family and friends who have stood by me these many
years: my mother, Marsha Newman, who did everything she could to ease the pain of
writing; Barbara Walzer, who taught me how to read the past in physical objects; Matt
Jacobson, whose inimitable mix of humor, compassion, and understanding sustained
me at the end; Gina Morantz-Sanchez who read (and liked) every word I wrote; and
Kevin Gaines, who believed in me and appreciated the value of my work, long before
I did.
 Contents

Introduction:
Woman’s Rights, Race, and Imperialism 3
1
Evolution, Woman’s Rights, and Civilizing Missions 22
2
The Making of a White Female Citizenry:
Suffragism, Antisuffragism, and Race 56
3
The Politics of Patriarchal Protection:
Debates over Coeducation and Special
Labor Legislation for Women 86
4
A Feminist Explores Africa:
May French-Sheldon’s Subversion
of Patriarchal Protection 102
5
Assimilating Primitives:
The “Indian Problem” as a “Woman Question” 116
6
Eliminating Sex Distinctions from Civilization:
The Feminist Theories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
and Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge 132
7
Coming of Age, but Not in Samoa:
Reflections on Margaret Mead’s
Legacy to Western Liberal Feminism 158
Conclusion:
Coming to Terms 181
Notes 187
Selected Bibliography 229
Index 253
 WH I TE
WOM EN ’S
RI GH TS
 Introduction
Woman’s Rights, Race, and Imperialism

If rethinking the historical contours of Western racial [and femi-

nist] discourse matters as a political project, it is not as a mani-
festation 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)

I N TH E SPRI NG OF 1888, the renowned suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902),

at age seventy-three, presided over an international gathering of women. The meet-
ing 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 commit-
ment, 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, fa-
mous 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 see-
ing 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, Dou-
glass 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 Fif-
teenth Amendments. These amendments had 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

3
 4 • INTRODUCTION

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 emancipa-
tion and enfranchisement of enslaved men and women. Yet, at a moment of celebra-
tion 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. Suf-
fragists had actively supported the Republican party during the Civil War and had ex-
pected to be rewarded with the franchise afterward. But this had not happened. De-
spite 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 Amend-
ments contrasted starkly with Douglass’s support, and she harbored continuing re-
sentment. Several years earlier, in 1884, Anthony had refused to support publicly Dou-
glass’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 inter-
marriage 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 obvi-
ous 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. An-
thony’s comment serves as a tragic reminder that the possibility for interracial coop-
eration 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 nonethe-
less 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 time when the country was growing increasingly hostile toward
 INTRODUCTION • 5

attempts to redress the political, social, and economic injustices to which African
Americans were subjected. White women’s expressions of resentment over the en-
franchisement 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 reso-
nance 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 vic-
timhood, postbellum suffrage ideology stressed white women’s racial-cultural superi-
ority to newly enfranchised male constituencies—not just black men, but also natu-
ralized 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 Amend-
ments threatened to introduce a new gender-based hierarchy that overlooked distinc-
tions of education, virtue, and refinement, qualities that Stanton believed existed in
greater degree and preponderance in white women because of the more advanced de-
velopment 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 remem-
bered 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
 6 • INTRODUCTION

his boyhood, just after the Civil War ended, that Stanton, Anthony, and Julia Ward
Howe had “devoted all their efforts toward obtaining the ballot for the Negro, even to
the neglect of their own dearly cherished cause.”10 During the renewed suffrage bat-
tles 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 coop-
eration, 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 ad-
dress 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 intersect-
ing 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 compar-
ing 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 consid-
ered 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
 INTRODUCTION • 7

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 Rep-
resentative Women, a 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 Con-
gress was not the result of a practice of sisterhood . . . but part of a discourse of ex-
oticism. . . . 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 hind-
sight. 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 superi-
ority were everywhere around them, justified in lynchings, performed in minstrel
shows, and celebrated in fairs and expositions. It is not surprising, then, that white ac-
tivists had a heightened racial consciousness of themselves as civilized women, con-
tributing to and reinforcing dominant religious, scientific, and cultural ideologies that
attributed to them unique moral and political roles on the basis of this identity. Blend-
ing 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 Protes-
tants 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 en-
tire vocabulary that implied the degradation of [nonwhite, nonwestern] women:
zenanas and harems; the seraglio and the bagnio, female infanticide and suttee, concu-
binage and polygamy; bride sale; foot-binding and ear and nose boring, consecrated
prostitution and sacrifice; 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
 8 • INTRODUCTION

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 “advance-
ment” of “primitive” women.
The implications of this paradox were far-reaching in U.S. society and race rela-
tions. 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” cul-
tures as the worse perpetrators of abuse, when the problems were much more com-
plex. (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 be-
tween 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 con-
solidate 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” immi-
grants 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 effec-
tiveness 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 become civilized. Black women reformers offered themselves as
models of black womanhood to prove to white racists that there was nothing inher-
ently inferior about the black race. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a leader in the National
 INTRODUCTION • 9

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 re-
pudiate altogether the prevailing ideologies of the cult of domesticity and true wom-
anhood. 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 domes-
ticity, 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 man-
dated 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 accep-
tance 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 tem-
perance, 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 sug-
gesting that they were much better off than were African American (and Asian
American and Native American) women in their own cultures. But evolutionist dis-
courses called into question the status of black women, who had to devote their ef-
forts to proving that blacks were as civilized as whites.
In sum, evolutionist discourses limited and prescribed the social positions, political
ideologies, and utopian visions of “Negro” and “Anglo-Saxon” women in very differ-
ent ways. White women’s determination to transcend the limits of the domestic
 10 • INTRODUCTION

sphere, which they accomplished by proclaiming themselves central to civilizing mis-

sions, enabled them to imbue themselves with social authority at a time when their
access to more formal, public, institutional forms of power was severely circum-
scribed. Black women’s analogous claims that they too were central to their race’s so-
cial progress meant that they had to disavow their cultural past, adopt patriarchal
gender norms, and celebrate white cultural practices. The strictures of social evolu-
tion 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 sta-
tus” and “replicated the dehumanizing logic of racism.”25
This book, then, begins by exploring the particular precepts of evolutionist theo-
ries concerning social progress, woman’s nature, and racial difference that Anglo-
American Protestant women used to empower themselves. Although Anglo-Protes-
tant 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 be-
tween 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 civi-
lization back into a less advanced society.
In other words, evolutionist discourses specified that the sexual differences be-
tween (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 nineteenth-century discourses used universalizing language to make gen-
eralizations about the “race,” “woman,” or “man,” while intending these generaliza-
 INTRODUCTION • 11

tions to apply only to people of Anglo-Saxon (or Euro-Protestant) descent. Nine-

teenth-century discourses conflated race, class, culture, religion, and geographic
origin, so that “Anglo-Saxon,” “American,” “white,” “civilized,” “Caucasian,” “Chris-
tian,” 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 Amer-
icans 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 Protes-
tantism.28 For example, throughout the nineteenth century, the subordinate and im-
poverished 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 andcultural entity.
A person was born with his or her race predetermined by ancestry, and the conse-
quences of this inheritance was of great import. To be identified as a member of a spe-
cific 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 upbring-
ing could temper the original racial inheritance. Yet within a generation or two, for
Euro-Americans at least, the cumulative effects of climate, geography, education, up-
bringing 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 used to invent distinctions between what we would now call
 12 • INTRODUCTION

classes,”while “the rhetoric of genderwas 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 in-
herently 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 educa-
tion and upbringing to such an extent that they would then transmit to their own off-
spring 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 Euro-
pean 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 Chi-
nese 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 “pro-
tectors” 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 politi-
cal circumstances of nonwhite and non-elite groups of women. As part of their civiliz-
ing 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 orga-
nized 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) es-
tablished 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 es-
tablished the first settlement house for immigrants in Chicago in 1889, creating an or-
ganizational model that would soon be adopted in other urban areas.
Much suffering was alleviated by these efforts, and many success stories could be
FI GURE 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.
 14 • INTRODUCTION

told of 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 work-
ing-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 ef-
fective civilizers, every bit the equals of white men because of a shared evolutionary
history.
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 evolu-
tionist 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, al-
laying 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 re-
strictive), using it as a locus from which to demand an expansion in political rights for
themselves.

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 conscious-
ness. Articles appearing in such periodicals as the National American Review, Nation, At-
lantic Monthly, and Harper’sdepict a nation struggling to overcome political divisions be-
tween 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
 INTRODUCTION • 15

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 simul-
taneously with these other developments. Observers at the time linked these various
phenomena, viewing the drop in white women’s fertility in relation to the demo-
graphic increase in the populations of non-white peoples. They drew connections be-
tween 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 fol-
lowing 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 an-
nexation argued that assuming the government of foreign territories was in violation
of the Monroe Doctrine and went against democratic principles, especially the princi-
ple of government by consent 35 and that benign forms of colonization would be inef-
fective 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 for-
eign“primitives.” The outlook of Mrs. Jefferson Davis was characteristic:

[T]he President probably has cogent reasons for conquering and retaining the Philip-
pines. 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 theseand promote their welfare we have not
yet solved. . . . The question is, What are we going to do with these additional mil-
lions 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 im-
plemented 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, bourgeoisVictorian 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 civi-
lization needed to take place. The supposed superior adaptability of the Anglo-Saxon
male, previously understood as an advantageous trait in a so-called “empty” Ameri-
can wilderness, was considered a drawback when it came to colonizing what were rec-
ognized to be fully inhabited foreign lands. The adaptability of the Anglo-Saxon male
 16 • INTRODUCTION

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 some-
how it had to be shown that an increase in a mixed-race population would not jeopar-
dize 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 adapt-
able as to be in danger of losing his racial distinctiveness while residing in the tropics.

FI GURE I-2 Sexual dangers of U.S. colonialism. A Test of Disi-

pline. Postcard, c. early 1900s. For anti-imperialists, one of the
greatest dangers of colonizing primitives was the threat of misce-
genation.
 INTRODUCTION • 17

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 de-
cline 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 be-
tween 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 manipu-
lated 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 Femi-
nismand Suffragein 1978, women’s historians have understood that beliefs in white supe-
riority profoundly shaped the arguments and strategies of white leaders in the suffrage
movement. Kraditor argued that as the (white) suffrage movement transformed itself
from a “visionary movement [an outgrowth of northern abolition] . . . to a practi-
cal cause with a real chance for success,” white suffragists relinquished earlier argu-
ments based on concepts of natural rights and justice and adopted new ones based on
“expediency” (how woman suffrage would benefit society).39 As part of this transfor-
mation, Kraditor claimed, northern white suffragists, who were increasingly con-
cerned about immigrant and labor problems, united with southern white suffragists,
who worried about the Negro problem—to argue that enfranchising women would
strengthen white middle-class values (because “better” classes of women would vote
in much larger numbers than “worse” classes of women and men combined). As
Suzanne Lebsock has observed, “Kraditor’s characterization of the white suffragists
has had a great deal of staying power.”40 Many scholars, both white and black, have
followed in Kraditor’s stead, criticizing white suffragists for excluding women of color
from their organizations and for exploiting racist arguments.41
Yet, where Kraditor argued that the white suffrage movement slowly gave up its
“egalitarian” (her term) arguments, other narratives depict a movement that became
increasingly more expansive, not just in membership but in its ability to encompass
the differing views of various constituencies. As Nancy Cott perceptively notes, “the
 18 • INTRODUCTION

gathering force of the woman [suffrage] movement had by the early twentieth cen-
tury encouraged into voice women who spoke out . . . about disfranchisement ex-
plicitly informed by [their own] racial, political, or economic loyalties. . . . The vote
appealed instrumentally to different subgroups [black women, white Southern
women, socialist women, trade union women] for various reasons, while they had
their common disenfranchisement to unite them.”42
Seemingly at odds, Kraditor’s and Cott’s perspectives are not as contradictory as
they might first appear. White suffragists throughout the nineteenth century ex-
pressed views that repeatedly affirmed their belief in white racial superiority; yet other
groups engaged in antiracist politics envisioned that the vote might help their cause as
well. Racial and class divisions among women were not overcome by the suffrage
movement, they were merely subsumed, momentarily, within the common goal of
suffrage (as they are today subsumed in “right to choice” arguments), even as white
racism and middle-class paternalism rose to their full expression.
My narrative about postbellum suffragism, presented in chapter 2, has different
emphases from the Kraditor school, even though I agree with the crucial underlying
point—that both suffragism and antisuffragism were fundamentally racialized and
racist discourses. The work of Nancy Cott has opened up a way to question Kraditor’s
sense that egalitarian arguments were gradually replaced by expedient ones, or that
nonracist claims about universal rights gave way to racist attempts to buttress white
supremacy. As Cott has argued, it was not simply a question of one rhetorical strategy
substituting for another: “nineteenth-century women protesting against male domi-
nance . . . did not choose to argue simply on the basis of women’s human character
(that is, likeness to men) or simply on the basis of women’s unique sexual character
(that is, difference from men). Women voiced these two kinds of arguments in the
same breath.”43 In other words, arguments about expediency and the political benefits
of maintaining woman’s sphere (which were racialized) coexisted throughout the suf-
frage debates with arguments about natural rights and equality (which were also
racialized—more on this hereafter). From 1848 to 1920, the white woman movement
affirmed (white) women’s racial similarity to (white) men because of the conviction
that white women drew on the same evolutionary and racial heritage as white men.
Yet, at the same time, white suffragists affirmed (white) women’s sexual difference
from (white) men because they believed sexual differences formed the bedrock of
whites’ civilization. This “functional ambiguity,” as Cott describes the tension, was not
so ambiguous at the time: social evolutionary discourses specified quite plainly that
white women were both fundamentally similar to white men (because of “race”) and
fundamentally different from white men (because of “sex”).
In addition, Jean Fagan Yellin’s research compels us to assess the ideology of north-
ern abolitionist-suffragists more critically than Kraditor did.44 The so-called egali-
tarian arguments of many abolitionist-suffragists demanded that citizenship should
not be restricted solely on racial grounds, but white abolitionists still believed that the
white race was “higher” and that whites currently manifested a superiority to blacks
in character, morality, intelligence, and civilization. It was just that blacks and other
racial inferiors could be “elevated” or “uplifted”—if freed and treated properly, edu-
 INTRODUCTION • 19

cated, Christianized, and granted citizenship. In this regard, the abolitionist-suffragists

were not very different from postbellum suffragists; indeed they were often literally
the same people. Perhaps the abolitionists more frequently evoked metaphors of space
(high/low) while later suffragists preferred metaphors of time (backward, forward,
progress); but there is a great deal of overlap and continuity between the two. Social
evolution did not fundamentally change abolitionists’ previous understandings of
race, gender, and citizenship. Older abolitionist-suffragists, like Stanton, merely took
up the new discourse when social evolutionary theories offered them an explanation
of why blacks and Indians were “inferior races” and more “backward” than whites and
Europeans, who were “superior races” and more “advanced.”
Consequently, my narrative begins with the perspective that citizenship in this
country was (and still is) racialized and gendered at its core. Instead of trying to see
how woman’s rights advocates went wrong—how an egalitarian movement became a
racist one—I explore the ideological and political strategies that various white women
reformers used at different times to assert the citizenship rights of groups (themselves
and others) whom they believed did (or did not) manifest the attributes of the norma-
tive white male citizen. My hope is that this approach will help us come to a better
understanding of how discourses of race and gender still inform discourses of equality
and citizenship (and vice versa).
In the 1980s, work by black scholars made white feminists even more aware of the
dangers of composing narratives that took the experiences of white middle-class
women as the norm and treated black and working-class women solely as tokens,
marginal figures, or victims.45 In 1987, Hazel Carby protested that attempts on the
part of white feminist literary critics and historians to recover a “lost sisterhood” left
uninterrogated the ways in which white women’s ideologies operated as “sites of racial
and class struggle,” enabling white women to “negotiate their subordinate role in re-
lation to patriarchy.”46 In recent years, a burgeoning literature has emerged in which
scholars are re-examining the history and current operations of white racial forma-
tions. Gail Bederman, Tracey Boisseau, Ruth Frankenberg, Jane Hunter, Carolyn
Karcher, Peggy Pascoe, Laura Wexler, and Jean Fagan Yellin, among many others, have
looked anew at white women’s use of and embeddedness within the racial discourses
of abolitionism, benevolence, suffragism, missionary ideology, civilization, imperial-
ism, progressivism, and feminism.47 David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and Matthew Ja-
cobson have examined how various ethnic and working-class groups worked to create
white identities for themselves to compensate for their exclusion from economic, po-
litical, and social forms of power.48 This book draws heavily from this new historiogra-
phy, as well as from the rich theoretical insights of scholars working in anthropology,
cultural studies, critical legal studies, and British colonialism.49

Argument and Goals

In the most general sense, I argue that imperialism provided an important discourse
for white elite women who developed new identities for themselves as missionaries,
 20 • INTRODUCTION

explorers, educators, and ethnographers as they staked out new realms of possibility
and political power against the tight constraints of Victorian gender norms. White
women in the late nineteenth century were engaged in a struggle for a positive female
identity in a deeply misogynistic society: they articulated new arguments about race
and gender to assert themselves as the political, social, and racial equals of white men.
By offering themselves as the epitome of social evolutionary development, they were
also trying, simultaneously, if paradoxically, to articulate an egalitarian vision, one
that could be inclusive of women of color and that envisioned “lower races” as their
potential equals in the future. They hoped that assimilation would lead eventually to full
racial equality, and they believed that nonwhite women would want to follow them
down this road. They did not see assimilation as a form of racism, for they were con-
vinced, as were many black elites in this period, that assimilation was vastly preferable
to racist notions of fixed biological difference. In their minds, assimilation denoted a
social vision that encompassed both a melding of peoples and a firm sense of hierar-
chy—an invitation to Others to participate (as almost-but-not-quite Anglos) in the
body politic. Early feminist theory as articulated by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and
Mary Roberts Coolidge grew out of and bolstered the “civilizing missions” of the nine-
teenth century, was firmly grounded in social evolution theory’s stipulations about
white racial supremacy, and defended cultural assimilation as a means of promoting
the equality of nonwhite peoples.
My goal, to echo Robyn Wiegman, is to shift our frame of reference so that we be-
come more sensitive to the ways in which contemporary discourses continue to draw
on their assimilationist legacies. Most important, I hope to shake up what I see as a lin-
gering complacency in egalitarian liberalism as an effective means of addressing issues
of racial, gender, and class inequalities. Claims about the egalitarian goals of feminist
politics (in the nineteenth century as well as now) reflect a common confusion about
racism, sexism, and classism that needs to be exposed: too often, it is posited that non-
racist (nonsexist, nonclassist) behavior requires a purposeful overlooking—a not-
seeing—of difference, even when the consequences of such not-seeing lead to the
maintenance of structures of oppression. (Think of the white liberals who proudly ex-
claimed, “Oh, I never thought of him/her as black” as if this constituted evidence of an
enlightened racial consciousness.) The same confusion operates in well-intentioned
“feminist” claims that sexual equality is best achieved by treating men and women the
same. The national romance with colorblindness, and its corollary, gender sameness, is
a fundamentally misguided strategy (metaphorically, a two-headed ostrich with both
heads in the sand)—an ineffective way to address the real discursive effects of social
hierarchies intricately structured along the multiple axes of race, class, gender. The
favored approach of the U.S. legal system in questions of legal equality—treating simi-
larly situated individuals similarly—works only when individuals are indeed similarly
situated. But what if they are differently situated?In the context of American political
culture in which power is already aligned along gendered, racialized, and class lines,
people of different races, classes, and genders are always already situated differently. To
assert “sameness” is to purposefully ignore the material and ideological effects that race
(gender, class, sexuality) have had in creating oppression, inequity, and injustice.
 INTRODUCTION • 21

This book, then, has four specific goals: first, to analyze how evolutionary con-
structions of racial progress and sexual difference were central to the ways in which
white women activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries conceptu-
alized woman’s rights and sexual equality; second, to examine how white women in
the progressive era anchored their political activism to this ideological foundation,
creating new forms of public authority for themselves that emanated from their un-
derstandings of their unique roles as civilizers of racially inferior peoples; third, to ex-
plain how feminism developed out of this earlier discourse as a racialized theory of
gender oppression. In this regard, I examine feminism’s connection to two related
contexts: first, to the United States’ efforts to assimilate Native Americans, African
Americans, and the Chinese at home, and second, to the country’s struggle to assert
itself as an imperial power abroad. Finally, this book shows how ongoing discussions
about and among U.S. feminists today remain indebted to these earlier conceptions
from the late nineteenth century of gender and sexual difference as the defining fea-
tures of “advanced” or “civilized” nations.
This study is arranged in three sections. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the develop-
ments in evolutionist theories and national politics of the 1870s and 1880s that pro-
vided the intellectual underpinnings for white women’s racialized views of sexual
equality. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 explore how white women modified and made use of so-
cial evolutionary discourses in several different contexts: in the debates over “sex in
education” and “sex in industry” with the physicians Edward Clarke and Azel Ames,
respectively, during the 1870s; in the Indian reform movement of the 1880s; and in the
popular response to May French-Sheldon’s safari in East Africa in the early 1890s.
Chapters 6 and 7 turn to the emergence of feminist theory in the early twentieth cen-
tury. Chapter 6 explores how Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary Roberts Smith
Coolidge, two self-proclaimed feminists, managed to remove “sexual difference” as
the defining factor in the evolutionary hierarchy of races, while still maintaining that
Anglo-Protestant women were the best civilizers of racial inferiors by virtue of their
special evolutionary history. The final chapter examines how this paradigm was
slowly transformed in the 1920s and 1930s by analyzing how Margaret Mead success-
fully challenged the Victorian idea of evolutionary assimilation, yet was not able to re-
linquish the cultural ethnocentrism that celebrated the United States as a superior
nation on the basis of its gender ideologies.
The dangers of such an approach are formidable. Because of its focus on the racism
within feminism, this study may be taken as mitigating, if not rendering invisible, “worse”
forms of racism in the culture at large and of aiding an ongoing conservative backlash
against the women’s movement. My hope, however, is that this recasting of the history
of woman’s rights might give us more insight into how and why the legacies of evolu-
tionary feminism continue to endure and perhaps might even help us to imagine new
departures. While it may be unsettling to look at our past in this way, it is critical that we
acknowledge the inheritance bequeathed to us by these early feminists—for we are all
caught in the webs of race and patriarchy, just as they were.
 1

Evolution, Woman’s Rights,
and Civilizing Missions

It matters not whether we regard the history of the remotest past or

the diverse civilizations of the present, the emancipation and exal-
tation of women are the synonym of progress.
Otis T. Mason, Woman’s Share
in Primitive Culture, 1894

A S TH EY LOOKED BACK over recent decades, contemporary observers of the 1890s

recognized this period in U.S. history as “the Era of Woman”—a time when
women’s organizations proliferated and the country seemed especially focused on
women’s issues and women’s rights. Richard T. Ely, director of the School of Econom-
ics, Political Science, and History at the University of Wisconsin, declared, “Our age
may properly be called the Era of Woman, because everything which affects her re-
ceives consideration quite unknown in past centuries.”1 Commentators at the time
were impressed with the recent “progress” of woman, her increased visibility in public
and political affairs, her entry into colleges and universities, and her commitment to
social reform. Those in sympathy with the woman’s movement viewed these changes
in woman’s status as the manifestation of evolutionary progress, a sign that the civi-
lization of the United States was equal to the higher civilizations of Europe and far su-
perior to the primitive cultures of Asia and Africa. In the words of Joseph Rodes
Buchanan, a professor of physiology, medicine, and anthropology, “sustained wom-
anhood is a Western condition, as degraded womanhood is the Oriental condition.
. . . The darkness that rests upon Asia and the midnight that enshrouds Africa,
where woman has no rights . . . have their appointed time to pass away in the illu-
mination of which the American Republic is the destined centre.”2
For Buchanan, as for many others, social evolution theory provided the frame-
work and language through which changes in woman’s sphere were interpreted. De-
mands for woman’s rights arose simultaneously with the spread of evolutionist ideas
about racial development, sexual difference, and social progress. For prescient ob-
servers, it was not merely coincidental that the woman’s movement had grown to un-
precedented heights in the 1880s, at precisely the same moment that politicians, busi-

22
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS, AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 23

nessmen, educators, and scientists were all promulgating the “survival of the fittest”
and laissez-faire principles of social Darwinism.3 Rather, it was evolutionist theories
that made possible new social and political roles for white women as “civilizers” of the
race, strengthening longstanding beliefs in (white) women’s moral superiority. More-
over, the emergence of a strong imperialist sentiment, the effort to establish the
United States as an empire, and the extension of missions, both domestically and
abroad, fundamentally influenced the direction and content of white feminist thought
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For contemporaries like
Buchanan, the rise in the woman’s movement could not be understood apart from
these other developments. As Buchanan articulated the relationship, the woman
question was more than a question of woman’s rights; it was “a national question, a
race question, a world question.”4
In other words, the simultaneous development of two ideologies, woman’s rights
and social Darwinism, accompanied and made possible white women’s entry into the
public sphere, at a time when new corporate and monopolistic forms of capitalism were
creating vast differences in wealth between an educated white managerial class and an
impoverished (often immigrant and nonwhite) working class. Social-Darwinian theo-
ries encouraged and enabled the development of ideologies concerning white middle-
class women’s emancipation that emphasized (white) women’s specific role as the
“conservators of race traits” and the “civilizers” of racial and class inferiors. The Anglo-
Saxon Protestant woman’s self-proclaimed burden at the turn of the century was to
help her nation in rescuing these so-called primitive and working-class peoples from
stagnation and decay, to protect them from the violent abuses of the U.S. government
(and primitive and working-class women from the supposed abuses of their men), and
to assimilate evolutionary inferiors into a more advanced Christian civilization. White
women who participated in domestic and foreign missionary societies, in the local, na-
tional, and world temperance movements, in the settlement house movement, in the
international peace movement—in any of the organized white woman’s movements at
the turn of the century—built their institutions on the premise that they, as Anglo-
Saxon Protestant women, were the best conveyors of advanced civilization. Supporters
of the women’s settlement house movement could be quite candid about the relations
this ideology produced between themselves and the objects of their civilizing efforts.
Katharine Coman, a professor at Wellesley College, observed, “A settlement is a colony
planted in a strange land by immigrants from a superior civilization. . . . Hull House
has become a potent force in the civilizing of the great city wilderness where it was
planted.”5
Ideas about evolution, woman’s rights, and civilizing missions were widely dissemi-
nated in the culture through what historian Anne McClintock has termed commodity
racism, which took the form of advertising, photography, national expositions, and
museums, and converted “the narratives of imperial Progress into mass-produced con-
sumer spectacles.”6 Commodity racism occurred not only on a grand scale, for example in
the Midway portion of the Chicago Exposition in 1893 and in the ape exhibits of the New
York Museum of Natural History, but also filtered down into popular and material cul-
ture in a more mundane way, on trade cards that promoters used to advertise house-
 24 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

hold goods such as soap, cereals, and sewing machines.7 Idealized notions about how
evolution would led to racial assimilation and racial progress were even disseminated
through children’s toys, as a puzzle of the United States, manufactured by McLoughlin
Brothers in New York, probably sometime in the 1880s, suggests. (See fig. 1-1.)
On the box cover of the McLoughlin puzzle are two metaphorical figures, the
white woman as civilizer, and the unassimilated primitive. In the center, demanding
the viewer’s attention, is a goddess-like woman seated in a forest setting, clothed in
a white flowing robe, a royal blue sash draped around her shoulders. At her side is a
diminutive figure, childlike in form, though with a countenance too knowing for a
child, yet too naive for an adult. This childish figure, outfitted in a short skirt, with
pretty moccasins on its dainty feet and a single feather in its long, flowing hair, repre-
sents a quintessential, sexually undifferentiated Indian—although the bare breasts and
the bow and arrows strewn along the ground reveal this to be a nonthreatening male
Indian. The woman is pointing at a map in a book held open in her lap. Following her
gaze, the Indian is also looking at the book, and his posture, more than the unreadable
expression of his face, suggests that he is open to, if not exactly eager for, the instruc-
tion about to be dispensed.8
The colors of the woman’s dress—white and royal blue—connote her sexual pu-
rity and aristocratic heritage, signifying that she represents not only the best of ideal-
ized womanhood, but also the white civilized race. Her red headdress (recalling the
headgear of Joan of Arc) completes the tricolor scheme of red, white, and blue. This
female figure is a national icon, a symbol for the United States, the embodiment of the
nation’s Christian duty to educate Indians. The masculine strength and ferocity of a
savage warrior has been replaced by an ineffectual, cartoonlike Indian whose bow and
arrows are heedlessly left strewn about like those of a white child interrupted at play.
This Indian figure, physically immature and absurdly small, poses no threat to the civ-
ilizing mission.
The box cover embodies several cultural meanings. Most explicitly, it represents a
marketing strategy directed at white families desiring to educate their children in na-
tional geography. The image encourages an identification between the white child, for
whom this puzzle was intended, and the Indian child depicted on the cover. Yet the
cover also narrates in an unintentionally ironic, but nonetheless poignantly accurate
way, the story of how civilization-woman-nation descends upon the Indian-man-child,
saying in effect: “Now that you’ve been denied your former way of life, and can only
play at being Indian, let me teach you some geography in accordance with our re-
mapping of a wilderness that once was yours.” Because the woman-nation is making an
effort to teach the Indian man-child, the assumption here is that the primitive is as-
similable into U.S. civilization. In the context of the late nineteenth century, this ide-
alized woman and still-to-be-assimilated Indian encapsulated a progressive view of
race relations that derived from an evolutionist conviction that races could change
and progress: primitives could be turned into the civilized. The educational programs
at Hampton and Carlisle Institutes were institutional manifestations of the same
ideology.
FI GURE 1-1 Civilizing mission of white women. Dissected Map, United States. Puzzle Box Cover, c. mid-
1800s. As white women became the symbolic representatives and upholders of civilization, white activists
employed this ideology to carve out new social and political roles for white women as civilization-workers.
 26 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

has observed, the rise of an evolutionary science fo-

AS H I ST ORI AN CYN TH I A RU SSET T
cused on sexual difference was a response “to the particular historical moment in
which [Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle-class] women were asserting new claims to a
life beyond the domestic hearth.”9 Although organized forms of women’s resistance
to patriarchy can be traced back to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, where Lucre-
tia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton convened a gathering of approximately two-
hundred women and forty men to discuss white women’s grievances, the woman’s
movement increased its numbers dramatically after the Civil War and became even
more vocal in espousing woman’s right to personal autonomy, self-government, and
economic independence.10 According to one contemporary observer in 1892:
The last twenty years have seen the definitive term “Woman’s” prefixed to more societies
than have been designated by that distinction in the world’s history previously. . . .
Woman’s Home and Foreign Missionary Societies, Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union, Woman’s Suffrage Association, Woman’s Protective Agencies, Woman’s Relief
Corps, Woman’s National Indian Association, Woman’s Press Clubs, National Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Women, King’s Daughters, Deaconness Societies, Daugh-
ters of the Revolution, and lastly the Lady Managers . . . besides all the local societies
for women, literary social, esthetic, philanthropic, professional, educational, industrial,
hygienic and dress reform.11
Historians believe that this postbellum explosion in women’s organizing was pre-
cipitated by the radicalizing influence of the Civil War, which brought women into
public view in record numbers—a breakdown temporarily at least in the rigid ide-
ology of separate spheres. As historian Catherine Clinton has written, “the [Civil] war
brought changes of staggering proportion. Most were changes in degree: public arenas
in which women had only token representation before the war were brimming with
women during wartime.”12 For example, increasing numbers of women found em-
ployment in northern factories. In 1860, 270,000 women worked in the textile, shoe,
clothing, and printing industries, but the war created one hundred thousand new
jobs. Northern white women also got posts with the Union government (nearly five
hundred women were employed by the U.S. government by 1865), and roughly three
thousand women became army nurses. The most important women’s organization to
come out of the war was the Sanitary Commission (later renamed the Red Cross),
which raised millions of dollars to furnish supplies to soldiers, widows, and orphans,
and helped train nurses for work in hospitals and on battlefields.13
In the mid-1860s, immediately following the war, an additional four thousand
northern white women went south to help set up schools for the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Some of these women were widows; others had been too young to marry before the
war. In 1870, the Harvard paleontologist Nathaniel Shaler would write contemptu-
ously of the “northern woman who toils her life away [in the South Seas Islands off
the coast of South Carolina] under the delusion that she can fight all Africa with a
spelling-book and multiplication-table.”14 (See fig. 1-2.) But in 1885, Alice Fletcher,
suffragist and leader of the Women’s National Indian Association, would credit these
women with having successfully brought civilization to the Negro:
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 27

FI GURE 1-2 Off to civilize the primitive. If They’ll Only Be Good. Political cartoon, Puck(Janu-
ary 31, 1900). Caption underneath reads: “Uncle Sam—You have seen what my sons can do in
battle;—now see what my daughters can do in peace.” The stereotypical representations of the
white women (Irish matron, Old Maid, Prissy Schoolteacher, Innocent Debutante, and the
Benevolent Nurse) suggest that the cartoonist found the woman’s movement’s involvement in
imperialism ludicrous.

An army of [self-]sacrificing Northern missionaries, with Bible in one hand and spelling
books in the other, scarcely waiting for the smoke [of] battle to scatter, followed in the
march of the Union army, sought the freedmen, extended the help which they so
much needed, but which the poverty and temper of the South at that time could not
afford. Northern benevolence then and since has planted over $25,000,000 in this
Southland, and has furnished an army of her best men and women to assist the negro
in his dire necessity.”15
Most of these women had returned north by the late 1870s, but a few made their
homes in the South and became involved in political activism, agitating for state fund-
ing for black schools, pressing black land claims, and supporting black male suffrage.16
Although the temporary shortage in manpower caused by the war created new
economic opportunities for white middle-class women, the Civil War also fundamen-
tally altered many of these women’s sense of their rightful place in the world. Many
women who had been used to having male providers were now deprived of them—
some only momentarily while the war lasted, others permanently. In the Civil War
620,000 soldiers died (roughly 9 percent of the total white male population aged eigh-
teen to forty-five), a number almost equal to the total number of deaths sustained in
 28 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

all the rest of the nation’s wars combined (680,000).17 After the war, the decline in
marriageable men prompted many young white women to pursue careers. Contem-
poraries estimated that roughly three-hundred thousand (white) women sought
wage employment who might otherwise not have entered the paid labor force.18 By
the 1880s, two-thirds of public school teachers nationwide were women; in 1892 this
proportion had increased even further, to five-sixths.19 At the end of the nineteenth
century, white middle-class women also dominated office work (they were only 3.3
percent of office workers in 1870 but 75 percent in 1900); two-thirds of the stenogra-
phers and typists were young single white women between the ages of fifteen and
twenty-five, the majority living at home with their parents.20 Furthermore, during
this period, white women demanded and received access to institutions of higher
learning so that they could receive the appropriate training for the more lucrative and
prestigious “male” professions of law, ministry, college teaching, and medicine.
Married white women also became more visible in public arenas: they joined
church groups and missionary societies, they took part in charity work and benevo-
lent associations, and they even assumed appointive positions in local and state gov-
ernments, serving on school boards, state sanitary commissions, and so forth. Collec-
tively, these developments represented extraordinary, unprecedented change in white
middle-class women’s social roles, necessitating a new ideology about womanhood
and woman’s rights.
Equally relevant for specific articulations of woman’s rights in this period was the
country’s continued inability to address and resolve racial conflicts. Ongoing immi-
gration and urbanization in the 1870s and 1880s transformed neighborhoods, schools,
towns, and local cultures. As increased contact between different racial, ethnic, and
national groups became a fundamental feature of urban life in the late nineteenth
century, many white elites grew more fearful that their way of life would disappear.
Immigration from southeastern Europe fundamentally altered the demographic
structure of the Euro-American population; new immigrants brought with them
their religions (Catholicism, Judaism) and different cultural practices. Urbanization
meant that the older and familiar forms of maintaining social order, which had de-
pended on the local authority of town ministers and governors, had to be replaced
with urban bureaucracies, police forces, and social welfare organizations. Reconstruc-
tion’s enfranchisement of newly freed black male slaves compelled whites everywhere
to rethink their fundamental convictions about race and citizenship. Native Ameri-
cans continued to wage battle against the U.S. government, and career soldiers were
redeployed after the Civil War to help subjugate Indian tribes. Thousands of unmar-
ried Chinese men emigrated to western states to help build railroads during the Civil
War and then came into conflict with whites when they stayed on to work as miners,
farm laborers, and cannery workers.
All of these developments fueled tensions, mistrust, and violence among Anglo-
Saxons and other racial groups. At such vulnerable moments, Anglo-Saxon elites
found in the concept of social evolution a reassurance that the changes occurring be-
fore their eyes would be orderly and predictable. David Starr Jordan, president of Stan-
ford University, explained that evolution “as a science . . . [was] the study of chang-
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS
AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 29

ing beings acted upon by unchanging laws.”21 Evolutionist theories buttressed whites’
flagging confidence that the fittest would survive and appealed to those elites who felt
uneasy about the challenges to their social authority and political power that were
coming from new alliances of industrial workers and farmers (Farmers’ Alliances),
from potential coalitions between free blacks and poor whites (Populism), from the
Catholic Church, and from evangelical white women (the woman’s movement).
Anxious about their future and fearful of racial equality in its myriad aspects—inte-
gration as well as miscegenation—many whites looked to evolutionist theories to
help them understand the relationships among race, sexual difference, and civiliza-
tion—to reassure themselves that their own culture would prevail.22 Evolutionist
treatises dealing with such issues found a ready market among intellectuals. An editor
for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine remarked in 1874 that the “origin of race” was of
“greater interest to the student than almost any other problem.”23
From 1870 to 1920, then, as historians Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander Gilman have
observed, evolutionary science “became both more specialized and authoritative as a
cultural resource and language of interpretation” for understanding biological and
cultural differences.24 At the same time, evolutionist theories grew more popular and
more familiar to masses of Americans. One journalist reported that “evolutionists
[have gained a] hold upon the thinking world; and they will not be answered, if ever,
until they shall find an opponent as studious of life and as unflinching in reporting its
testimonies as are Darwin, Lyell, Lubbock, and Tylor.”25
Influential texts for laying out foundational principles of evolution and social evo-
lutionary theory were Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man
(1871), and Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Biology (1864) and Social Statics (1865).
Spencer developed his own theories concurrently with Darwin, coining the term
“survival of the fittest” in The Principles of Biology.26 While Darwin continued to empha-
size the idea that adaptive changes occurred fortuitously, Spencer gave his version a
sharply teleological cast, asserting that evolutionary changes occurred so as to pro-
duce social and racial progress, leading to ever higher and more advanced civilizations
and races.27 It was Spencer’s versions, even more than Darwin’s, that drew American
interest, in part because Anglo-Saxon elites were interested in using evolutionist theo-
ries to forecast social development for the future. In 1872 Edward Livingston Youmans
founded a new journal, Popular Science Monthly, to help disseminate Spencer’s work, and
by the 1880s the United States had become, in historian Richard Hofstadter’s well-
known phrase, the Darwinian country.28
As a theory that linked biology and culture, social evolutionary theories connected
societal change with individual change, equated advanced civilizations with white
racial superiority, and anchored both of these in sexual difference. Social evolutionary
theories also introduced the theoretical possibility that sexual and racial differences
could change over time—and change as a result of individual and social actions. In the
United States, these theories offered support both to those who were arguing that
racial inferiors could be quickly civilized through assimilationist programs as well as to
those who were opposed to government intervention in political affairs. In other
words, social evolutionary theories purported to predict progress, but they also delin-
 30 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

eated the limits of human agency, specifying the point at which social reform could
no longer be expected to be effective. Always, there were white elites who resisted the
idea that evolution implied progress or were skeptical that careful selection of mates
would produce superior offspring (the basis of eugenic theories in this period). For ex-
ample, Louis Agassiz, a Harvard scientist, objected to the principle of the survival of
the fittest. He wrote, “The whole subject of inheritance is exceedingly intricate, work-
ing often in a seemingly capricious and fitful way. Qualities, both good and bad are
dropped as well as acquired, and the process ends sometimes in the degradation of the
type and the survival of the unfit.”29 So while evolutionary processes seemingly had
brought about current manifestations of (white racial) superiority, further evolution-
ary development might bring about racial degeneration. Because social devolution
was always a theoretical possibility, white elites felt that they had to be particularly
careful about the activities of white women, precisely because they began to hold this
group responsible for the development of new race-and-sex traits, which, via La-
marckian processes, could be transmitted to offspring and become part of “the race’s”
future inheritance.30
Darwin’s fourth edition of On the Origin of Species appeared in 1871, along with the
newly written Descent of Man. These works along with books by other evolutionists, like
Alfred Russel Wallace’s Contributions totheTheory of Natural Selection, Edward Tylor’s Primitive
Culture, Henry Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society, and John Lubbock’s Origin of Civilization and
the Primitive Condition of Man, were widely read among U.S. intellectuals in the 1870s,
causing one reviewer to comment that the “doctrine of evolution,” “what is now
known as ‘Darwinism,’” had won over even those “eminent students of science who
claim to be orthodox.”31 White women also read these treatises, in particular Darwin’s
Descent of Manand Spencer’s “Psychology of the Sexes,” but with increasing consterna-
tion, because of the seeming disparagement of white women as evolutionary inferiors
to white men.32
As historians Sue Rosser and Charlotte Hogsett have explained, Darwin accounted
for variations among individuals (and races) by stressing two types of struggles: in the
first type of struggle [natural selection], he said, “males . . . drive away or kill their
[inferior] rivals, the females remaining passive.” In the second type of sexual struggle
[sexual selection], females “no longer remain passive, but select the more agreeable
partners.”33 According to these strictures, males who beat out their rivals or were
deemed more attractive by females gained the opportunity to mate, thus passing on
their own advantageous characteristics to offspring. In other words, evolution was
largely driven by the males of the species, whose competitive or attractive qualities
made them successful in outliving and outreproducing others with less adaptive
traits.
Theoretically, according to Spencer, sexual differences were considered the evolu-
tionary products of the social functions of each sex.34 Change the functions of each
sex. (make primitive women homemakers, for example) and their sexual differences
would change, with the newly acquired sexual traits being passed on to offspring.
Both Darwin and Spencer speculated that traits acquired early in the life of an indi-
vidual, particularly physical attributes such as size and strength, were acquired
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 31

through natural selection and were transmitted to both sexes through the law of
equal transmission but were manifested only in one sex. Characteristics that appeared
later in life—such as intelligence and reason—were supposedly acquired through
sexual selection and transmitted only to the offspring of the same sex, according to
the laws of partial inheritance. Men passed on male forms of intelligence to sons;
women passed on female forms of intuition to daughters.35
Men’s intellectual superiority was never doubted by male evolutionists—although
woman’s rights activists would repeatedly challenge this evolutionary assumption.36
Spencer offered the explanation that women’s brain remained less developed than
men’s because of “a somewhat earlier arrest of individual evolution in women than in
men; necessitated by the reservation of vital power to meet the cost of reproduc-
tion.”37 Spencer assumed that all women, but especially women of the higher races,
needed more “vital power” than men to carry on the biological functions of repro-
duction, and that this vital power could not be used to sustain intellectual growth
without risking severe injury to the female reproductive system. Women who at-
tended college would have to draw on vital power in pursuing their educations, and
this in turn would deprive them of the necessary energy to reproduce (thus suppos-
edly accounting for the lower birth rates of college-educated women). Edward H.
Clarke and G. Stanley Hall, influential educators in the 1870s and 1880s, adhered to
this view, cautioning women that if they attended institutions of higher learning in-
tended for men, they would subject themselves to great physiological dangers, result-
ing in the worst case in infertility and death.38
Following these social-Darwinian precepts, biologists and social scientists often be-
lieved that there was less variability among Anglo-Protestant women than among
Anglo-Protestant men—these women as a group clustered around an average type,
with few excelling in any particular way.39 This average type of woman exhibited cer-
tain characteristics that were also common among “primitives” or “lower races”: irra-
tional and slow thinking, intuitive or instinctual approaches to knowledge, religiosity,
emotionality, and so forth. The more advanced mental functions—imagination and
reason—were presumed to be characteristic of the more highly evolved brains of civi-
lized men.40 The terminology is revealing: “woman” was used to mean an Anglo-
Protestant woman; “lower races” or “primitives” were used without reference to gen-
der because the theory presupposed that there were no significant sexual differences
among primitives.
What was new and destabilizing about evolutionist theories in relation to earlier
ideologies about race and gender, however, was the idea of the potential for racial and
sexual differences to change over time. Prior to the 1870s, the philosophical and theo-
logical traditions that white elites had drawn on to explain sexual and racial differ-
ences to themselves had emphasized the permanency, universality, and naturalness of
sexual and racial differences. According to the earlier traditions, sexual and racial dif-
ferences were attributed to the “laws of Nature” or the “laws of God”—interchange-
able terms, as God was the ultimate Creator, Nature being his handmaiden. Woman’s
nature, in other words, was determined by God on the day of creation, and like all of
God’s work was considered complete, perfect, and unalterable.41
 32 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

The cult of true womanhood, as historian Barbara Welter has termed this endur-
ing ideology, which lasted into the late nineteenth century, had both descriptive and
prescriptive elements embedded in it, specifying that woman’s nature was character-
ized by four essential attributes: purity, piety, domesticity, and submissiveness.42 As a
prescriptive category, woman’s nature established the cultural boundaries of what
was considered “normal” for a woman and set forth an ideal by which all groups of
women were judged and to which they were supposed to adhere. As a descriptive
category, it characterized the daily pursuits of millions of white middle-class married
women who spent their lives cultivating these feminine attributes. The most radical of
white thinkers at the time, women like Lydia Maria Child for example, believed that
women of other racial groups shared these same intrinsic qualities, even though they
might not yet be manifested in behavior and appearance.
Nonetheless, white woman’s rights advocates in the 1830s and 1840s found this ide-
ology of woman’s nature constraining and argued for an enlargement of woman’s
sphere—for the need and value of (white) women assuming public roles. They be-
lieved in the possibility that their own womanly nature, although God-given, could
change over time. Although they did not yet have access to evolutionist notions of
change, woman’s rights activists in the antebellum period distinguished between
woman’s inherent nature and current manifestations of women’s present natures, agreeing that
the former was God-given and unalterable but asserting that it had not yet been at-
tained by most women. As Lucretia Mott, the Quaker abolitionist and woman’s rights
reformer, declared in 1850, men had wrongly equated the “present position” of
woman with the “original state” designed for woman:

We would admit all the difference, that our great and beneficent Creator has made, in
the relation of man and woman, nor would we seek to disturb this relation; but we
deny that the present position of woman is her true sphere of usefulness. . . . True,
nature has made a difference in [woman’s] configuration, her physical strength, her
voice, etc.—and we ask no change, we are satisfied with nature. But how has neglect
and mismanagement increased this difference! It is our duty to develop these natural
powers by suitable exercise, so that they may be strengthened “by reason of use.”43

In Mott’s formulation, certain deficiencies in woman’s character had been height-

ened and magnified because of unfair restrictions, societal conventions, and lack of
use. What was “natural,” were not those qualities or characteristics that were cur-
rently being exhibited by women but the qualities or characteristics that God had
made available to women even though they were not yet manifest in woman’s nature.
One reason that evolutionist theories would later prove so attractive to woman’s
rights activists was because they reinforced this notion that new attributes could
emerge. It was even possible to conceptualize how, given appropriate activities,
women would develop in ways that would diminish apparent sexual differences. At a
time of laissez faire in social and political affairs, these woman’s rights activists were re-
questing the deregulation of woman’s nature so that it could approach the ideal of
God’s design.
During the antebellum period, most white advocates of woman’s rights were evan-
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 33

gelical Protestants or Quakers, and they spoke out of a theological conception of

womanhood. Their religious beliefs asserted the universality of womanly qualities and
made it possible for adherents to argue that all women—despite racial, ethnic, class,
or other differences—shared, or could potentially share, a common womanhood.
Most antebellum advocates of woman’s rights acknowledged that differences existed
between (white) men and women, but they believed that these differences (white
women’s smaller physical size and lesser muscular strength, for example) were rela-
tively insignificant and not relevant for deciding whether to grant (white) women po-
litical equality with (white) men. Sarah Grimké, a well-known southern abolitionist
and proponent of woman’s rights in the late 1830s and 1840s, for example, argued that
the original, God-given differences—as opposed to the manifest ones—were so insub-
stantial in fact that they would not deter (white) women from extending their activi-
ties outside the home.
White male conservatives vehemently disagreed, going so far as to declare that
since (white) women could not financially support themselves or others and could
not protect themselves or fight in wars, they could not be equal citizens with (white)
men and should not be allowed to vote or take part in political activities. Patriarchal
families and republican forms of government (in which white men represented white
women) had developed in accordance with natural sexual differences: strong, intelli-
gent, courageous (white) men had been assigned by God the duty and responsibility
for providing for and protecting weak, emotional, and vulnerable (white) women.
Consequently, white women had been assigned to their own, separate sphere, where
they were loved and cherished, protected from the brutal day-to-day struggles of
mankind.
By the 1860s, white advocates of woman’s rights routinely argued that opponents
were substituting their own convictions about woman’s nature for the ideal created
by God. What God created would withstand all human efforts to alter it. What man
falsely conceived as woman’s nature would break down as women expanded their
sphere of activities. “If you want to know what is the true sphere of man or woman,”
Reverend Samuel Longfellow, a supporter of woman’s rights, preached to the already
converted audience at the Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention in May 1860,
“just leave the man or the woman alone, and the natural law and the divine law,
which can not be broken, and which are as sure in the moral and human world as they
are in the external world, will settle the matter.”44 Abba Goold Woolson, New En-
gland reformer and author of Woman in American Society, observed, “It is an amusing in-
consistency which never seems to have struck them [opponents of woman’s rights]. If
this limitation of [woman’s] powers to any one sphere be Nature’s provision [and not
theirs] . . . why should there be need of so many precautions to keep her from the
higher walks of service and learning from which she has been debarred?”45 The suf-
fragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton made the same point with deliberate irony: “If God has
assigned a sphere to man and one to woman, we claim the right ourselves to judge of
His design in reference to us, and we accord to man the same privilege.”46
Although evolutionist theories encroached heavily on preexisting theological and
philosophical discourses, in some ways they were compatible and continuous with
 34 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

these earlier traditions. With even more emphasis than the theological and philo-
sophical viewpoints that preceded it, evolutionist theories linked sexual differences
with racial progress. “Civilized” races were differentiated from “primitive” races ac-
cording to the specific sexual traits and gender roles that characterized the white mid-
dle classes. As historian Gail Bederman has argued, civilization itself was understood
in the 1880s as a biologically transmissible racial trait—so far exhibited only by the
more advanced white races.47 In 1897, William I. Thomas, a social scientist at the Uni-
versity of Chicago, specified with utmost clarity the concept of the evolutionary con-
nection between sexual difference and racial progress: “The less civilized the race the
less is the physical difference of the sexes.”48 Or to put the same relationship another
way around: the more civilized the race, the more the men and women of that race
had to differ from one another.
Evolutionist theories also helped support the longstanding belief that (white or
civilized) men and women were naturally, inherently different and strengthened the
longstanding Christian conviction that civilized countries treated women better than
uncivilized societies, a mainstay of Christian missionary practice for at least two cen-
turies. Within the context of empire-building, Christian doctrine held that women
were best off in Christian (civilized) societies because those societies operated in accor-
dance with “the law of love.” Evolutionist theories were used to argue that, as a result
of Christian love, civilized women had changed physically, mentally, and morally to
become more delicate, intelligent, moral, chaste, and refined than women of “lower
races” because they had been protected and cherished by civilized Christian men.49
Theories of evolution thus gave scientific backing to missionary and women’s
movements long underway, further encouraging large numbers of women, most of
them white and middle class, to assume responsibility for bringing Christianity, civi-
lization, and citizenship to peoples whom they considered their evolutionary and
racial inferiors. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the job of civilizing “primi-
tives” had fallen mostly to white men—most often trained ministers (albeit fre-
quently accompanied by their wives) who were sent to the field to convert the hea-
then. Only eleven single women served as foreign missionaries in the antebellum
period.50 The Civil War marked a watershed for white women’s involvement in both
the home and foreign missionary movements. In this period, as social Darwinism sat-
urated the ideological atmosphere, the number of single women serving as foreign
missionaries rose into the thousands, and the movement attracted the support of mil-
lions of women. Between 1868 and 1873, as historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg explains,
“foreign missions were, among women at least, a veritable growth industry.”51
Women in each of the major American Protestant evangelical denominations sepa-
rated from the “parent boards” of male directors to form their own foreign mission
organizations under female leadership. The numbers of the women’s auxiliary sec-
tions among the Presbyterians alone expanded from 100 in 1870 to 10,869 in 1909.52
Generally, antebellum women’s rights activists used the terms “woman’s nature”
and “woman’s sphere” in the universal singular, as if the concept applied equally to all
groups of women—poor as well as rich, Christian as well as non-Christian, native
born as well as foreign born, black as well as white. While they might not have be-
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 35

lieved in black equality, white woman’s rights activists generally opposed slavery, and
they regularly compared “woman’s status” (the women here were also assumed to be
white) to the “Negro’s” (assumed to be men), leaving out of these comparisons alto-
gether the specific experiences and conditions of black women, both free and en-
slaved.53 Yet elite white women’s analysis of the woman question did not go unchal-
lenged: throughout the antebellum and postbellum periods, women of color
struggled for recognition and inclusion in white women’s reform movements and
successfully articulated alternative discourses of womanhood.54 As Hazel Carby has
argued, Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Jackson Coppin, and
Ida B. Wells, among many others, fought to establish their own public presence in the
nineteenth century, finding themselves in a highly contradictory position: both a part
of and excluded from the dominant discourse of white women’s politics.55
For white women activists, black women activists served both as a promise that it
would be possible to advance the black race and as an indication that the supposed
physical constraints of womanhood that immobilized white women could be over-
come. For example, the white Ohioan abolitionist-suffragist Frances Matilde Gage saw
in Sojourner Truth a physical reminder that women were not necessarily a weaker
sex—that they did do equal work with men and thus were deserving of equal political
rights. Gage’s fictionalized account of Sojourner Truth’s extemporaneous speech at a
women’s rights convention Gage presided over in 1851 (published twelve years later in
the New York Independent in 1863) emphasized how Truth was able to quiet a restive au-
dience by her sheer physical presence: “every eye was fixed on this almost Amazon
form, which stood nearly six feet high, head erect, and eye piercing the upper air like
one in a dream. At her first word there was a profound hush.”56 In Gage’s retelling,
Truth gave a hostile white audience the following dressing-down:
“Well, chillen, whar dar’s so much racket dar must be som’ting out o’ kilter. I tink dat,
’twist the niggers of de South and de women at de Norf, all a-talking ’bout rights, de
white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking ’bout? Dat man
over dar say dat woman needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and
to have de best place eberywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-
puddles, or gives me any best place;” and, raising herself to her full height and her voice
to a pitch like rolling thunder, she asked, “And ar’n’t I a woman? Look at me. Look at
my arm,” and she bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing its tremendous mus-
cular power. “I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could
head me—and ar’n’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man,
(when I could get it,) and bear de lash as well—and ar’n’t I a woman? I have borne
thirteen chillen, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a
mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard—and ar’n’t I a woman?”57

Historian Nell Painter argues that Gage made up the dialect and drew on slave imagery
(in the image of Truth baring her arm and the allusion to her children being sold at
the auction block) in order to make Truth into a black folk hero who transcended the
physical and psychological limitations of ordinary white womanhood. Painter also ar-
gues that by making up the phrase “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” and having Truth reiterate it
four times, Gage both highlighted and erased the specificity of slave women’s experi-
 36 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

ences, invoking white beliefs in black racial difference—Truth’s size, strength, and
outspokenness—to respond to opponents of woman’s rights who were asserting that
(white) women’s need for men’s physical protection and support was a legitimate jus-
tification of their exclusion from the franchise.58
Gage’s account played on crucial ambiguities and confusions in whites’ under-
standings of womanhood. If God had created one universal woman’s nature, how had
such extraordinary differences (extraordinary in the eyes of white elites in this period)
developed among different races of women? If all human beings were descendants of
Adam and Eve’s union, as recounted in Genesis, how had racial differences developed?
Could climate and geography have had such a profound impact in producing sexual
differences among the different races? What about the impact of culture and history?
White elites drew on social evolutionary theories to help them resolve these kinds
of conundrums—both to compose more satisfying accounts of how racial and sexual
differences developed in a relatively short time and to express optimism about the
country’s continuing attempts to assimilate its racial primitives. Despite the awe they
felt at Sojourner Truth’s size and strength, white women reformers continued to be-
lieve that social and racial progress lay in infusing sexual differences into sexually ho-
mogeneous races by making primitive women more delicate, more passive, more sub-
servient, and more feminine. (Primitive men were deemed sufficiently masculine,
although too violently sexualized, and still lacking advanced forms of male intelli-
gence and emotional restraint.)
With the enfranchisement of black men and the naturalization of immigrant men,
fears of “the race” becoming “overcivilized” or “degenerating,” of (white) men be-
coming “effeminate,” or of whites being “tainted” by the black race abounded. Despite
the optimistic assumptions about progress that were present in most social-Darwinian
descriptions of evolution, many white elites feared that there was no guarantee that
white racial progress was an inevitable outcome of evolution.59 Social evolution
seemed to have produced white racial superiority so far, but whites were concerned
about their racial future. They feared that the United States could regress from civi-
lization into barbarism or savagery. Such occurrences had happened in the past—the
so-called dark ages and the Middle Ages were understood as times of such cultural
regression.
Indeed, resistance to woman’s rights increased whenever fears of white masculine
decline were heightened. White men’s concern that white women were becoming
“desexed” and “unwomanly” was a projection of their own anxiety about racial-sexual
devolution. Women at the time understood that this was what was at the bottom of
white men’s antagonism to woman’s rights. Sarah Grand, a woman’s rights advocate,
declared, “True womanliness is not in danger. The trouble is not because [white]
women are [becoming] mannish but because [white] men grow ever more effeminate.
. . . [W]e are accused of aping men in order to conceal the side from which the con-
trast should evidently be drawn.”60
Thus social reformers who were attending to problems of racial assimilation in the
second half of the nineteenth century became obsessed with issues of heredity, misce-
genation, and the transmission of racial traits. Mary Lowe Dickinson and Lydia Maria
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 37

Child reflected on these issues in their novels Among theThorns(1880) and A Romance of the
Republic(1867), respectively, works whose central female heroines are initially unaware
of their black parentage and so grow up constructing themselves as white.61
The novels relate what befalls these heroines as adults when they and others learn
that they have black ancestry. Essentially, their white husbands and lovers are unable to
keep their vows of love and loyalty, despite the fact that these women embody to the
fullest extent possible the virtues of true womanhood (piety, chastity, domesticity, sub-
missiveness). Thus, the women experience an immediate and irreversible decline in
economic and social status, ending up single, isolated, and impoverished. The plots un-
fold as tragedies, the authors offering critiques of a white male racism that prejudges
these women on the basis of racial affiliation rather than character. For the authors, this
type of white racism is irrational and unfounded: the blackness of these characters is
simply a label placed on them because in every significant way—appearance, behavior,
upbringing, culture, outlook—these women appear white and act civilized.62
Dickinson’s and Child’s remonstrances notwithstanding, the primacy of color
over character was the point from which white elites in the age of evolution could
never escape. Implicit but never directly explored in these novels was white men’s
unarticulable fear of being deceived by white-looking wives into propagating a black
race. While Child and Dickinson do not allow this possibility to arise in their fiction
(the marriages are terminated before reproduction occurs), a postcard from the turn
of the century graphically speaks to this concern. (See fig. 1-3.) In this image, a white
couple have come to an alienist’s office, the husband seeking recourse because his wife
has just had a black child. Although no explanation is offered textually, the image it-
self allows for two possibilities: either the wife has committed adultery with a black
man, or one of the partners has black ancestry and has been passing, knowingly or
not, for white. Over the past several years, white viewers to whom I have shown this
postcard generally bring up the first possibility and interpret the (white) woman’s
tears as admission of guilt over her adultery. Black viewers frequently raise the second
alternative, explaining the (black) woman’s tears in terms of her alarm and shame
caused by the exposure of her undisclosed black racial heritage. None of the viewers I
have encountered initially suppose that the white-looking man might actually be
black, although when I raise this as a possibility, all have acknowledged that the text
allows for such a reading. What the postcard reveals about the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, I believe, is white men’s fear that they could not fully con-
trol the process of racial reproduction, a fear that was endemic in the period from 1870
to 1920, and which fundamentally colored (pun intended) the debates over woman’s
rights and race suicide. Interestingly, most of my several hundred viewers, regardless
of race or gender, continue to hold the woman responsible for the birth of the black
baby, a fact that I think reflects more than our ongoing cultural assumption that
women’s primary role is reproductive. My (admittedly unscientific) survey suggests to
me that the effects of evolutionist discourse, which held white women accountable
for racial development, are still in evidence a century later, even though the late
nineteenth-century assignation of the woman as “conservator of the race” has long
been forgotten.
FI GURE 1-3 Racial Purity. A Divorce Reason. Postcard, c. early 1900s. Ensuring racial purity was presumed
to be the responsibility and obligation of white women—intercourse between white women and black
men was stigmatized as deeply shameful for the woman and grounds for lynching the man. In contrast, in-
terracial sexual liasions between white men and black women were tolerated by whites, who attributed
these relationships to the unchaste and predatory nature of black women.
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 39

White Women’s Responses to Evolutionist Theories:

Evolving a New Woman without Endangering
the Race
When, therefore Mr. Spencer argues that women are inferior to men be-
cause their development must be earlier arrested by reproductive func-
tions, and Mr. Darwin claims that males have evolved muscle and brains
superior to females, and entailed, their pre-eminent qualities chiefly on
their male descendants, these conclusions need not be accepted without
question, even by their own school of evolutionists.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell,
The Sexes throughout Nature, 1875
The theoretical linkage of the “advancement of civilization,” “racial progress,” and the
“intensification of sexual difference” in dominant evolutionist theories deriving from
Spencer’s initial formulations had a profound effect on how white woman’s rights ac-
tivists formulated their own claims to sexual equality in the postbellum period. At one
level, the effects can be seen in the type of discourse and language that woman’s rights
activists developed. Religious claims about women’s moral superiority were no longer
sufficient; it became impossible to argue for a change in woman’s sphere without first
thinking the argument through in evolutionist terms. Science had to be used to
counter science, or, as cultural historians Stepan and Gilman have argued, “[t]he out-
come was a narrowing of the cultural space within which, and the cultural forms by
which, the claims of biological determinism could be effectively challenged.”63
Earlier in the century, white Protestant women had been able to invoke their supe-
rior moral character as Christian women to justify their demands for the franchise.
Now they also had to prove that voting would not be detrimental to their health, re-
duce their fertility, or interfere with their social responsibilities as wives and mothers.
Women like suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Boston reformer Abba Wool-
son, who were past college age when evolutionism became the craze in the 1880s, kept
up with these theoretical developments by reading journals and newspapers and re-
sponded with their own articles and books to explain why the expansion of woman’s
sphere would not endanger the Anglo-Saxon race. Younger women who went to the
newly established women’s colleges in the 1880s gained the necessary scientific exper-
tise and authority by taking courses in biology and the social sciences that they would
later use to mount an effective challenge to evolutionist precepts about woman’s na-
ture in the early twentieth century.64
In the 1880s and 1890s, though, white women were extremely careful to show that
their demands, if met, would not jeopardize the sexual differences on which their
racial supremacy and Christian civilization were based. Instead, white woman’s rights
activists argued that their sexual differences, the sign and measure of their civilized
status, constituted the proof that they shared in the racial superiority of the white
race. Their sexual differences, rather than barring them from political and social
equality with white men, they argued, should be seen as the predominant justification
for their equal treatment.
 40 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Elite white women strengthened evolutionists’ stipulation that whites were a supe-
rior race because it gave them a theoretical foundation on which to stake their own
race-specific claims to sexual equality. While male evolutionists continued to disparage
“woman” by comparing her to the “Negro,” “slave,” “African,” and “lower races,”
white women’s appropriation of theories of evolution resisted these comparisons and
instead emphasized the racial commonalities between white women and white men.
White women’s first move was to insist that sexual differentiation need not necessarily
imply sexual inequality; Antoinette Brown Blackwell argued, “It is the central theory
of the present volume that the sexes in each species of being . . . are always true
equivalents—equals but not identicals in development.”65
Basically, white women’s responses can be divided into two main categories. One
category of responses tried to downplay sexual difference by taking what evolutionists
said were “male” traits and showing that these were also possible for (civilized)
women. “The fact that all human creatures are the subject of environment and of
hereditary conditions,” Lizzie Holmes wrote in 1898, “signifies that [the white] woman
is no exception. There is every reason to suppose, that under like conditions with men,
women would develop in a manner as men do.”66 Holmes tried to universalize as
“human” the qualities that most evolutionists deemed were “masculine.” Tentatively,
and with a great deal of hesitation, she moved away from sexual difference in the di-
rection of sexual identity.67
This was an unusual position for white women to adopt in the 1880s and 1890s, al-
though some women boldly began to assert that “qualities which deserve to survive to
the next dawning, should be equally developed in both men and women fitting for a
time when sex is to be obliterated.”68 Its rarity was due, at least in part, to the problem
of asserting sexual identity between man and woman without threatening the foun-
dation of white superiority. In the hands of U.S. commentators, theories of evolution
offered explanations for how changes in human nature had occurred. Yet white
women were hesitant to argue for encouraging further change in woman’s nature,
even as they were strongly demanding alterations in women’s social roles. This was a
tricky business—a logical contradiction, given that Spencer had posited that alter-
ations in woman’s sphere would bring about changes in woman’s nature. As they
moved toward advocating that women could potentially become more like men,
white women knew they were threatening the hierarchy of sexual difference on
which white civilization was based. Thus they had to find ways to reassure themselves
that increasing the similarity of activities performed by themselves and (white) men
would not bring about racial degeneration or undermine their own racialized concep-
tions of themselves as belonging to a superior race and civilization.
This theoretical problem was not resolved definitively until Charlotte Perkins
Gilman found a way to dismiss sexual difference as an “archaic” trait in the early 1900s.
Until then, a common response among white women was to accept the need for
white women’s sexual difference but call for a reassessment of white women’s role in
reproduction and mothering. For example, suffragist Ora Brashere wrote in 1902,
“Judging by the best ethical standards of humanity, those qualities corresponding to
mental and moral forces which were bequeathed by the female are to be ranked
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 41

higher than the predominant propensities of the male.” Brashere considered man’s
love for society, his conceptions of right and wrong, and his conscience an “extension
of [woman’s] maternal love.” Without the “influence of female instincts, males would
never have risen beyond an overmastering desire for sex-gratification.”69 This strategy
demanded a revaluation of the sexual traits (emotionalism, intuition, moral sensi-
tivity, selflessness, altruism) and the social duties (childrearing, homemaking, school-
teaching) that were customarily associated with middle-class white women and that
were devalued by white men. Brashere’s strategy depended on making these female
traits central to civilization itself, more than just a useful supplement to white men’s
rationality, intelligence, and proficiency with technology. Instead of denying that “fe-
male instincts” were inherent in white women, Brashere and others responded that
feminine qualities ought to be more highly valued for their centrality to the white
race and to U.S. society as a whole in its competition for international status and
power. After a careful reading of the Descent of Man, another white woman’s rights ad-
vocate, Eliza B. Gamble, reported that she “became impressed with the belief that the
theory of evolution . . . furnishes much evidence going to show that the female
among all the orders of life, man included, represents a higher stage of development
than the male.” For Gamble, Darwin’s theories also offered a refutation of “theologi-
cal dogmatism,” in which “man . . . regarded himself as an infinitely superior
being.”70
Sometimes the two approaches—woman’s sexual differences can be eliminated
without racial degeneration, and woman’s sexual differences, revalued in positive
terms, are crucial for racial progress—existed side by side within the same text in an
uneasy but not entirely contradictory fashion. For example, Frances Emily White
(1832–1903), who graduated from the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia in
1872 at the age of forty and was a professor of physiology and hygiene at her alma
mater from 1876 to 1903, criticized evolutionary accounts for overemphasizing (white)
women’s sexual differences from (white) men. But her arguments for “woman’s” po-
tential to become more like “man” were full of qualifications. On the one hand, she
believed that evolution involved changing sexual roles. On the other hand, she
wanted to keep some of womanly nature unchangeable. She brought these antitheti-
cal points together by arguing that since evolution was a theory about progressive
change, woman’s sphere should be allowed to evolve, but she also claimed that evolu-
tion would not produce any undesirable social effects for civilization because, (white)
woman’s inherent mental and physical traits would act as a natural boundary for an
expanding woman’s sphere.71
This ambiguity or tension within White’s arguments derives from the intellectual
difficulties that elite white women, well schooled in evolutionary science but still op-
erating within an older discourse of woman’s rights rhetoric, encountered as they
tried to wrest evolutionist theory away from social conservatives who were using it to
restrict white women to a narrowly defined sphere of homemaking and childrear-
ing.72 White was struggling with what she feared might be two irreconcilable goals:
one was to obtain recognition of a “higher character of womanhood,” which, by the
precepts of civilization and evolution, meant increasing sexual differences. Another
 42 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

was to expand “woman’s sphere” to encompass professional opportunities, which was

not only a longstanding demand of the woman’s rights movement but also a personal
objective of White’s (that she had indeed fulfilled). If society refashioned woman’s
sphere to become more like man’s, then women themselves might become more
like men (lowering, not raising, women’s character). White never resolved this
dilemma. She remained fearful that an expansion in woman’s sphere would jeopar-
dize womanly character and diminish the civilized status accorded to white middle-
class womanhood.73
As the case of Frances White reveals, white women used evolutionist precepts to
challenge the confining boundaries of the culturally prescribed “woman’s sphere,”
but they were equally intent upon preserving traditional notions concerning “wom-
anly nature.” For White, the key to (white) woman’s own racial progress was a sepa-
rate sphere of development in order to allow the development of her particular racial-
sexual differences—those traits specific to her own race-sex. White women remained
committed to maintaining woman’s separate sphere, all the while demanding its en-
largement, so as not to jeopardize white racial superiority.

Evolutionist Theory, Racial Difference, and U.S.

Imperialism in the Age of Empire

Evolutionist theories did more than offer ways to differentiate white women from
white men; they also made possible a whole range of cultural distinctions: between
“civilized” and “primitive” women, between women of the “West” and women of the
“Orient,” and between “Christian” and “heathen” women. The greater power of the
West was not just symbolized by the status of its women but was understood to be a
direct consequence of its superior (patriarchal) gender system. Similarly, the power-
lessness of the Orient was construed as the result of an inferior and perverted gender
system. For the ruling elite of the United States in the late nineteenth century, sexual
difference, race, and national power were all causally connected.
As I have shown, the mental-psychological traits associated with the most “ad-
vanced” women, such as emotionalism, spirituality, and sexual chastity, were consid-
ered the evolutionary consequences of these women’s treatment by (civilized, Chris-
tian) men, qualities that were passed on from generation to generation through the
racial inheritance of acquired sexual traits. The primitive woman, on the other hand,
was presumed to lack the sexual differentiation and moral development of the civi-
lized woman, due to her centuries-long exploitation by the men of her own race.
Whether the “primitive” woman was embodied in the white imagination as the Indian
squaw, an Oriental harem girl, or an African savage, she became the physical yardstick
by which white women in the United States measured their own moral status, social
progress, and racial development.
From the perspective of liberal white elites, the overarching problem of the 1880s
was to create a homogeneous Christian community out of the discrete racial-cultural
groups of people who were lodged at different stages in the evolutionary hierarchy.
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 43

The challenge was to assist evolutionary inferiors, especially those residing within the
United States, to advance more rapidly, so that they could be more quickly assimilated
into the supposedly more advanced civilization of Anglo-American and European
whites. Acculturation of the primitive—at least through assimilation—was far from
assured. (See figs. 1-4–1-6)
Perceptions of the difficulty of assimilating purportedly “inferior” peoples at home
led many assimilationists to turn to eugenics, including immigration restriction and
other forms of social control, to contain and limit interracial contact—to “protect”
the country from the “racial” “degeneration” that “hordes of foreigners” and “unas-
similable” blacks signified for those who identified themselves as part of “civilized”
Anglo-Saxon culture. Although eugenics had its intellectual basis in the work of Fran-
cis Galton—a cousin of Darwin who published his own theoretical works beginning
in the 1860s—eugenics as a social movement began to flourish in the United States in
the last two decades of the nineteenth century and continued to attract supporters
into the 1920s. Eugenicists, like their philosophical opponents, the social-Darwinists,
also adhered to Lamarckian laws of inheritance (despite the rediscovery of Mendel’s
theory of genetic inheritance in 1900) and discussed the transmission of racial and

FI GURE 1-4 Assimilation far from assured. I Strive for a Higher Positon. Postcard, c. early 1900s. This
image mocks political efforts to assimilate blacks into the civilization of whites, representing African
Americans as monkeys still residing in the jungle. Despite the accoutrements of civilization (Victo-
rian dress) and the seeming conformity to Victorian gender relations (male chivalry), the cartoonist
upholds whites’ belief in the inherent inferiority of African Americans. The slogan, “I strive for a
higher position,” which echoed the rallying cry of the woman’s movement in this period, indicates
how closely the two struggles were connected in the minds of contemporaries, with the juxtaposition
of slogan and image implying that (white) women’s sruggle to obtain gender equality was as absurdly
problematic as African Americans’ struggle to obtain racial equality.
44

FI GURE 1-5 Assimilation in progress. Philippine Islands, Manila, and text appearing on back of trade card.
Singer Sewing Machine, Trade card distributed at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893. Singer marketed its sewing
machines worldwide by asserting itself as “one of the foremost factors in civilization.” The obvious purpose of
the machine was to clothe the naked. Covering the body, especially the female body, was deemed the first step
in advancing a society from primitivism to civilization.
45

FI GURE 1-6 Assimilation achieved. Typical Manila girl and her uncivilized sister, Philippines. Postcard, c. 1902.
 46 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

sexual traits in terms of the biological transmission of acquired characteristics. How-

ever, in opposition to the laissez-faire principles of social-Darwinists, eugenicists advo-
cated governmental intervention in social processes in a variety of ways: immigration
restriction laws, antimiscegenation laws, birth control practices, and so forth. All these
policies were intended to control the reproduction of so-called “inferior” groups in
order to promote “racial progress” (of whites). The comments of historian George W.
Stocking, Jr. regarding the eugenics movement in Great Britain also apply to the
movement in the United States; he writes that eugenics was the “product of a period
when traditional liberalism, threatened by forces of democracy and collectivism at
home, and by those of nationalism and militarism abroad, was no longer the opti-
mistic creed it had once been. . . . [E]ugenics was an attempt to compensate for the
failure of natural selection to operate under the social conditions of advanced civiliza-
tion.”74 As early as 1887, commentators argued forcefully that there “should be shut
out, [all those] who belong to a civilization essentially lower than our own.”75 To ig-
nore the “problem” that these uncivilized represented or to let social-Darwinian laws
(survival of the fittest) operate without any governmental intervention was to risk
permitting U.S. society to fracture along the fissures of cultural and racial difference.
Despite the threat that racial differences signified for white elites in this period,
many reformers remained hopeful that the cultural incorporation of others into the
United States’ Christian civilization was possible and could take place quickly if suffi-
cient attention were brought to the cause. Yet in the minds of some white Christian
civilizers, mistakes had been made in the past and should be avoided in the future. To
have enfranchised blacks during Reconstruction before they were fully civilized
seemed to some northern whites in the 1880s to have put the cart before the horse.
They laid the blame for the failure of Reconstruction not on national or state govern-
ments or even on individual blacks themselves but on the primitive evolutionary state
in which blacks were still mired as a race. Other whites, however, including the liberal
Ohioan President Garfield, believed that “the emancipated race [had] already made re-
markable progress” and thought that the educational programs implemented as part
of Reconstruction’s industrial training for blacks should serve as a model for other
“primitive” groups.76
In this period, most whites referred to blacks living in the United States as “Ne-
groes” or as “Africans,” depending on how “civilized” the particular group of blacks
appeared to them. (Lighter skin color, European dress and hairstyles, and the assump-
tion of middle-class values all signified evolutionary advancement.) Whites thought of
themselves either as “Europeans” or “Americans” and believed that they had greater
“adaptiveness” or racial flexibility than Africans.77 Hundreds of pages in the popular
press were devoted to the question of whether Africans could be assimilated, given
their supposed greater resistance to climate, geography, and environment. These kinds
of debates took place in relation to other racial groups as well: Indians were seen as
even more resistant to civilization than Africans (and their right to U.S. citizenship
was delayed until 1924). The Chinese threatened evolution’s racial hierarchies suffi-
ciently for whites to pass special antimiscegenation and immigration restriction laws
forbidding their intermarriage with whites and making it impossible for Chinese la-
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 47

borers to bring their wives and families to the United States until after World War II.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made certain exemptions for travelers, students,
merchants, and their families, but even so, in 1900 the overall sex ratio for Chinese liv-
ing in the United States was nineteen men to every one woman; and for foreign-born
Chinese residents, it was more than thirty-six to one.78
Although evolutionist theories opened up a way to conceive of how lower races
could become more like higher races (and racial difference eliminated or tran-
scended), many whites doubted whether so-called primitive groups had developed the
evolutionary capacity for adaptation and learning. They were not convinced that edu-
cation would produce new racial traits that would then be inherited by the next gen-
eration, and they questioned whether evolutionary processes worked in exactly the
same way for blacks, Indians, and the Chinese as they had for the English, Germans,
French, and Scandinavians. Moreover, northern white elites in particular were wor-
ried by the miscegenation that had already taken place between the black and white
races in the South during slavery and feared that black racial progress was predicated
on white racial degeneration. Out of these concerns, many white intellectuals, social
scientists, and political leaders went to great lengths to make sure that the kind of
race-mixing that had produced a significant interracial population in the South would
never occur in the North.
The views of two prominent U.S. social scientists, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
(1841–1906) and Lester F. Ward (1841–1913), can serve to illustrate how evolution was
used in different ways to articulate and alleviate these fears. Shaler, writing in the
1870s, as the United States was struggling with the politics of Reconstruction, used
evolutionist theory as a justification for why Reconstruction did not work and should
be dropped. For Shaler, blacks fell outside the laws of evolution and were highly re-
sistent to change. Hence assimilationist processes, such as education, seemed ineffec-
tive to Shaler, a waste of time and resources. He subscribed to laissez-faire doctrines (it
was best for governments not to interfere with nature) and was convinced that the
laws of evolution would eventually result in the elimination of blacks as a race, yet he
still felt it necessary to suggest that the government scatter blacks over the United
States to prevent them from becoming too much of a burden on any given section of
the country.79 The sociologist Lester Ward, on the other hand, wrote in the 1890s and
early 1900s, several decades after Reconstruction had ended, at the height of Jim Crow.
In this political climate, when racial segregation was rigidly enforced, Ward argued
that interracial contact had played an evolutionarily beneficial role in the develop-
ment of an advanced civilization.80
Shaler studied geology and zoology under Louis Agassiz at the Lawrence Scientific
School in Cambridge from 1859 to 1862, and after serving two years in the Union army
as a captain of the Fifth Kentucky Battery, he returned to Cambridge to become an as-
sistant to Agassiz for two years. He then spent another two years abroad in study and
exploration, returned to Harvard as a lecturer in 1868, and was made professor of pale-
ontology in 1869. He remained at Harvard for the rest of his life—nearly forty more
years—also serving as dean of the Lawrence Scientific School from 1891 until his death
in 1906. An active and innovative scientist who was in charge of the Atlantic Coast Di-
 48 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

vision of the United States Geological Survey (in this connection, it seems, he traveled
almost the whole length of the coast from Maine to Florida on foot), Shaler was also a
public intellectual who published his views on a myriad of social issues, including the
“Negro problem,” in popular journals such as the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s, and the
North American Review. In an article entitled “An Ex-Southerner in South Carolina,”
which appeared in 1870, Shaler registered his disapproval of sending northern white
women down south to school African Americans in civilization. “The all-important
question is, What should we do to secure to this people the highest cultivation of
which they are capable? Should we begin by trying to force upon them the last prod-
uct of our civilization, intellectual culture?”81 For Shaler, the futility of such an en-
deavor was only equaled by earlier attempts to teach a Comanche English grammar.
“He would be a fool, indeed,” Shaler continued,

who expected that the consequences would be the immediate change in the nature and
purposes of the Indian. Now the fact is we have almost as much to do in order to
change the average negro into an intelligent citizen in a white society as we should have
if we tried to embody the Indian into our government. . . . The school has its place
in civilization, and, as a teacher, I should be the last to belittle its importance; but it is
the last step in the development of a race, not the first. . . . [W]hen we undertake to
civilize a race as foreign to us in every trait as the negroes, by imposing upon them this
final product of our national growth, we wrong ourselves and them.82

Observation convinced Shaler that Africans did not respond to the environmental
conditions (both climate and culture) of the United States as other races did. French
people in the northern section of the United States, for example, quickly evolved to
have more in common with German people living in the North than they did with
French people living in the South. Regional difference, according to Shaler, had
clearly and definitively altered the racial histories of civilized peoples, but the same did
not seem to be true of Africans: “One looks in vain,” Shaler wrote in 1873, “for any
marks to separate him from his kindred in other regions. . . . This inflexibility of
the African is . . . a very striking feature [and] we may venture the opinion that the
negroes of the South give many evidences of being a far less elastic race than our
own.”83 Shaler was perplexed by these findings because, by the tenets of his own
theory, changing geographic and cultural conditions should have had a profound im-
pact on the bodies, minds, and social practices of blacks, who had sustained the great-
est climatic and cultural changes in their forced relocation from Africa to the United
States. He thus puzzled over his finding that “the negro has changed less in his move-
ment from one hemisphere to another, from tropical to local conditions, from the in-
dolence of savage life to the toil of slavery than has the European in his migration
from one side of the Atlantic to the other.”84
This apparent evolutionary fixity of the African in the face of geographic mobility
and cultural transformation confounded Shaler’s expectations, and he sought vainly
for some sort of explanation that made sense within his evolutionary framework. In so
doing, he provides us with a good illustration of the continuum between racial preju-
dice and enlightened discourse within scientific racism. For example, Shaler wondered
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 49

whether the discrepancy might be explained by the “general rule, among animals” that
the “higher members of any group” seemed “to be more variable in character than the
lower,” although he was uncertain as to whether blacks and whites were far enough
apart within the human genus for this law of the animal kingdom to apply. It was also
possible, Shaler reasoned, that the pronounced variability of Europeans was an “ac-
quired capacity”—an evolutionary product of several thousand years of European mi-
grations. In all Shaler’s hypotheses, the ruling assumption was that the greater adapt-
ability and variability of whites must have been a consequence, as well as a sign, of their
more “advanced” evolutionary development. Simply put, Shaler believed that Africans
were less susceptible to environmental change than whites because they were less civi-
lized. “[T]he resistance to change which his body shows is shared by his mind and . . .
his intellectual advance will necessarily be slow, even under the most favorable condi-
tions.”85 For Shaler, the political implications of these evolutionary truths dictated that
the best course of action was to keep the races apart, as blacks (due to their essential evo-
lutionary fixity) could not benefit from cultural contact with whites.
For Lester Ward, interracial contact, both in the form of cultural integration and
sexual intercourse, had been and would continue to be beneficial to Africans struggling
to catch up to the superior whites. Moreover, interracial conflict—what Ward called
the struggle of the races—was a fundamental principle inherent in the laws of social
evolution. The history of mankind was a history of a (superior) conquering race annihi-
lating or absorbing an (inferior) conquered race. Separation of the races was not only an
impossibility, it was also an undesirable arrangement, given how evolution and misce-
genation worked together to produce racial progress.
Optimistically, Ward predicted that whites and blacks in the United States would
eventually learn that they shared common interests, would join together in commer-
cial and other enterprises, and would intermarry with one another until the society
became more or less racially homogeneous. “Race miscegenation therefore begins immediately,
but it does not cease after the subjugation is complete. . . . All attempts tokeep the superior race pure fail
utterly.”86 White racial purity was an impossibility; miscegenation a social inevitability.87
Yet Ward wrote in support of whites’ double sexual standard with regard to misce-
genation, condoning sexual intercourse between white men and black women as ad-
vantageous to blacks, while castigating and forbidding sexual intercourse between
black men and white women as detrimental to whites.88 For the purposes of evolu-
tionary progress, according to Ward, sexual intercourse need only occur between men
of the conquering race (white men) and women of the conquered race (black
women). The other gender pairing (intercourse between white women and black
men), would have no evolutionary advantage for blacks, and could only lead to white
racial deterioration.89 Although Ward offered no explanation for why white women’s
birthing of black babies and white men’s fathering of black babies had such different
evolutionary outcomes, he claimed nonetheless to sympathize both with the “biologi-
cal imperative” that black men felt to “elevate” his race, as well as the indignation of
whites who were “impelled to pursue, capture, and ‘lynch’” the offender because of a
“biological law of race preservation.”90
As we have seen, antimiscegenation laws reflected white men’s fears about white
 50 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

racial degeneration and inability to control white women’s sexuality and reproduc-
tion. To assuage these fears, Ward developed another theory about white woman’s
sexual conservatism—or her central, conserving role in the preservation of civiliza-
tion. Many male theorists in this period argued that (white) woman’s biological con-
servatism made her more resistant to evolution and held her responsible for retarding
the evolutionary development of the white race. Ward, on the other hand, argued
that white women’s special role in passing race traits on to children meant that the
white race owed all its progress in social evolution to white women. Thus, while Ward
agreed that (white) women were less variable than (white) men, he denied that this
meant that “the female sex [was] incapable of progress, or that man [was] destined to
develop indefinitely, leaving woman constantly farther and farther in the rear.”91 In-
stead, Ward saw (white) woman’s relative biological inflexibility as “the balance-wheel
of society, keeping it in a steady and fixed condition of growth.”92 “Accepting evolu-
tion as we must,” Ward proclaimed:

[R]ecognizing heredity as the distinctive attribute of the female sex, it becomes clear
that it must be from the steady advance of woman rather than from the uncertain fluc-
tuations of man that the sure and solid progress of the future is to come. The attempt
to move the whole race forward by elevating only the sex that represents the principle
of instability, has long enough been tried. . . . the way tocivilize the race is tocivilize woman.
And now, thanks to science, we see why this is so. Woman is the unchanging trunk of
the great genealogic tree; while man, with all his vaunted superiority, is but a branch, a
grafted scion, as it were, whose acquired qualities die with the individual, while those of
woman are handed on to futurity.93

In other words, Ward attributed to white woman a specific racial-cultural function—

the preserver of racial traits for society—and he tied that function to woman’s evolu-
tionary development of a specific race and sex-linked biology. It is worth noting how
white women’s and black men’s racial fixity were given very different valuations in
Ward’s work: white women assisted evolutionary processes by preserving desirable
racial traits among whites, while black men resisted evolutionary processes by not
being able to learn and assimilate into white civilization.
By 1903, in Pure Sociology, Ward had elaborated fully an alternative evolutionary
theory to Darwin and Spencer—what he called his gynaecocentric theory. In contrast
to Darwin, who focused on natural selection—males’ competition with other
males—Ward focused his theory on sexual selection: women’s power, especially in
primitive societies, to select mates.94 Primitive women, Ward argued, had played a cru-
cial evolutionary role in determining the racial traits that would appear in offspring,
although civilized women had lost this power of sexual selection.95 Ward was con-
vinced, however, that civilized women retained the power of racial transmission and
through this function wielded dominant control over the future characteristics of the
race.
This new thinking about woman’s role as transmitter of race traits contained several
important reformulations of the theory of the inheritance of acquired traits. In effect,
Ward was dismissing the usual Darwinian claim that sexual traits were passed on via the
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 51

laws of partial inheritance—from father to son and mother to daughter. Instead, he

proposed that the mother was the source of all race traits, which were passed indiscrim-
inately to both daughters and sons. Charlotte Perkins Gilman would later characterize
this theoretical innovation (“woman as the race-type”) as the “most important contri-
bution” yet made to “Neo-Feminism.”96 Man—previously thought of as the primary
source of new variations—was no longer granted the dominant role in the process of
racial inheritance (and thus social evolution) that he had held previously. Woman—
previously granted little efficacy in passing on beneficial traits to offspring—took on
the central role in this new theory of evolutionary racial development.
Moreover, Ward’s modification of the biological laws of inheritance accommo-
dated a subtle and yet powerful reconceptualization of white woman’s role in the na-
tion’s political life. The reconceptualization reinforced already prevailing notions that
women’s primary social role was reproductive. Yet in attributing to civilized women
the biological power for determining the racial traits of offspring, and for serving as
the exemplars and models for other races, Ward’s theory endowed white women with
a powerful claim to direct the nation’s policies and resources in regard to civilizing
primitive others.
Ward seems to have believed that all women served the evolutionary function as
the preservers and transmitters of racial traits for their respective races. Anna Julia
Cooper, a black woman who most likely heard Ward lecture in Washington, D.C. dur-
ing the mid-1880s, interpreted his theory in this way and built her own theories of
black woman’s equality on this foundation.97
And Otis T. Mason immediately understood the implications of Ward’s thinking
for reforming the United States’ policy in assimilating Indians. Mason served as a cura-
tor of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology (part of the National Museum, now the Smith-
sonian Institution) in Washington, D.C., from the early 1870s until his death in 1908.98
Prior to joining the bureau, Mason had been a professor at Columbian College (now
George Washington University), a position he retained from 1861 to 1884. In 1885,
Mason assisted the newly formed Women’s Anthropological Society (WAS) by provid-
ing this group with an outline of study, and in 1893, as president of the men’s Anthro-
pological Society of Washington, D.C., he presided over a joint meeting held with the
WAS.99
Mason’s own book, Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture, the culmination of talks he
began giving in 1888, advised the country to assess the stored capital, energy, and expe-
rience of its most “advanced” women, as these women contained, in his view, the bio-
logical-cultural elements on which the future of the country depended in its mission
of bringing civilization to others.100 Moreover, his book argued that the United States
ought to redesign its Indian policies, so as to civilize and assimilate Indian women: “The
longer one studies the subject,” he declared, “the more he will be convinced that sav-
age tribes can now be elevated chiefly through their women.”101 Yet whites first had to
correct their misconceptions about the biological nature of primitive women. Indian
women were not the immoral, promiscuous, or irrational beings that white Ameri-
cans thought they were. Rather they shared with white women a capacity for mor-
ality, sexual purity, and religious devotion, and, most important, they exercised the
 52 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

same kind of “influence” over their husbands that civilized women were presumed to
exercise over their men. In his evocative renderings of the common domestic lives of
primitive and civilized women, Mason downplayed ongoing political conflicts be-
tween whites and Indians. Thus, Mason’s work offered a soothing balm for white
Americans’ longings for racial harmony, as he insisted on the potential for similarity
among the races—at least their common femininity—and for the possibility for the
universal acceptance of patriarchal domesticity.

White Women and Civilization-Work

Evolutionist discussions about (white) woman’s role as an agent of civilization intensi-

fied in the 1880s as whites focused on the primitive others within their midst—
whether African Americans, Native Americans, southern Europeans, or Asian immi-
grants. The growing interest in white women’s potential contribution along these
lines coincided with the country’s obsessions with “Americanizing” the immigrant
and “uplifting” the Negro.102 To put this point in a different way, the combination of
social anxiety about the presence of nonwhite groups in U.S. society at this time, along
with changing social scientific theories in the 1880s, made possible a more powerful
public role for elite, white women as civilization-workers. As I have already men-
tioned, this was not a new role for white women, as some had served as missionary
wives in the early nineteenth century, accompanying husbands to foreign missions to
demonstrate the advantages of traditional patriarchal families.103 In the postbellum
period, evolutionists’ discourses buttressed white women’s desire to work alone, with-
out husbands or male protectors, among primitive groups. Increasingly, as the nine-
teenth century wore on, civilization-work became secularized, although it remained
firmly linked to an evangelical worldview. Extensive women’s organizations devel-
oped through which white women could derive enhanced status and power by serv-
ing as exponents of civilization, in carrying the ideals of Christianity to “primitive”
peoples, whether they lived within or outside the borders of the United States.
Even suffragists, who had for decades argued that racial distinctions should be
irrelevant to the granting of the franchise, began to think about citizenship in relation
to the future of the white race, as global questions of empire and civilization began to
shape domestic discussions of women’s issues. In 1895, voicing her concern over the
inclusion of “ignorant foreigners” in the franchise, Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared
that the “remedy” for the domination of one sex by the other was “education of the
higher, more tender sentiments in humanity, the mother-thought omnipresent in
every department of life. . . . This must be done,” Stanton insisted, “before we can
take another step in civilization.” “Women, the greatest factor in civilization” [must]
first [be] enfranchised.”104
Many groups of women found evolutionist discourse a useful way to analyze race
and gender problems, but it was also an ideology that bolstered the public authority
and power of white women without seeming to transgress traditionally conservative
notions about woman’s appropriate sphere and activities. To the minds of white con-
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 53

temporaries, women’s civilization-work was distinct from male forms of political ac-
tivity, which they understood to be morally questionable and inappropriate for white
women. White women who carried out this civilization-work at home among Native
Americans, the urban poor, and immigrants became a part of the ruling class of the
progressive era without having to press their own claims for the elective franchise to
obtain political power. Mary Lowe Dickinson, president of the Women’s National In-
dian Association in 1885, explained, “That it [our type of work] exists at all is due to
that enlightened spirit of philanthropy, which as a natural outgrowth of Christian
principle, permeates as never before the sisterhood of the land. It is this spirit that is
making [the white] woman a most potent adjunct in the solving of the social prob-
lems that press upon the enlightened conscience in this day of grand endeavors for
the uplifting of the race.”105
White middle-class women generally found missionary work appealing because it
permitted them to exercise cultural authority over those they conceived as their evo-
lutionary and racial inferiors. Espousing their superior capacities as reformers and civi-
lizers, white women garnered unprecedented visibility and status from their roles as
special government agents (Alice Fletcher), as appointed state commissioners on vari-
ous boards dealing with urban problems (Josephine Shaw Lowell), as leaders of the set-
tlement house (Jane Addams) and temperance movements (Frances Willard), or as
missionaries either at home or abroad (Helen Montgomery). The woman’s foreign
mission movement eventually became the largest movement of white women in the
United States, attracting more than three million women as members by 1915, far ex-
ceeding in size even Frances Willard’s popular National Woman’s Christian Temper-
ance Union (160,000 members).106 Through their roles as civilization-workers, white
women’s words, actions, and political demands carried power and influence with gov-
ernment officials, church leaders, and social reformers.
“Woman as a civilizing force” became the common rallying cry of all segments of
the woman’s movement. Yet this notion was deployed by different groups for different
political objectives. Antisuffragists drew on this discourse to argue that the franchise
might jeopardize the moral superiority of the civilized woman by making her a parti-
san rather than an impartial political actor. One antisuffragist argued that “woman is
not the subject sex, nor will she ever become the subject sex unless we turn to savagery
and she ‘earns her own living’ at hard labor just as man does.”107 While suffragists used
this ideology to buttress white women’s demands for equal political rights with white
men, their opponents used it to point out that civilized women were already in a
privileged position and did not need any more rights. The elasticity of this hegemonic
discourse meant that no group within the United States could make a play for politi-
cal power without invoking civilizationist ideologies. Because of the ways in which
this discourse constructed the alternatives—identify as a (civilized) Christian or be
identified as a (barbaric) heathen—every group first had to demonstrate adherence to
the precepts of Christian civilization before it could make any demands to be included
in the body politic of the nation.108
Although in general, social-Darwinian theory posited that the competitive strug-
gle for survival was a beneficial mechanism, a way of weeding out unfit individuals,
 54 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

there were exceptions in these theories that enabled nineteenth-century elites to ig-
nore competition if it occurred in troubling instances, such as between white men and
white women (whether within the family or in the workplace) or between Anglos and
other races, or between Western and non-Western countries. The renowned paleon-
tologist and antisuffragist Edward D. Cope explained, “While the interests of the mem-
bers of the same sex [i.e., white men] often bring them into collision with each other,
those of [the] opposite [sex] cannot normally do so.”109 As I have shown, evolutionary
processes were assumed to function in different ways in relation to the sexes (white
men and white women), to different races (Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Chi-
nese), or to the same sexes of different races. The claim that “social progress” de-
pended on competition or social conflict (leading to the “survival of the fittest”) was
invoked only when it sanctioned the interests of white elites, particularly when it jus-
tified the dominance of white men in business, government, the professions, and so
on. When the conflictual processes of evolution might lead to competition between
white men and white women, or between white and black men, these processes were
either not recognized as evolutionary, were considered as some sort of undesirable
side effect of “natural laws,” or were seen as likely to produce white racial or sexual de-
generation.
Evolutionist theories also stigmatized the working classes as lesser, uncivilized be-
ings. Class divisions and class conflict were increasing in this period, and some social-
Darwinists attributed poverty to an inferior racial inheritance—an insufficiently
developed cultural heritage that was manifested in the exploitation of working-
class women. William Graham Sumner argued, in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other,
“Strange and often horrible shadows of all the old primitive barbarism are now to be
found in the slums of [our] great cities, and in the lowest groups of men, in the midst
of civilized nations. Men impose labor on women in some such groups today.”110 Evo-
lutionists’ stipulation of social progress as a unilinear and normative movement from
savagery to civilization helped white elites redefine economic and political problems as
cultural-racial problems, characterized by gender abnormalities and sexual perver-
sions. Moreover, class distinctions were rarely recognized within uncivilized groups,
even when class differentiation was clearly evident. Evolutionist discourse, for exam-
ple, recognized educated or privileged African Americans simply as “Negroes,” not as
members of a multi-racial middle-class.111
To white elites who formulated and applied theories of evolution to their social re-
form movements, poor peoples’ poverty and political marginality were deemed mat-
ters of personal ignorance, sin, or deviance rather than of economic exploitation or
political oppression. Most often, those who invoked evolutionist theories denied that
wealth or class status had any bearing on the differences between the civilized and un-
civilized. For the most part, they did not consider reallocation of economic resources
or alteration in property ownership relevant to the civilizing process. The charity or-
ganization movement of the 1880s, for example, believed that providing “gifts” of food
or money was counterproductive to solving problems of poverty and instead focused
on instilling the values of white patriarchal civilization—giving the gift of patriarchy.
Most groups of impoverished peoples—blacks living in rural areas, and urban immi-
 EVOLUTION, WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND CIVILIZING MISSIONS • 55

grants, for example—were not able to gain support for their demands for economic
redress.112
Even though evolutionist theories made it possible for some to predict the dimin-
ishing of sexual, racial, ethnic, or class differences, most white authorities gave elabo-
rate explanations for why this did not, could not, happen. In the case of African
Americans, the rate of evolutionary change was too slow and uncertain (Shaler). Or
the Negro could only evolve through sexual intercourse between white men and
black women (Ward). Moreover, even if evolutionary theory did sanction “progress,”
there was no guarantee that white women, people of color, or working-class and non-
Western peoples could perform the kinds of tasks that would ultimately produce
sexual, racial, or class equality. We might read these convoluted discussions, in which
white elites went to great lengths to restrict ideas of what evolution could make possi-
ble, as an indication of how anxious they felt about the need to maintain their domi-
nant position within a fragile and destabilized social order.
Sexual differences and racial concerns were also at the heart of the suffragist-
antisuffragist debates of this period. Historians have argued that suffragists were
advocating rights and responsibilities for women identical to those of men, while anti-
suffragists stressed women’s purported sexual differences as the reason for their con-
tinued exclusion from the franchise. In fact, suffragists and antisuffragists generally
agreed on their perception of (whites’) sexual differences and their significance. What
they vehemently argued over, as I shall show next, was how to give political recogni-
tion to these differences, given the complex ways in which the racial and class hierar-
chies of society were shifting.
 2

The Making of a White Female Citizenry
Suffragism, Antisuffragism, and Race

We can not make [white] men see that [white] women feel the hu-
miliation of their petty distinctions of sex, precisely as the black
man feels those of color. It is no palliation of our wrongs to say that
we are not socially ostracised as he [the black man] is, so long as
we are politically ostracised as he is not.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Degradation
of Disfranchisement” (1891)

I N THE 1870S, 1880Ss AND 1890s, white suffragists used theories of evolution
to support
a new rationale for their own enfranchisement, one that depended on redefining
what it meant to be a white female citizen. The new definitions made use of older be-
liefs in white women’s moral superiority but also drew on a growing conviction that
white women’s special racial qualities were needed to counteract the influence of the
immigrant and African American men who had just been enfranchised. As govern-
ment representatives, ministers, and church groups discussed how to make citizens
out of so-called primitives, white suffragists conceptualized a special role for them-
selves in assimilating nonwhite peoples into U.S. civilization and made this point one
of their primary rationales for their own inclusion in the franchise.
Older notions of patriarchal citizenship, stemming from classical republicanism
and Lockean individualism, emphasized the necessity of citizens bearing arms in de-
fense of the republic. Since “woman” was presumed to lack the intellectual and physi-
cal strength required to defend herself or her country, white women could not make
headway within this framework in convincing men that they should be granted the
franchise. Throughout the nineteenth century, white women’s relation to politics was
supposed to remain indirect, mediated through the family, via their relation to hus-
bands, fathers, and sons. Moreover, the maintenance of their specific forms of moral
virtue—purity, piety, empathy, and spirituality—depended on their staying outside
existing political institutions and structures. White women were expected to remain
in the domestic sphere and to exert their moral influence from within the home
through their roles as wives and mothers.1
In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, this constellation of beliefs
was challenged on several fronts. First, black men were legally admitted to the fran-

56
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 57

chise after the Civil War, implicitly casting them as protectors of white women—an
idea that greatly upset white women, who responded by defining their capacities and
responsibilities as citizens in new ways.2 White women began to assert themselves as
the rightful, natural protectors of uncivilized races (the protectors of black men, not
the other way around) and used this racialized responsibility to assert their rights as
white (“Saxon”) female citizens. Second, as more and more white women began to live
part of their lives outside conventional forms of domesticity, slowly the distinction
between a private domain for white middle-class women and a public one for white
middle-class men became less salient. White women increasingly developed their own
institutions—voluntary and charitable societies, church groups, self-improvement
clubs, settlement houses, and organizations focused on “municipal housekeeping”—
from which they could influence men’s political forums and play a direct part on the
formulation of social policy. Even though many white women did not consider their
activities or institutions political, they themselves became increasingly visible and ac-
tive as political agents, using demonstrations, petitions, boycotts, lobbying, and pam-
phlets to express their political views and consolidate their political power.3
As I have shown, theories of evolution linked civilization and sexual difference in
such a way that calling for change in woman’s sphere seemed to threaten the ad-
vancement of whites’ civilization. The problem facing postbellum white suffragists,
then, was how to argue that the franchise would alter woman’s sphere but not dimin-
ish whites’ sexual differences or endanger their civilization. To address this problem,
some white suffragists reaffirmed a pre-evolutionist view of woman’s nature, insisting
on the principle of the stability of sexual differences against the tenet of change in evo-
lutionist theory, to justify the idea that woman’s sphere could be modified without
producing corresponding changes in woman’s nature. Suffragist Margaret Evans ex-
plained, “Experience proves that true womanly qualities are too firmly founded on
immutable laws to be shaken by the fall of a ballot.”4 Other suffragists, however, ac-
cepted evolutionary predictions that woman’s nature would evolve in response to
changes in woman’s sphere and were careful to defend their proposals on the grounds
that it would be evolutionarily advantageous for white women to vote.5
While much debate occurred over how malleable woman’s nature was likely to be
in response to the franchise, the vast majority of white activists in the woman’s move-
ment insisted that (white) women were different from (white) men. I am using paren-
theses again to focus our attention on the unarticulated racial component in suffragist
ideology during the postbellum period. When suffragists of the period used racial
modifiers, they used the terms “Saxon” and “white” interchangeably, and they used
“black” as a modifier when they were speaking about “the Negro.”6 Often, though,
they made universal claims about man, woman, and the race that they clearly in-
tended to apply only to whites. Regardless of whether they used racial modifiers, ideas
about race difference were always present, even if race functioned as an absent pres-
ence, as it so often did. At crucial moments, however, white suffragists invoked race
explicitly in their arguments, calling attention both to their own racial similarity with
white men and to their racial superiority to nonwhite men. For example, at the
Seneca Falls convention in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton called for a platform affirm-
 58 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

ing woman’s right to vote with the proclamation: “We need not prove ourselves equal
to Daniel Webster to enjoy this privilege [of suffrage], for the ignorant Irishman in the
ditch has all the civil rights he has. . . . All white men in this country have the same
rights, however they may differ in mind, body or estate. The right [to vote] is ours.”7
Thus, even before white women drew on evolutionist ideas to assert their own sig-
nificance to civilizing missions, white women invoked their racial similarity with
(white) men when they insisted on their inherent capacity to vote and their inherent
right to the franchise—racial similarity taking precedence over any sexual difference.
At the same time, however, suffragists used sexual differences to criticize the govern-
ment for taxing them without representation, insisting that full representation could
not occur without woman’s vote, since (white) men could not understand or repre-
sent (white) women’s very different needs. William E. Channing, speaking at a
woman’s rights convention on September 6, 1853, declared, “It has never been asserted
that [the white] man and woman are alike; if they were, where would be the necessity
for urging the claims of the one?”8 Even after the Civil War, few among white activists
would concede that political equality would endanger sexual differences; few activists
proposed changes in woman’s sphere with the intent of eliminating sexual differences;
and few suffragists desired or expected sexual differences to disappear as a result of
women’s enfranchisement. To make such claims would have meant risking the accu-
sation (which, ironically, was made anyway) that they were actively working for the
devolution of civilization. An anonymous contributor to Popular Science Monthly argued
in 1878, “Advancement toward perfection is reached by differentiation; [the woman’s
movement] in so far as it aims at breaking down the natural barriers between the du-
ties of the two sexes, is palpably retrograde . . . anti-differentiation . . . must be a re-
turn to a lower condition.”9
By situating the debates over woman suffrage in the context of evolution and racial
progress, it becomes clear that the prosuffrage arguments were not simply about the
right of woman to vote, but about the repercussions of enfranchisement on white
women’s sexual differences, and thus about the future progress of Anglo-Saxons as a
race. Suffrage discussions intensified as whites assessed whether Reconstruction in the
South had been a success, debated what to do about the assimilation of Africans, Indi-
ans, and the Chinese, and responded to the social and cultural changes that accom-
panied several decades of massive immigration. The different outcomes of suffrage bat-
tles in different parts of the country may reflect the ways in which different regions
confronted and dealt with their own specific racial concerns. The western states of
Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah, which had very few blacks, a relatively small
population of Anglo-Saxon women, and which physically removed resident Native
Americans from the body politic by placing them in reservations, were the first to pass
woman suffrage laws. As early as 1869, Wyoming had such a provision, which it kept in
its constitution when it was admitted to statehood in 1890; Utah had woman suffrage
as a territory in 1870 but was deprived of it by Congress in 1887 as punishment for its
allowance of polygamous marital practices, but put it back into its constitution by ref-
erendum when it was admitted to statehood in 1896; Colorado adopted a state consti-
tutional amendment in 1893, having defeated one previously in 1877; Idaho adopted a
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 59

state constitutional amendment upon its first submission in 1896.10 West coast states
that struggled with the “problem” of Chinese immigration took longer to pass suffrage
laws. A woman suffrage amendment finally passed in Washington in 1910 (after the
state defeated amendments in 1889 and 1898); California passed a statute in 1911 (after a
defeat in 1896 and after national legislation restricting Chinese immigration was passed
in the 1880s); and Oregon passed one in 1912 (after defeats in 1884, 1900, 1906, 1908, and
1910).11 In the Northeast and Midwest, where immigration posed the greatest threat to
the political monopoly of Anglo-Saxon elites, woman suffrage was debated along with
immigration restriction and eugenic regulations, and the northern states’ ratification
of the Woman Suffrage Amendment in 1920 was soon followed by the passage of na-
tional legislation restricting immigration in 1923. Southern states, grappling with racial
strife between blacks and whites, resisted woman suffrage the longest. Many southern
states never ratified the Woman Suffrage Amendment of 1920, partly out of a concern
that the woman question would reopen the “Negro question.”12
In the midst of such extreme racial conflict, a new conception of politics emerged,
and with this new conception, the ballot’s significance changed dramatically. Prior to
the Civil War, politics was defined as public service and was reserved for elite (prop-
erty-holding) Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. “Disinterested” politicians supposedly
transcended personal interest to promote the public good. In this paradigm, the ballot
was a symbol of the political equality of Anglo-Saxon men, granted on the presump-
tion, and taken as a sign, of the superior moral character, physical autonomy, and eco-
nomic independence of these white men. After the Civil War, however, politics was no
longer the exclusive preserve of Anglo-Saxon elites. In the North, naturalized immi-
grants gained power in urban areas. In the South, the electorate briefly encompassed
former slaves who elected blacks to local and national offices. It was presumed that
the new constituencies of immigrant-citizens and enfranchised freedmen lacked the
moral character of Anglo-Saxon whites and, because of their imputed racial inferi-
ority, could not be trusted to resist corrupt political leaders. A new understanding of
politics as a competitive and corrupt business emerged, reflecting white elites’ general
fear and distrust of immigrants, blacks, and working classes, as was evident in the new
political terminology. Politics was discussed in terms of “bosses” and “machines” who
supposedly were not bound by traditional republican precepts in their quest for and
use of power. From the perspective of white elites, then, politics had become a morally
bankrupt realm of activity, in which men of “lower races” manipulated voters
through patronage and bribery. From this vantage point, politics was no longer sepa-
rable from business, and politicians no longer embodied republican ideals of virtue, in-
dependence, and disinterestedness. The ballot, previously considered a privilege
granted to white men in recognition of their moral virtue and economic indepen-
dence, was reconceptualized as a tool used by a morally reprehensible leadership to
dominate servile and racially inferior classes of men.13
White female suffragists offered a complex and ambivalent response to this emerg-
ing understanding of politics in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the one
hand, they held out a nostalgic promise that (the white) “woman” by virtue of her
special moral qualities could help restore politics to its former glory. To borrow from
 60 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

cultural historian Mary Poovey, the rhetorical separation of (white) men’s economic
and political realm from (white) women’s domestic sphere helped consolidate bour-
geois power by linking morality to white middle-class women, who were deemed im-
mune to the self-interest and competition integral to the economic and political
sphere in which their husbands, fathers, and brothers operated.14 White middle-class
women did not hesitate to use this conception of their race-, class-, and gender-spe-
cific forms of moral superiority to buttress their claims to political and social au-
thority, particularly in calling for reform of business, law, education, medicine, and
politics. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the intellectual powerhouse behind the suffrage
movement, held firmly to moral distinctions and discussed them in gendered and
racialized terms.15 In 1869 she referred to the “male element [as] a destructive force,
stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in
the material and moral world alike discord, disorder, disease and death” and pointed
out that “philosophy and science alike point to [white] woman, as the new power des-
tined to redeem the world.”16 In 1890 she stated, “Our civilization today is strictly mas-
culine, everything is carried by force and violence and war, and will be until the femi-
nine element is fully recognized, and has equal power in the regulation of human
affairs. Then we shall substitute co-operation for competition, persuasion for coer-
cion, individual sovereignty for absolute authority.”17
Although they never fully overcame their disappointment and anger at being left
out of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, white female suffragists eventually
resigned themselves to the fact that the electorate included those whom they consid-
ered their evolutionary inferiors and found ways to find some advantage in what oth-
erwise seemed to them a deplorable situation. Many argued that the expansion of the
electorate to include nonwhite men meant it was no longer meaningful to require
that women conform to eighteenth-century standards of republican ideology. If other
groups—notably immigrant and black men—could vote and participate in the for-
mal political process, even though they did not embody republican virtues, then,
white suffragists argued, all classes of women should be allowed to vote as well.
By the 1880s, when questions of racial assimilation became most heated, resulting
in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Indian Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887,
white women already had a fifty-year history of direct public involvement in national
debates over race. Many had been abolitionists in their youth and helped create a po-
litical discourse in which comparisons were made between women and slaves. Aboli-
tionist-suffragists like Lydia Maria Child, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Susan B. An-
thony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Julia Ward Howe, and others had argued before the
Civil War that white women and black men shared an analogous type of bondage.
Black men were enslaved through the institution of slavery, white women through
the institution of patriarchal marriage. Both “woman” and “slaves” were treated as
property rather than individuals; both had been denied personal and political rights;
both experienced conditions of subjection, sustained through physical coercion.18
With the use of two tropes, that of sisterhood and uplift, white women claimed to
share the victimization of slaves rather than to identify with the power and privilege
of the white male oppressor. The exclusion of enslaved black women from the cate-
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 61

gories of both “slaves” and “woman” was a common feature of white abolitionist-
suffragist discourse, although white women sometimes invoked claims to a universal
sisterhood that contained assumptions about a universal womanly character. At the
same time, the tropes of sisterhood and uplift began to foster and reflect a new self-
understanding among white women that they, as white women, had a moral respon-
sibility to reform an evil social and political system. As historian Jean Fagan Yellin has
pointed out, these tropes were readily apparent in iconography that white female abo-
litionists used on their stationery and transformed into folk art through their needle-
work. The imagery depicted a kneeling slave-supplicant asking the question “Am I
Not a Woman and a Sister?” a phrase that white suffragist Frances Gage put in the
mouth of Sojourner Truth when she retold Truth’s 1851 address (“Ar’n’t I a Woman?”)
in the article Gage published in 1863 (see chapter 1).19 In some of the feminist-aboli-
tionist iconography of this period, the question was addressed to a white female figure
also represented in the image, who was sometimes depicted holding a torch (repre-
senting truth), standing in a print shop (signifying freedom of the press), or carrying
scales (to dispense justice). In other instances the white female figure was absent from
the image, and the question floated as a slogan, intended to prick the conscience of a
white audience. Such iconography was intended to inspire and empower white
women to take action. Significantly, what the iconography did not present was an
image of slaves rising and breaking their own chains. As Yellin has argued, abolitionist
iconography “negat[ed] the possibility of a servile insurrection that would replace
black slavery with black mastery” and thus carefully sidestepped whites’ fears about
slave revolts.20
When abolitionist literature did address slave women specifically, it was usually to
emphasize their sexual debasement. For many white women, the greatest horrors of
slavery were the ways in which slave mothers were exploited as breeders and then de-
prived of any relation to their children. These were real horrors, experienced daily by
enslaved women, and white people often denied responsibility for them, refusing, for
example, to acknowledge that white men routinely raped black women. Instead
whites often held slave women accountable for their own victimization by attributing
to them wanton and excessive sexual desire for intercourse with white men.21 Aboli-
tionist literature, on the other hand, pointedly tried to get white women to sympa-
thize with the victimization of black women. Elizabeth Chandler’s poem “Kneeling
Slave,” published in Benjamin Lundy’s abolitionist newspaper, begins with the line:
“Pity the negro . . . [for] hers is not / Like thine, a blessed and most happy lot!”
Chandler urges white women to act on the slave woman’s behalf:

She is thy sister, woman! shall her cry

Uncared for and unheeded, pass thee by?
Wilt thou not weep to see her sink so low,
And seek to raise her from her place of woe?22

In trying to motivate a white audience to do something about slavery’s sexual abuse of

black women, however, Chandler’s poem, like so much abolitionist literature, em-
phasized the moral degradation of the slave woman, depicting her as fallen and de-
 62 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

serving of pity, not respect. Paradoxically, the effort to get white women to feel com-
passion for slave women served to emphasize further the slave woman’s debasement.
The lower slave women were presumed to have sunk, the greater was the need for
white women to act as uplifters. Thus, white abolitionist ideology of liberation and up-
lift created two interdependent roles delineated along racial lines: for the enslaved
black woman, the role of a helpless debased victim; for the free white woman, the role
of an empowered, sanctified uplifter.
These tropes of sisterhood and uplift endured into the second half of the nine-
teenth century, lasting well beyond the institution of slavery itself, and remained a
dominant feature of the white suffrage debates of the 1880s and 1890s. In particular,
these tropes were used by white women to register their resentment that their own
so-called slavery and political exclusion continued while the black man’s was suppos-
edly ended by his emancipation and inclusion in the franchise. From white women’s
perspectives, the amendments that granted black men the right to vote worked
against their own future enfranchisement by explicitly characterizing citizenship as
male (and because white women believed, mistakenly, that black men would oppose
woman suffrage even more vehemently than white men). The Fourteenth Amend-
ment, passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868, provided sanctions against any
state that attempted to exclude any of its “male citizens” from the franchise, while the
Fifteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in 1869 and ratified in 1870, asserted that
the “right of citizens to vote could not be denied or abridged on account of race, color,
or previous condition of servitude” but said nothing about sex.23 The rights of recently
freed male slaves were to be recognized, while the rights of prominent white upper-
class women were not. Stanton immediately voiced her objections in a letter she
wrote to her cousin, Gerrit Smith: “If that word ‘male’ be inserted [into the Constitu-
tion], it will take us a century at least to get it out.”24
As a consequence of these proposals mandating different legal statuses for black
men and white women, a sharp division occurred among the ranks of white suffragists.
At the first anniversary meeting of the Equal Rights Association in New York in May
1867, white women debated what the proposed amendments would mean for their on-
going struggle to enfranchise themselves. In opposition to these amendments, Stanton
expressed what would become a common refrain in her subsequent speeches: “The
Negro should not enter the kingdom of politics before woman, because he would be an
additional weight against her enfranchisement.”25 Abby Kelley, another white aboli-
tionist and suffragist, disagreed with Stanton, pointing out that the differences in black
men and white women’s social conditions mandated different political solutions: “Were
the Negro and the woman in the same civil, social and religious status today, I should
respond aye, with all my heart to this sentiment [of Stanton’s].” But, Kelley continued,
“What are the facts?The Negro is treated as a slave to-day in the South. Without wages,
without family rights, whipped and beaten, given up to the most horrible outrages,
without that protection which his value as property formerly gave him. Have we any
true sense of justice . . . if we wish to postpone his security till [the white] woman
shall obtain political rights?”26 Once again, white women’s support for the political
equality of blacks was articulated within a framework of black victimization.
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 63

White abolitionist-suffragists could not agree on whether it was better to accept

what the proposed amendments offered, or hold out for amendments that also recog-
nized the rights of white and black women. In 1869, two separate woman suffrage as-
sociations with different positions on this issue emerged: the American Woman Suf-
frage Association (AWSA), led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, and Julia Ward Howe, and the National Woman Suffrage Association
(NWSA), led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The AWSA supported
the Republican party’s effort to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments out
of a conviction that a partial extension of the franchise was better than no extension at
all. The NWSA opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments on the grounds
that these amendments provided no constitutional protections for women, white or
black. Black suffragists found themselves in the position of having to choose between
the two new suffrage groups. Harriet and Robert Purvis and Mary Ann Cary attended
meetings of the NWSA, while George T. Downing and Frances Harper were affiliated
with the AWSA. Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth attended meetings of both
groups.27
As it turned out, Stanton was mistaken in her belief that black men would be more
hostile to woman suffrage than white men. Many black men saw the question of
woman suffrage as another component of their own struggle for racial equality. There
was no organized resistance to woman suffrage among black men as there was among
white men. In contrast to prevalent fears among whites that woman suffrage would
increase disharmony between husband and wife and interfere with (white) “woman’s”
social responsibilities to raise children (hence further endangering the race, a fear that
was intrinsic to this position but often not articulated directly), most blacks did not
believe that enfranchising black women would add to the black race’s familial, racial,
or political difficulties. Many blacks believed that woman suffrage represented a way
to increase the political power and status of black people overall, since it was pre-
sumed, correctly, that black women would vote in alliance with black men rather
than form a political interest group with white women. Other blacks, however, were
cynically realistic about the futility of the franchise for black liberation. Josephine St.
Pierre Ruffin, a founding member of the black women’s club movement, remarked in
1915 that “many colored men doubt the wisdom of women suffrage”—because they
feared that woman suffrage would “increase the number of our political enemies”; en-
franchised white women would vote against the interests of black people, while the
country would surely disenfranchise black women along with black men.28
Where white suffragists conceived of the enfranchisement of (white) women as an
antidote to manpower, black suffragists hoped that (black) women’s enfranchise-
ment would serve as an antidote to racism. White advocates of woman suffrage em-
phasized the role that they—elite white women—could play in restoring politics to
its former glory and in reforming society to rid it of immoral elements, symbolized for
whites by the political activities they associated with blacks and immigrants. Blacks
never held this view of suffrage—they did not see eighteenth-century republicanism
as some golden age of politics, since the past for them only contained evidence of po-
litical slavery, economic exploitation, racism, and social injustice. Occasionally gender
 64 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

tensions were expressed within black circles, as black women invoked dominant ide-
ologies of womanhood to buttress their demands to the franchise. Nannie Burroughs,
a leader of the black women’s club movement, believed that the moral strength of
black women would enable them to escape the exploitation and disfranchisement, to
which, she argued, black men had fallen victim.

Because the black man does not know the value of the ballot, and has bartered and sold
his most valuable possession, it is no evidence that the Negro woman will do the same.
The Negro woman, therefore, needs the ballot to get back, by the wise useof it, what the
Negro man has lost by the misuseof it. . . . The world has yet to learn that the Negro
woman is quite superior in bearing moral responsibility. A comparison with the men of
her race, in moral issues, is odious.29

On the other hand, black suffragist Mary Church Terrell, at a meeting of the National
American Woman Suffrage Association held in Washington, D.C., in 1904, responded
to whites’ criticism that black men sold their votes by saying, “Much has been said
about the purchasability of the Negro vote. They never sold their votes til they found
that it made no difference how they cast them.”30
After the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, white women
feared that their racial interests would be compromised by legislators representing
nonwhite constituencies, and they remained highly mistrustful of black and immi-
grant men’s ability to legislate on their behalf. In subsequent decades, some white
women attributed continued resistance to woman suffrage to the unenlightened no-
tions of “lower races” rather than to the patriarchal and racist beliefs of white men.
The feelings of racial superiority that Anglo-Protestant women nurtured concerning
their own ancestry, heredity, and evolutionary history led them to insist that they
shared the white man’s inherited capacity for self-government. White suffragist Dr.
Mary Putnam-Jacobi declared, “To the Anglo-Saxon race seems to have been espe-
cially committed the mission of securing and developing political freedom among
men. . . . [I]n this it has been invariably foremost and easily supreme. [Anglo-Saxon]
women cannot fail to share, at least to some extent, in the inherited instinct of the raceand
in its especial and accumulated capacity for [government].”31
Putnam-Jacobi, Stanton, and other white suffragists could not have known in 1869
that state governments would soon find ways to circumvent the intent of the new
Constitutional amendments by devising extralegal ways to disenfranchise immigrants,
the working classes, and blacks. In the late 1860s, it appeared to Stanton as if the
“lower orders” would play an active role in state and national governments, or at least
she exploited whites’ fears that such would be the case in order to motivate white
women to oppose any amendment that did not also enfranchise elite white women.
“American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish
the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of
womanhood, to make laws for you and your daughters . . . awake to the danger
of your present position and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the
government!”32
Although some white women were able to reconcile themselves to an amendment
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 65

that affirmed black men’s right to vote, the enfranchisement of black men ahead of
white women clearly rankled many white suffragists, even decades after the event. We
have already encountered Stanton’s expressions of resentment. Other women ex-
pressed similar feelings. Julia Wilbur, who had been a member of the Rochester Ladies’
Anti-Slavery Society and had served as an agent for the Freedmen’s Aid Bureau after the
Civil War, later confessed “to feeling a little jealous—the least bit humiliated.”33 Un-
doubtedly she was thinking of her students, those she was fervently teaching to read
and write, walking to the polls, while she was forced to remain at home. Mary Putnam-
Jacobi was still enraged over this issue in 1894: “From many points of view, it certainly
seemed most absurd to invite to a share in the Popular Sovereignty a million negroes
only just emancipated from two hundred years of bondage, and who, moreover, had
not themselves dreamed of demanding more than their personal liberty, their ‘forty
acres and a mule.’”34 Susan B. Anthony summarized the emotional responses of white
women in her Autobiography: “What words can express her [the white woman’s] humilia-
tion when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so
faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the politi-
cal superiors of all the noble women of the nation the negro men just emerged from
slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public ques-
tion.”35 As late as 1912, feminist Mary Roberts Coolidge was still expressing the sense of
betrayal that white women felt as a result of the government’s decision not to include
them, along with black men, in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.36
The split within the white woman suffrage movement after the Civil War has
sometimes been characterized in terms of a “collapse” of a “prewar abolitionist unity
of women’s rights and black rights,” and scholars have argued that this collapse was
accompanied by a “new racism in the woman suffrage movement.”37 At one level, this
characterization is useful, calling our attention to the way that white women in the
postbellum period asserted their shared racial ancestry with white men as a justifica-
tion for their own enfranchisement. But we should not forget that in the antebellum
period, abolitionists had their own forms of racism, reflected in arguments that sup-
ported universal rights while still upholding white superiority.38 At their best, ante-
bellum abolitionists asserted that freedom and civil rights could not be justly withheld
from purportedly inferior or unqualified groups, since freedom itself was the neces-
sary precondition for the moral development that slaves and white women were
deemed to be lacking. Lydia Maria Child argued in her Appeal in Favor of that Class of
Americans Called Africans:

[T]he present degraded condition of that unfortunate race is produced by artificial

causes, not by the laws of nature. . . . As a class, I am aware that the negroes, with
many honorable exceptions, are ignorant . . . but this ceases to be the case just in
proportion as they are free. The fault is in their unnatural situation, not in themselves.
. . . And even if the negroes were, beyond all doubt, our inferiors in intellect, this
would form no excuse for oppression or contempt.39

While pre–Civil War abolitionist-suffragists, like Child, used a Christian theological

worldview to assert a God-given common humanity that was shared by all races, suf-
 66 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

fragists in the 1880s and 1890s modified their former position by drawing on civiliza-
tionist precepts to argue for white woman’s sexual distinctiveness. White suffragists
began to consider political questions in relation to the bearing they would have on the
future of civilization. “[Woman’s] ideal,” Stanton declared, “must be represented in
the State . . . before we can take another step in civilization.”40 Stanton continued
to express her outrage that “all orders of foreigners rank[ed] politically above the most
intelligently, highly educated women—native-born Americans.” To Stanton, this was
“the most bitter drop in the cup of our grief.”41 Still, Stanton was careful to point out
that “it is not the principle of universal suffrage that I oppose, but . . . the admis-
sion of another man, either foreign or native, to the polling booth, until women the greatest
factor in civilization, are first enfranchised.”42
Perhaps the most popular exponent of this type of reasoning was Frances Willard,
who helped found the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874 and
became president of the NWCTU in 1879, leading this, the largest prosuffrage organiza-
tion with 160,000 members, until her death in 1898. For many white Americans Willard
represented “womanhood’s apotheosis.” (See fig. 2-1.) In the words of one contempo-
rary, Willard was the “personification of consummate feminine excellence in thought,
purpose and performance.”43 Historian Ian Tyrrell has argued that Willard envisioned a
racial hierarchy that linked the “advance of civilization” to woman’s emancipation
within Christian societies. At the bottom of this hierarchy were non-Christian nations
(such as Islamic Turkey); in the middle were Christian Orthodox countries (such as
Greece and Bulgaria); at the top were evangelical Protestant nations (Great Britain and
the United States). By 1869, when she toured Europe and the Middle East, Willard had
reached the conclusion that “only Christian countries treat women kindly.”44
Despite her disclaimer that she had not an “atom of race prejudice,” Willard’s
racial assumptions were reflected in her favorite slogan, “A white life for two,” and
emerged most visibly in a four-year confrontation (from 1890 to 1894) with Ida B.
Wells, a black journalist who led a movement to abolish lynching.45 “A white life for
two” was Willard’s shorthand for calling for the elimination of the double sexual stan-
dard (among whites) by insisting that men conform to standards of social purity that
were only being demanded of white women. For sexual equality to become possible,
Willard believed, all men must adopt “a white life”—defined as lifelong abstention
from alcohol, sexual chastity before marriage, and sexual monogamy within marriage.
Describing her vision of a white life in 1892, Willard wrote: “[W]hen woman is recog-
nized as a human being as distinct as man, with equal rights, equal privileges and an
equal claim to develop her own nature . . . she will either accept man’s standard of
morality, or she will induce him to accept her own. . . . The acceptance of the male
standard would be a degradation unspeakable.”46 In Willard’s estimation, woman suf-
frage was necessary to help (white) women bring about both temperance and sexual
purity. “The fire of woman’s ballot will burn out the haunt of infamy [houses of pros-
titution] and burn in the single standard of a white life for two.”47
On the surface, Willard’s call for “a white life” might seem an innocuous
metaphor. Yet Willard, like most white Protestant elites in this period, conflated moral
differences with racial and religious differences—only white Christian men were con-
FI GURE 2-1 Apotheosis of womanhood. Frances E. Willard. Postcard, 1906. A portrait of Frances Willard and
the statue erected in Washington D.C. in 1906, to honor her after her death in 1898.
 68 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

sidered moral human beings. Like Stanton, Willard desired an educational qualifica-
tion for the franchise because she feared that the oppression of (white) women would
worsen as “animalistic” males participated in the legislative process. Willard believed
that education was especially crucial, given universal male enfranchisement, as a
means of raising the standard of morality among those she considered “inferior
races.”48
The confrontation between Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells began with an inter-
view given in October 1890, in which Willard expressed her belief that white Southern-
ers were mostly “kindly intentioned towards the coloured man” and sympathized
with them over their “immeasurable” problem. She went on to portray black men as
illiterate alcoholics who multiplied like the “locusts of Egypt,” concurring that in the
South, black men represented a physical threat to white women, who were in con-
stant need of white men’s surveillance and protection: “the safety of [the white]
woman, of childhood, of the home,” Willard proclaimed, “is menaced in a thousand
localities at this moment, so that the [white] men dare not go beyond the sight of their
own roof-tree.”49
These pronouncements outraged Wells, and she exposed these depictions as racist
myths in her pamphlet Southern Horrors. Wells argued that accusations concerning black
men’s lack of sexual control were used to cover up the fact that interracial sexual li-
aisons between black men and white women were voluntarily engaged in by white
women.
“The miscegenation laws of the South . . . leave the white man free to seduce all
the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and
advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-
American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the
smiles of white women.”50
Willard took great offense at this representation of the moral character of white
women, and attacked Wells for casting doubt on the racial-sexual purity of white
women. “It is my firm belief,” Willard wrote, “that in the statements made by Miss
Wells concerning white women having taken the initiative in nameless acts between
the races, she has put an imputation upon [the female] half of the white race . . .
that is unjust.” Wells, in turn, objected to this misrepresentation of her position, and
pointed out that she never put such an imputation on white women. All she had said
was that “colored men have been lynched for assault upon [white] women, when the
facts were plain that the relationship between the victim lynched and the alleged vic-
tim of his assault was voluntary, clandestine, and illicit.”51
Willard found it impossible to believe that southern white women would engage
voluntarily in sexual relationships with black men. The most Willard would concede
was that the sexual impulse to rape white women was not inherent in black men’s na-
ture but an effect of the loss of control induced in them by the consumption of alco-
hol. “An average colored man when sober is loyal to the purity of white women,”
Willard acknowledged, “but when under the influence of intoxicating liquors the ten-
dency in all men is toward a loss of self-control.”52 Willard continued to maintain that
black men were lynched in the South for sexual crimes (rape), not, as Wells ultimately
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 69

demonstrated, for threatening the economic status of whites. Although Willard even-
tually supported antilynching resolutions at annual meetings of the NWCTU, she
continued to assert that black men’s “nameless outrages perpetrated on white women
and little girls were a cause of constant anxiety” to white southerners.53
The public confrontation between Wells and Willard illustrates how civilizationist
ideology jeopardized a potential alliance between a black and white woman. The con-
flict was never resolved, despite the fact, as historian Gail Bederman has pointed out,
that there was much common ground between Wells and Willard: Willard detested
lynching, and Wells avidly supported temperance.54 Willard remained unable to revise
her belief that white women would never risk their racial purity through voluntary
sexual relations with nonwhite men. Social purity, as Willard’s slogan “a white life for
two” metaphorically suggested, insisted that white women could only be sexually at-
tracted to whiteness and denied the possiblility that white women might be volun-
tarily engaging in sexual intercourse with black men.

Preserving White Women’s Virtue: Antisuffragists’

Defense of a Distinct Political Identity
for White Women

In terms of social and class background, marital status, educational accomplishments,

and political activism, the white leadership of the antisuffrage organizations did not
differ substantially from the white leadership of suffrage organizations; antisuffragism
attracted white men and women, primarily of the higher socioeconomic classes.55
One way in which these two political groups did differ, however, was in their racial
composition; suffrage attracted both whites and blacks, and while interracial organiz-
ing among suffragists was difficult and black women often formed their own institu-
tions, white and black suffragists were united in their immediate objectives: enfran-
chisement of all women. The antisuffragist movement, in contrast, was an all-white
movement. Men and women of color, whatever their personal views about the desir-
ability of woman suffrage, did not organize against the enfranchisement of women.56
For all concerned in the postbellum period, suffragist and antisuffragist alike, vot-
ing meant much more than casting a ballot once a year. Suffrage encompassed sitting
on juries, participating in political campaigns, attending political conventions, run-
ning for and holding elective office, and enforcing laws. From this perspective, the bal-
lot encouraged types of behavior (disagreeing with men in public, traveling in mixed
company, self-promotion, neglect of domestic duties, etc.) that antisuffragist women
considered inappropriate or immoral for women.57 (See fig. 2-2.) Antisuffragist women
felt all the “true womanly” virtues—selflessness, subservience, humility, piety, coop-
eration, obedience, altruism—would either be at odds with, or endangered by, the
forms of political activity that had been historically developed by and for (white) men.
Mary A. M. M’Intire observed, “The influence of woman standing apart from the bal-
lot is immeasurable. Men look to her . . . (knowing that she has no selfish, political
interests to further) as the embodiment of all that is truest and noblest. . . . We be-
 70 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

FI GURE 2-2 Woman suffrage a threat to domestic life and the family. I
Want to Vote, But MY WIFE WON’T LET ME. Postcard, 1909. Opponents of
woman suffrage feared that the franchise would pervert civilized gender re-
lations, lead (white) women to abandon their homes and families, and re-
sult in the domestication and demasculinization of (white) men.

lieve that it is of vital importance that our sex should have no political ends to
serve!”58 Caroline Corbin wrote that many leading workers in charity and philan-
thropy “make a special plea for immunity from political responsibilities, on the
grounds that at present women . . . can carry their claims for legal help to both po-
litical parties and be sure of a respectful hearing, while if they were voters they would
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 71

by their votes be allied with one or the other party and their requests would be subject
to party action and the rise and fall of party fortunes. Experience has taught them to
prefer decidedly their present independent position.”59
White women began to organize state antisuffrage societies in the 1890s and for two
decades successfully blocked suffragists from winning state referendums. The antisuf-
fragist movement had its greatest number of victories in a single year in 1915, when
suffrage referenda were defeated in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massa-
chusetts. Between 1912 and 1916, twenty-one state referenda on woman suffrage came
to a vote, and only six passed. At its height in 1916, the antisuffrage movement, coordi-
nated by the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, encompassed twenty-
five state organizations with a total membership of roughly 350,000.60
White women’s opposition to suffrage, however, must not be construed as part of a
blanket opposition to the woman’s rights movement overall. Boston reformer and an-
tisuffragist woman’s rights advocate Kate Gannet Wells could not have been more ex-
plicit on this point: woman antisuffragists, she affirmed, believed in “woman’s capacity
for advancement in every direction; in her right to receive the highest education, to de-
mand equal wages with men, to work as physician, lawyer, minister, lecturer . . . [to]
serve on school committees, on State boards of charities, and on all kindred institu-
tions, so that we wish to effect nocurtailment of awoman’ssphereexcept inthedirectionof suffrage.”61
Ruth Lyman, an antisuffragist member of the Woman’s Municipal League in Boston,
insisted, “It is not a “woman’s rights’question; it is a whichwoman’s rights question.”62 In
other words, with the sole exception of suffrage, suffragists and antisuffragists often
agreed on the other social changes they desired; in Lyman’s words, “both desire the
same end—namely, a better world to live in—[but] they differ fundamentally as to the
method of attaining it.”63 While on the surface it might seem that white suffragist and
antisuffragist women disagreed over sexual differences, what they were really debating
was how to make best political use of the racialized sexual differences that they agreed
set elite white women apart from other groups of women. Suffragists like Frances
Willard argued vehemently that (white) women should extend their activities explic-
itly to encompass politics, believing that women’s special womanly virtues would be
well suited to solving urban problems of poverty, crime, the assimilation of foreigners,
urban mismanagement, and so forth (“municipal housekeeping”).
Nonetheless, campaigning against suffrage raised practical problems for female an-
tisuffragists, who struggled to find ways to oppose suffragists without contradicting
their own ideals of what constituted acceptable political activity for women. Accord-
ing to historian Louise Stevenson, members of the all-female Massachusetts Associa-
tion Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women developed special tactics
(e.g., displaying placards that they hoped would be “silent speeches” rather than ad-
dressing people directly) that allowed them to participate in a “political campaign
without violating their self-imposed domestic standards.” Insisting that their organi-
zation was a women’s and not a political organization, they coordinated their activi-
ties with their male counterparts in such a manner as to permit them to relinquish
“the ‘political’ aspects of the campaign while managing its ‘educational’ aspects.”64
Not only did antisuffragist women largely share suffragists’ views about (white)
 72 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

women’s racial-sexual differences, they also often disagreed vehemently with male an-
tisuffragists’ blanket statements concerning the inferiority of “woman’s nature.” Alice
George emphasized: “No question of superiority or equality is involved in the opposi-
tion to votes for women”; educator Annie Nathan Meyer declared forthrightly that
“there is no longer [any] question of the capacity of woman’s brain to be trained to
wield the suffrage”; and journalist Jeanette L. Gilder agreed, stating that she was “a
great believer in the mental equality of the sexes.”65 While male antisuffragists sum-
moned biological and evolutionist theories to “prove” (white) women’s inferiority, fe-
male antisuffragists emphasized the need for women to develop themselves along
separate and different lines and to adopt a division of social labor that did not overlap
with men’s.66 Mrs. Herbert Lyman (an antisuffragist) argued as follows at the turn of
the century:

The strikingly progressive message the new century presents us is this: Give equal op-
portunity to men and women for expression along their different lines. Government,
law making, law enforcement, with all the allied problems of tariff, taxation, politics,
railroads, interstate and international relations, etc., must still be the business of men.
The business of women must be to work out a national ideal of domestic life and juve-
nile training.67

Many antisuffragist women supported other planks of the woman’s movement,

including women’s right to higher education, equal pay for equal work, access to male
professions, and so forth, and continued to work alongside white suffragists from the
1870s through the 1890s, serving together in organizations such as the Association for
the Advancement of Women, and the National Council of Women, the International
Council of Women, and in temperance and missionary societies. Leaders of organized
antisuffragism included women who considered themselves integral to the woman’s
movement, among them Catharine Beecher (1800–1878), founder of the Hartford Fe-
male Seminary and promoter of women’s education; Caroline Fairfield Corbin
(1835–c.1900?), who helped establish the Association for the Advancement of Women;
Annie Nathan Meyer (1867–1919), one of the original founders and trustees of Barnard
College, who promoted college education for women; Minnie Bronson, an agent of
the U.S. Labor Department, who lobbied for protective labor legislation for women;
Kate Barnard (1875–1930), a labor and prison reformer, who worked for the abolition
of child labor, state support of widows, and humane prison conditions for women;
Alice N. George, a labor organizer who belonged to the National Civic Federation of
the Woman’s Trade Union League; Helen Kendrick Johnson (1844–1917), a member of
the National League for the Civic Education of Women; Clara Leonard (1828–1904),
who was a leader of the prison reform movement in Massachusetts in the 1870s;
Catherine Robinson, who was active in a variety of social service organizations in
Massachusetts; and Kate Gannett Wells (1838–1911) who worked for the Massachu-
setts Moral Education Association to combat prostitution and alcoholism, led the
Woman’s Education Association of Boston in the 1870s, and was an active member and
secretary of the Association for the Advancement of Women in the 1880s.
White women’s opposition to suffrage, therefore, should not be misconstrued as
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 73

opposition to woman’s rights or to the woman’s movement overall. Antisuffragist

women believed that their opposition to the franchise was perfectly compatible with,
indeed requisite for, their continuing efforts to “advance” (white) women, improve
(whites’) civilization, and foster (white) racial progress. Critical of the existing male
system, female antisuffragists wanted to remain outside of electoral politics so that
they could use their position as outsiders as a form of moral leverage, to exercise their
“influence” with male elites to achieve the reforms they supported. They did not deny
the need to bring about social change or to alter the status and position of (white)
women. “That there are still unfair and degrading laws is granted,” wrote Kate Gan-
nett Wells, but “will a brutal, an intemperate husband be any less brutal or intemper-
ate because his wife has the power to vote?”68
In keeping with the antidemocratic sentiments of their class, antisuffrage women
wanted to preserve their own power relative to that of immigrants, blacks, and work-
ing-class people, whom they felt were not competent to take on political responsibili-
ties. In explaining her opposition, Annie Nathan Meyer, a proponent of women’s
higher education and a founder of Barnard College, pointed out: “It must be remem-
bered that the suffrage—at least in America—is almost certain to be refused to all
women, or given to all women; that a vote to one woman will be a vote to all women,
vicious and virtuous, ignorant and educated, lowest and highest.”69 Grace Goodwin
reiterated the same point in her own arguments: “In this day of frenzied democracy,
limited suffrage is not popular. . . . Suffragists desire full female citizenship [for all
women] with all the rights of men. It is against these wholesale claims that the anti-
suffragists level their objections.”70 Catharine Beecher also advocated a partial suf-
frage, and the famous writer Margaret Deland explicitly stated that she would support
a limited extension of suffrage to educated women only, but as so long as suffragists
insisted on a universal extension, she would not approve of the reform.71 Goodwin,
for example, argued that the United States should not follow the lead of other nations
who were considering enfranchising women, stressing that the United States was
unique in that it had “a negro and alien problem. . . . Our American negroes . . .
have not yet ceased to be a political menace. In the Southern states, where white con-
trol is held only by the rankest bribery, it is proposed to add, for further exploitation
and bribery all the negro women, who are more helpless and ignorant than the
men.”72
Like their suffragist counterparts, many ideas of the antisuffrage movement’s older
leaders, including Catharine Beecher and the prominent political journalist Mary Abi-
gail Dodge (1833–1896), were shaped by the debates over slavery, and their views about
white women’s role in politics were racialized at the very core. Beecher’s views were
formed at the height of debates over abolition during her residence in Cincinnati dur-
ing the 1830s, in the midst of violent confrontations between whites and blacks.
Dodge, who came into public view under the pseudonym Gail Hamilton in the late
1850s and emerged full-blown on the national journalistic scene in the 1860s, formu-
lated her views during the years of struggle preceding the Civil War and then in the
fiery debates over Reconstruction.
Despite the difference in their ages, Dodge and Beecher were similar in back-
 74 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

ground, self-identity and aspiration. Raised in evangelical Protestant families in small

northeastern towns (Beecher in Litchfield, Connecticut, Dodge in Hamilton, Massa-
chusetts), both women received the best private education available to young girls in
their day. Both began their careers as schoolteachers, but eventually shifted their en-
ergies from schoolteaching to writing, as they consciously sought to enlarge their own
public “influence.”73 Dodge even taught at the Hartford Female Seminary for a brief
period of time in 1854, although Beecher had long since left the school by then. Both
women remained single throughout their lives and so found themselves outside the
conventional boundaries of middle-class white women’s domestic sphere.
Together, these two women did as much as any suffragists to imbue white women
with a new political identity. Beecher transformed the subordinate role of the white
woman vis-à-vis the white man into a sign of “woman’s” superior moral sensibility
and made it the foundation from which white women might act in the political arena.
Historian Kathryn Sklar has argued that Beecher “defined the home not as the place
isolating [white] women from political affairs, but as the base from which their influ-
ence on the rest of the culture was launched.”74 But if Beecher was proposing a new
role for (white middle-class) women as mediators, working behind the scenes to miti-
gate social conflict, it must not be forgotten that such drastic action was required be-
cause the nation was facing a racial crisis: white women’s skills were needed to soothe
and diffuse immanent racial violence.75
More than thirty years younger than Beecher, and having more models to emulate
(including Beecher), Dodge eventually achieved a reputation only slightly less promi-
nent than Beecher’s famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Where as Beecher had had
to defend her decision to publish treatises on race questions, Dodge accepted her po-
litical authorship as a natural extension of a white woman’s moral authority. Whereas
Beecher had had to go to great lengths to show why white women, as the best-trained
mothers of society, had much to contribute to political debate (a position that suffrag-
ists would take up and exploit to full benefit in the 1880s), for Dodge, motherhood was
beside the point. Even in the 1880s, Beecher still held on to the hope that “woman’s in-
fluence” could reinvigorate Jacksonian forms of republicanism, eliminate racial and
class conflict, buttress white racial supremacy, and peacefully resolve social conflicts.
In contrast, Dodge accepted social and racial conflict as an inevitable component of
public life, in accordance with laissez-faire and evolutionist notions that competitive
conflict led to progress, and so did not argue that it was white women’s responsibility
to purge politics of contentiousness and conflict. Indeed, rather than celebrate domes-
ticity, Dodge criticized it, exposing the cultural myths that depicted marriage, moth-
erhood, and domesticity as fulfilling occupations for white women.
The lives of these two antisuffragists reveal the meaninglessness of trying to define
antisuffragism as a conservative or conventional defense of domesticity in contrast to
suffragists’ purported attack on the home, for Beecher helped to make domesticity
and motherhood the basis for white middle-class women’s political activity in ways
that suffragists would later emulate and adopt, while Dodge’s criticism of white
women’s subordination within middle-class homes was so trenchant that she was
often mistaken for a radical suffragist. What these two antisuffragists shared, both be-
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 75

tween themselves and with their white suffragist opponents, however, was a determi-
nation to create political roles for white women that would maintain white civiliza-
tion and advance “the race.”

The Gender Politics of Catharine Beecher

But while [the white] woman holds a subordinate relation in society to the
other sex, it is not because it was designed that her duties or her influence
should be any less important, or all-pervading. But it was designed that
the mode of gaining influence and of exercising powershould be altogether different
and peculiar.
Catharine Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism(1837)

Catharine Beecher’s public visibility as a political commentator was consolidated,

ironically enough, in the series of “Letters” she exchanged with Angelina Grimké on
the slavery question in the late 1830s. At issue in this exchange was not only the ques-
tion of the future legal status of African Americans but also the redefining of white
women’s role in the political struggle over slavery and abolitionism. Beecher took the
position that white women should not assume a direct role in the antislavery move-
ment, and she argued for their remaining “impartial” actors so that they could con-
solidate their power as “moral” arbiters of social problems.
In Beecher’s day, public opinion was traditionally shaped in three main ways:
through the press, through the pulpit, and through the party. All these vehicles were
the domain of elite Anglo-Saxon men, but by the mid 1830s, white middle-class
women were beginning to develop their own forms of political activity: circulating
petitions for signatures, offering talks and lecture courses in the homes of prominent
women, and publishing monographs, letters, poems, and columns expressing their
political views.76 Beecher herself used these kinds of tactics in a campaign to assist the
Cherokees in 1828, as they were being expelled from Georgia, when she wrote a circu-
lar addressed “To Benevolent Women of the United States.” Seeking “the aid and
council of some of the most judicious and influential ladies of Hartford,” Beecher con-
vened a meeting, read the circular, sought signatures on a petition, and offered
prayers calling for “the intervention of the National Government to protect the Indi-
ans.” She then sent the circular as an anonymous chain letter to “lady friends” in
other northern, midwestern and western cities, asking recipients to keep their identity
secret but to mail the circular to “the most influential and benevolent ladies of [their]
acquaintance.”77 In keeping with this approach, eight years later Beecher would argue
against the propriety of white women taking active roles in abolitionist societies, al-
though she fully approved of these other activities. If Beecher did not directly chal-
lenge the terms of the dominant discourse, in which politics was considered a “male”
activity, she nonetheless helped fashion a culturally sanctioned role for white women
in political affairs.
In 1832, Catharine, at age thirty-two, moved to Cincinnati with her father and her
 76 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

two younger sisters, Harriet and Isabella, so that her father, Lyman Beecher, could as-
sume the presidency of Lane Seminary, a liberal institution whose students were sym-
pathetic to the antislavery cause. Catherine worked to establish a new school for
young ladies, the Western Female Institute, and devoted her time to raising money for
her project and attracting prospective students.
When the Beechers arrived in the early 1830s, Cincinnati was embroiled in a
decade-long period of racial conflict. Because of its location on the north bank of the
Ohio River across from slaveholding Kentucky, Cincinnati served as a stopping-off
point for many slaves trying to escape the South, and had a significant black presence.
Moreover, Ohio, as a free state, was attractive to white liberals from both New England
and nearby southern slaveholding states, but a large majority of prominent white
families in town had commercial ties to the South and were antiblack and proslav-
ery.78 In 1826, The Cincinnati Colonization Society was formed to restrict the size of
the black population, which had grown since 1810 to roughly 10 percent of all resi-
dents.79 In 1829, racial tensions culminated in white riots against blacks, and the town
instituted “black laws” requiring black residents to present certificates of freedom to
city officials. The new laws and the white antipathy prompted roughly 50 percent of
the local black population to flee the city in the early 1830s.80 In the midst of this racial
turmoil, Beecher was hard pressed to stay neutral: she needed to remain on good
terms with prominent white families (whose patronage she required to keep her insti-
tute functioning), and yet members of her own family would soon declare themselves
in support of abolition.
Catharine was present in 1834 when white students at Lane Seminary discussed the
relative merits of colonization (freeing individual blacks and repatriating them in
Africa) versus immediate abolition (ending slavery and allowing freed blacks to re-
main in the United States) in a series of debates that was organized by a student,
Thomas Weld. The immediate result was the conversion of the majority of Lane’s stu-
dents from colonization to abolition. The trustees outlawed the students’ antislavery
society, and Lyman Beecher, when he returned to town, sided with the trustees, per-
haps at his daughter’s recommendation. Student leaders, including Weld, were threat-
ened with expulsion, whereupon most resigned and left for the newly established
Oberlin College, which openly welcomed blacks.81
In August 1836, tensions escalated further in Cincinnati. A group of prominent
white men destroyed the press of James Birney, a well-known abolitionist and fol-
lower of Weld, who had been publishing an abolitionist journal, the Philanthropist. The
white society in which the Beechers traveled was divided. Some prominent citizens,
such as Nathaniel Wright and Jacob Burnet, were sympathetic to those who had de-
stroyed Birney’s newspaper. Others, like Samuel P. Chase, an abolitionist, and Charles
Hammond, a local newspaper editor, defended Birney’s right to free speech.82
Catharine apparently attended a meeting between Jacob Burnet and James Birney, in
which Burnet had urged Birney to stop publication—in an unsuccessful attempt to
forestall the planned action to sack the press if publication continued.83 Shortly after
these riots, Catharine’s sister Harriet wrote to her husband, Calvin Stowe, that “a large
body, perhaps the majority of citizens, disapprove [of the violence] but I fear there will
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 77

not be public disavowal. . . . Mr. Hammond (editor of the ‘Gazette’) . . . has con-
demned the whole thing, and Henry [Catharine’s brother, who edited the Cincinnati
Journal] has opposed, but otherwise the papers have either been silent or in favor of
mobs.”84
Unlike her sister and brother, Catharine did not immediately defend Birney’s right
to free speech, nor did she join the local female anti-slavery society when one of its
members came to her home with abolitionist literature just after Birney’s press was
destroyed.85 While she lived in Cincinnati, Beecher remained opposed to the forma-
tion of abolitionist societies and held local abolitionists personally accountable for stir-
ring up civic unrest. In a letter written to members of her family in January 1838,
Catharine gave her reasons for keeping her distance from the Cincinnati abolitionists:
“I have yet to . . . see that Abolitionism and all that help it along are not doing
more harm than good—retarding the prospect of a speedy ending of it [slavery]—and
making more and more probable the result of a dangerous and bloody issue to what might
have been accomplished by safer and gentler means. . . . As to freedom of speech and
all that matter I never saw less of it than since the Abolitionists have begun to take
care of it.”86
Meanwhile, Angelina Grimké (1805–1873), whom Beecher had met briefly years
before when Grimké visited Catharine’s school in Hartford, had joined the Philadel-
phia Female Anti-Slavery Society and had become well known as an abolitionist who
had formerly been a slaveholder herself.87 Grimké’s pamphlet, An Appeal tothe Christian
Women of the Southpublished in 1836, attracted a great deal of attention, and by the fall of
1836, the American Anti-Slavery Society had engaged her to hold meetings in private
homes in New York City to recruit white women to the cause.88 Beecher received a
copy of Grimké’s Appeal and was asked to circulate it. Instead she decided to respond to
Grimké publicly, a decision she justified to her readers by explaining that she needed
to show “ladies of the non-slave-holding States” why it would be “unwise” and “inex-
pedient” for them “to unite themselves in Abolition Societies.”89 Beecher’s published
response,An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionismwith Reference to the Duty of American Females, was
answered in turn by Grimké’s Letters toCatharine Beecher, first published in Garrison’s Lib-
eratorand then collected in book form in 1838.
Although Beecher opposed both male and female participation in abolitionist
societies, she felt that abolitionism was particularly unsuitable for (white) women, as
abolitionist tactics were “calculated to stimulate pride, anger, ill-will, [and] con-
tention.” “A man may act on society by the collision of intellect, in public debate;”
Beecher wrote; “he may urge his measures by a sense of shame, by fear, and by per-
sonal interest; . . . he may drive by physical force, and he does not outstep the
boundaries of his sphere.” But (white) women, Beecher believed, ought to act in ac-
cordance with a higher moral standard: “But all the power, and all the conquests that
are lawful to woman, are those only which appeal to the kindly, generous, peaceful
and benevolent principles.”90
Beecher’s understanding of what was necessary for a political system to function
without disorder or conflict was built upon a republican ideology that emphasized
self-restraint, disinterestedness, and rationality as necessary qualities for political lead-
 78 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

ers and republican citizens, qualities that up until this point were thought to be avail-
able only in white men. Beecher invoked this ideology both to counter blacks’ chal-
lenges to whites’ racial domination (she believed whites were superior in these re-
spects to blacks) as well as to buttress white women’s race-specific claims to a political
role. Although Beecher was working out of a political philosophy in which political
leaders (presumed to be white Protestant men) were expected to control and suppress
strong feelings as they legislated for the “public good,” she became increasingly con-
cerned that white men could no longer restrain themselves—and that the special
skills of white women had to be employed. For example, in critiquing Garrisonian op-
position to the Colonization Society, Beecher wrote:
The peaceful and christian method of meeting the difficulty would have been, to col-
lect all the evidence of this supposed hurtful tendency, and privately, and in a respectful
and conciliating way, to have presented it to the attention of the wise and benevolent
men, who were most interested in sustaining their institution. If this measure did not
avail to convince them, then it would have been safe and justifiable to present to the
public a temperate statement of facts, and of the deductions based on them, drawn up
in a respectful and candid manner, with every charitable allowance which truth could
warrant.91

In effect, Beecher began to advocate for white women the model of political action
that she could no longer find in male leaders.92
Although Beecher lessened her opposition to abolitionism when she left the Mid-
west, she never lost her conviction that white men’s control over politics and the so-
cial order were deteriorating as the country was entering a period of heightened racial
conflict. In the 1850s, Beecher’s sense of a growing national crisis grew more acute, and
she singled out conflict between immigrants and the native-born; sectarian strife; par-
tisan politics; and a corrupt political press as the worst ills.
Meanwhile, as men are losing the restraints of self-government, family discipline, and
law, the causes of dangerous excitement are multiplying. The clashing interestsof foreign-
ers and native-born citizens, the deep-rooted prejudices of Catholics and Protestants,
the threateningaspects of slavery, the demoralizinginfluencesof party politics and the political
press, the all-pervading malaria of corrupt literature, the low tone of piety in the
Christian church, the consequent increase of sectarian bitterness, and finally, the wide
prevalence of rationalism, infidelity, and skepticism—all these present portentous
omens of danger.93

The solution for ills of this nature, Beecher believed, no longer lay with men or their
organizations: “It is WOMAN,” Beecher wrote,” who is to come in at this emergency,
and meet the demand . . . if this country is ever [to be] saved, it must be by woman
more than by man.”94
Beecher’s efforts to politicize the home and bring white women into the public
arena as peacemakers and moral mediators went hand in hand with her attempts to
make teaching a respected profession for women and to professionalize mother-
hood.95 (White) woman’s role as savior of her country had to be acted out through her
contact with and influence over children—both as mother and teacher. For this she
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 79

needed specialized training. Homemaking needed to be practiced seriously as a profes-

sional occupation, bringing to bear all the new developments in “domestic science” on
daily chores.
Beecher’s call for a profession of homemaking that was “as honorable and as lucra-
tive for her [the white woman] as the legal, medical and theological professions are for
[white] men,” was not just a means of increasing the status of white women.96 It also
instantly forged new class divisions among white women on the basis of education and
training. Not all women could become “professionals” in mothering, teaching, and
homemaking—the status of the professional depended on many women falling
below the “professional” standard, since the very concept of “professionalizing” meant
creating occupational categories into which access was carefully regulated.97 Prior to
the demand for domestic training, all mothers, regardless of class or ethnic back-
ground, potentially had been equals in their mothering because mothering had been
understood as a “natural” quality inherent in womanhood, not a skill to be taught
and learned. In demanding training for motherhood (and training for teachers to
train mothers), Beecher introduced a new class hierarchy among women—creating
new categories of better and worse mothers. Moreover, Beecher’s demands for domes-
tic reform and the professionalization of motherhood introduced new racialized divi-
sions among white, immigrant, and black women, since many groups—including en-
slaved, immigrant, and Native American women—were automatically excluded from
Beecher’s conception because they did not have the kind of homes Beecher conceived
as the foundation for “woman’s” political authority.
In sum, by redefining (white) woman’s role in the family, school, and government,
Beecher solidified the class and racial components of a social hierarchy that were not
always explicitly recognized but existed nonetheless. As teaching, mothering, and
homemaking were invested with moral qualities and requirements that were not
matched in any other domain; as the home became the locus of ethical learning; and
as the schoolhouse (beginning to be dominated by white middle-class women) be-
came the reinforcer of moral rules, white women could lay claim to a kind of au-
thority to which they had previously been unable to appeal, and from which non-
white women were excluded.

The Racial Politics of Mary Abigail Dodge

[White] women in not voting are not unrepresented in the sense or to the
extent to which non-voting negroes are unrepresented. The African is a
separate race from the Caucasian, with its own ambitions and traditions.
Either, without the other, is an entire and a distinct race; but the men and
women of an American community are one race.
Gail Hamilton [Mary Abigail Dodge],
Woman’sWrongs(1868)
In 1858, at age twenty-three, Mary Abigail Dodge left New England for Washington,
D.C., to take a position as governess in the family of Gamaliel Bailey, the abolitionist
 80 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

editor of the National Era, in which he had two years earlier published some of Dodge’s
poetry and essays. Bailey lived the life of a prominent, influential political journalist, in
a large house staffed with black servants—a life very different from the one Dodge had
known in the reserved New England Congregational household in which she had
grown up. Despite Bailey’s recent illness and increasing financial problems, his resi-
dence remained a social center for politicians, journalists, and foreign expatriates.
During the day, Dodge made the acquaintance of the social elite of Washington; in the
evenings, she engaged in literary and political conversations with guests, including
many prominent Republican politicians.98 During this period she sent political com-
mentaries to the Congregationalist under the assumed name Cuntare, becoming one of
the first female political correspondents in Washington, D.C.99
In 1860, after Bailey’s death, Dodge moved back home to Hamilton, where she re-
mained for the duration of the Civil War, and where she wrote the columns published
in the Atlantic Monthly that instantly brought “Gail Hamilton” fame and public appre-
ciation, causing one of her admirers later to remark that “in sarcasm and invective
[Gail Hamilton] has hardly a peer among American authors. She is incisive, even com-
bative, by nature, and thoroughly enjoys a good, hot old-fashioned controversy.”100
After the death of her father in 1864, Dodge stayed on to nurse her mother through a
final illness, which ended in her death in 1868. In 1871, at age thirty-eight, her journal-
istic reputation secure, Dodge moved back to Washington, D.C., spending her winters
in the household of James G. Blaine, who was married to her first cousin, and her
summers up north, in her home in Hamilton.
Dodge quickly became an integral and beloved member of the Blaine family, assist-
ing her cousin with the hosting of dinner parties, serving as a sounding board for
Blaine’s political ideas, and enjoying the political influence that she wielded through
her close association to powerful politicians.101 Outwardly, at least, the Blaine house-
hold was similar to Bailey’s: large, well staffed with servants, a social center for liberal
Republican political circles. Blaine was a prominent national politician, holding the
positions of Speaker of the House (1869–1876), senator from Maine (1877–1881), and
secretary of state (1880–1881, 1888–1892).102 The Blaine household was an ideal place
from which to wield the kind of political influence that antisuffragists desired to pre-
serve. Harriet Prescott Spofford, a political journalist in her own right and close friend
of Dodge’s, wrote several years after Dodge’s death: “[G]reat men and charming
women clustered about her, senators, cabinet officers, diplomats, and titled English-
men of the High commission, the President himself, all attended on her court, at first
entertained and delighted with her brilliancy and pleasantness, and then discovering
her as a woman of affairs, having her part in statecraft, and of great value with her ad-
vice and her work.”103
As Spofford’s reminiscence suggests, when Dodge returned to Washington, D.C., in
the 1870s, she attracted a great deal of attention. Women who wrote about meeting
her often noted how she immediately drew men to her. Men who wrote about their
first encounters with Dodge said they found her “brilliant.” Dodge herself was proud
of the impression that she made, as a woman, upon men. The care and expense that
Dodge assumed to outfit herself were known throughout the city. Her decision to re-
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 81

main single was not the result of a lack of suitors. On the contrary, Dodge had many
male friends and admirers, including a George Wood, who was interested in her from
the first day he met her in Washington in 1858, an interest that did not abate through-
out their long correspondence in the 1860s.104 Rather, Dodge had no romantic illu-
sions about the bliss of wedded life, and in a private letter she ruminated, “I assure you
with entire seriousness that nothing which my own life has missed given me a tithe of
the disturbance, I might almost say despair, which I have found in the terrible bewil-
derments of the married lives I have seen.”105
In keeping with this sentiment, much of Dodge’s writing in the late 1860s and early
1870s exposed the cultural myths that celebrated middle-class marriage, motherhood,
and domesticity.106 She often remonstrated with (white) married women for not pay-
ing adequate attention to their appearance and personal development, arguing that
they ought to resist and change their domestic condition rather than merely submit
to it with quiet forbearance. Refusing to idealize domesticity or to make it the basis for
women’s politicization, she called housework necessary drudgery and saw it as some-
thing that prevented white women from engaging in other more interesting and re-
warding activities, anticipating the arguments that Charlotte Perkins Gilman and
Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge would set forth decades later. For Dodge, the solution
lay in finding ways to escape domestic work. Thus, Dodge recommended that moth-
ers hire servants to care for their infants so that they could continue to read, ride, play
music, and cultivate themselves.107
The assumption of a pseudonym enabled Dodge to develop two personas: as Mary
Abigail she was a charming, witty hostess—the epitome of “true womanhood” (ex-
cept for her lack of a husband, but her position in Blaine’s household was an excellent
substitute). As Gail Hamilton, however, Dodge was biting, argumentative, confronta-
tional, and aggressive—qualities that made some of her readers certain that she had to
be a man. The use of the pseudonym allowed her to express a wide range of political
ideas without having to bear the consequences of her political outspokenness in her
private life. Her family humorously nicknamed her “Mary the Dodger” and John
Greenleaf Whittier, an intimate friend, reportedly told her that it would be better if
she wrote under her real name, as that “might keep her within the bounds of good be-
havior.”108 The assumption of the pseudonym did not serve so much to mask Dodge’s
growing power as to further enlarge her public sphere of influence without endanger-
ing her private life.
Because of the lucidity with which Dodge critiqued the misogynist views of male
antisuffragists, she was sometimes mistaken for a supporter of woman suffrage. Her
first antisuffrage treatise, entitled Woman’s Wrongs: A Counter-Irritant, was devoted (in
Dodge’s words) to “tearing in pieces some of the flimsiest of these anti-female-suffrage
arguments; . . . set[ting] in their strongest light the arguments for female suffrage.”
But in the end, Dodge concluded “that these [prosuffrage] arguments also availed
nothing, and that female suffrage would not mend matters.”109 Even so, Dodge’s po-
litical analysis was so incisive that Susan B. Anthony wrote to her, asking if she would
be willing to write for the Revolution, the newly founded journal of the National
Woman Suffrage Association.110 Two decades later, in the mid 1880s, the Woman’s Journal
 82 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

quoted Hamilton out of context, giving the impression that she was a suffragist.111 In
1912, the feminist Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge included Dodge among her pantheon
of early advocates of women’s rights in a history of the woman’s movement.112
This longstanding confusion over Dodge’s antisuffrage stance is fully understand-
able, given her scathing criticism of white men’s political misogynism and her lifelong
commitment to critiquing the ideology of woman’s sphere.113 Arguing against those
who opposed woman suffrage because it contravened woman’s nature and natural
sphere, Dodge wrote, “If the right of suffrage shall result in bringing woman from the
domestic hearth to the public hall, it will only show that we have all been wrong to-
gether in restricting her to the former.” To those who claimed that (white) men could
be trusted to represent the interests of their families, Dodge replied scornfully, “Cer-
tainly they cannot [be trusted]. Men are in the constant daily habit of doing injustice
to wife, mother, daughter, sister.”114 Dodge also dismissed the argument that (white)
women’s involvement in politics would be unseemly or that these women should not
have (or did not need) a political voice, and she insisted that her opposition to woman
suffrage was not to be taken as a slight upon the general intelligence or political readi-
ness of “American” women:

Are American women, as a class, more unfit to vote than Irishmen?Are they less capa-
ble of understanding issues involved, and of passing judgment upon measures pro-
posed, than negroes who have been slaves for generations? . . . It will not be denied
that the Mrs. Stowes, the Miss Mitchells, the Mary Lyons, the Mrs. Mills, the Madame
de Staels, [the Gail Hamiltons!] are as able to form an intelligent opinion, even upon
questions of finance and internal improvements, as the laborers who are digging in the
canals, and the shoemakers pegging on their benches.115

She lamented the naturalization and enfranchisement of “illiterate foreigners,” con-

sidering it “utterly irrational” for them to “make laws for the nation, while an edu-
cated and intelligent woman is not allowed to cast a vote to keep him at home.”116 Yet
Dodge remained unconvinced that the “indiscriminate” enfranchisement of women
would bring any definite benefit to women as a group or to the nation. Had Dodge
had the alternative of a partial or limited franchise—one that restricted suffrage on
the basis of education to the racial groups she thought suited for it—she probably
would have lent her support to the measure.117
Although Dodge did not support the universal enfranchisement of women, believ-
ing that the contributions of women like herself would not make up for the involve-
ment of lower-class women, she adopted a different approach to the enfranchisement
of black men. In 1868 Dodge argued that racial differences, unlike sexual differences,
mandated immediate political recognition:

Women in not voting are not unrepresented in the sense or to the extent to which non-
voting negroes are unrepresented. The African is a separate race from the Caucasian,
with its own ambitions and traditions. Either, without the other, is an entire and a dis-
tinct race; but the men and women of an American community are one race. . . .
The life of our [i.e., white] men and women is constantly and inextricably intertwined;
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 83

in the house, in the church, in the assembly, in work and worship and recreation, they
are inseparable companions, every moment giving and receiving influence.118

Dodge’s terms reveal how magnified for her racial difference appeared: Negroes were
of a different continent—they were “African,” not “American.” It was the profundity
of this racial difference that justified the enfranchisement of African American men
but not “American” women.
Yet Dodge’s support of black enfranchisement went hand in hand with a belief in
black inferiority and a deep antipathy for blacks as a race, which, if it was not already
evident in the late 1860s, was clearly present in an article she wrote on “Race Preju-
dice” in 1885 for the North American Review. In this piece, Dodge was outspokenly critical
of the Congregational church, the Home Missionary Society, and the American Mis-
sionary Association for allowing racially mixed congregations. Dodge defended
whites’ right to attend all-white churches, calling whites’ maintenance of a color line
an “ethnological fact, utterly without moral quality.” Her claims were formulated
using social-Darwinian language, as is evident in her attribution of “much of his [the
Negro’s] inferiority . . . to his longer apprenticeship at barbarism, his longer servi-
tude to degradation.” Moreover, Dodge went on to explain that “race prejudice” did
not exist “all on one side. . . . The colored people have as strong an objection to
mingling with their Caucasian brethren as the Caucasians have to mingling with the
Africans.” These statements elicited a vehement response from Charlotte Forten, a
prominent black poet and writer in Philadelphia, who pointed out that one reason
blacks seemed to Dodge to prefer to remain in their own churches was that they were
mistreated by whites when they visited white churches.119
It is not clear whether Dodge always harbored these racist views or grew more stri-
dent after Reconstruction. Although her writings from the 1860s do not contain such
explicit claims about blacks’ racial inferiority, nothing I have seen in the primary
sources suggests that these remarks were a departure for Dodge. Abolitionism and a
belief in black inferiority were never mutually exclusive ideologies, and Dodge’s com-
mitment to political liberty for enslaved blacks was not meant to challenge white su-
premacy. As Dodge wrote in the mid-1880s: “The old question, put in abolition days,
‘Do you want your daughter to marry a nigger?’ was impertinent, irrelevant, ignorant.
A ‘nigger’s’ marriage had nothing whatever to do with a ‘nigger’s’ freedom. The ques-
tion was of political and personal liberty, not of social status.”120 In the 1880s, however,
debates about sexual difference, race, empire, and miscegenation raised the question of
black men’s social relations to white women directly, and Dodge was not embarrassed
to express the distaste she felt for intermarriage. “But when we come to this question
of mixed churches, we come plumply [sic] and squarely upon the question of ‘marry-
ing a nigger.’”121
Dodge’s life and writings are full of interesting contradictions that serve as a cau-
tion against overstating the conservative dimensions of antisuffragism, despite the
pervasive racism contained therein. Dodge opposed woman suffrage, yet she encour-
aged intelligent (white) women to take an active interest in politics. She advocated a
 84 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

“Hands-off government” policy in the industrial realm, departing from most other
antisuffragists in this regard, because she believed that working-class women, like
everyone else, should be treated as independent, responsible agents. Like her suffragist
opponent, Caroline Dall, she believed that women had a right to “equal pay for equal
work.”122 Finally, while she disavowed the wisdom of the government intervening in
the economy, this was not meant to be a full rejection of patriarchal protection.
Rather, she insisted that women deserved the protection of husbands, even though
she was also critical of women’s financial subordination in the home and personally
could not bear the emotional dynamics produced by financial dependency.
Dodge’s life also exemplifies the way that antisuffragists of her generation exploited
dominant cultural beliefs about the need for (white) women to be protected, even as
they themselves gradually moved to take on the agency of the protector of others. For
this reason, many antisuffragists opposed what they called “equal suffrage”—a term
they used with disapprobation—because they feared it would jeopardize the roles of
moral arbiters that they had developed since Beecher’s activism of the 1830s. In their
view, “equal suffrage” threatened (white) women’s traditional means of serving the
state, for such women demonstrated their sense of civic responsibility by having chil-
dren and by exercising their “influence” over husbands and legislators, as well as
through social work and holding appointive office. For antisuffragists, it was clear:
“protection” signified “privilege,” and they offered lists of the sex-specific “privileges”
that (white) women would have to forgo if they agreed to be enfranchised. They were
allowed to acquire a settlement without paying a tax; they were exempt from sup-
porting indigent husbands (even though men always had to support their wives); they
could divorce husbands who failed to provide for them and were frequently entitled to
alimony even if they remarried (husbands had no equivalent rights); they were not
liable for their husbands’ debts, even though husbands were liable for wives’ debts;
they could not be arrested in a civil action until a judgment was obtained against
them, while men could be so arrested; they received more favorable terms in life in-
surance policies than men; they were treated more leniently by juries than men and,
if unmarried or widowed, they were exempt from taxation.123 All these “special privi-
leges” were accorded “in recognition of the fact that as a woman she has a special ser-
vice to perform for the state . . . in order that the motherhood of the race may be protected
and that future citizens shall have the birth right and the inheritance of a strong and
vigorous childhood.”124 All these privileges, antisuffragists believed, would have to be
forgone if women were recognized as the legal equals of men. Most significant, female
antisuffragists opposed woman suffrage because they anticipated that the principle of
equality embedded in suffrage demands would endanger special protective labor laws
that had been introduced in the 1880s. Mrs. Arthur M. Dodge succinctly summed up
the conflict: “Equal suffrage would demand that woman should enter into competition
with man in a fair field with favor to none, but woman’s welfare demands protection
under the laws.”125
The awareness of the conflict between “equality” and “protection” that was ex-
pressed in antisuffragist writings in the 1890s did not elicit much response from suf-
fragists prior to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. It was not until
 THE MAKING OF A WHITE FEMALE CITIZENRY • 85

the mid-1920s that advocates of the Equal Rights Amendment directly clashed with
proponents of protective labor legislation over the meaning of “political equality” and
the significance of “equal rights.” In 1923, many women who had previously advo-
cated woman suffrage, including Carrie Chapman Catt, Florence Kelley and Jane Ad-
dams, opposed the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment because they be-
lieved the latter would jeopardize sex-specific, special protective labor legislation.
They too were now confronting a tension between “difference” and “equality” that
antisuffragists had identified a generation previously. The origins of that struggle can
be traced to the debates over coeducation and industrial education that took place in
the 1870s, as I will show in the next chapter.
 3

The Politics of Patriarchal Protection
Debates over Coeducation and Special
Labor Legislation for Women

For both sexes, there is no exception to the law, that their greatest
power and largest attainment lie in the perfect development of their
organization. . . . The physiological motto is, Educate a man for
manhood, a woman for womanhood, both for humanity. In this lies
the hope of the race.
Edward Clarke,
Sex in Education (1873)

D URI NG TH E POST BELLU M PERI OD , the woman’s movement fashioned a politics

out of protection that eventually made it possible for white middle-class women
to become political actors and agents of the state, despite dominant cultural assump-
tions about sexual differences that characterized women as unsuited for these roles.
Yet protection—which encompassed white men offering white women financial sup-
port, supervision, polite courtesies, and a general solicitousness that was not extended
to other groups of women—was conceived as a “privilege” to be granted only so far as
(white) women lived in conformity with patriarchal norms of middle-class domes-
ticity. White women sensed that these kinds of protections would be withdrawn if
they did not conform to their primary roles as homemakers and childrearers. Freeing
themselves from the category of the protected and becoming protectors themselves
was a difficult maneuver, yet it became, as I shall show, one of the most effective ways
that white, middle-class women began to assume political power without transgress-
ing culturally prescribed notions of womanhood and civilized gender relations.
In the 1870s, physicians accused middle-class women who aspired to college educa-
tions of willfully flouting motherhood and domesticity, and they castigated these
women for any illnesses that later beset them. It was generally assumed that college
women voluntarily brought reproductive harm upon themselves by removing them-
selves from the domestic realm of patriarchal protection so carefully constructed for
their benefit. The same physicians were much more sympathetic toward women in-
dustrial workers, whom they cast as victims of the “disarrangement of economic
forces in society,” believing that these women worked only because the structures of
patriarchal protection had malfunctioned. Dominant cultural prescriptions held that
women employed in industry were not working out of “choice”—that they would

86
 THE POLITICS OF PATRIARCHAL PROTECTION • 87

have preferred to remain at home and that they would happily leave the paid labor
force as soon as it was economically feasible for them to do so. Thus, in contrast to the
dangerous expressions of autonomy that many conservatives saw in middle-class
women’s attempts to secure higher education, most labor reformers construed
women’s industrial work and other forms of wage labor as the consequence of a bro-
ken-down patriarchal system (men’s inability to protect women) that was itself proof
that the country was regressing faster and faster in the direction of barbarism and sav-
agery. Most white people viewed industrial work for women either as a temporary oc-
cupation for young women still seeking husbands; as a necessary stopgap measure for
women whose fathers and husbands could not earn adequate livings; or as the last re-
sort for widows and other single women who lacked male protectors.1
This chapter examines the contradictory responses of the woman’s movement to
these two issues during the 1870s: its opposition to one physician’s (Edward Clarke’s)
invocation of sexual difference to protect women from the purportedly harmful ef-
fects of higher education, and its support of another physician’s (Azel Ames’s) use of
sexual difference to protect women who labored in industry. Examining these debates
side by side, we can see a fundamental paradox operating at the heart of “the politics
of protection,” in which class and racial dimensions were central but rarely articulated
explicitly. In the context of higher education, advocates of woman’s rights exposed as
a myth the claim that (middle-class white) women needed men’s “protection.” But in
the context of labor reform, these advocates embraced the position that (working-
class) women’s sexual differences mandated special treatment in the form of protec-
tive labor legislation. In so doing, women’s rights advocates helped fashion a new role
for themselves as protectors of the laboring classes, a role that superseded their own
status as protected middle-class homemakers.

IN i     AT TH E I N VI TATI ON OF SU FFRAGI ST Julia Ward Howe, Dr. Edward H. Clarke, a

retired faculty member of Harvard Medical School, gave a controversial address on

“Sex in Education” to the New England Woman’s Club of Boston.2 Women’s rights ad-
vocates had considered Clarke an ally of their cause because three years earlier he had
denounced male medical students in Philadelphia for harassing female classmates. In
his address to the Woman’s Club, however, he warned that men’s colleges and univer-
sities were potentially harmful to women’s health because women’s unique physiol-
ogy mandated a different educational system from that designed for men.3 Clarke in-
sisted that he was not arguing for a full restriction in (white middle-class) women’s
education or woman’s sphere, only for a change in the way that these women were ed-
ucated: “Women who choose to do so,” Clarke acknowledged, “can master the hu-
manities and the mathematics, encounter the labor of the law and the pulpit, endure
the hardness of physics and the conflicts of politics.” But, he added, “they must do it
all in woman’s way, not in man’s way. In all their work they must respect their own
organization, and remain women, not strive to be men, or they will ignominiously
fail.”4
Clarke’s talk sparked a vehement discussion among woman’s rights activists—and
physicians, professionals, and scientists more generally—about the ways in which
 88 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

(white) women differed from (white) men.5 Yet in some respects, the vehemence of
women’s responses is surprising, for in his arguments about the need for a “special”
educational program for women, Clarke was merely following a position well out-
lined by female educators of the previous forty years—educators such as Caroline
Kirkland, Emma Willard, and Catharine Beecher, all of whom had been demanding
separate educational institutions for (white) women on the grounds that (white)
women’s sexual differences and unique sexual roles necessitated a different training.
Indeed, many of Clarke’s critics, including Caroline Dall, an organizer of the New
England Woman’s Rights Convention of 1859 and author of Woman’s Right toLabor(1860)
and The College, the Market, and the Court (1867), insisted that they shared Clarke’s views on
sexual difference. Dall wrote, “I start from the same premises with Dr. Clarke; for I be-
lieve the spiritual and intellectual functions of men and women to tend differently to
their one end; and their development to this end . . . to be best achieved by differ-
ent methods.”6 Why, then, if they agreed with the basic premise—that women funda-
mentally differed from men and thus needed different educational methods—did
women like Dall find Clarke’s book so objectionable? Most advocates of woman’s
rights saw Clarke as a significant adversary in a battle in which much was at stake. Eliza
Duffey, another woman’s rights activist in Boston, wrote that she considered Clarke’s
“line of attack masterly” and feared that “if he convinces the world that woman is a
‘sexual’ creature . . . the battle is won for those who oppose the advancement of
women.”7
Clarke’s remarks, and the vehement debates that ensued, were part of an extensive,
broad-based response to the influx of young white women into higher education that
took place in the first decade after the Civil War. In 1870, five years after the war’s end,
roughly eleven thousand women attended institutions of higher education, 4.6 per-
cent of these in coeducational colleges. By 1880, however, there was a fourfold increase
in the numbers of women attending college to approximately forty thousand, almost
a quarter of them enrolled in coeducational institutions.8 Higher education—gaining
access to it, and using it to obtain occupational and financial reward—had become a
crucial issue for middle-class women aspiring to economic independence in the early
1870s, as they increasingly realized how significant education had become for their fa-
thers, husbands, and brothers in differentiating themselves from men of nonprofes-
sional or lower-class status. In effect, Clarke was denying these women access to the
same avenue of class differentiation, financial improvement, and status elevation that
middle-class men had already used most effectively.9
Conservatives who had read Clarke’s book were alarmed by the developments in
higher education, which they interpreted in light of reports about falling birth rates
among college-educated (white) women. Although the fertility of white women had
been steadily dropping since 1800 (as documented in 1843 by George Tucker, a profes-
sor of moral philosophy and political economy at the University of Virginia)10 na-
tional debates in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s conveniently forgot about the antebellum
period and instead placed the beginning of this trend in the 1860s. Census observers
believed that the drop in (white) women’s fertility rates worsened significantly in the
1870s and 1880s, at the height of (white) women’s demand for higher education. The
 THE POLITICS OF PATRIARCHAL PROTECTION • 89

Census Bureau published birth rate statistics every decade, and U.S. commentators
grew increasingly alarmed with every subsequent study, especially as it appeared that
the birth rates of purportedly inferior “darker races”—southeastern Europeans and
African Americans—were increasing.11 (See figs. 3-1 and 3-2.) Francis A. Walker, direc-
tor of the U.S. Census in 1870 and 1880, struck an alarm bell among whites in the early
1890s when he compared the birth rates of native-born whites with foreign-born im-
migrants, blaming the declining fertility of whites on immigrants themselves.12 By the
1890s, it was well publicized that more than half the women who had graduated from
college in the 1880s still had not married. At the turn of the century, the trend seemed
stable and indisputable: in 1900, still less than half of women who attended college
during the postbellum period had married; and of those who had, approximately 20
percent remained childless. As early as 1867, an anonymous critic, identified only as an
“anti-reconstructionist,” attributed the declining birth rates of (white) women to the
“doctrine of the woman’s rights movement” that originated in New England and had
spread elsewhere. “The anti-offspring practice has been carried [by women] in New
England and wherever New England ideas prevail. . . . It is not that the New En-
gland women are unable to bear as many children as formerly, but that they will
not.”13 In 1875, Oliver Wendell Holmes, professor of anatomy and physiology at Har-
vard, in a review of Clarke’s book, restated what was clearly already at the crux of the
debate for many white middle-class Americans: “We have heard a great deal . . . of
the rights of woman. . . . It may be very desirable that she should vote, but it is not
essential. . . . It is essential that she should be the mother of healthy children well
developed in body and mind.”14
Clarke associated the woman’s movement with the evolutionarily regressive posi-
tion of “sexual sameness” and blamed the movement for reducing the birth rate of
white elites and impeding the advancement of civilization. His genius was to make it
difficult for advocates of woman’s rights to use the ideology of sexual difference for
their own purposes. He labeled them in ways they disliked, attributing to them ideas
about sexual identity that they insisted they did not advocate. Speaking of woman’s
physiological differences from man, Clarke declared:
All this is so well known that it would be useless to refer to it, were it not that much of
the discussion of the irrepressible woman-question, and many of the efforts for better-
ing her education and widening her sphere, seemtoignore any difference of the sexes; seemtotreat
her as if she were identical with man, and to be trained in precisely the same way; as if her orga-
nization, and consequently her function were masculine, not feminine. Woman seems
to be looking up to man and his development, as the goal and ideal of womanhood.
The new gospel of female development glorifies what she possesses in common with
him, and tramples under her feet as a source of weakness and badge of inferiority the
mechanism and functions peculiar to herself.15
By reformulating the “irrepressible woman-question” in this manner, Clarke con-
structed an ideological conflict over sexual difference that had never in fact existed be-
tween the woman’s movement and its opponents, obscuring a much more critical
struggle occurring between middle-class white men and women over political au-
thority and educational resources that had been in progress for more than fifty years.
FI GURE 3-1 White fears of racial annihilation. No Race Suicide Here. Postcard, c. 1905–1907. In the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, whites worried incessantly about their falling birth rates in comparison
to the much higher birth rates of nonwhite peoples. The presence of the elegant young black woman (second
from left) and the well-attired children suggests that the photograph was posed under quite other pretexts
than the one for which it was ultimately used.
 THE POLITICS OF PATRIARCHAL PROTECTION • 91

Many who responded to Clarke, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Julia Ward
Howe, Caroline Dall, Mercy B. Jackson, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and Eliza Duffey,
vehemently objected to the way in which Clarke appropriated the concept of sexual dif-
ference in order to characterize the position of the woman’s rights movement as insist-
ing on sexual similarity. Higginson, for example, denied that sexual identity was the
“gospel” of the woman’s movement and reiterated that “the strongest arguments in
favor of Woman Suffrage are based not on the identity, but on the difference of the
sexes.”16 The woman’s movement had carefully negotiated the question of sexual differ-
ence in its quest for higher education and its demands for the suffrage (see chapter 2),
often basing arguments for female seminaries on the grounds that (white middle-class)
women required special institutions to train themselves for sex-specific social roles. That
Clarke understood that there was such a struggle for power taking place was apparent in
the way he sought to reassure his female opponents that in making his specific claims
about the ramifications of women’s sexual differences he was not calling for the per-
petuation of sexual inequality.17 As white women moved into the cultural spaces that
were defined as “male” and were seen as potential competitors for economic and politi-
cal power, conservatives like Clarke made claims that woman’s sexual differences made
it racially dangerous for (white) women to “compete” politically with (white) men.
The Woman’s Journal, a prosuffrage publication, of which Howe was an editor, re-

FI GURE 3-2 Keeping up the birth rate. Comparing Notes. Postcard, 1905. In both overt and sub-
tle ways, white women were commanded to fulfill their social responsibility to have children
for the race.
 92 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

ported Clarke’s speech on December 21, 1872, and covered the ensuing debate in the
months that followed.18 So much public interest was generated by his lecture that
Clarke extended his original remarks and published them several months later under
the title Sex in Education: Or, a Fair Chance for the Girls (1873). Among academics and intel-
lectuals the book was an immediate bestseller. In Ann Arbor, where women had been
attending the University of Michigan for only three years, a bookseller reported sell-
ing two hundred copies in a single day.19 About a dozen editions were issued within
the first few months of the book’s appearance, yet Sex in Educationstill did not exhaust
its readership. From 1875 to 1887, it was reprinted at least seventeen more times, and
reviews appeared in magazines and newspapers around the country.20 In 1875, the edi-
tor of Scribner’s Monthly reported that the controversy had grown so large and so heated
that it had become a “matter for criticism, [simply] on its merits as a controversy.”21
M. Carey Thomas, founder of Wellesley College, would later remark, “We did not
know when we began [admitting women to universities] whether women’s health
could stand the strain of education. We were haunted in those days by the clanging
chains of that gloomy specter, Dr. Edward Clarke’s Sex in Education.”22 As late as 1904,
the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who served as president of Clark University from its
founding in 1888 until 1920, a solid opponent of coeducation himself, affirmed that
“even though he may have ‘played his sex symphony’ too harshly, E. H. Clarke was
right.”23
Clarke succeeded in removing the debate from the realm of politics or ethics—a
realm that woman’s rights advocates had been learning to address with some assur-
ance by invoking their superior moral status as civilized women—by insisting that
woman’s access to higher education was not a moral issue (it could “not be solved by
applying to it abstract principles of right and wrong”).24 The solution “to the problem
of woman’s sphere,” Clarke declared, “must be obtained from physiology. . . . The
quoestiovexataof woman’s sphere will be decided by her [physical] organization.”25 In the
process, Clarke elaborated a biological theory of the development of (white) woman-
hood that divided human physiological maturation into three periods: childhood,
which extended from birth to the onset of adolescence, characterized by similarity be-
tween the sexes; adolescence and mature adulthood, when “the sexes diverge[d]” as
part of a natural process of maturation; and, for women, a third stage, menopause,
which continued into the “unknown” and involved a return to sexual similarity with
men. Adolescence or young adulthood, as Clarke constructed it, was a stage of sexual
divergence, a turbulent and fragile period during which young women experienced a
“rapid expenditure of force” that resulted in the creation of a “delicate and extensive
mechanism”—a stage that had no counterpart in men, whose growth was presumed
to occur steadily from birth through maturity.26 In Clarke’s book, adolescence be-
came identified with (white civilized) women’s physiological departure from a male
norm. “Overworking” women’s brains during this crucial phase of maturation meant
risking the normal development of the female reproductive system and endangering
the future evolution of civilized society.27
Within the woman’s movement, Clarke’s remarks generated an immediate and
angry response. In a year, four volumes had appeared: Howe’s edited collection Sex and
 THE POLITICS OF PATRIARCHAL PROTECTION • 93

Education, which included essays by prominent reformers, educators, and writers, in-
cluding such luminaries as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mrs. Horace Mann, Caro-
line Dall, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, among others; Eliza Bisbee Duffey’s treatise No
Sex in Education; a monograph, coauthored by Professor George Fish Comfort and his
wife, the physician Anna Manning Comfort, Woman’s Education and Woman’s Health; and
The Education of American Girls, edited by Anna Callender Brackett, which included con-
tributions from well-known physicians, educators, ministers, and suffragists, among
them Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Mary Putnam-Jacobi.28
Many of these respondents rushed to do combat with Clarke by marshalling “sci-
entific” studies to show that college education (even if they were designed originally
for men) did not, in fact, impair female students’ reproductive health. In 1874, when
the Harvard Medical School announced that the next topic for its Boylston Prize
would be the effects of menstruation on women’s health, a group of women in Boston
went looking for a female physician to counter Clarke’s claims. In the fall of 1874,
C. Alice Baker wrote to Mary Putnam-Jacobi, a physician trained at the Ecole de
Médecine (in Paris, 1869), urging her to submit an essay. Jacobi interviewed several
hundred women about the effects of work on their experience of menstrual pain. Her
study, “The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation,” found that most
women were able to do intense intellectual work during their periods without debili-
tating pain or a need for rest. “Nothing in the nature of menstruation,” Jacobi found,
“impl[ied] the necessity, or even the desirability, of rest for women whose nutrition is
really normal.”29 A decade later, women were still conducting scientific studies to
rebut Clarke’s pronouncements. In 1885, a special committee of the Association of
Collegiate Alumnae surveyed 1,290 female college graduates and found that 19 per-
cent of them reported experiencing a deterioration of their health while in college, in
comparison to 21 percent who reported experiencing an improvement.30 Mary
Roberts Smith Coolidge, associate professor of sociology at Stanford, published a
study in 1900 to show that the marriage and fertility rates of college-educated women
were roughly the equivalent of noncollege women of the same race, class, and social
background.31
Despite these attempts to demonstrate that college-educated women were not im-
paired physiologically by their educations, most female advocates of coeducation did
not give up the argument that (white) “woman” differed from “man.” Nor did they
argue for the “identical” treatment of women as a means of obtaining educational
equality for women, in part because they firmly believed in the existence of sexual dif-
ferences. Mercy Jackson, for example, explicitly rejected Clarke’s depiction of the
woman’s movement and pointed out that what was at stake in this debate was who
would be able to claim sexual difference for their own purposes: “We regret to find,”
Jackson wrote,
that one who should be informed of the views of the prominent advocates of co-educa-
tion should permit himself to talk of their wishing to make women as nearly as possible
like men, and of women as wishing to become like men, and despising those differences
in themselves which distinguish the sexes, when in fact these are the opprobriums of their opponents
instead of arguments to defeat the cause. . . . What women now struggle for is not to be like
 94 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

men, not to get their education by the same mental processes as men, but to have the
same opportunities to use in a woman’s way. . . . Why the Doctor supposes it neces-
sary to co-education that women should study like men . . . I cannot imagine.32
Maintaining the ability to appeal to sexual difference was crucial to many of
Clarke’s opponents, in part because they did not have the credentials or training to
argue as scientists or physicians (having been excluded from most colleges and medi-
cal schools). Needing to find other ways to assert authority for their position, female
respondents emphasized their differences from men of their race and class to establish
the validity of their own forms of knowledge. This special “woman’s knowledge,” they
argued, had developed as a result of their experiences as wives and mothers. These ex-
periences, they insisted, gave them as (white middle-class) women a perspective that
no white male scientist could match or counter. Hence, Eliza Duffey defended her
“qualifications” to write on the subject of “woman’s” health and physiology in the fol-
lowing way:
The writer of this book—a book designed for women exclusively—is a woman, a wife
and a mother. These facts alone, with the experiencesthey involve, seem to give her qual-
ifications for the work she has undertaken superior, in many respects, to those pos-
sessed by any man, professional or otherwise. . . . Men have had their say. It is but fit-
ting now that a woman should have hers, especially as the woman who assumes to
speak does so with an authority man cannot venture to claim.33

Thus, one tactic was to insist upon the superior knowledge that sexual difference
afforded them as (civilized) wives and mothers—without mentioning, of course, their
specific racial or class position in the prevailing social hierarchies of the 1870s. But an-
other tactic involved focusing attention on their racial similarity with white men,
shifting the terms of the debate away from their sexual differences, and onto their evo-
lutionary racial sameness with white men. For example, in her effort to defend (white
middle-class) women’s right to higher education, Julia Ward Howe drew on prevailing
ideology that held that Europeans exhibited greater responsiveness to climatic influ-
ences than other racial groups, initiating what was to become a recurrent strategy
among the white woman’s rights movement.34
Howe began by questioning Clarke’s assumption that there was a direct connec-
tion between higher education and arrested physical development among (white)
women. First, she claimed that “savage” women in other parts of the world also had
reproductive problems, and these, Howe believed, were clearly not the result of over-
education. In citing this example, Howe did not mean to suggest any point of sexual
likeness between civilized and savage women—she was merely pointing out that re-
productive troubles (anywhere) were generally attributable to climatic factors, not
education. Howe’s alternative explanation for the failed health and imperfect
physique of educated New England women focused on the role that cold winters
played in producing these results. Climaticly induced physiological changes in (white)
women, Howe believed, also had their counterpart in (white) men residing in New
England, who were widely recognized to be less robust than men of other regions and
less strong than men of other racial groups. Here Howe was drawing on a long tradi-
 THE POLITICS OF PATRIARCHAL PROTECTION • 95

tion, dating back to the eighteenth century and George Louis Leclerc Buffon’s claims
in his Natural History (1761), but more recently argued by British scientists and reported
in the Atlantic Monthly in 1872.35 To buttress these arguments, Howe drew on the recent
experience of Western colonizers.

English families resident in India soon lose the freshness of their coloring and the full-
ness of their outline. . . . The writer has seen an American official long resident in
Turkey whose physiognomy had become entirely that of his adopted country. The po-
tent American climate works quickly in assimilating the foreign material offered to it.
Two generations suffice to efface the salient marks of Celtic, Saxon, French, or Italian
descent. The Negro alone is able to offer a respectable resistance.36

Thus, Howe insisted that it was not college but climate that produced the physical
weakness and reproductive ills within the white race residing in New England, includ-
ing the Anglo-Saxon women attending universities in this region.
Because the debates over Clarke’s book focused on sexual differences that were un-
derstood as sufficient grounds to lump all women together as a group, the class and
racial dimensions embedded in these claims to difference (and in the politics of protec-
tion more generally) remained hidden in the debates over coeducation. Yet, in this
same decade, other discussions erupted that exposed the underlying tensions among
race, class, and gender, when Azel Ames, a Boston physician who became interested in
labor reform, read Clarke’s book and instantly saw the value of extending it to
“woman’s employment in industry.” Although the two discussions occurred simulta-
neously, Ames’ remarks elicited no outpouring of scorn from the woman’s move-
ment. Rather, woman’s rights activists agreed with Ames that working-class women
deserved “protection.” A special rationale for “protective labor legislation” was devel-
oped during the 1880s and 1890s that defined “woman” as a special class of worker
who, because of her vulnerable position in the labor force and her unique reproduc-
tive system, deserved different legal status and economic treatment from that ac-
corded to working-class men.

“Sex in Industry”: Historical Origins of Protective Labor

Legislation for Women

Inspired by the visibility and success of Clarke’s book, Azel Ames, a special commissioner
of investigation for the Massachussetts State Bureau of Statistics of Labor, produced his
own study, Sex in Industry: A Plea for the Working-Girl, in 1875, in which he documented the
suffering of thousands of young women employed in factories in Massachusetts—
women who worked exceedingly long hours for pitifully low wages, under brutal condi-
tions. Rooms were poorly ventilated, and the heat and noise were overwhelming. Ade-
quate restroom facilities were rarely available, and these women were not permitted to
take breaks during the day. Sex inIndustry set forth guidelines for fundamental changes in
the economic structures and labor policies affecting such women.37
Broader analyses of the “labor problem” in this period, Ames’s included, often
 96 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

stressed that working-class men were not paid enough to support their families. Labor
reformers generally favored solutions that they believed would help guarantee work-
ing-class men a “family wage,” solutions that would raise the standard of living among
working-class families while at the same time encouraging working-class women to
stay at home to take care of their families in accordance with middle-class ideals of do-
mesticity.38 In Ames’s state of Massachusetts, for example, the State Bureau of Statis-
tics of Labor reported in 1873 that the average income earned by an adult male worker
was less than $550 per year, although a family of five required approximately $650 per
year to eke out a minimal subsistence. According to the Bureau’s report, without the
“assisting labor” of wives and children, the average laborer could not make ends meet.
Many labor reformers maintained that the best solution was not to raise women’s
wages to make up this difference or to make it easier for women to obtain jobs but
rather to bar women from the most dangerous jobs and create other incentives to in-
duce women to leave the paid labor force.
So-called special protective labor legislation for women appealed to both “progres-
sive” reformers as well as “conservatives” on the woman question for different reasons:
progressives, like Caroline Dall and Florence Kelley, believed they were acting in accor-
dance with social evolution by calling for the elevation of working-class women into a
patriarchal world of domestic protection. Conservatives believed they were buttressing
patriarchal domesticity, protecting a vulnerable group of women from economic abuse
and preserving the domestic morals of civilization. Both sides could agree on maxi-
mum-hour legislation for women, seeing this legislation as a means of “protecting”
women’s health and making it possible for women to devote more time to domestic re-
sponsibilities. Both could also support minimum-wage laws for women since these
were expected to help women earn the same salaries as previously, but with fewer
hours, and therefore enable them to spend more time in the home caring for their fam-
ilies. Because the labor market was segregated in ways such that men and women (and
blacks and whites) rarely competed for the same jobs, the proposal to guarantee women
a minimum wage was not construed as a competitive threat to male labor. If anything,
minimum wage laws, by raising women’s wages (making them more expensive as la-
borers than they had been previously) would reduce the large disparity in the cost of fe-
male versus male workers and might even help dissuade employers from hiring female
workers as a way to reduce their labor costs. Moreover, in the late nineteenth century,
the demand for “equal pay for equal work” did not embody the view that (white)
women should or would become permanent employees. Rather, it was a measure that
was seen as supportive, not subversive, of domestic ideologies, as it was intended as a
method of raising (white) women’s wages so that they could earn more money by
working fewer hours and consequently be able to spend more time at home, caring for
their families. In other words, proposals for protective labor legislation—whether they
took the form of maximum-hour or minimum-wage laws, “equal pay” slogans, or
night-prohibition statutes—reinforced and perpetuated dominant ideologies of patri-
archal domesticity, buttressing white middle-class ideals about manhood that attrib-
uted to (white) men the role of financial provider and physical protector of women.39
Many participants in the woman’s movement, as well as male labor reformers and
 THE POLITICS OF PATRIARCHAL PROTECTION • 97

male unionists, agreed that the work environment itself also endangered the morals
of young women. Middle-class society claimed it needed to protect itself from the
moral degradation that threatened to engulf it, particularly in urban areas. Ames ar-
gued that state regulation of women’s employment was justified because it was the
public, not the employer, who had to assume the costs of rehabilitating working-class
women, whose health and morals, he asserted, were damaged by industrial labor.
However, women in the woman’s movement often wanted to correct the work envi-
ronment (put older elite women in charge as managers, for example), while male re-
formers wanted to remove the victim, arguing that labor itself was degrading to
women and that industrial employment accelerated girls’ physical development and
made them sexually precocious—an ironic criticism since they were also concerned
that the hard work would impair these young women’s reproductive systems, making
it impossible for them to reproduce “the race.”
This ironic contradiction was at the heart of Ames’s work. In one breath, Ames
worried about infertility in working women, and in the next breath, he warned that
“the stimulus of a heated atmosphere, the contact of opposite sexes, the example of
lasciviousness upon the animal passions—all have conspired to produce a very early
development of sexual appetencies [sic].”40 Ames’s greatest fear was that moral deteri-
oration and increased sexual activity among working women would mean that even if
reproduction took place, it would not ensure the perpetuation of “civilization” but in-
stead might lead to evolutionary regression. Ames was preoccupied with the deciviliz-
ing effects of industrial work, which he believed would produce “primitive” sexual ap-
petites among (working-class) whites, and he articulated his fears by saying that “the
female population engaged in manufactures approximates very closely to that found
in tropic[al] climates.”41
Some women reformers tried to counter these views by arguing that moral and
racial deterioration was not intrinsic to an industrial economy that employed women
but stemmed from the behavior of immoral men who took sexual advantage of young
girls in these settings. The fault was with the men who abrogated the civilized, manly
role of protector. For example, Caroline Dall, who, as I have already shown, objected
to Clarke’s arguments concerning the dangers of coeducation, insisted that the labor
problem had nothing to do with girls’ unique physiological and reproductive systems,
or with the effects upon women’s morals that were attributed to wage labor. Instead,
Dall ascribed the degradation of working-class women to the lack of respect that men
generally demonstrated toward all women, and to the special (class) stigma that was
attached to paying women for their labor.42
For Dall, the labor problem encompassed intertwining economic and moral issues:
male employers did not pay women as good wages as they paid men, in part because
they knew that women, out of desperation and lack of organization, would work for
less money. Because women worked for less money, Dall argued, male employers had
less respect for woman’s work. The volunteer work of middle-class women, Dall
noted, only made the problem worse. So long as “ladies” refused to accept money for
their labor, feeling that payment would somehow lower them, they perpetuated the
notion that wages degraded female laborers. At bottom, Dall believed the economic
 98 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

problem would disappear when the ethical one was solved: “When men respect
women as human beings, consequently as laborers,” Dall wrote, “they will pay them
as good wages as men.” Dall also urged “women of rank” to help counter the stigma
that attached to working women by demanding payment for their own work. “Plenty
of employments are open to [women],” Dall argued, “but all are underpaid. They will
never be better paid til women of rank begin to work for money, and so create a re-
spect for woman’s labor.”43
Dall’s efforts to break down the moral distinctions held to differentiate middle-
class “ladies” (who did volunteer or charity work) from working-class women (who
received wages for their labor) predated later arguments that would reject the social-
Darwinian assumption that economic hardship was synonymous with moral failure.
In the 1880s, labor reformers and charity workers, including women like Josephine
Shaw Lowell, began to introduce new moral distinctions among the working classes,
differentiating between the worthy and unworthy poor. Ames himself was a forerun-
ner of this new group of reformers who attributed poverty to systemic and institu-
tional factors—a malfunctioning economy—rather than to character flaws of the
poor person. This type of analysis was crucial to gaining acceptance for protective
labor legislation: if the poor woman herself was not to blame for her condition, she
deserved protection.
Ames put forward his call for state protection of women at a time when govern-
mental intervention in economic processes concerning male workers could not be
sustained. For male workers, equality and protection could not be reconciled: to ask
for state protection for men was interpreted as involving an admission of personal in-
adequacy, some fundamental lack of manhood. This perspective was clearly encapsu-
lated in the economist William Graham Sumner’s defense of laissez-faire notions of
liberty in 1883:

Certainly liberty, and universal suffrage, and democracy are not pledges of care and pro-
tection, but they carry with them the exaction of individual responsibility. The State gives
equal rights and equal chancesjust because it does not mean to give anything else. It sets each
manon his feet and gives him leave to run, just because it does not mean to carry him.
Having obtained his chances, he must take upon himself the responsibility for his own
success or failure.44

Ideologies about individual responsibility, that linked equality with manhood, lib-
erty, suffrage, and democracy (in opposition to “protection”), were employed by
court decisions in the 1880s and 1890s: to be a free man meant to be free to enter into
contracts with employers without any state regulation or interference. Thus, protec-
tive labor laws that were written in universal or gender-neutral language and were
tested in the 1880s were generally invalidated.45 In the 1880s and 1890s, the United
States Supreme Court ruled repeatedly that general (sex-neutral) labor legislation
was unconstitutional because it interfered with the [male] individual’s and the corpo-
rate entity’s right to enter freely into a labor contract, a right that the court found was
guaranteed under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.46
Hence, labor reformers began to argue that the state could legitimately treat
 THE POLITICS OF PATRIARCHAL PROTECTION • 99

“woman” as a “special class” of citizen by virtue of her sexual differences so as to ob-

tain special protective labor legislation for women workers only. As legal historian
Nancy Erickson has argued, the courts slowly developed sexually differentiated no-
tions of liberty—one for male workers and one for female workers—beginning in the
mid-1870s through the mid 1890s.47 Yet, while sexually distinct notions of liberty for
women had their origins in this period, it is also true that such notions of liberty were
strongly resisted.48 In 1876, as the case of Commonwealth v. Hamilton Mfg. Company reveals, it
was still possible to uphold maximum-hour legislation for women without drawing
on the kinds of arguments that Ames was developing, and without perpetuating the
constructions of sexual and class differences that made the legislation necessary in the
first place.49 The Massachusetts court simply argued that no infringement of an indi-
vidual’s right to contract had occurred, without reference to the sex of the employee
or arguments about her sexual differences.50 Twenty years later in 1895, however, the
State Supreme Court of Illinois, in Richie v. People, reviewed the Massachusetts finding
and found its reasoning inadequate. The Illinois court accused the Massachusetts
court of “begging the question,” skirting what was the heart of the issue: the fact that
maximum-hour legislation didplace restrictions on the femaleindividual’s right to con-
tract freely.51 Unlike the Massachusetts court, the Illinois court felt it had to take up
the question of whether sexual differences could be deemed relevant in justifying dif-
ferent treatment for women. It reached the conclusion that sexual differences were
not relevant and decided to strike down its own maximum-hour law because it could
find no other appropriate legal justification.52
By the end of the 1890s, however, a legal consensus had developed that agreed that
the state could legitimately regulate women’s employment—even though in so
doing, the state restricted the freedom of individual women to enter into labor con-
tracts—so as to ensure that (white) women would be able to bear adequate numbers
of children in the future. The rationale for this legislation drew on several types of ar-
gument: first, that such legislation was needed to alleviate women’s oppression in
light of their sexual differences; second, that the state’s interest in ensuring a future
(white) population justified regulation of woman’s employment to ensure (civilized)
motherhood; and third, that the state had a responsibility to protect the public’s
moral welfare and ensure the future evolution of civilization.53
The Supreme Court sanctioned such reasoning in a 1908 case that is now well
known among scholars of women’s and labor history, Muller v. Oregon. Using argu-
ments prepared by Josephine Goldmark of the National Consumers’ League, Louis
Brandeis, the lawyer who argued the case in front of the Supreme Court, cited
women’s “special physical organization,” “child-bearing and maternal functions,” and
the need to prevent “laxity of moral fibre which follows physical debility” as adequate
justifications for the state’s different treatment of men and women employed in in-
dustrial wage labor.54 The Court upheld maximum-hour legislation on the grounds
that women’s sexual differences and unique role in reproduction mandated and justi-
fied state intervention, even when no such intervention could be mandated or justi-
fied in the case of men.55
The politics of protection, so strongly resisted by white middle-class women in the
 100 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

1870s when it was applied to their educational options, had now been fully endorsed
by most segments of ruling white elites. “Home protection”—the slogan used by the
NWCTU to call for woman suffrage and temperance legislation—had achieved its
legal counterpart. (See fig. 3-3.) This approach to politics would become so dominant
in the early decades of the twentieth century that the National Woman’s Party could
not muster much support from within the woman’s movement for the Equal Rights

FI GURE 3-3 Mobilizing women under a politics of protection. The Home vs.
the Saloon. Postcard, 1910. Members of Frances Willard’s National Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union supported woman suffrage because they be-
lieved that women needed to vote to protect their home and children.
 THE POLITICS OF PATRIARCHAL PROTECTION • 101

Amendment when it was first introduced into Congress in 1923; most white activists,
including the National Consumers’ League, the General Federation of Women’s
Clubs, and the National Women’s Trade Union League opposed the amendment be-
cause they feared that it would jeopardize the special protective labor legislation that
they had worked so hard to secure.56
Protection was a problematic strategy in woman’s movement politics, implying de-
pendency, victimhood, and vulnerability on the one hand but also privilege, high sta-
tus, economic well-being, and personal security on the other hand. In the context of
late-nineteenth-century U.S. political culture, to accept the status of the protected
implied a certain lack of autonomy, a curtailment of freedom and economic opportu-
nity, even as protection supposedly insulated white women from the sullying aspects
of competition and worldly activity. In the late 1890s, as the nation specifically justified
its imperialist ambitions with the explanation that it had a moral obligation to “pro-
tect” vulnerable (i.e., incompetent) peoples from other, more brutal, colonizers, “pro-
tection” became even more problematic for white women, as it was associated with
“protectorates.” Woman’s rights advocate Lizzie Holmes explained in 1898, “A free
woman will not choose to be ‘protected’ in the old sense. Protection has ever been an
implication of weakness and a willingness to occupy a subordinate position. Nations
which call upon other nations for protection must needs give up for that protection
some portion of their independence.”57 Moreover, in the context of laissez-faire ver-
sions of social Darwinism, protection of primitives was deemed a dubious strategy, as
social evolution was supposedly most efficient at weeding out the racially unfit when
permitted to operate without interference. Finally, the move to protect so-called
primitive races had different consequences for primitive men and women: protection
diminished the primitive male as lacking in manliness, unable to protect his own
women himself, while it raised the status of the primitive woman closer to that of the
protected homemaker, deemed to be the first step in cultural assimilation. The next
two chapters examine the complexities in such a politics, as white women began to
throw off the mantle of protection for themselves and to act on a newly claimed right
to serve as protectors for others.
 4

A Feminist Explores Africa
May French-Sheldon’s Subversion
of Patriarchal Protection

[I]f anyone would start schools among them [African primitives]

. . . [and] teach them a better way of living . . . lifting them
up by degrees, they would in time become Christians.
Fannie C. Williams, “A ‘White Queen’ in Africa” (1893)

The whole future of this world rests upon the status of women, and
those who have influence should see that [others] who have not had
their advantages should be brought up to their standard.
Evening Sun, quoting
May French-Sheldon (1915)

O N TH E EVE OF H ER DEPARTURE for Africa in 1891, May French-Sheldon was, by all

accounts, a strikingly beautiful forty-four-year-old American woman, happily
married to a prosperous London banker, who enjoyed entertaining prominent busi-
nessmen in her own drawing room. Nothing in the public record gives any indication
that she was dissatisfied with this role. No personal illness, singular ennui, family cri-
sis, or other necessity prompted her to leave her comfortable home to venture on a
three-month safari into a remote region of East Africa. Unlike other Victorian British
women who embarked on their own travels through what was known as the dark
continent, the flamboyant French-Sheldon never tried to make her voyage palatable
to Europeans or Americans by cloaking her actions in socially acceptable forms. She
was leaving a husband behind for no compelling reason other than that she desired to
prove to the world (and perhaps to herself as well) her ability to pull off such a dan-
gerous trip without any white men to “protect” her. Resourceful, energetic, strong-
willed, and outspoken, with definite tastes and opinions, May French-Sheldon was as-
serting her independence from and picking up the gauntlet laid down by the
suffocating protectionism of Western patriarchy.1
As remarkable as the action itself, however, was the way in which French-Sheldon
was received as an “American heroine” by the U. S. press on her return. The Chau-
tauquanpraised her for her “perseverance and . . . pluck” and for demonstrating that
a woman could perform such a masculine endeavor without any diminishing of her

102
 A FEMINIST EXPLORES AFRICA • 103

womanliness.2 The NewYork Times called it simply “the most remarkable performance
in recent travel and exploration.”3 Reporters and the public alike marveled at the ac-
commodations French-Sheldon fashioned for herself (which she exhibited at the
World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 for all to see). French-Sheldon had
slept in an elaborate, portable bed (her palanquin) “made of wicker and furnished
with luxurious and downy pillows in plenty, and with silk curtains.” She had dined
formally with linen tablecloths and silver cutlery, and she had served proper English
tea to visitors she met along the way. There were even rugs on the floor of her tents.4
“Tall and slender . . . [with] graceful figure, dark sparkling eyes and . . . fine
complexion,” May French-Sheldon embodied the “culture of a true woman”—a
model homemaker, even in the bush.5
French-Sheldon’s singular accomplishment was that she had survived an excur-
sion that had defeated many a white man before her, all without sacrificing her wom-
anliness or needing white men’s protection or supervision. Alice Fletcher, the nation-
ally famous Indian reformer of the 1880s who had had her own share of experiences
among the “primitives” on Indian reservations, was duly impressed. She awarded
French-Sheldon a prize for “best exhibit” at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, not-
ing that she “was the first of her race and sex to enter [an unfrequented region]” and
commending her for a “heroic and successful expedition.”6 (See fig. 4-1.)
Popular celebration of French-Sheldon’s safari in East Africa lasted for nearly forty
years, from 1892 through the 1920s. Her lecture tours were well received by both the
public and the media throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century. Her
celebratory reception as an “American” explorer of Africa (she was received much
more enthusiastically in the United States than in Great Britain, where she was some-
times castigated as a “vulgar American”)7 spoke to the pride that Americans took in
the fact that they now had an explorer of their own—one that even knew and had
corresponded with the famous Henry Morton Stanley. Had French-Sheldon so boldly
circumvented patriarchal domesticity in the United States, she would have been ig-
nored or even denigrated. But from the perspective of white elites, her gender trans-
gressions, having taken place in Africa, served a good cause: French-Sheldon was un-
derstood as demonstrating the superiority of white civilization to primitive peoples.
The story of her life makes manifest how the United States’s desire to assert itself as an
imperialist nation, on a par with other European nations, helped make emerging fem-
inist challenges to patriarchal protection more palatable.8
In the 1890s, the U.S. media saw French-Sheldon as the embodiment of a “true
woman” who had proven herself the equal of white male explorers—and an emblem
of the civilizing mission, even though she herself expressed little interest in Christian-
izing heathens. Journalist Fannie C. Williams acknowledged that French-Sheldon “did
not go as a missionary . . . simply as an explorer,” yet she credited French-Sheldon
with introducing African natives to the superior virtues of white civilization. “Mrs.
Sheldon has left behind her in Africa an influence which cannot fail to be felt . . .
her example, worshipped as she was by them, was emulated in every possible way by
these poor ignorant savages.” For Williams, the primary symbolic act, signifying the
great transformation that French-Sheldon wrought by her mere presence among
FIGURE 4-1 Celebrating civilization. Award for “best exhibit” at the World’s Columbian Exposition,
Chicago 1893. Reproduced with permission of the Library of Congress. Alice Fletcher was among the
judges who awarded May French-Sheldon this prize for her exhibit of African artifacts acquired during
her safari to East Africa in 1891. The iconography of a white woman in classical garb, symbolizing the
United States, supervising the education of young savages, was a common way to represent the supposed
benefits of imperialism and assimilation.
 A FEMINIST EXPLORES AFRICA • 105

primitives, was the natives’ improved table manners. “These tribes were in the habit of
mincing their food all together . . . and crowding it down their throats with force,
in a horribly gluttonous fashion. Sometimes a thousand at a time would come down
from the mountains to see the white woman eat; and now where she has passed
through, they eat with knives and forks.”9
In contrast, in the 1910s and 1920s, the U.S. media promoted her, without censure
or ridicule, as a “feminist” who had not needed a woman’s movement to secure her
liberation. The kind of feminism May French-Sheldon came to represent was that of
the universalized liberal subject whose liberation from patriarchy was manifest in a
personal autonomy that was purported to result from individual character—will,
courage, and determination—disproving the need for structural change or “special
rights.” Moreover, an unprecedented outpouring of excitement over women travelers
in this period (including the excitement generated by Margaret Mead’s work Coming of
Age in Samoa in 1928) marked the full transformation of French-Sheldon from an
anomalous female explorer into a prototypical feminist ethnographer—signaling an
extraordinary shift in popular conceptualization concerning the advancement of
women that occurred between the 1890s and the 1920s. Despite the media’s represen-
tation of French-Sheldon as a feminist, however, she never lost her cultural cachet as
a true woman. Rather, she reinvigorated the image of the white woman as sexually
pure, chaste, and refined (at a time when flappers were putting this into question),
even while she exploited, for her public’s titillation, the sexual tension between a
white woman and male primitives. As late as 1924, when French-Sheldon was seventy-
seven years old, she was still considered an exemplar of liberated womanhood—a
woman who had “blazed the way for [other] women in the fields of geology, geogra-
phy, exploration and science.”10 Her success in this regard was due directly to her de-
ployment of whiteness within a master narrative of colonial domination, which au-
thorized her to embody, for at least three generations of American women, what was
best in white civilization.
French-Sheldon’s safari also symbolized for her white female audiences the possi-
bility that colonization did not have to be based on male force or coercion: even the
most “brutish” of African savages, French-Sheldon’s experiences indicated, instinc-
tively had recognized and responded to her authority. As she wrote in the foreword of
Sultan toSultan, her account of her safari, one of her purposes had been “to demonstrate
that if a woman could journey a thousand and more miles . . . among some hostile
tribes . . . without bloodshed, [then] the extreme measures employed by some
would-be [male] colonizers is unnecessary, atrocious, and without the pale of hu-
manity.”11 On her death in 1936, writers of her obituaries exaggerated this aspect of
French-Sheldon’s self-presentation, propounding a distorted view of her as an oppo-
nent of colonization (when in fact this had not been the case).12
From the start, May French-Sheldon was aware of her safari’s potential historic sig-
nificance, both in demonstrating to skeptical European and white American men the
full capabilities of a true woman and in altering contemporary European colonial
practices. She purposefully chose what others considered a dangerous route, and she
 106 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

repeatedly turned down requests from “professional and scientific men entreating
[her] to allow them to accompany [her].”13 Later she boasted that over two thousand
men and women had asked to join her expedition, but she had refused them all,
telling the Evening Sunthat she wanted “to show how easy it was for a woman to . . .
travel about on friendly terms with the natives where a man would probably have to
make his way by force.”14 French-Sheldon went on to explain that a female travel
companion “might fall ill, and out of common humanity I should have to stop and
care for her and perhaps be obliged to change my plans entirely.” As for a white man:
“I was afraid he would want to take care of me, shoulder all the responsibilities &c.,
and it would turn into hisexpedition instead of mine.”15
Part of the reason that French-Sheldon could venture abroad without white male
protectors was that she was acutely aware of the symbolic power that her whiteness
would have among African natives, and she emphasized this to full effect by dressing
up as a “White Queen” (her term, and one that U.S. reporters repeated with evident
delight) to receive African princes, in a kind of oneupmanship that signified that she
knew that she had European colonial power backing her. Garbed in a spun-silver se-
quined gown, bedecked with jewels and a blond wig, French-Sheldon appeared as the
literal embodiment of Miss Britannia. Transforming herself into a White Queen al-
lowed French-Sheldon to create a new identity, one that highlighted her race, along
with her gender, in asserting her superiority in relation not just to the African leaders
she encountered along the way but, more important, to white men. Her other favorite
title for herself, one that she used throughout her life, long after her return from East
Africa, was Bébé Bwana, a term supposedly given to her by her African porters. Bébé, a
polite form of address, meant “Madam,” Bwana “leader,” but French-Sheldon often
translated this expression for her readers as “woman-master” or “woman-man,” to
emphasize the anomaly and uniqueness of her role.16 Stressing the special attributes
that she believed were part of her whiteness (ingenuity, courage, self-discipline, intel-
ligence, leadership), French-Sheldon fashioned an identity that countered both
African and American understandings of “woman” as incompetent and vulnerable, in
need of men’s protection, and incapable of governing others.
Assuming the role and demeanor of a European monarch, perhaps also ridiculing
it even as she invoked it, French-Sheldon was able to mitigate the public condemna-
tion she otherwise would have received in the United States for her utter disregard of
gender conventions. In evidently sincere appreciation of the outrageousness (and
splendor) of French-Sheldon’s self-presentation, the NewYorkTimeswrote, “Who but an
American woman would have conceived the idea of making a Worth gown help her
win her way into the interior of Africa?” The Timesalso lamented the fact that French-
Sheldon’s husband, Eli Sheldon, who financed the fifty-thousand-dollar excursion,
died soon after his wife’s return, so he could not be present to enjoy the publicity (or
to signal French-Sheldon’s return to the patriarchal fold). But the Timeswas consoled
by the thought that Eli had gone to his grave a happy man, for his wife had been
supremely successful—“an American woman had won distinction as an African
explorer.”17
French-Sheldon luxuriated in this public praise and attention, clipping newspaper
 A FEMINIST EXPLORES AFRICA • 107

accounts and preserving them carefully in a scrapbook.18 On her return to England,

she set to work on Sultan to Sultan and prepared to exhibit her artifacts in the Chicago
Exposition. Her book and exhibits were reviewed in glowing terms by the New York
Times, The Critic, the Chautauquan, and the Nation; furthermore, during the 1890s and
early 1900s she was a popular speaker on the U.S. lecture circuit, and gave many talks
in Great Britain and Canada as well.19 During this time she assiduously promoted her-
self as a scientist and ethnographer. Sultan to Sultan mixed the conventions of nine-
teenth-century travelogues, evangelical ethnology, and the newly emerging scientific
genre of anthropological ethnography. In addition, she wrote formal academic pieces
on East African women and England’s commercial future in Central Africa, which
were published in the Journal of the Anthropological Instituteand the Journal of the Tyneside Geo-
graphical Society,respectively.20 For her research, monographs, and collecting, she was
honored by the Royal Geographic Society in London in 1892, which admitted her into
its ranks, along with a number of other women. French-Sheldon was fiercely proud of
this achievement, and always referred to herself (somewhat misleadingly) as the so-
ciety’s first woman member, frequently signing her public correspondence with the
initials F. R. G. S. (Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society) to remind readers of the
honor.21

MAY FRENCH (1847–1936) WAS BORN I N BEAVERv PEN N SYLVAN I A, to a wealthy and
prominent family. Her mother was a respected physician, among the first generation
of women to practice medicine in this country. Her father derived his fortune from
sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations. In the 1860s, May and her sister, Belle French-
Patterson, were educated by private tutors and then taken on an extended trip to Eu-
rope to round out their education. May French’s early adult life has been lost from
view. It is not clear what happened to the family’s fortunes after the Civil War; and ex-
tant records in the United States reveal few details about her life in the 1870s. It may be
that she had an early, unsatisfying first marriage while she was in her twenties.22 By
the mid-1880s, however, May was living in London with a new husband, Eli Lemon
Sheldon, who managed successful banking and publishing businesses.
French-Sheldon seems to have enjoyed a happy and prosperous life in London. She
was wealthy and well connected among British businessmen and scientists. She spent
a lot of time in artistic pursuits (painting and fiction writing), outdoor activities, and
physical exercise. In 1886, she published a translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo,
which brought her immediate recognition as a serious student of French literature.
Then, in January 1891, for reasons that remain unclear, French-Sheldon, at age forty-
three, made plans for an expedition to East Africa, writing in earnest to the famous ex-
plorer Henry Morton Stanley for assistance. French-Sheldon evidently had already
mapped out an itinerary that would take her on a thousand-mile trek, through parts
of what are now Kenya and Tanzania and into the territory around Mt. Kilimanjaro
claimed by Germany. These areas were known to be sites of violent resistance to colo-
nial power; the Masai were challenging German authority, and other African peoples
in the surrounding regions of British-held Kenya were reluctant to venture inland.
Knowledgeable Europeans considered French-Sheldon’s plan foolhardy. Stanley
 108 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

advised her “not to go further than the Free Methodist Mission nine miles beyond
Mombasa” and cautioned her that “a long stay will bring out any lurking malady that
you may have, and you will certainly lose your good looks.”23 Still, he agreed to pro-
vide her with several letters of introduction to British officials in the region. Even with
Stanley’s letters, however, French-Sheldon met with resistance from George MacKen-
zie, the representative of British colonial authority in Mombasa, whom, it seems,
doubted that French-Sheldon could successfully manage the type of expedition she
envisioned. “The fact was,” French-Sheldon related afterward, “it was feared that the
consequences of a woman’s leading a caravan might throw the natives into a frenzy,
[and] bring difficulties about which would involve the Imperial British East African
Company in trouble and expense to come to my rescue.”24
Knowing in advance that the European men she would encounter in Africa were
unlikely to assist her, May French-Sheldon was still determined to proceed. She left
London in January 1891, parted from her husband in Naples, and caught a boat that
took her to Mombasa (on the coast of what is now Kenya). Finding the British officials
unhelpful if not hostile, and assured that it would be impossible to hire any porters in
Mombasa (due to an excess number of recent expeditions), French-Sheldon went on
to Zanzibar, a small island just off the coast of present-day Tanzania, to outfit her
expedition. In Zanzibar, European residents greeted her with the same antagonis-
tic skepticism she had encountered in Mombasa, but she was able to engage a Mr.
Boustead, an employee of a caravan-outfitting concern, who agreed to help her hire
fifty porters. Moreover, the American consul general, a Mr. Ropes, arranged an audi-
ence for her with Abdal Aziz bin Mohammed, the sultan of Zanzibar, who endorsed
her proposed safari, writing a letter that made it possible for Mr. Boustead to engage
the men she needed. Returning triumphantly to Mombasa to make final preparations
for her expedition, French-Sheldon found that George MacKenzie had overcome his
initial opposition sufficiently to write her an affidavit of support, which read as follows
(French-Sheldon translated it from Arabic for her U.S. readers):

To all Arabs and Swahilis traveling in the interior: This is to inform you that this lady, to
whom I have given this letter, is my friend, and I wish every one who meets her caravan
to be kind to herself and her porters, and to do everything to help her safari. Any one who
does this, and brings a letter from her to say she is pleased with what has been done for
her, will receive thanks on arrival at Mombasa. Should any one interfere with her cara-
van, annoy her in any way, and do any act of disrespect to her, [that person] will be con-
sidered to have offended the company, and will be treated and punished accordingly.25

Thus prepared, and disregarding Stanley’s advice to stay close to Mombasa, French-
Sheldon set off for the interior on an expedition that ended up lasting three months,
from March to May 1891. In the end, at least 153 people accompanied her: 138 por-
ters and a number of palanquin-bearers, soldiers, and headmen, as well as several
interpreters.26
Captain William E. Stairs, a British officer renowned for his own expeditions, ad-
vised French-Sheldon to have “as many women as possible . . . as it shows peaceful
intentions,” and so, probably as a result of his advice, French-Sheldon hired several fe-
 A FEMINIST EXPLORES AFRICA • 109

male attendants.27 (One, named Suzani, was a “black woman” who had a “natural gift
of massage,” and French-Sheldon employed her in this capacity during afternoon
breaks.)28 Yet French-Sheldon rarely mentioned these African women in her written
accounts (newspaper interviews never mentioned these women either). French-
Sheldon may have preferred to keep silent on this point to emphasize her own singu-
lar capacities. Only once in Sultan to Sultan did French-Sheldon express admiration for
the strength and perseverance of her female attendants. Mostly, she claimed that she
“found the few [women she] had a perpetual nuisance. They were always inciting dis-
putes among the porters, and resorted to all sorts of measures to win from them por-
tions of food and other things which they coveted.”29
In part to highlight her managerial abilities, French-Sheldon stressed the extraor-
dinary magnitude and complexity of her caravan. “A caravan going into the interior,”
she explained to her English and American readers, “is like a migratory community
and must be provisioned and armed for the entire expedition.”30 She needed sufficient
goods to prevent hunger, purchase rights of way through native-controlled territo-
ries, provide presents for negotiations, afford protection against the elements, and
offer defense against wild beasts. Thus, French-Sheldon’s provisions included beads
(for trade), carried in boxes or canvas sacking; cloth (for her porters’ wages and trade
with other natives) in long bales covered in coconut matting; rice in sacks; pots, pans,
and kettles; tents and poles; chairs and folding tables; large waterproof canvases to
protect her goods; ground cloths to protect her tents; boxes of candles, soap, car-
tridges, matches, flints, and steel; cotton to clean guns; coconut oil and kerosene in
large square tin cans that, when emptied, were used for water or bartered to natives;
coffee in sacks; lanterns; water bottles; photographic apparatus and observation in-
struments; tools (rope, canvas, nails, sail needles, great hanks of linen thread, alu-
minum, wire, solder, irons); medicine cases; large tin buckets for water; a bathtub
(French-Sheldon insisted on bathing every evening); hammocks for the sick; and “all
manner of trifling accessories.”31
Furthermore, French-Sheldon traveled well provisioned with gifts for the natives
she expected to encounter along the way:

the most valued among which will be the British soldier coats, flaunting red, with
gaudy gold-lace and plenty of brass buttons, European hats, and red umbrellas, tooting
horns, music boxes, clocks, matches, razors, knives, bells, rings, bracelets, metal belts
and jeweled weapons, needles, sewing thread, pins, fishhooks, tops, kites, dolls, picture
books, clay pipes, tobacco snuff, tea, sugar, silverware, china cups, knives, spoons and
forks, paint boxes, mirrors, sewing machines, tools.32

All of these items were weighed, numbered, and allotted to individual porters, and
then rearranged and reallotted on a daily basis, as articles were traded, used, con-
sumed, or redistributed.
Because of the reported Masai disturbances, French-Sheldon’s caravan was heavily
armed, rendering her the commander of a small army (and indirectly disproving anti-
suffragist claims that women were unable to defend themselves or others). Most
of her porters (at least seventy men) carried guns; the rest carried knives. French-
 110 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Sheldon emphasized, for her American readers, how threatening the group appeared:
“I looked with amazement over all these strange black and every shade of brown faces,
with much brutality imprinted thereupon, and marveled if I should always be able to
control them and make them subservient to my commands.”33 Her doubts, French-
Sheldon quickly added, were instantly dispelled, as she had faith that the “savages”
would intuitively respond to the superiority of her whiteness. To wield power over
these men, she knew discipline was crucial. She first tried to govern in a “womanly”
way, but her initial attempts to direct “by kindness and moral suasion,” she reported,
were ineffectual, and she unabashedly adopted more masculine means. “I found that
discipline could only be maintained by chastising serious offenders in the accepted
way [i.e., flogging]. . . . Coaxing arguments and persuasive talks were disregarded
and sneeringly laughed at, probably the more so because I, their leader, was a woman.”34
Taking charge and inverting the politics of protection with gleeful pleasure, French-
Sheldon constructed herself as the leader and protector of her porters, rather than
the other way round, even though on several occasions, French-Sheldon conceded,
her porters saved her from injury and death.35
Knowing, too, that her white audiences would be titillated by her intimate en-
counters with primitive men, yet concerned that her sexual purity never be in ques-
tion, French-Sheldon stressed the many ingenious stratagems she came up with to
elude the sexual advances of the sultans who “courted” her. The titles of her most
popular lectures from the 1920s, “Thrilling Experiences in Savage Africa,” “Camp Life
with Natives in the Jungle,” and “Thrilling Adventures of a Lone White Woman in
Savage Africa,” invoked these same sexual themes.36
Most crucial, French-Sheldon’s narrative of 1892 recounts how her porters, despite
their respect, loyalty, and devotion, could never quite “reconcile my office with that
of a woman.” “I would open my tent-flap and say, ‘Boy!’ Back would come the answer,
‘Sabe!’ (sir); and they never got over it. If I addressed a porter he would respond, ‘Dio,
Bwana’ (yes, master).”37 French-Sheldon took credit for winning African respect by
means of her strength of character, courage, and indomitable will—her successful
projection of herself as a White Queen fully in command.
It is therefore with a sense of personal pride [that] . . . surrounded constantly by
these black porters, the majority of them culled from the roughest specimens of na-
tives, deficient in intellect, devoid of any certain knowledge as to the proper attitude
that men should assume to a white woman, and many of them full of brutish instincts,
that they universally treated me with deference and obedience. . . . All this I firmly
hold was due to [a] certain regime I adopted, based upon the combined experience of
many white explorers and an innate conviction that individual prestige, consisting in
personal dignity and self-respect on the part of a leader, must be maintained wherever
you may be, if you expect to inspire those whom you aim to guide and command with
your personal importance.38
French-Sheldon’s tone, a mixture of fondness and condescension, suggested that
she found Africans’ acceptance of her as their leader natural and in keeping with her
status as a white woman. She clearly believed in a personal superiority that entitled
her to lead and govern men she felt were “deficient in intellect” and “brutish.” Yet her
 A FEMINIST EXPLORES AFRICA • 111

reportage of these observations, on the surface meant to point to the inability of

Africans to fully comprehend white women’s leadership abilities, also signaled her
ironic awareness that Africans could overlook her gender because of her race and call
her “sir” with respect, when white men never could.
French-Sheldon’s challenge of white male patriarchy is manifest in her continual
defense of herself as a competent explorer and superior administrator. Sometimes she
made such assertions directly, but more often she compared her own actions—taken
as a woman—with those of other white male explorers in ways that affirmed her
judgment of herself as a superior leader. Occasionally, French-Sheldon offered ad-
monishments to previous explorers, who, in her view, falsely misrepresented Africans
as unclean or sexually licentious; always the underlying subtext was a pointed affirma-
tion that Africans had been misrepresented as savages by white men and that they
were indeed capable of assimilating Western civilization. This subtext can be seen oper-
ating in French-Sheldon’s narration of a conversation with a young sultan who asked
her for an English saw and hammer so that he could “live like a white man.”
I asked, “What do you want these for?”
He answered, “Ah, Bébé Bwana, I want to build an English house and live like a
white man.” I promised to send him the saw.
He said doubtfully, “Ah, yes, white men all promise, but they all forget; the mzungu
always lies.”
I interrupted him sharply, “Stop, Miriami, you must not speak to Bébé Bwana in
that way. I will send you the saw.”
And upon my return, while the delirium was raging during my illness, this thing
haunted me with other promises I had made those poor trusting natives, and I never
rested, day or night, until every one had met a fulfillment. . . . Miriami has his saw.39
French-Sheldon’s frequent references to herself as a whitewoman, her repeated dec-
larations of how profoundly she had won the allegiance of black subjects (“Stay, Bébé
Bwana, Stay; you shall be more powerful even than all the sultans”),40 her proud dis-
play of her skills as a hunter and disciplinarian—all of these were part of a strategy to
demand respect from white men on the grounds that she was a competent ruler of
African savages known to resist and disobey white male rulers.

I N 1903 FRENCH c SH ELDON RETURN ED TO AFRI CA, this time to the Belgian Congo,
where she went to investigate accusations of Belgian abuses among rubber plantation
workers. Belgium had been one of the ruling European authorities in this region since
the division of the Congo in 1885. Under the guise of international humanitarianism,
King Leopold II had created a protectorate called the Congo Free State, and he eventu-
ally assumed full control in 1908, administering the colony through a partnership of
government, church missions, and interlocking companies. Initially Belgium ex-
ploited the Congolese ivory trade, becoming one of the main European traders in
ivory. By the late 1890s, however, elephants were “shot out,” and with ivory supplies
dwindling, Belgium turned to wild rubber, which was used to manufacture hoses and
later motor tires and other industrial products. Rubber was much more lucrative
than ivory, accounting for sixteen million francs in 1896 and forty-three million francs
 112 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

in 1904, or about 83 percent of the Congo’s foreign trade.41 Thus, much was at stake
when William Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews in London, offered to pay French-
Sheldon five hundred pounds for a series of letters to begin January 1, 1904, about the
Belgian Congo’s use of African labor on rubber plantations. Stead wrote her that
she was “absolutely free to describe things exactly as they are” and warned her that
“the man who goes out to the Congo with the intention of investigating the evil deeds
of the Congo State, and going out unattached [to] the missionary societies, State
or Co’s. takes his life in his hands.”42 Although she departed for the Belgian Congo
ready to expose imperialist exploits, French-Sheldon found herself becoming sympa-
thetic to the Belgian rubber operators, and she ended up a lifelong apologist for King
Leopold II.
Indeed, her observations of the plantation system in the Belgian Congo inspired
French-Sheldon to try to develop a similar scheme for exploiting the timberlands of
Liberia, using the labor of African Americans, whom she intended to “repatriate” to
Africa for this purpose. She negotiated with both the Liberian government and the U.S.
Secretary of State, Elihu Root, for two years, hoping to create a business enterprise that
would establish her as a colonial entrepreneur. Ultimately, the Roosevelt administra-
tion refused to assist her, and the Liberian government never granted its approval.43
During World War I, French-Sheldon left London, her primary residence since the
1880s, and returned to the United States for the duration of the war. Accompanied by
her longtime companion, Nellie Butler, the two went on a lecture tour of the United
States and Canada to raise funds for the Belgian relief services.44 It was during this pe-
riod that U.S. reporters explicitly linked French-Sheldon’s earlier safari with the re-
cently emerging feminist movement. “Before the feminist had been made one of the
issues of the day,” the New York Press reported in 1915, “a woman explorer had found
her way into the heart of Africa.”45
After World War I, French-Sheldon resumed her residence in London, but she con-
tinued to return to the United States annually in the early 1920s to do lecture tours. In
her mid-seventies now, but still a beautiful and stylish woman of much younger ap-
pearance, French-Sheldon continued to fascinate young white women and to draw
the attention of the local press as she traveled around the country with Nellie Butler
and gave presentations before women’s clubs, schools, universities, art galleries, book-
stores, and amateur societies, such as the Women’s Athletic Club, the Woman’s Press
Club, the American Pen Women, and the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Most of her talks took place in the South, in New York state, and in California. Be-
tween 1922 and 1925, when she was most in demand as a speaker, French-Sheldon gave
multiple presentations in about a dozen cities each year.46 In September 1923, a jour-
nalist in Covina, California, gave notice of a talk that French-Sheldon was to give at
the Woman’s University Club, identifying her as “one of the outstanding figures
among the great women of modern times.”47
French-Sheldon offered young white people an alternative to more contentious
forms of feminism. She firmly believed in higher education and individual ability and
thought white women should be treated the same as white men. She did not support
special protective labor legislation. Although she had been a suffragist, she was not
 A FEMINIST EXPLORES AFRICA • 113

what might be called a movement woman. She simply offered herself as evidence that
the “old prescriptions of former days which were so galling, so unfair and unjust”
were gone.48 Young white college women in the 1920s were inspired by her example,
which they took to mean that anything was possible for them, as long as they had
adequate strength of will and purpose.49
Yet French-Sheldon was not fully recuperable by the U.S. media as a nonthreaten-
ing feminist, and in some ways she challenged her society to rethink its conventional
assumptions about the civilized West and the African primitive. Whereas whites
thought of primitive women as the most debased of all creatures, French-Sheldon of-
fered a modified view, responding that “the African woman seems to have achieved
that economic independence for which our women are [still] clamoring.”50 Yet she
also contributed her own orientalist stories about the depraved institution of the
harem, relating how the sultan of Zanzibar discouraged her from greeting the women
in his harem with the words, “Do not trouble yourself for them. They are too many,
all alike, and not worth it.”51
On the other hand, French-Sheldon wrote sympathetically of polygamy, challeng-
ing the dominant view that polygamy signified African women’s sexual debasement.
Rather, French-Sheldon emphasized the economic efficiency of the institution, seeing
it as a system that could alleviate household drudgery and increase female pleasure,
autonomy and power:
A man accumulates more land or more cattle than his first wife can attend; he pur-
chases another wife, and so on. The wives are far from being jealous of each other; in
truth are delighted to welcome a new wife, and make great preparations for her. Each
wife has her own hut. . . . She has control of her own plantations, and has the
supreme right to her children. Her moral standard is exactly the same as her hus-
band’s.52

Implicit in this statement was a criticism of gender relations in the United States,
where married women had difficulty retaining title to their own property, had no
legal right to their children, and needed to maintain their own sexual fidelity regard-
less of the sexual liaisons their husbands might form.
Nonetheless, French-Sheldon’s white audiences thought of African men as sexual
beasts and sat on the edge of their seats waiting to hear how she had managed to pre-
serve her chastity in the face of so much licentiousness. And while French-Sheldon ex-
ploited these assumptions in the ways she framed her stories about sultans “courting”
her, she always insisted in the end that she had never been treated more chivalrously
by men anywhere in the world than she had been by the so-called savages of Africa. In
depicting African men as chivalrous, French-Sheldon put white men on notice: to
prove their superiority to the African, they would have to treat the white woman
with the same respect and deference that she claimed to have received while on safari.
On French-Sheldon’s death in 1936, an obituary in a London newspaper interpreted
the significance of her 1891 safari, forty-five years earlier, as follows:
For months she lived alone except for head-hunters and cannibals. She had at least 60
proposals of marriage from native sultans, kings and chiefs. “Not that they loved me
 114 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

for myself,” she used to say. “They simply thought that the acquisition of Bébé Bwana
would add to their prestige. It requires some tact and nerve to refuse a native potentate
when he has you at his mercy.” She added, nevertheless, that in all her experience of
savage races she had never known a savage [to] insult her. “It is only when one gets back
to civilisation that one is reminded of one’s sex.”53

This account contains many of the classic themes that surfaced in popular discussions
of white women among primitives during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries: the emphasis on the physical danger that the primitive represented (“head-
hunters and cannibals”); the hint of miscegenation (“60 proposals of marriage”); the
dismissal of any possible sexual desire on the part of white women, along with a sub-
textual rendering of the primitive as rapist (“It requires tact and nerve to refuse a na-
tive potentate when he has you at his mercy”). Indeed, the sultans are depicted as in-
capable of Western-type love (“Not that they loved me for myself”). Yet the final line
of the obituary contained the unexpected paradox: “It is only when one gets back to
civilisation that one is reminded of one’s sex.” Despite everything, encounters with the
primitive were coming to symbolize a realm of freedom and power, personal indepen-
dence and control over others that was not available to white women at home in En-
gland or the United States. Taking on the role of the protector of primitives, French-
Sheldon traveled widely and independently at her own discretion. Her trips to Africa
quite literally enabled her to escape the suffocating protection of white men at home.
Obituaries published in U.S. newspapers went even further in representing French-
Sheldon as an emancipated woman who also had worked for the emancipation of
African natives. The NewYork Timesreported:
Mrs. French-Sheldon was not only a pioneer among women explorers in Africa but one
of the few of either sex who in her generation returned with kind words for the natives.
In a day when they were described as treacherous and bloodthirsty she insisted their
white exploiters were more guilty. For many years she argued the cause of the blacks,
and [the] decrease in the cruelty with which natives were handled was in some part at-
tributed to her championship.54

What wasn’t noted in this obituary was French-Sheldon’s long and vigorous defense of
Belgium’s rule of the Congo and her justifications of the brutal system of indentured
servitude that King Leopold II and his successors enforced among African laborers on
Belgium-owned rubber plantations. Nor did the writer mention French-Sheldon’s ad-
vocacy of immigration restriction legislation for the United States during 1915 or her
unsuccessful lobbying attempts on behalf of the Americo-Liberia Company.
The elevation of May French-Sheldon to the status of a national heroine came
about through her specific negotiations with the discourses of the 1880s and 1890s, that
positioned white women as potentially ideal civilizers of primitive peoples. For
French-Sheldon, however, the supposed savagery of African natives was not innate in
primitive nature but a logical response to the aggression of white men; substitute the
refined white woman in the place of the aggressive white man, and imperialism need
not generate opposition. Thus for French-Sheldon, African men’s acceptance of her as
their superior indicated a new way to go about colonizing primitives, even as it pro-
 A FEMINIST EXPLORES AFRICA • 115

vided evidence that African men were not hopelessly mired in savagery. As a role
model for young women and the embodiment of a feminist esprit for the nation,
French-Sheldon helped shape a feminist alternative to male imperialism, while up-
holding the white woman as the prime measure of the superiority of U.S. civilization.
French-Sheldon’s life was clearly extraordinary in her access to great wealth, her
connections to powerful men in Great Britain, her self-confidence, and her racial
pride as a white woman. Yet she had much in common with other woman’s rights ac-
tivists of this period whose lives and commitments were shaped by prevailing dis-
courses of civilization and empire that enabled them to make their own race-specific
claims to equality with white men. By her example, French-Sheldon proclaimed white
women’s capability as explorers and scientists and embedded this construction within
an emerging discourse of Western imperialism. In the next chapter, I will examine
how Alice Fletcher’s involvement in the Indian reform movement of the 1880s and
1890s drew on and consolidated the special attributes that white women purportedly
had in bringing civilization to the primitive.
 5

Assimilating Primitives
The “Indian Problem” as a “Woman Question”

Never, before I came out among the Indians, did I realize the power
of woman’s work, and how she is indeed the mother of the race.
Alice Fletcher, “Among the Omahas” (1882)

Let us women give to the destitute tribes Christian homes and mis-
sions, for without these no race can rise.
Amelia S. Quinton, Annual Address in Indian’s Friend (1899)

Does anybody suppose that if Amelia S. Quinton, Alice Fletcher

and Elaine Goodale [White leaders of the Indian Reform move-
ment] had been given power over our bewildered Indians of the
plains,—that pitiful remnant of a race cut down as ruthlessly as
the forests of the Adirondacks,—[that] this winter’s tragedy would
“have crimsoned” our military records?
Frances Willard, address in Transactions of the
National Council in the United States (1891)

I N 1891, TH E SAME YEAR TH AT May French-Sheldon sailed to Africa, Frances Willard

addressed the National Council of Women, a gathering that included the heads of
most of the major women’s organizations from around the country.1 Willard tried to
clarify what she thought was at the heart of the woman question. “Women as a class
have been the world’s chief toilers; it is a world-old proverb that ‘their work is never
done.’”2 Although she could have been thinking about women working in factories,
or as teachers, nurses, and domestic servants, or even all women’s unpaid domestic
labor in their own homes, Willard did not make reference to any of these instances. In-
stead, she drew upon the observations of one of her temperance workers on an Indian
reservation in Florida. As Willard reported, this temperance worker
saw oxen grazing and a horse roaming the pasture, while two women were grinding at
the mill, pushing its wheels laboriously by hand. Turning to the old Indian chief who
sat by, the temperance woman said, with pent-up indignation, “Why don’t you yoke
the oxen or harness the horses and let them turn the mill?” The “calm view” set forth
in his answer contains a whole body of evidence touching the woman question. Hear
him: “Horse cost money; ox cost money; squawcost nothing.”3

116
 ASSIMILATING PRIMITIVES • 117

This statement, meant to inspire white women to take a larger view of the woman
question and the important civilizing work still before them, contained a number of
core truths for white reformers in this period. First, the label “squaw” conjured up an
image of an overworked, prematurely aged Indian woman, exploited by a husband
who had long since lost any sexual interest in her.4 Second, this scenario drew on so-
cial Darwinian beliefs that Indians remained in a state of barbarism because they re-
fused to allocate labor along acceptable gender lines, protect their women in monoga-
mous family structures, and adopt individualist, capitalist understandings of property
ownership. Willard and other white women were convinced that Indians remained in-
ferior to whites as a race because they oppressed their women. For white women, suc-
cessful assimilation of Indians could not come about without the “emancipation” of
Indian women from the barbaric practices within their own culture.
After the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 (which made the granting of U.S. citi-
zenship conditional on Indian conformity to the gender, economic, and religious
structures of patriarchal, capitalistic Christian civilization), white women increasingly
encouraged each other to expand their understanding of “womanhood” to include
the “squaw” and took it upon themselves to mediate between what they defined as a
brutal primitive male and his exploited female subject. “There is a sense,” Amelia
Quinton, president of the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), wrote in
1888, “in which the Indian Question must become more and more a woman question.
When all legal rights are assured, and all fair educational facilities provided, the
women and children of the tribes will still be a sacred responsibility laid upon the
white women of the land. The true civilization that begins with the child and
the home must come through women’s work.”5 A feeling of sympathy ensued (remi-
niscent of abolitionist appeals to a common sisterhood with enslaved black women),
since all women everywhere were considered “mothers of the race,” responsible for
their own races’ advancement into civilization. Still, white women believed they had
“progressed” further than Indian women because they had had Christian men as pro-
tectors. Eventually Indian men would have to become Christians and assume the cor-
rect patriarchal role vis-à-vis Indian women. In the meantime, however, white women
like Alice Fletcher and the members of the WNIA would assume this role themselves.
At the base of such views was an ambivalence about Indian women’s capacity for
civilization. On the one hand, white women posited that all women, civilized and
primitive, could serve as the agents and promoters of civilization—hence the focus on
sending Indian women to schools like Hampton in Virginia and Carlisle in Pennsylva-
nia to train them to become homemakers, teachers, and missionaries. On the other
hand, white women considered Indian women, especially ones who “return to the
blanket,” the main impediment, not just to the racial progress of the tribe, but also to
the future of the United States.6 The primitive woman was therefore heralded as em-
bodying the solution to the Indian problem and at the same time castigated for hold-
ing back “the nation.” The discourse worked simultaneously as an evangelical declara-
tion of solidarity between white and Indian women, even as it reinforced the
superiority of white Christian civilization over heathen Indian cultures. “Let the
women then give to the destitute tribes Christian homes and missions, for without
 118 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

these, no nation can rise, for as the women are so will the nation be,” stated Quinton,
echoing an ambiguous refrain that was becoming axiomatic in white women’s politi-
cal ideology, without specifying exactly which women (or nation) she meant.7
In white female reformers’ rhetoric, evolutionist theory linked the future of white
women, the United States, and destitute Indian tribes by suggesting the need to save,
protect, and elevate Indian women. To accomplish this purpose, it was essential to
“educate” Indian women about white middle-class norms of domesticity and home-
making, and the WNIA made this their prime concern. In 1884, Alice Fletcher, a
prominent white reformer and an advocate of dismantling the existing reservation
system by allotting individual homesteads to nuclear families, recommended at a Lake
Mohonk conference that a fund be started to build homes for the young people re-
turning from the boarding schools at Carlisle and Hampton Institutes. The idea was
picked up by Sara Kinney, president of the WNIA’s Connecticut chapter, and imple-
mented by the WNIA, which helped build roughly forty new homes on reservations
over the next four years.8 Kinney explained in 1890:

If we could excite . . . in [Indian women and children] a desire for home-life which
should have in it the elements of decency and comfort and progress, we need have no
fear for the men. Indian men are curiously like their white neighbors, they can be influ-
enced through their affections, and may be led towards better ways of living by the
women and children whom they love. Save [Indian women], and we may be reasonably
certain of the salvation of [Indian] men.9

For Fletcher and other activists in the WNIA, the most needed reforms were indi-
vidual (male) ownership of land; monogamous family structures; male support of
women and children through farming; traditional log cabins instead of Native Ameri-
can dwellings; Indian women’s assumption of white women’s domestic duties; learn-
ing of English; conversion to Christianity; education of children in missionary, com-
mon, or industrial training schools; and adoption of white styles of dress and
appearance. Even something so simple as a short haircut for boys became crucially sig-
nificant, symbolizing the acceptance of “civilized” practices and values. (One mission-
ary reported that as she cut away the locks, she felt barbarism retreating.) Hampton
and Carlisle trained Indian boys in agriculture, cattle raising, and mechanical skills
and taught Indian girls to tend house, do laundry, cook, and sew. “It is not enough to
teach these girls how to sweep and scrub and wash and iron, “ another missionary
teacher explained. “[W]e must strive so to get them in the habit of being neat in person
and surroundings [so] that they cannot be comfortable otherwise.”10
Work in anthropology appearing in the 1890s lent support to this approach. For ex-
ample, Otis Mason argued in Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture that previous attempts to
civilize Indians had failed because earlier policies had been misdirected toward male
rather than female Indians. Past attempts to turn Indian men into farmers had been
futile because they required a profound transgression of primitive gender relations. To
ask the “savage man . . . to lay down a bow and arrow and take up the hoe, a
woman’s implement” imposed too great a humiliation. “See how this racks his whole
being,” Mason wrote, “bodily, mentally, and spiritually.” Mason believed that less cul-
 ASSIMILATING PRIMITIVES • 119

tural trauma would result from transforming Indian women’s gender roles, and ulti-
mately the same purpose would be achieved: that is, a gendered division of labor in ac-
cordance with the ideology of separate spheres. Having primitive women become the
domestic keepers of western-style homes, according to Mason, “need modify their
[the Indians’] conceptions and their opinions very little.”11 In keeping with this per-
spective, reformers measured their success by the degree to which Indian women
modeled themselves after middle-class white women and rejected their former prac-
tices. “They have fallen out with their old ways of doing things. The hair must now be
arranged becomingly, the colors that adorn their persons must correspond, and there
is a certain dignity exhibited in their carriage.”12
Most white reformers in the 1880s and 1890s, including Fletcher, Quinton, and
Willard, initially had no doubt that civilization would improve Indian women’s lives;
rather than have to do backbreaking labor while their menfolk loafed, they would ex-
perience the joys of domesticity; they would be protected from sexual exploitation
within monogamous, nuclear family structures; and they would become citizens of a
home-loving republic and receive the blessings of democracy, even without the vote.
In short, Indian women were to be given the gift of patriarchy, with all the protection
it afforded.
As I shall show, the discourses of civilization, evolutionary progress, and patriarchal
protection brought certain perspectives into view and obscured others, making it diffi-
cult for white women to comprehend the ways in which their work to “save” the In-
dian was the culmination of a cycle of cultural annihilation that had been taking place
for more than two centuries. Yet the influence was not entirely in one direction. Civi-
lization-work brought white women like Fletcher, Quinton, and Elaine Goodale into
extended contact with Indian cultures, and these women were deeply affected by the
experience, both in their personal lives and political outlooks. Goodale married
Dr. Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux, with whom she lived for thirty years, bearing him
six children. Fletcher developed a lifelong attachment to an Omaha Indian, Francis
La Flesche, a man seventeen years her junior, with whom she lived for forty years. Both
women spent years living on western reservations and made Indian rights their lifelong
cause, and both became nationally known for their political activism and their philan-
thropic work among Indians—Fletcher as well for her prolific contribution to the
newly developing field of anthropology. Perhaps more than any other person of her
day, Fletcher was responsible for developing the severalty policy, which conferred citi-
zenship on “allotted” Indians (Fletcher’s term).13 Due to the efforts of white reformers,
the country came to adopt the view that in relation to Indians, separate could not be
equal. In the end, however, the main beneficiaries of this civilizing work were white
women themselves, as in an odd and unexpected way, their work among Indians
brought white women great public visibility and political power, smoothing over any
nascent tensions between white women’s assumption of a new public role and perfor-
mance of their traditional responsibilities as mothers and homemakers.14

1879 occurred during one of the most violent peri-

TH E FOU N DI NG OF T H E WN I A I N
ods in the history of white–Native American relations. The decade of the 1870s was
 120 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

one of unceasing raids and counterraids, including the Modoc War of 1872–1873, the
Red River War of 1874–1875, and ongoing battles with the Sioux, Nez Perces, Utes, and
Apaches, among others. By 1881, as the surrender of Sitting Bull marked the close of
the Plains Indian wars, all tribes in the West, except the Apaches, had been compelled
to relocate to reservations designated for them in Indian Territory, in what is now
Oklahoma.15
The white women who became active in the WNIA recognized that whites had a
shameful past to overcome in their relation to the Indian.16 Helen Hunt Jackson’s ex-
posé, A Century of Dishonor(1881), had laid out this history in detail, and her premature
death in 1885 only strengthened other white reformers’ resolve to continue in her
stead.17 They knew that the U.S. government routinely made treaties that it did not
honor and used the military to squelch resistance. They were highly sensitive to the
fact that white administrators of Indian reservations personally profited from the dis-
tribution of government rations and were unable to restrain white settlers and rail-
road developers bent on appropriating reservation land for themselves. Even though
the government was helping to finance industrial education programs at Hampton
and Carlisle Institutes to buttress ongoing efforts to “civilize” Indians, these programs
were widely acknowledged to be insufficient to meet the need. Moreover, despite tak-
ing certain initiatives, the government had been unsuccessful in its attempt to purge
the reservation system of gross abuses or to end armed conflict between Indians and
whites.18
At this critical historical juncture, then, Mary Lucinda Bonney, principal of the
Chestnut Female Academy, and Amelia Stone Quinton, a former teacher of the
school, both members of the First Baptist Church in Philadelphia, founded the Indian
Treaty-Keeping and Protective Association in late 1879 (renamed the Women’s Na-
tional Indian Association in 1883).19 Quinton, born in Jamesville, New York, near Syra-
cuse, had been involved in the woman’s movement for several years, most recently as
a temperance worker in Brooklyn, but she had also worked among inmates of charita-
ble and correctional institutions in New York City and taught in women’s seminaries
in Syracuse, New York, and Madison, Georgia.20 Bonney, born in Hamilton, New York,
had had a career as a teacher at girls’ seminaries in New Jersey, South Carolina, and
Rhode Island. She also served as an officer of the Philadelphia branch of the Woman’s
Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands and had contributed money
to support the sending of female missionaries to eastern countries. Their decision to
take up Indian reform and “home missionary” work was sparked by Ponca Chief
Standing Bear’s lectures about the Ponca relocation of 1877 and newspaper accounts
that Bonney had read concerning proposals in Congress to allow whites to acquire
land in Indian Territory.21
In 1877, the Ponca tribe had been compelled to move from one reservation located
in Dakota Territory to a new one in Indian Territory because the government had in-
advertently assigned the former reservation to the Sioux. Subjected to great pressure,
the Poncas agreed to relocate, but they experienced so much hardship in Indian Terri-
tory that, in the spring of 1879, Standing Bear decided to move his people back home.
When Standing Bear stopped at the Omaha Agency, he was arrested. With the help of
 ASSIMILATING PRIMITIVES • 121

Thomas H. Tibbles, a white reporter from Omaha City who publicized the cause, the
case reached a federal court, which ordered Standing Bear and his party released from
jail, and ruled that an Indian, as a person in the eyes of the law, could not be deprived
of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, as mandated by the Fourteenth
Amendment. The Poncas were allowed to remain in Nebraska, but the question of
where they were to live remained unresolved. To keep national attention focused on
their plight, Standing Bear embarked on a speaking tour in the east, accompanied by a
young Omaha interpreter, Suzette La Flesche, her half-brother Francis La Flesche, and
her future husband, Thomas Tibbles.22
Standing Bear’s eloquent lectures prompted Bonney and Quinton to take action in
ways that, by this time, were conventionally understood as appropriately feminine.
Among white women active in church work in the Philadelphia area they circulated
petitions calling for the honoring of government treaties and presented them to Presi-
dent Rutherford Hayes and the Congress: the first, in February 1880, had thirteen
thousand signatures; another one later that same year had over fifty thousand signa-
tures and also demanded the granting of citizenship to Indians; a third, circulated in
late 1881, which bore one-hundred thousand signatures, called for the allotment of
separate plots out of the collectively held reservation land to individual Indian house-
holders. This third petition, with its “lands in severalty” policy, was introduced in the
Senate by Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts in 1882.23
Standing Bear’s speeches also profoundly affected Alice Cunningham Fletcher,
(1838–1923), who was to become the most famous woman in the Indian Reform
movement and a key formulator of the final version of the severalty policy that was
contained in the Dawes Act of 1887.24 Decades later, Fletcher tried to recapture for a
younger audience the effect that Standing Bear and Suzette La Flesche (“clad in the
garb of a white woman”) had had on white audiences in Cooper Union in New York
City and Faneuil Hall in Boston: “The old stereotyped picture of the savage faded.
. . . The need to push the question as to whether or no the Indian was ‘a person’
vanished. . . . [T]he skill with which the eloquence of the Chief was rendered into
ringing English by the young Indian woman, showed that the door of language could
be unlocked and intelligent relations made possible between the two races.”25
Fletcher immediately took up the cause and within a few years had become a very
powerful advocate of Indian rights—a power that she garnered through a number of
channels: the organized woman’s movement, women’s clubs and philanthropies,
church groups, missionary societies, Hampton and Carlisle Institutes, Peabody Mu-
seum of Harvard University, the Bureau of Ethnology in Washington, D.C., the Bu-
reau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Interior, and Congress, as well as the or-
ganizations of the Indian reform movement—the WNIA, Herbert Welsh’s Indian
Rights Association, and Albert Smiley’s Lake Mohonk Conferences of Friends of the
Indian. The outlines of her career show how an individual white woman could de-
velop extraordinary political power even before women could vote or hold elective
office. In 1883, Fletcher was appointed as a special agent of the Department of the Inte-
rior, employed to implement the new allotment policy among the Omaha in Ne-
braska. In 1885, in response to a request from the Senate, Fletcher drew up a lengthy
 122 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

(693-page) compendium of U.S. policies, entitled Indian Education and Civilization, a docu-
ment that solidly established her as a foremost expert on Indian affairs. After the pas-
sage of the Dawes legislation in 1887, Fletcher was again hired as a special agent, this
time to administer allotments among the Winnebago Indians of Nebraska (1887–1889)
and the Nez Perces in Idaho (1889–1893). During the 1880s and 1890s, in addition to her
government work, Fletcher also became a highly acclaimed and widely published
ethnographer, respected for her scientific expertise on the Omaha and Nez Perces. In
1890, she was awarded a lifelong fellowship through the Peabody Museum, which re-
moved all pressure of having to earn her living, and which transformed her into the
foremost woman scientist in the nation (the astronomer Maria Mitchell having died
in 1889).
Fletcher grew up in New York City and was raised by a widowed mother and a step-
father with whom she did not get along. Educated in private schools, she eventually
became a governess in the family of a school friend (the father, Conis Conant, was a
wealthy Brooklyn merchant) and was supported with a large salary for many years
(from age eighteen to thirty-two). When she left the Conants in the early 1870s, finan-
cially independent, she moved to Manhattan, joined Sorosis, and helped plan the first
Woman’s Congress, at which the Association for the Advancement of Women (AAW)
was founded in October 1873. As secretary and later cochair of one of the AAW’s key
committees, Fletcher planned its annual congresses from 1873 through 1881, becom-
ing acquainted with some of the most influential and important women in the
woman’s movement of this period, including AAW presidents Mary Livermore, Maria
Mitchell, and Julia Ward Howe.26
Then, unexpectedly, the financial depression of the mid-1870s wiped out Fletcher’s
investments, and she was forced to turn to public speaking to earn her living. In 1879,
when Fletcher first met Standing Bear and Suzette and Francis La Flesche in Boston,
she was forty-one years old and had been lecturing on topics dealing with Indians for
several years. She had become a serious student of ethnology, informally studying
under Frederick Ward Putnam, the director of the Peabody Museum at Harvard Uni-
versity. When Suzette La Flesche and Thomas Tibbles returned to Boston in early 1881,
Fletcher approached them about the possibility of visiting them on their reservation
along the Missouri River in Nebraska, about one-hundred miles north of Omaha City.
They arranged for her to spend several weeks during the summer camping in Dakota
Territory among the Sioux—a tribe that for whites was (in)famous for its longstand-
ing conflict with the government, its defeat of General George Custer at Little Big
Horn on June 24, 1876, and the recent surrender and imprisonment of Sitting Bull and
his followers at Fort Randall. Thus, when Fletcher set off for Omaha City in the sum-
mer of 1881 (just five years after Custer’s defeat), she did not know what to expect, but
she left with a plan: she was going to focus her study on the life of Indian women in
the hope, as she wrote Lucian Carr, an associate at the Peabody Museum, that there
would be “something to be learned in the line of woman’s life in the social state repre-
sented by the Indians that . . . will be of value not only ethnologically but help to-
ward the historical solution of ‘the woman question’ in our midst.”27
As historian Joan Mark so perceptively points out, what Fletcher saw on this first
 ASSIMILATING PRIMITIVES • 123

trip was deeply colored by her study of ethnology and the preconceptions she had
about Indian women’s degradation.28 At this juncture, she believed that Indians were
mired in barbarism because they did not know how to cooperate with one another.
Later she would add that their backwardness also resulted from tribal restrictions on
individual initiative and the absence of individual ownership of land.29 Yet she was
deeply impressed by how much work Indian women did, admitting, “[N]ever before
. . . did I realize the power of woman’s work, and how she is indeed the mother of
the race. I knew theoretically that from her lap sprang the industries; here I see them
starting from her knees.”30 Moreover, while it was clear to her that Indian women
controlled their own property, and that the economic well-being of the family was de-
pendent on their labor, Fletcher believed that they would have to give up much of
their traditional work in order for their race to progress from barbarism to civilization.
She was also profoundly moved by what she interpreted as Sitting Bull’s request that
she help Indian women adjust to what they both knew would be a painful transition.
“‘You are a woman,’” Fletcher recorded Sitting Bull’s words in her diary, pub-
lishing them in the Woman’s Journal in 1882. “‘You have come to me as a friend. Pity my
women. We men owe what we have to them. They have worked for us . . . but in
the new life their work is taken away. For my men I see a future; for my women I see
nothing. Pity them; help them, if you can.’ It was a touching natural speech,” Fletcher
added. “The women had been the tillers of the soil and now the men must take their
work in the change of life. What shall the faithful women find to do?”31 For Fletcher,
this was to be the beginning of a lifelong rumination on the Indian Problem as a
woman question.
In May 1883, Fletcher went to the Omaha reservation, with Francis La Flesche as her
interpreter, to implement an experimental policy in individual allotments, out of a be-
lief that if Indians were to “progress” they would have to adopt the monogamous
family structures and gendered economic division of labor encompassed in whites’ ide-
ology of separate spheres. The policy was controversial among the Omahas, and a group
of twelve families who banded together as “the Council Fire” opposed individual allot-
ments of the reservation land. However, Chief Joseph La Flesche, Francis’s father, was
among the first to take possession of his assigned land, and others followed. Then,
Fletcher got soaked in a sudden downpour on July 3, caught a chill, and lay in bed
for eight months, recovering slowly from what was eventually diagnosed as inflamma-
tory rheumatism, an illness that aged her prematurely and left her lame. During these
months, her authority among the Omahas declined precipitously, as many who had
been opposed to allotments interpreted her illness as divine retribution.32
Fletcher had La Flesche set up his desk by her bed so that she could continue with
her work. After seven months, with still one-third of the allotments to make, Fletcher
decided to implement her policy with force. According to Mark, Fletcher had the
reservation police round up the resistors, force them to appear before her, and compel
them “to make their mark in the presence of witnesses indicating that they accepted a
designated piece of land.”33 Mark estimates that roughly one-fourth of the Omahas
actively supported the allotment program, one-third actively opposed it, and the rest
were persuaded to go along.34 In all, Fletcher allotted 75,931 acres in 954 separate allot-
 124 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

ments to 1,194 persons. About 50,000 acres were sold to white settlers, and the remain-
ing 55,450 acres were reserved for the children who would be born during the next
twenty-five years. In line with whites’ patriarchal customs, wives were not given their
own allotments. Heads of families received 160 acres; single persons over eighteen (of
both sexes) received 80 acres each, and children under eighteen received 40.35
In June 1884, her work allocating land among the Omaha completed, Fletcher
took the train back east to Washington, D.C. For the next several years, she worked
both as an employee and lobbyist of the national government, continuing all the
while to write ethnographic papers for publication in the newly emerging professional
journals of anthropology. She prepared the U.S. government’s Indian Bureau exhibit
for the New Orleans Exposition of 1884, and in the fall she attended her first Lake Mo-
honk conference, where she was “made quite a heroine of,” as she confided to her
friend Caroline Dall. As Mark informs us, the Lake Mohonk reformers were generally
suspicious of ethnologists like Fletcher, whom they believed wanted to keep Indians
mired in barbarism in order to study their traditional cultures. But according to In-
dian reformer Philip Garrett, Fletcher was deemed “‘the single brilliant exception’;
her ‘philanthropy swallowed up her anthropology.’”36
It is during this period, the mid-1880s, that Alice Fletcher came to a comprehensive
view of the task facing the nation and decided on a final strategy. She understood
there to be a total of 262,000 Indians living in the United States. Approximately sixty-
four thousand were part of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes residing in Indian Terri-
tory (Oklahoma) and the Six Nations of New York—groups that were eventually ex-
empted from the Dawes legislation. This left 197,973 Indians, as Fletcher computed it,
whose relations to whites had to be reconfigured and whose rights to citizenship
needed to be recognized. These 198,000 Indians controlled 123 million acres of land on
124 reservations (excluding Indian Territory) and were under the authority of fifty-six
agencies that were scattered across eleven states and nine territories. To some reform-
ers—Lyman Abbott, for example—the problem seemed easily manageable; less than
two hundred thousand was a small number, especially in comparison to eight million
blacks. But Fletcher fully appreciated the difficulties: only a small percentage of the
reservation land (roughly eight million acres, or less than five acres per Indian) was
believed to be tillable, and this land was unevenly distributed across the 124 reserva-
tions. Complicating the problem still further was a reluctance on the part of Indian
men to enter into the occupation of farming, which in Indian societies, Fletcher un-
derstood, was conventionally assigned to the opposite sex.37
Fletcher also understood that Indians had very different understandings of land
tenure from Europeans, and this was the first thing Fletcher believed would have to be
altered if Indians were going to adopt “proper” gender relations. Fletcher declared,
“Tribal control, therefore, which ignores the individual and the family (as established
in civilized society) must be overturned, and this can only be effected surely, by giving
individual ownership of the land, and thus setting up the legal homestead. Until these
changes are made, all labor in behalf of the elevation, education, and civilization of the
Indian will be but partially effective.”38
Ultimately, Fletcher came to the conclusion that Indians’ traditional beliefs and
 ASSIMILATING PRIMITIVES • 125

practices about self-government, land, property, family, and gender could not be ac-
commodated. Evolutionary progress demanded that Indians adopt the same eco-
nomic and household arrangements as whites; private property, patriarchal marriage,
a gendered division of labor that conformed to whites’ ideology of separate spheres—
all these, she believed, were crucial to bringing about Indian equality with whites.
Based on her experience among the Omaha, Fletcher knew how difficult it would be
to get two-thirds of the tribes to vote in favor of allotment policies. The solution,
therefore, was to make allotments mandatory. “The work must be done for them [In-
dians],” Fletcher insisted, “whether they approve or not.”39
The final version of the Dawes Act of 1887, therefore, made no provision for tribal
consent and had several main features intended to do away with collective land own-
ership, matriarchal forms of gender practices, and tribal authority. First, it provided
for allotments of land to individual Native Americans as a first step toward granting
U.S. citizenship. Second, it specified different amounts of land to be granted to differ-
ent categories of people, thereby encouraging Native Americans to give up their tradi-
tional forms of kinship relations and to adopt white forms. The same numbers were
used as in the Omaha allotments: male heads of households would receive 160 acres
(wives none), unmarried men and women 80 acres each, and children 40 acres. But
discretion about how to categorize individuals—whether to recognize specific indi-
viduals as married or not—was left up to government agents. Third, and most impor-
tant, the Dawes Act deprived tribal authorities of unallotted land, specifying that all
“surplus” lands would be sold to the government and opened to white settlement.
Since the targeted Indian population was under two hundred thousand and reserva-
tions included 123,000,000 acres—or more than six hundred acres per person—this
provision had tremendous significance. In the end, the Dawes legislation provided for
a forced transference of a large portion of Indian land from tribal control to the United
States government. (Since the policy was mandatory, tribal authorities could not vote
to accept or decline these provisions.)40 There were whites at the time who were criti-
cal of this legislation, predicting that “under the profession of enabling the Indians to
become citizens” the United States would destroy Indians’ sense of themselves as inde-
pendent peoples and nations. As one unidentified editorialist remarked, severalty bills
were a “sham disguise. . . . They ought to be entitled bills for annihilating the In-
dian nations, in order to steal their lands.”41
Fletcher, in contrast, believed that these vast landholdings were not “fully utilized”
by Indian tribes and actually impeded the “advance of the Indian by isolating him
from the industries that teem throughout the length and breadth of our land.” Isola-
tion on remote reservations, Fletcher argued further, increased the Indian’s “depen-
dence upon the government,” kept him ignorant “of his own short-comings,” did
nothing to foster ambition, and left him impoverished.42 She thus praised Severalty
legislation for opening the way “for the legal release of the Indian from his hitherto
anomalous position in our midst. . . . The Indian may now become a free man; free
from the thralldom of the tribe; free from the domination of the reservation system;
free to enter into the body of our citizens. This bill may therefore be considered as the
Magna Charta of the Indians of our country.”43
 126 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

In defense of the decision to deny tribes the right to vote to decline allotments,
Fletcher offered the following rationale.
Under the combined influence of the chiefs and the agency system, the Indians are kept
in the irresponsibility of perpetual childhood. The only door of release opens through
the breaking-up of the Reservation and giving individual ownership to tracts of land
greater or less in extent, according to the nature of the soil, thereby extinguishing
tribal ownership, and in a great measure, tribal authority. By such a division of the
land, the individual would be set free and become the inheritor of his own labor, and the important point in
social advance would be gained by having the legal family established. . . . It seems clear that in any
legislation upon land for the Indians, the allotment of the land in severalty should be
made the rule, and the matter not left permanently optional with the Indians. . . .
To leave severalty optional and dependent upon a two-thirds vote of any tribe, is to
rivet the chains which bind the Indian to a hopeless position. . . . [I]t is surely impos-
ing too grave a task upon the Indian to bid him decide his own future condition; partic-
ularly as he is now standing facing the forward rush of civilization with its difficult
ideas, laws and customs, already closing him in with irresistible force.44

By likening Indians to children who lacked the maturity and experience to know
what was good for them, Fletcher justified depriving them of power over their own
lives, arguing it would be pointless to consult with or defer to them on questions con-
cerning their future. This metaphor was widespread in national discourse during the
period (see fig. 1-1 and the discussion thereof in chapter 1), but this fact should not ab-
solve Fletcher of responsibility for her role in perpetuating the view of Indians as de-
pendents. The metaphor of the Indian as a child clearly worked to bolster the au-
thority that Fletcher, as a white woman, wanted to assume. The custom of referring
to Indian men as children or wards made it possible for the gender inversion that was
necessary for white womento become rulers and protectors of Indian men. Casting Indi-
ans as children and wards also made it easier to placate white men who resented white
women’s increasing political visibility, and to argue for the naturalness of white
women assuming positions of authority and power. Who better than a white woman
would make a suitable protector for a vulnerable child? “We have inherited the
guardianship of the Indians,” Fletcher insisted, and “we must therefore act for the
benefit of our wards in a way that shall fit them to enter upon their majority.” “We
owe it to our own honor . . . to act as faithful guardians.”45
Fletcher used prevailing ideologies about evolutionary progress, the supremacy of
white civilization, and white women’s natural role as mothers to take the sting out of
a policy that would have been roundly rejected as antidemocratic had it been formu-
lated for whites. Interestingly, ideas about motherhood and guardianship also figured
in the way Fletcher conceived of her lifelong relationship with Francis La Flesche, the
young Omaha man who had served as her interpreter during her first stint as an allot-
ment officer on the Omaha reservation in 1883. Despite the difference in their ages, a
deep attachment formed between them, with Alice claiming to feel toward Francis
what a mother would feel toward a son. At one point, she even began adoption proce-
dures, giving this up when it became obvious that Francis would have to relinquish his
surname. Regardless, the two lived together in Washington, D.C., from 1884 until
 ASSIMILATING PRIMITIVES • 127

Fletcher’s death in 1923. From 1890 to 1906, Fletcher also shared her life and home
with Jane Gay, with whom she had a loving, if not erotic, relationship. Fletcher never
married; La Flesche did. His marriage, to Rosa Bourassa, which took place March 15,
1906, a date carefully chosen to coincide with Fletcher’s sixty-eighth birthday (La
Flesche was fifty), lasted less than a year and reconfigured the household in an unpre-
dictable way. Within weeks of the wedding, Francis, Jane, and Alice all became ill. In
May, a “scene” occurred at Fletcher’s bedside, and two weeks later Jane Gay packed up
and left the household permanently. Two weeks after that, Fletcher went to Mexico,
where she stayed for six months, leaving La Flesche alone in the house with his wife.
By the end of December, after a night-long conversation with Fletcher, La Flesche had
decided to end his marriage. Rather than becoming a family of four, La Flesche’s mar-
riage reaffirmed Francis and Alice’s commitment to each other. Francis left Rosa, Alice
gave up Jane.46
The unconventional way in which Fletcher lived her own personal life makes it even
more ironic that she took it upon herself to enforce monogamous domestic arrange-
ments among Indians. She did this, she insisted, for Indian women’s own protection. In
one instance, Fletcher told of her decision to prevent a sixteen-year-old girl from being
forced to marry a man she did not love. The girl, Fletcher related, was sold by her
brother to become the second wife of her older sister’s husband and repeatedly tried to
run away from her appointed husband. Each time her family forced her to return to the
man she was supposed to share with her older sister (in part to protect the family’s
property from being taken by their brother-in-law). Finally, the girl managed to run off
with another young man, against the wishes of her mother and brother. At this mo-
ment, Fletcher “allott[ed] the girl as the wife of the young man” and refused to “yield to
the pleading of mother or any other one to give her land separately.” Fletcher explained
that she was acting merely “to protect the young people,” but she feared that her at-
tempts would prove futile: “the Indian custom[s] hold good, and there is no [white] law
to guard the girl, or the property of the brother, who certainly did wrong in selling his
sister. . . . Were there law, these customs would cease to be practiced; as it is, they will
continue in spite of agents’ attempts to have a better state of affairs.”47

I N TH E 1880s, FLET CH ER COMBI N ED H ER dual identities as an ethnographer and gov-

ernment agent into the single role of advocate of political equality for Indians. Where
her contemporaries saw a tension between the two identities, Fletcher did not experi-
ence any contradiction. In fact, she was delighted when she received her first appoint-
ment on the Omaha reservation because she thought that this position would enable
her to continue her ethnographic work almost full-time. As a scientific expert, she
would be able to assemble the knowledge that she believed would help the govern-
ment determine the best methods to elevate, purify, and assimilate evolutionary infe-
riors into a higher civilization. Like most ethnologists in this period, Fletcher did not
study other cultures in order to criticize or find alternatives to Anglo-Saxon practices.
(Margaret Mead would introduce this practice in the 1920s.) Because of her evolution-
ist perspective on the world, she never doubted the superiority of her own culture or
saw any reason to look for alternative models elsewhere.
 128 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

In 1899, however, a fundamental change occurred in her thinking about assimila-

tion. Joan Mark attributes the change to a second trip that Fletcher took to the Omaha
reservation in the summer of 1897, which revealed to her that Indians’ lives on the
reservation had deteriorated from what they had been four years earlier when she had
made her allotments.48 It is also possible that the Spanish-American-Filipino War
helped to alter her perspective, allowing her to see more clearly the cultural annihila-
tion that was the flip side of racial assimilation. Now Fletcher began to advocate the im-
portance of every racial group “having a [rightful] claim to [its] past history, a right to
build one’s life into its present.” Fletcher even began to sense that Indian cultures might
be able to bring a new perspective to whitewomen’s rights: “We must endeavor to reach
the Indian’s standpoint if we would learn what was the true relation of man and woman
to each other,” Fletcher claimed for the first time.49 Fletcher also felt it imperative to
correct misreadings from the past (some of which she had helped to promote) so that
“they [Indians]who are the natural inheritors, and we [whites]who share their heritage,
may more truthfully estimate the past history of this continent.”50
To further this end, Fletcher urged young Indians, especially those who were
“thoughtful and educated,” to embark on the recording of cultural practices that
were quickly disappearing from everyday life. She wanted to “rescue” these rituals be-
fore they all “pass[ed] away with the life of the old people.” But here we must be care-
ful not to make too much of this change in Fletcher’s thinking. Although she insisted
on the importance of recording native culture so that it “could foster a noble pride in
the Indian” and serve as a “contribution to the enlightenment of the future,”
Fletcher’s identification as a full-time ethnographer made this new position one that
was solidly in her interest. No longer needing to balance the dual careers of govern-
ment agent and ethnologist, Fletcher’s main ambition was to record and publish as
much as she could. Fletcher never relinquished her role as the preeminent scientific
authority on Indian culture and reserved for herself the status of final arbiter, noting
she would be careful not to “encourage false estimates of ideas born under conditions
of limited knowledge.”51
Fletcher continued to reflect on the early conversation about the status of Indian
women that she had had with Sitting Bull during her first visit to the Sioux in 1881. In
1899, she published another version of it:

Sitting Bull . . . turned to me, saying: “You are a woman; take pity on my women,
for they have no future. The young men can be like the white men, till the soil, supply
the food and clothing, they will take the work out of the hands of the women, and the
women, to whom we have owed everything in the past, will be stripped of all which
gave them power and position among the people. Give a future to my women!” He
drew a ring from his finger, and said; “Take this to remind you of my request. Help my
women.”52

Now, in 1899, at the height of public debate about the United States’ role in the Philip-
pines, Fletcher saw a new lesson in these words—a warning about the deterioration in
the status of all women, not just Indian women, that came about as societies moved
from savagery through barbarism into civilization. Intending her remarks to encom-
 ASSIMILATING PRIMITIVES • 129

pass white women in the United States as well as Indian women, Fletcher issued a
solemn warning: “Woman’s work has been taken from her by man, and with each ap-
propriation she has been bereft of importance in the community.”53 But Fletcher still
could not move beyond this insight to a more forceful critique of patriarchal gender
relations within the supposedly advanced civilization of whites. The best she could do
was to entreat white people to be more sympathetic with the Indian woman’s “long-
ings for her previous life,” in which her labor had been valued and her status in rela-
tion to Indian men greater than it had become under “civilized” conditions.
Fletcher’s willingness to revise old ethnographic approaches to grant Indians more
agency in recording their past marked her as a radical in her day. This radicalism is
even more salient if we compare her to other women reformers, like Mary Collins and
Alice Crane, who also wrote on the Indian Question—for the Arena and the Southern
Workmanrespectively—in the early 1900s. By this time, Collins and Crane had lost pa-
tience with what they understood to be missionaries’ misguided attempts at kindness
and sympathy toward “backward” peoples. They did not consider rations a just system
of economic redress, but rather a foolish and ineffective form of almsgiving. They
blamed the government for its pampering of the Indian—calling government
support “degrading to [Indian] manhood,” and they held the Indian responsible for
a willful, illogical resistance to the white man’s civilization.54 In contrast to Kinney,
who had argued twenty years earlier that Indian men would follow their women
eagerly into civilization, Collins stated flatly, “The needs of wife and children do not
appeal to him.” Collins understood this as “the natural result of [the Indian’s] he-
redity” yet insisted that “these traits [be] altered” through a system that would give
Indian men more incentive to work. “They will only learn to work for the sake of
results. . . . If the government would hire more Indians, pay better wages, and
give less, it would help to forward this cause.”55 Crane was even more adamant
about ending all economic supports: “let him loose and make him work or starve.”56
In contrast, Fletcher never relinquished her belief that Indians were the equals of
whites in their capacity for civilization, a conviction that coexisted without any ten-
sion with her cultural ethnocentrism. If Indians had not yet fully been assimilated, the
fault lay not with them but with the failure of whites to properly execute their civiliz-
ing missions.

EVOLUTI ON I ST DI SCOURSES OF CI VI LI ZAT I ON provided the lens through which white

women focused their efforts to address “the Indian problem” as a “woman question,”
but their work among Indians also prompted them to turn the lens back upon them-
selves, reaffirming their conviction that motherhood and homemaking were
woman’s highest callings. Paradoxically, their work among Indians gave them re-
newed appreciation for the racial significance of their own domesticity. As early as
1882, Alice Fletcher had remarked that only after living among the Omaha did she re-
alize the “power of woman’s work.” Twenty years later, she was still trying to compre-
hend what she had seen. Evoking the same image that Frances Willard had offered to
the assembly of white women at the National Council of Women, Fletcher wrote for
the Woman’s Journal:
 130 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

There is a picture frequently presented to illustrate the degraded position of the Indian
woman and the lazy selfishness of the Indian man. She is seen trudging with burdens
on her back, driving the laden pony or dog, and looking after the children concerned
with nothing but her duties; while he, with quiver slung over his shoulder, bow in
hand, or his gun resting across his saddle, rides on horseback in picturesque costume,
apparently free from labor or care. When the journey ends, the woman sets up the
tent, gathers the wood, makes the fire, cooks the food and serves the family; while the
man, after watering his horse, and turning it out to graze, returns to the tent, drops on
the ground, and smokes, or falls asleep until called to partake of the meal.57

As Fletcher knew, this image was sure to raise white women’s ire: for here was the
by now classic inversion of civilized gender relations: the Indian man nonchalantly en-
joying his leisure while the Indian woman labored from morn to night. From the per-
spective of middle-class white women, it was supposed to be the reverse: man laboring
in business, supporting a wife who no longer had to perform domestic chores. The
leaders of Christian missionary societies, as women with means, employed others to
help them with domestic tasks. They knew, as Mary Abigail Dodge had put it, that do-
mestication was the death of women. But where Willard and most other white
women were affronted by this “abuse” of the squaw, Fletcher was trying to get her au-
dience to have renewed appreciation for the value that Indian culture placed on In-
dian women’s work.”Under the old tribal regime woman’s industries were essential to
the very life of the people,” Fletcher explained, “and their value was publicly recog-
nized. . . . [H]er work was exalted ceremonially. . . . Her influence in the growth
and development of tribal government, tribal ceremonies, and tribal power, shows
that her position had always been one of honor rather than one of slavery and degra-
dation.”58 Fletcher knew that her outlook would seem to her white audience “to run
counter to ordinary observation,” but she knew herself to be the better judge, and she
cautioned her colleagues in the woman’s movement against making “superficial ob-
servation[s] from a foreign standpoint.” She felt the irony poignantly: Indian women,
who had been honored for their work, were now to give it up to become ordinary
housewives.
It was an irony that women of Fletcher’s generation could never fully examine;
nor could they cover it up entirely. These women shunned housework themselves;
they occupied themselves in activities outside the home, for which they adamantly re-
fused payment so that they could perpetuate the myth that as women of leisure, they
did not work. Fletcher’s own feelings must have been deeply conflicted. Fletcher her-
self had never known domestic drudgery or financial dependence on a husband, and
these were not experiences she lamented missing. She knew firsthand what it meant
to fall from the leisure class to laboring status (she had been independently wealthy in
the early 1870s); and she knew how she felt when she was once again relieved of the
need to work for her living (as a result of having received a lifetime fellowship).
Primitive women’s labor, and the respect it was accorded in their own cultures,
presented a potential opening for feminists who were critical of their own dependency
and confinement within the domestic sphere. But evolution’s construction of ra-
cial progress prevented them from proceeding down this road. Fletcher tentatively
 ASSIMILATING PRIMITIVES • 131

headed in this direction (and Margaret Mead would take up this lead in the late 1920s,
soon after Fletcher’s death), but in the intervening decades from 1900 to 1920, femi-
nists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge would choose a
different path. Rather than celebrate primitive society for offering civilized women a
better alternative, Gilman held primitives responsible for white women’s relegation to
the home. On the face of it, the argument seems patently absurd—how could primi-
tives who did not have a gendered division of labor that relegated woman to the home
bequeath this legacy to civilized societies?Yet Gilman’s contribution to feminism was
to explain how this indeed had taken place. For her, there was no doubt about it: pa-
triarchy was an invention of the primitive, and sexual differences were a constraining
legacy that would have to be overthrown if the white race were ever to advance be-
yond its primitive heritage. Gilman’s generation—the “new woman” of the 1890s—
disavowed the domestic sphere as a site of woman’s protection and emancipation, in-
sisting that escape from the home, rather than protection within it, was the only
means by which white women could attain their freedom and equality.

I N T H E N EXT CH APTER , I turn to the evolutionist feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gil-

man and Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge, two important theorists who offered searing
critiques of white women’s oppression under civilization. Yet, remarkably, their cri-
tiques served only to fix more firmly the evolutionary boundary between the primi-
tive and the civilized even as they severed the link between civilization and sexual dif-
ference. Their feminism both drew on and reinforced dominant discourses that
constructed the white middle-class woman as the symbolic and physical embodiment
of civilization.
 6

Eliminating Sex Distinctions from Civilization
The Feminist Theories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
and Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge

[A]ll that makes for civilisation, for progress, for the growth of hu-
manity up and on toward the race ideal—takes place outside the
home. This is what has been denied to the lady of the house—
merely all human life! . . . Race characteristics belong in equal
measure to either sex, [my emphasis] and the misfortune of the
house-bound woman is that she is denied time, place, and opportu-
nity to develop those characteristics.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home (1903)

It is scarcely half a century since China was an unknown country,

and the Chinese—to our complacent view—a weird, incredible,
uncivilized people; yet in that time China has risen to be one of the
greater powers. . . . Surely, if in so short a time the “Heathen
Chinee” can rise to be a progressive human being in our estima-
tion, it is not impossible that [white] women may become social en-
tities, [my emphasis] whose acquired “femininity” may be modify-
ing faster than the carefully digested ideas of scientific observers.
Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge,
Why Women Are So (1912)

It is necessary, then, to understand Feminism as an evolutionary

development.
Beatrice Forbes-Roberston Hale,
What Women Want (1914)

W H I TE WOMEN WH O SU PPORTED T H E abolition of the Indian reservation system

were intent on eliminating racial differences in order to transform primitive
women into civilized women. They believed this endeavor was crucial both to saving
the entire race of Indians from evolutionary extinction and to freeing Indian women
from the sexist oppression of their own cultures. To do this, Anglo-Protestant women
insisted on the incorporation of patriarchal gender relations into Native American
cultures as part of an assimilationist strategy to eliminate the racial traits that they

132
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 133

deemed primitive. Even when Anglo-Protestant women were able or willing to ac-
knowledge (and usually they were not) that Native American women would have to
give up power, economic advantages, and status to assimilate into white civilization,
they still insisted on assimilation as the first step toward making Christian citizens out
of Indian primitives.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) and Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge (1860-
1945), two important feminist theorists of the early twentieth century, sympathized
with this assimilationist endeavor and, like Alice Fletcher and other members of the
WNIA, looked to the government to play a major role in this process. Gilman, who
was five years old when the Civil War ended, thought that Reconstruction and its af-
termath had demonstrated the possibilities for an enlarged assimilationist program
and that “the African race” had progressed rapidly since emancipation. She was opti-
mistic that this progress would continue.1 But Gilman also believed that a large seg-
ment of American Negroes were rejecting white cultural norms; refusing to work and
support families; and creating havoc and social disorder—in short, interfering with
the ongoing evolutionary progress of whites. Gilman wrote:

Transfusion of blood is a simple matter compared with the transfusion of civilization;

yet that is precisely what is going on between us and the negro race. . . . We have to
consider the unavoidable presence of a large body of aliens, of a race widely dissimilar and in
many respects inferior, whose present status is tous a social injury. . . . What can we do to promote
the development of the backward race so that it may become an advantageous element
in the community?2

Gilman argued that all African Americans, men and women, who had not yet at-
tained “a certain grade of citizenship” should be forced to join “industrial armies” and
compelled to perform menial labor. Universal education should be provided for the
children. “Decent, self-supporting, progressive negroes” would not need to enlist in
these armies, “but the whole body of negroes who do not progress, who are not self-
supporting, and who are degenerating into an increasing percentage of social burdens
or actual criminals should be taken hold of by the state.”3 In other words, Negro men
who, by breeding or education, could demonstrate their civilized status by working
hard, supporting families, living temperately, and worshipping Christianity were to be
accorded the rights of citizens; those who acted as primitives (were lazy, drunk, las-
civious, or unable to support themselves and their dependents) were to be imprisoned
and compelled to work so that white Americans could continue, unencumbered, in
their efforts to evolve a more perfect civilization. Gilman admitted that “a certain per-
centage of degenerates and criminals would have to be segregated and cared for,” but if
they were placed in institutions that would prevent them from reproducing, she ar-
gued, the state would benefit greatly from “cutting off the supply of these degener-
ates.” . . .4 Even in her day, Gilman’s solution seemed harsh, and an anonymous
critic in the New York Literary Digest called her proposal “a system of enforced labor,
like those which have disgraced countries like Egypt.”5
Gilman’s proposals for blacks’ assimilation were grounded in her enduring convic-
tion of the superiority of white civilization. Gilman believed that whites were a supe-
 134 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

rior race because they had created an advanced civilization, and she was convinced
that the racial advancement of nonwhite peoples was conditional on their having con-
tact with white civilization. This ethnocentrism, sometimes dismissed by white schol-
ars as a puzzling inconsistency within Gilman’s gender egalitarianism, has recently
been understood as the foundational basis of Gilman’s feminism. As Gail Bederman
has shown, Gilman’s “feminism was inextricably rooted in the white supremacism of
‘civilization’ [discourse].”6
Gilman saw no contradiction between these views: for her, white supremacy was
entirely consistent with a belief in equality between the sexes. Nor would she have
considered herself a racist because she believed that individuals, while inheriting the
acquired characteristics of their race, could ultimately transcend their racial heritage
through education and upbringing. In this way, Gilman, like other white progressives
in the early twentieth century, downplayed blackness as a permanent category of so-
cial inferiority: Negroes were not to be branded uncivilizable as a race but judged indi-
vidually on the basis of their adherence to middle-class, gendered social norms. Civi-
lization was a crucially important category in Gilman’s thought—the key to how she
envisioned (white) women’s sexual equality with (white) men. In Gilman’s view, civi-
lized women were both racially superior to noncivilized peoples generally, and
racially similar to civilized men—the racial similarity more than compensated for any
sexual inferiority. Shared racial inheritance meant that men and women of the same
race had more in common with one another than they did with the same sex of differ-
ent races. In Gilman’s words, “there is more difference in social evolution between a
civilized man and an Ainu man than there is between their relative degrees of mas-
culinity; and similarly there is more difference in social evolution between a civilized
woman and an Ainu woman than there is in their relative femininity.”7
Like Fletcher, Gilman believed that the key to uncivilized peoples’ racial advance-
ment lay in their adopting the gender practices (the cult of domesticity, the separation
of spheres, and the ideals of Victorian womanhood) that she, as a feminist, found op-
pressive in her own life and was determined to abolish from white civilization. Yet the
contradiction, so apparent to us, was not visible to Gilman for the same reason that it
was not visible to Fletcher: these women understood social evolution as an unilinear
stage process. As each race proceeded from savagery through barbarism to civilization,
the matriarchal structures of savage or primitive societies would be replaced with the
patriarchal structures of civilization. Only after industrial civilization had been at-
tained could a race become fully egalitarian in its treatment of women.
What is imperative to grasp, however, is not simply the cultural ethnocentrism or
racial prejudice of these early feminist thinkers, but the historical relationship be-
tween the simultaneous emergence of feminist ideology and assimilationism as two
components of a culturally comprehensive racial politics. Both Gilman and Mary
Roberts Smith Coolidge drew important lessons from the assimilation of foreigners
and primitives as they articulated a new ideology that they and others explicitly, self-
consciously identified as “feminist.” If racial traits could be eliminated from foreigners
and primitive peoples by their conformity to the gender roles of civilized society (en-
abling them to move up the hierarchy of evolution), then certainly the historically
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 135

developed sexual traits of white women—now redefined as “primitive survivals”

within Christian civilization—could be abolished as well. As Coolidge put it, “if in so
short a time the ‘Heathen Chinee’ can rise to be a progressive human being in our esti-
mation, it is not impossible that women may become social entities, whose acquired ‘femininity’ may be
modifying faster than the carefully digested ideas of scientific observers.”8 In this way, Gilman and
Coolidge applied assimilationist ideologies toward a new goal, calling for the eradica-
tion of so-called primitive sexual traits within (white) women so as to accelerate the
evolution of civilized society.
In other words, white feminist thinkers of the early twentieth century, unlike their
nineteenth-century predecessors, reviewed their country’s recent treatment of primi-
tives and came to an optimistic conclusion: assimilation of these nonwhites had
worked. “The African race,” Gilman declared, “with the advantage of contact without
more advanced stage of evolution, has made more progress in a few generations than
any other race has ever done in the same time, except the Japanese.”9 Traits previously
considered to be biologically fixed in a racial primitive had proven amenable to
change. If primitives could be so improved within such a short time, then so could
(civilized) women. The supposed biological fixity of the white woman’s sexual differ-
ence—her greater emotionality, inability to reason well, physical weakness—all this
could be altered within a relatively short period. This is what Coolidge meant when
she said that “in some aspects, the woman-questions are analogous to race ques-
tions.”10 Gilman agreed. “Our own general history,” Gilman wrote, “with its swift, re-
sistless Americanization of all kinds of foreigners, shows the same thing. . . . From
the foreigner of every sort the American is made.”11
The key, however, was convincing others that sexual difference should be elimi-
nated—for it was not just misogynists or social conservatives who were insisting on
the naturalness and social benefit of sexual difference. As I have noted repeatedly,
sexual difference had been accepted by the woman’s movement of the late nineteenth
century as the defining feature of white women’s contribution to white civilization.
Gilman’s key contribution to feminist theory was to recast sexual difference not as the
touchstone of Christian civilization but as a “primitive survival” within Christian civi-
lization—a detrimental vestige of less evolved societies that blocked the ongoing evo-
lution of white society. Gilman effectively dismantled her society’s hegemonic associa-
tion of (the civilized white) “woman” with the supposedly natural and ineradicable
sexual differences produced by woman’s relegation to the home.
Moreover, while most participants in the woman’s movement of this period—suf-
fragists, temperance workers, protective-labor advocates, missionaries, and so forth—
continued to base their particular demands for political and social change on woman’s
centrality to the home, Gilman and Coolidge rejected and departed from this strat-
egy. Rather than argue that the world was the home writ large, Gilman and Coolidge
conceived of the home as a primitive institution, one that had not kept up with the
evolving industrialism of the late nineteenth century. Gilman declared that “all that
makes for civilisation, for progress, for the growth of humanity up and on toward the
race ideal—takes place outside the home.”12 Her proposals for communal living
arrangements, with public dining halls, maid service, and childcare facilities on the
 136 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

premises, were fashioned out of a desire to free (white) women from the daily chores
of housekeeping and domestic life so that they could partake in the supposedly more
advanced forms of economic production and social interaction.
However, Gilman’s dismantling of nineteenth-century constructions of (white)
domesticity and womanhood did not alter the prevailing racial beliefs and hierarchies
that were embedded within those constructions. In fact, her new theories of (white)
womanhood—her feminism—while dismissing sexual difference as crucial to evolu-
tionary progress, nonetheless continued to encode assumptions of white racial superi-
ority. Gilman’s discursive tactics, formulated in response to the racial anxieties (and in
light of the assimilationist policies) of whites during the progressive era, were based on
an ongoing denigration of the “primitive” as the antithesis of “civilization.” She never
intended to challenge the civilizationist hierarchy of evolutionary theories. She only
wanted to remove the sexual difference of (white) woman as its defining feature. To do
this, she and Coolidge emphasized the racial similarities, or the potential for such
similarities, between white women and white men, and thus the racial distance be-
tween white women and nonwhite women. In this way, Gilman’s own theories of so-
cial evolution reinscribed many of the same racial assumptions about white women’s
superiority that were contained in earlier social Darwinian constructions of (civilized
white) womanhood.
In sum, then, the specific feminist visions of Gilman and Coolidge were historically
and discursively intertwined with the assimilationist politics of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Anglo-Protestant feminism developed as an integral
member of the family of discourses that emerged as a response to laissez-faire versions
of social Darwinism, discourses that included socialist strategies to deal with labor
conflict; eugenics and birth control strategies to deal with fears of racial degeneration;
and state regulation to deal with immigration, poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, and
other social ills. To put this point another way, feminism and assimilationism were
historical siblings, the offspring of a marriage between democratic liberal ideals that
held forth the promise of equal citizenship for all who conformed to the gendered
ideals of Anglo-Protestant civilization and contemporary evolutionist premises about
the superiority of the civilized in relation to the primitive.
Unlike many white women of this period who remained ambivalent about chang-
ing woman’s nature, Gilman and Coolidge embraced this aspect of social-Darwinian
theory. How profound the potential changes in white women might be, Gilman and
Coolidge proclaimed, no one could yet foresee. As Coolidge explained, just as it was
impossible to know what “degree of civilization” nonwhite peoples might attain
under “the stimulus of new environments,” it was also not possible to predict what
(Anglo-Saxon middle-class) women might become in a world in which sex segrega-
tion was not rigidly enforced.13 Just as racial differences of blacks or the Chinese could
be made to disappear, given appropriate measures to assimilate them into civilized so-
ciety, so might primitive sexual differences of (white) women disappear with analo-
gous types of changes.
Gilman and Coolidge worked to dislodge sexual difference from the realm of nor-
mative white civilization by arguing that sexual differences would disappear as civi-
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 137

lized women became less like the primitive. Whereas white women in the WNIA un-
derstood sexual differences as a positive feature of Anglo-Saxon civilization, evidence
of white Christians’ superiority and membership in the “higher races,” Gilman and
Coolidge identified sexual differences for whites as a negative vestige of their primitive
past. Thus, a fundamental contradiction existed at the intersection of early feminist
and assimilationist strategies: sexual difference was to be inserted into primitive cul-
tures as a way to lessen the racial difference between primitives and the civilized; but
sexual difference was to be removed from civilization as a way to promote equality be-
tween white men and white women. Gilman and Coolidge’s assimilationist policies
called for the diminishing of racial differences between whites and nonwhites, while
their feminist demands were based on a reassertion of racial differences between the
civilized and primitive.
For civilized (white) peoples, sexual difference needed to be expunged because it in-
terfered with the further development of industrial efficiency and individual and so-
cial morality in modern civilization. For primitive peoples, however, sexual difference
needed to be injected into the society to help accelerate “racial inferiors” along the
path of social evolution. Hence for Gilman, the development of patriarchal economic
and familial structures was an evolutionary consequence of the gender relations of specific
racial groups. “The Teutons and Scandinavian stocks seem never to have had that period
of enslaved womanhood, that polygamous harem culture; their women never went
through that debasement; and their men have succeeded in preserving the spirit of
freedom which is inevitably lost by a race which has servile women.”14 In other words,
Gilman held primitives responsible for originating and perpetuating “androcentric”
doctrines that held woman in subjection to man. Literary critic Susan Lanser has
stated it most succinctly: “for Gilman, patriarchy [was] a racial phenomenon.”15
Moreover, by transferring responsibility for the origin of patriarchal oppression
from “civilized” Anglo-Saxon men to “savage” or “primitive” African and Asian men,
Gilman made it possible for Anglo-Saxons to continue to assert their racial superiority
over other “races” without having to invoke permanent sexual differences as the de-
termining causal factor of their racial superiority. It was clear to Gilman that the dan-
ger of allowing “androcentrism” (or patriarchy) to continue was that so long as
(white) women were subjected to androcentric practices, the racial development of
whites would be slowed. In 1911, Gilman expounded in Man-MadeWorld:

Nature did not intend him [man] to select [a woman as his sexual partner in marriage];
he is not good at it. . . . When women became the property of men; sold and
bartered; “given away” by their paternal owner to their marital owner; they lost this
prerogative of the female, this primal duty of selection. The males were no longer im-
proved by their natural competition for the female; and the females were not im-
proved; because the male did not select for points of racial superiority, but for such qualities as pleased
him.16

So long as (white) women remained economically dependent upon (white) men,

(white) men would maintain control over sexual selection. And because white men
chose to reproduce with women whom they found attractive for superficial reasons—
 138 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

because “the male did not select for points of racial superiority”—the future develop-
ment of the white race would remain in jeopardy. This was Gilman’s answer to those
who blamed (white) racial degeneration on the declining birth rates of (white) women.
Gilman held that the solution to the problem of “race suicide” was to make (white)
women economically independent of men so that (white) women could once again re-
sume control over sexual selection.
In Coolidge and Gilman’s discussions of sexual difference, the traditional qualities
associated with (white middle-class) womanhood—virtue or chastity, emotional sen-
sitivity, and physical delicacy—were no longer deemed positive or permanent traits,
although both theorists continued to posit these qualities as biologically transmittable
traits. Because of their adherence to evolutionary explanations for the appearance of
“feminine” qualities, neither woman was ever able to fully differentiate between bio-
logical notions of sex and social constructions of gender, although Coolidge under-
stood hyperfeminine qualities to be a “pretense” that (Anglo-Protestant middle-class)
women assumed in order to secure economic support. In Coolidge’s words, woman
had “pretend[ed] to be extremely delicate, elusive, and emotional in order to enhance
her charms [ to secure a husband].”17
Gilman also denigrated the so-called womanly virtues, characterizing “obedience,
patience, endurance, contentment, humility, resignation, temperance, prudence, in-
dustry, kindness, cheerfulness, modesty, gratitude, thrift, and unselfishness” as “con-
venient virtues of a subject class.”18 She continued to believe that (white) woman’s
sexual differences from (white) man had become a part of her biological and racial in-
heritance through her relegation to a “primitive” sphere of life. The assimilationist
strategy of feminizing primitives to address their inferiority was reversed in Gilman’s
mind; now the (white) woman was primitivized as a part of a critique of Western gen-
der relations. Yet the biological inheritance of white women could be reformed by al-
tering the prescribed social activities and duties of (white) women—first by removing
the cultural restrictions that kept these women confined to their primitive (domestic)
sphere. The “woman problem,” as Gilman redefined it, was that Anglo-Protestant
women had been “denied time, place and opportunity” to develop those “race” char-
acteristics that were part of every white woman’s shared racial heritage with white
men but were now mistakenly referred to as “male,” when in fact they were “human”
traits, potentially available to both white men and women.
Gilman and Coolidge demanded that woman’s “human”—as opposed to “fe-
male”—traits be given due recognition by society, but what they really meant was
that the humanity of white women be recognized as essentially the same as and equal
to whitemen. Most of the time, the racial component of their argument was obscured
by universal or racially neutral language about “the race,” which as historian Linda
Gordon has pointed out in relation to eugenic discourse of this period, was revealingly
ambiguous: “race” could mean either the human race or the white race.19 Occasion-
ally, though, Coolidge and Gilman voiced their racial views so explicitly that it be-
came evident that they were self-consciously fashioning their theories about sexual
equality on a foundation of racial superiority. Quoting from Thomas Wentworth Hig-
ginson’s work of the 1880s, for example, Coolidge espoused what were by now long-
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 139

standing truisms about the lack of sexual differentiation among primitives and the
evolutionary gulf between white women and women of the lower races.

This is not denying the distinctions of sex , but only asserting that they are not so inclu-
sive and all-absorbing as is supposed. It is easy to name other grounds of difference
which entirely ignore those of sex, striking directly across them, and rendering a differ-
ent classification necessary. It is thus with distinctions of race or color, for instance. An Indian man and
woman are at many points more like one another than is either toa white person of the same sex.20

Coolidge also believed that sexual differences were less relevant to theories of social
equality than were racial differences, and she too was convinced that racial differences
could be overcome by Americanizing immigrants, educating blacks, reforming Indi-
ans, and assimilating the Chinese. Similarly, Gilman’s statement that “race character-
istics belong in equal measure to either sex” should not be read as an egalitarian asser-
tion about all women’s potential equality or common humanity with all men. “Race
characteristics belong in equal measure to either sex” meant that men and women of
any particular race shared equally in their own race’s specific racial heritage.

I N AN EFFORT TO EXPLAI N TH E personal roots of Gilman’s feminism, historians have

called attention to the tensions within Gilman’s difficult childhood and young adult-
hood.21 By the time she was nine years old, Charlotte knew firsthand how the ide-
ology of separate spheres, which promised women protection and care within the do-
mestic realm, often left women impoverished and vulnerable. Her mother, Mary
Perkins, had had three children in quick succession before being advised by her physi-
cian that further childbearing would endanger her life. Embittered by this news,
Charlotte’s father, Frederick Perkins, distanced himself from his family and either re-
fused or was unable to support his wife and children. “Forced to take up the itinerant
lifestyle of genteel ‘poor relations,’” as historian Gail Bederman notes, the family was
constantly on the move to escape creditors. They ranged across three states—Rhode
Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts—often living with resentful relatives.22
Gilman later described her mother’s life as “one of the most painfully thwarted I have
ever known. . . . The most passionately domestic of home-worshipping house-
wives, she was forced to move nineteen times in eighteen years, fourteen of them
from one city to another.”23
The alienation, poverty, and dislocations must have been even more galling, how-
ever, because Charlotte Perkins was related to the prominent (and wealthy) Beecher
family. Her father was the grandson of the evangelical preacher Lyman Beecher.
Catharine Beecher, the proponent of women’s education, and Harriet Beecher Stowe,
author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were Gilman’s great-aunts. Through her sporadic contact
with these various relatives, Gilman was introduced to the reigning radical ideas (abo-
litionism, suffragism, evangelicalism, evolutionism) of the 1860s and 1870s. However,
while this kinship brought her into proximity with a northeastern intellectual elite, it
would also serve to remind her that she was denied full access to this elite world—an
exclusion she felt as a denial of a rightful inheritance.
In Charlotte’s family, then, as historian Gail Bederman points out, the Victorian
 140 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

doctrine of separate spheres was clearly ever-present as a religious dogma and social
ideal, yet entirely nonfunctional. Even as a child, Charlotte sensed that predicating
civilization’s advance on separate spheres was costing women financial security and
happiness. Reacting against a society that valued frailty and dependency in elite
women, Charlotte took great pride in her robust health and strong body. She re-
formed her dress, eschewed corsets and uncomfortable shoes, and began a serious pro-
gram of strenuous exercise, getting plenty of fresh air, and taking cold baths to in-
crease her physical endurance and self-discipline.
Determined not to share her mother’s fate, Charlotte began to prepare herself for
a life of intellectual activity outside the home. Because her family could not find the
money to send her to school, Charlotte took charge of her own education. In 1877, at
age seventeen, Gilman wrote her father (he was assistant director of the Boston Public
Library) to ask him to suggest books for her to read. (Throughout her life she would
repeat this pattern by corresponding with other academic men, developing a close in-
tellectual relationship with the sociologists Edward Ross and Lester Ward.) She later
described this moment as “the beginning of [my] real education.”24 Charlotte avidly
read the books her father suggested, including Edward B. Tylor’s Researches into the Early
History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865) and Primitive Culture (1871); John
Lubbock’s Pre-historic Times (1869) and The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of
Man(1870); and a large number of issues of Popular Science Monthly, a magazine that had
recently been established to disseminate the views of Herbert Spencer and other evo-
lutionists’ to an American public.25 Out of these works, Charlotte set about “building
my own religion,” and social evolution soon became the basis of her political views
and social commitments. Looking back on her life when she was writing her autobiog-
raphy in the 1920s, Gilman reflected, “[T]his religion of mine underlies all my Living, is
the most essential part of my life, and began in [those] years.”26
Eventually, Gilman conceptualized an alternative to living her life as a woman
doomed to the confinement of the domestic sphere. Instead, she would live as an
Anglo-Saxon, and accept the mission to “carry out the evolution of the human race.”
Like so many other white women of this period, Gilman would come to see Anglo-
Protestant women as central to the civilizing mission. But for Gilman, this choice
came at great cost, because she experienced the two components of her identity—her
race and her sex—as fundamentally at odds. Initially, at least, she could not reconcile
her life as a woman with her aspirations as an Anglo-Saxon civilizer. As Bederman
summarizes the conflict, “either she could follow the claims of sex—marriage, moth-
erhood, domesticity and dependency—or the claims of race.”27
By the time Charlotte was twenty-one years old, she had begun to experience pro-
found psychological turmoil over which avenue to take. She had just received a mar-
riage proposal from a handsome young artist, Charles Walter Stetson, to whom she
was very much attracted. At first she refused him, but then she wavered: “on the one
hand, I knew it was normal and right” for a woman to marry; “On the other, I felt
strongly that for me it was not right, that the nature of the life before me forbade it.”28
She eventually accepted Stetson, was married on May 2, 1884, and then promptly fell
into paralysis and despair, an illness from which she suffered acutely throughout her
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 141

brief marriage and which recurred in periods throughout her life. The initial depres-
sion was diagnosed as neurasthenia, and she sought treatment for this illness from
S. Weir Mitchell, an experience that nearly cost her her sanity and which she fictional-
ized in her short story The Yellow Paper (1891).29 Finding that her symptoms abated
when she was away from her husband, Gilman eventually left Stetson permanently in
1888, to embark on a new life in California as a writer and reformer.30 Years later, in
1900, at age forty, she entered into a happy second marriage with a younger cousin,
Houghton Gilman.
Although Gilman’s case is the most famous, many other white women activists of
the 1880s and 1890s experienced similar tensions with traditional forms of patriarchal
domesticity. Some of the women I have discussed in this book took similarly uncon-
ventional approaches to their personal life. After the death of her second husband,
which occurred when she was forty-three, May French-Sheldon developed an inti-
mate relationship with Nellie Butler, which apparently lasted for the rest of her life.
Alice Fletcher never married but shared her life with Francis La Flesche, a man who
was seventeen years younger than herself. Susan B. Anthony never married, drawing
her sustenance from her close friendship with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Mary Roberts
Smith Coolidge married for the first time at age thirty, later divorced, and eventually
settled into a happy second marriage with Dane Coolidge, a man fifteen years her
junior.
Within ten years of divorcing Stetson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman had become the
most influential and prominent feminist theorist in the United States, a reputation
she maintained until the mid-1910s. Women and Economics, her first monographic treat-
ment of these problems published in 1898, brought her instant fame and worldwide
acclaim. It remained her most successful book, going through nine U.S. printings by
1920, and was published in translation in Japan, Hungary, Holland, Denmark, Italy,
Germany, and Russia.31 Reviewers called it “the book of the age” and recognized it as
the most valuable contribution on the woman question since John Stuart Mill’s essays
on The Subjection of Women (1869).32 Thirty-five years after its publication, the New York
City Review of Literature was still asserting that Women and Economics was “considered by
feminists of the whole world as the outstanding book on Feminism.”33
In Women and Economics, Gilman argued that (white) women’s relegation to the home
and economic dependence on (white) men meant that they had not had the opportu-
nity to evolve socially. While (white) men had learned how to organize their efforts
collectively and to form industries with specialization of labor and economies of scale,
(white) women were still replicating each other’s labor in the home in ways that had
not changed much since the beginning of time. “The economic progress of the race,”
Gilman wrote, “involve[s] the collective activities of all the trades, crafts, arts, manu-
factures, inventions, discoveries and all the civil and military institutions that go to
maintain them.”34 As these were the exclusive domain of (white) men within the civi-
lization of the United States, (white) women’s present degree of economic develop-
ment was still very primitive, not because of “any inherent disability of sex” but be-
cause of the “present condition of woman,” which “forbid[s] . . . the development
of this degree of economic ability.” Were it not for the transmission of acquired traits
 142 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

to both sexes, (white) women would be even further behind (white) men in social
evolution. But because they too inherited transmissable traits from their fathers, they
shared in (white) men’s evolutionary development.35 These were themes that Gilman
would return to repeatedly in future books: Concerning Children(1900), The Home, (1903),
HumanWork(1904), The Man-MadeWorld(1911), and His Religion and Hers(1923).
Women and Economics drew heavily on social-Darwinian precepts. The main problem
was that (white) women were excluded from much social activity and thus had not
been able to evolve as much as (white) men. Gilman believed that sexual distinctions
between white men and women had increased so much that “we have in all the
higher races two markedly different sexes, strongly drawn together by the attraction
of sex, and fulfilling their use in the reproduction of species.”36 Unfortunately, the
higher races had evolved a “morbid excess” in sexual attraction (i.e., white men
wanted to have sex with white women much more frequently than was necessary for
the purposes of reproduction, and more frequently than white women wanted), and
this problem was compounded by the fact that white men did not choose their wives
for their usefulness to the race’s survival but merely for their sexual attractiveness.
“Man, as the feeder of woman, becomes the strongest modifying force in her eco-
nomic condition. . . . For, in [woman’s] position of economic dependence in the
sex-relation, sex distinction is with her not only a means of attracting a mate, as with
all creatures, but [also] a means of getting her livelihood.”37 Herein lay the central
problem: when woman stopped working for her livelihood, she was selected by men
for her sexual attractiveness alone, and her sexual function became the raison d’être of
her existence. As the middle-class white woman stopped producing goods (while
working-class and nonwhite women continued to do so because their husbands did
not earn enough for them to withdraw from productive labor), she became more
highly sexed, more emotional, less rational, and less useful in the world.
The negative impact of civilization’s sexual differences was not born by (white)
women alone. Sexual difference was also having a negative effect on (white) men, who
were in danger of regressing from strong, rational agents back into primitive aggres-
sors—men who would mistreat and abuse women. To illustrate this contention, how-
ever, Gilman did not cite signs of regression among white men. Rather, she took her
evidence from “oriental nations” that overbred women for sexual attraction. Not only
were these women much smaller and weaker than women elsewhere, but also they
had not produced vigorous male offspring. “The female in curtained harems,”
Gilman wrote, “is confined most exclusively to sex-functions and denied most fully
the exercise of race-functions. . . . In such peoples the weakness, the tendency to
small bones and adipose tissue of the over-sexed female, is transmitted to the male,
with a retarding effect on the development of the [entire] race.”38 Conversely, Gilman
maintained, Europeans had had a different evolutionary history: “in early Germanic
tribes the comparatively free and humanly developed women—tall, strong, and
brave—transmitted to their sons a greater proportion of human power and much less
of morbid sex-tendency.”39 White Europeans then had developed advanced civiliza-
tions not just because the men were the most advanced men in the world but because
the women had had a past history in which they had been active and strong. From
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 143

Gilman’s perspective, the Victorian moment was merely a recent phase in a much
longer history, and needed to be recognized as a potential threat to the future
progress of the (white) race.
Gilman’s contribution to evolutionary theory, then, was to hypothesize that in-
creasing sexual difference to such extremes that women were only valued for their
sexual attractiveness would lead to racial regression. In other words, women every-
where were the key to racial progress: strong intelligent women bred strong intelli-
gent men; weak, oversexed women bred weak ineffectual men. Civilization, although
initially brought about by sexual difference, was now in danger of producing too
much sexual difference: excessive sex was threatening the future progress of the white
race.
These ideas, while distinctive to Gilman, were not created by her in a vacuum.
Others were heading in similar directions. In fact, a community of intellectuals,
whom Gilman knew personally and whose work she read carefully, assisted her in
coming to these formulations. This community of scholars included (but was not lim-
ited to) the sociologists Lester Ward (1841–1913) and Edward A. Ross (1866–1951), as
well as the economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929).40
Gilman first met Ward in Washington, D.C., in early 1896, where she was attending
the annual suffrage convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Associa-
tion and was scheduled to address the Judiciary Committee of the House of Represen-
tatives. The Wards hosted a reception for Gilman, having known of her since the pub-
lication of her poem “Similar Cases” in the Nationalist in 1890. Gilman was also familiar
with and impressed by Ward’s work. She had read his article “Our Better Halves,”
which had appeared in the Forumin 1888 (see chapter 1).41 In her own work, Gilman
drew heavily from Lester Ward’s theories. Ward had posited that there had been a time
very early in human history when women had controlled the process of sexual selec-
tion, choosing their mates and thus determining the racial traits that would appear in
offspring. Women in these matriarchal societies could exercise this power of sexual se-
lection because they were self-sufficient laborers—the primary economic producers
in their societies—and economically independent of men.42 Gilman agreed with Ward
about this early prehistory and believed, too, that primitive men had usurped all
forms of women’s productive labor, made women their slaves and took possession of
them as property, enforced women’s economic dependence upon male providers, and
assumed control over sexual selection. With the advent of modern Christianity, how-
ever, the condition of women had improved dramatically. Civilized Christian men no
longer treated (white) women as slaves or property and were slowly permitting them
access to economic opportunities.
Moreover, as Ward also argued, (civilized) women now played a crucial role in the
perpetuation of the “race” because children inherited their core racial traits from their
mother, not their father.43 This was the point that Gilman recognized as critical in
revaluing (civilized) women’s role in evolution, appreciating the radical potential in
Ward’s reformulation of social-Darwinian ideas about (white) women’s role in the
transmission of racial traits. Gilman dedicated The Man-Made World to Lester Ward, in
acknowledgment of the influence that his “gynaecocentric theory” had had upon her
 144 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

work, stating “nothing so important to humanity [as gynaecocentrism] has been ad-
vanced since the Theory of Evolution, and nothing so important to women has ever
been given to the world.”44
Ward’s insistence that (white) women were the cornerstone of future racial
progress for “the race” meant that society could no longer afford to ignore the intel-
lectual and psychological stagnation of (white) women. Gilman’s abbreviated formu-
lation of this point was that the “female was the race type, the male, originally a sex
type only.”45 Or “the [white] child is born to a progressive fatherhood and a stationary
motherhood. . . . We rob our children of half their social heredity by keeping the
mother in an inferior position.”46
Yet, Gilman’s use of evolutionary theories differed from Ward’s in significant ways.
Where Ward had posited an evolutionary advantage to sexual differences among
whites, Gilman argued that existing differences between (white middle-class) women
and (white middle-class) men were not sexual differences at all but primitive survivals
that continued to manifest themselves in (white middle-class) women only because of
their relegation to a primitive sphere, an idea that she adapted from the work of Tylor
and Veblen. It was not that (white) women had a “feminine brain” and (white) men a
“masculine brain” but that (white civilized) women had a “home-bred brain” and
(white civilized) men a “world-bred brain.”47 Whereas Ward assumed that men’s con-
trol over sexual selection was beneficial to all “racial” progress, Gilman posited that
the control primitive men had wrested over sexual selection had led to (white)
women’s mental, physical, and psychological stagnation.
Through the Wards, Gilman became close friends with Edward Ross, who was six
years younger than Gilman and at the time of their earliest acquaintance was just be-
ginning to establish himself as a scholar.48 (Ross had married Ward’s niece in 1892
while Ross was employed in the sociology department at Stanford.)49 Like Gilman,
Ross eventually became a key figure among a generation of progressive academics and
reformers who opposed laissez-faire versions of social Darwinism and devoted their
lives to creating the intellectual foundations to justify state intervention in economic
and social practices. In the mid-1890s, just before Gilman’s reputation as the author of
Women and Economics was established, Ross was becoming known as a vocal advocate of
free silver—he wrote speeches for William Jennings Bryan’s presidential campaign in
1896. In the early 1900s, when Gilman’s national reputation was secured, Ross also be-
came famous for his views on “race suicide” and for his support of immigration re-
striction legislation as a way to protect native-born American laborers from declining
wages.50 President Theodore Roosevelt read Ross’s early monographs and found his
ideas extremely valuable in justifying the nation’s foreign imperialist and domestic as-
similationist programs.
Throughout Gilman’s life, Ross was warmly supportive of her work, and she de-
pended on him to keep her up to date on an ever-growing sociological literature. De-
spite his frank opinions of her work—and they were not always favorable—Gilman
was able to confide in him her feelings about her “scandalous lack of education and
most unscientific method of work.”51 She looked to him to supply her with the refer-
ences that she felt her arguments needed to be acceptable to academic audiences. She
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 145

wrote Ross in November 1900, “Can you not—without taking much time to it, jot me
down a little list of Standard Authors on Scientific Subjects who would have been au-
thorities if I’d read ’em? . . . [G]ive me a few of the big progressive sociologists,
whose work bears out mine or mine theirs.”52 He lent her copies of books he thought
would interest her—including William Graham Sumner’s Folkways(1906) and Sumner
and Albert Galloway Keller’s Science of Society (1927)—sent her copies of his own books,
and wrote her criticism of her works.53
Ross also introduced Gilman to Thorstein Veblen by lending her a copy of A Theory
of the Leisure Classwhich she claimed to find “most interesting and suggestive.”54 As col-
leagues in the social sciences, Ward, Ross, and Veblen regularly reviewed each other’s
works in academic journals and shared their ideas through their personal correspon-
dence. Ross also sent Ward a copy of A Theory of the Leisure Class, which the latter re-
viewed for the American Sociological Review. In turn, Veblen expressed warm appreciation
of Ward’s Pure Sociology (1903). Although Gilman never went to college or held an aca-
demic appointment, she followed these intellectual developments closely and took it
upon herself to become a popularizer of these men’s theories.55
By the early 1900s, Ward, Ross, and Veblen were all influential in academic as well as
progressive reform circles, although none of them had obtained Gilman’s interna-
tional stature. Only Ward, in addition to Gilman, received an entry in the 1899 edition
of the Dictionary of American Biography. Within several more years, however, Ross’s na-
tional reputation would become well established, despite or perhaps because of, his
controversial dismissal from Stanford in 1900.56 In 1901 he published two important
works: an article, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” and a monograph, Social Control. In
the former, Ross coined the phrase “race suicide” to describe the declining birth rates
of Anglo-Saxons, a phenomenon that was deeply troubling to whites of Ross’s genera-
tion.57 Ross was explicitly pro-imperialist in his views, and Social Control brought him
widespread recognition not only within academic sociology but also among politi-
cians and reformers. Roosevelt wrote Ross a letter of appreciation, as did the jurist
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.58
Veblen, on the other hand, had been opposed to the United States assuming a pro-
tectorship over the Philippines in 1901. Yet, even though Veblen’s work was intended
as a thoroughgoing attack on so-called civilized practices, his formulations were use-
ful to and were recuperated by those people who wanted to give imperialist policies a
central role in the civilizing mission. Ross and Gilman found Veblen’s work im-
mensely helpful in explaining how Anglo-Saxons had remained fit for the task of col-
onizing purportedly inferior peoples despite the strains of civilization. At the turn of
the century, as I have already shown, extensive debates occurred about whether the
United States was overstepping ethical boundaries and evolutionary possibilities when
it made the decision to bring civilization to primitives residing outside its geographic
borders. Veblen’s and Ross’s works, taken together, provided new and much needed
evidence that Anglo-Saxon Americans were racially suited to the role of foreign impe-
rialist and that primitives residing in remote lands could indeed be transformed into
well-assimilated subjects.
Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class rejected the Spencerian-Sumnerian assumption
 146 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

that social evolution, if left to its own devices, would lead to ever more advanced and
better societies. The book also rejected the assumption, widespread among white
elites, that primitives were unrelentingly, inherently hostile, brutal, and aggressive.
According to Veblen, civilized men manifested more aggression than primitive men,
as a result of an evolutionary process he called “the direct transmission of archaic
traits.” Aggression had survived in civilized societies, while the “peaceable” qualities of
primitive societies had not.59 Veblen reconstituted the so-called civilized Anglo-Saxon
male as capable of much more physical aggression and racial stability than had previ-
ously been acknowledged, and he characterized primitives as more peace-loving, co-
operative, and racially flexible than previously believed.
Indeed, it was this type of reasoning that Gilman might well have had in mind
when she called A Theory of the Leisure Classan “amazing” book.60 Veblen had taken up a
trait—aggression, which was previously thought to be primitive—and explained how
it had originated in primitives but now survived only in civilized peoples. Appropriat-
ing this theoretical move, Gilman accomplished the same kind of intellectual trans-
mutation for sexual difference: sexual difference originated in primitives, but had
come to manifest itself as an archaic survival in civilized peoples.
From Veblen’s perspective, the fact that the best traits of the most primitive socie-
ties (peacefulness and solidarity) had not endured, while the worse traits of less primi-
tive societies (aggression) had survived in civilized societies, was simply proof that the
Spencerian predictions about the survival of the fittest were mistaken: if Anglo-Saxons
were the “fittest,” clearly they were not the most fit in moral terms. Thus, Veblen
ironically maintained that the “energetic aggressiveness and pertinacity” of “preda-
tory [primitive] man is a heritage [enjoyed by present-day white men] of no mean
value,” and concluded that the “bellicose temperament [was] in some appreciable de-
gree a race characteristic . . . appear[ing] to enter more largely into the make-up of
the dominant, upper-class ethnic type— the dolicho-blond of the European countries.”61 In other
words, white, upper-class Anglo-Saxon men (like Roosevelt) were inherently, biologi-
cally, racially aggressive—this was a part of their ethnic or racial makeup.
Veblen found this conclusion deeply ironic and hoped that it would prompt read-
ers to question the benevolence of imperialist claims that the civilized had a respon-
sibility to assimilate primitives. For some readers, it may have had this effect, but
for others, like Ross, Veblen had provided plenty of evidence to make pro-imperialists
feel optimistic that the white race could and would physically conquer nonwhite
races. With Veblen’s work fresh in mind, Ross wrote in his own book, Social Control, that
“certain shocking practices of primitive folk which were formerly held to indicate
great ferocity . . . are now differently interpreted.” The savage was not, after all,
“savage at all, [save in his mode of warfare, but] on the contrary [was] amiable and
peaceful.”62
Veblen and Ross’ arguments that primitives were really peace-loving and not com-
bative enabled many whites to reclaim violence and aggression as an inherent, in-
evitable part of the racial inheritance of civilized white men and to rejoice in this reap-
propriation. Many imperialists saw this ideal of tough masculinity as an antidote to
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 147

the problems of “over-civilization” and a way to reassure skeptics that the United
States would prevail in its attempts to civilize primitives on foreign terrain. To shrink
from this civilizing mission would be to acknowledge that white men had degenerated
racially from earlier standards of white manliness. In 1899 Theodore Roosevelt argued
in “The Strenuous Life”:

We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and
the Philippines. . . . If we drove out a medieval tyranny [Spain] only to make room for
savage anarchy, we had better not have begun the task at all. It is worse than idle to say
that we . . . can leave to their fates the islands we have conquered. . . . Some
stronger, manlier power would have to step in and do the work, and we would have
shown ourselves weaklings.63

Moreover, to preserve yet temper the “adaptability” and “violence” of Anglo-

Saxon men, white racial ideology reconceptualized the reproductive role of Anglo-
Saxon women as a desirable sexual characteristic because it lent “racial stability” to the
white race.64 With this new balance of white male aggression and white female racial
stability, imperialists could feel confident that they would be able to withstand what
they assumed would be the debasing effects of primitive cultures as they set off to
colonize foreign peoples living in tropical climates.
Ross thought of imperialism as part of an ongoing evolutionary process, necessary
for the continuing racial development of Anglo-Saxons. Yet, while he had no doubts
that Anglo-Saxons had evolved to become superior to all other races, he had serious
misgivings about how the “race” would fare now that the United States was entering a
more “static” period in its development. Along with historian Frederick Jackson
Turner, who wrote about the closing of the frontier in 1893, Ross gave credence to the
notion that the country had used up its “wilderness,” in which Anglo-Saxons had de-
veloped the traits of “self-reliance” and “independence” that had given them their
evolutionary advantage. A new frontier was needed so that whites could continue
evolving. Thus, Ross advised (white) Americans to look to territories outside the con-
tinental United States to continue their racial development, for in Ross’ words, a “dy-
namic epoch” was required to ensure that Anglo-Saxons would remain superior to
other races.65
For Gilman, these reconfigurations of violence and aggression as natural and bene-
ficial racial traits in white manhood constituted a significant challenge and can help us
understand some of the contradictions in her theoretical work—for example, why
she often asserted that (white) women were “naturally” more peaceful than men
even as she was attempting to subvert the traditional sexual dichotomies of evolution-
ary theory. Her assertion that (white) men were inherently more violent and (white)
women inherently more peaceful derived from her desire to oppose the overt vio-
lence of imperialist policies yet still call for other tactics to assimilate racial inferiors
into the superior civilization of the United States. Faced with the claim that aggression
in white men was an advantageous racial trait in a world where conflict with uncivi-
lized peoples was presumed to be necessary for white racial advancement, Gilman re-
 148 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

sponded that (white) women offered a viable alternative in whites’ racial struggles to
preserve the cultural dominance of Anglo-Saxon civilization.
Most important, Gilman rebutted the notion that modern warfare was of evolu-
tionary benefit to whites—by denying that modern warfare served the same evolu-
tionary function for civilization that ancient warfare had served for primitive societies.
In “primitive warfare,” where women were “promptly enslaved, or, at the best, po-
lygamously married,” Gilman maintained, war and conquest might be in the interest
of social evolution. But as “civilization advances and monogamy obtains,” Gilman ar-
gued, “whatever eugenic benefits may have sprung from warfare are completely lost,
and all its injuries remain.”66 In primitive societies, in which women had been eco-
nomically independent of men and thus able to care for themselves and their young
without men’s assistance, combat had served the interests of human progress by
weeding out weak men and leaving only the strongest males as sexual mates for
women. In modern societies, however, where women were selected for their sexual
attractiveness and were dependent on men for their economic survival, warfare had
disastrous effects: the strongest men, who served as soldiers, were likely to die in com-
bat, leaving their wives and children destitute, while those men who were “too old or
too young, [or were] the sick, crippled [or] defective [would be] left behind to marry
and be fathers.”67
Thus war no longer constituted a “eugenic” solution to whites’ racial difficulties but
would lead only to a further diminishing of the white population, exacerbating the
problem of “race suicide” and producing what she called “surplus” women who lacked
husbands and so by necessity remained single and childless. Instead, Gilman proposed
widespread adoption of what she called the “female process”: “The female process is to
select the fit [as mates with whom to reproduce].” This (white) women could not do if
the “best” men were enlisting in imperialist wars.68 Refusing to accede to explanations
that attributed the declining birth rates among the white middle classes to white
women’s selfishness or ambition, Gilman railed, “All this talk, for and against and about
babies, is by men. One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared
the babies. . . . The women bear and rear the children. The men kill them. Then they
say: ‘We are running short of children—make some more.’”69 (See figs. 6-1 and 6-2.)
Gilman’s explanation placed responsibility squarely on white men and their proclivity
for warfare: “The birth rate is lowered,” Gilman wrote, “in quantity, by the lack of hus-
bands, and in quality both by the destruction of superior stock and by the wide dissemi-
nation of those diseases which invariably accompany the wifelessness of the segregated
males who are [hauled] off to perform our military functions.”70
Because of the ways in which white femininity and white masculinity were being
reconstituted in an imperialist era (white women have babies for the race; white men
fight wars for the race), Gilman faced a difficult theoretical task: to dislodge the sup-
posedly natural sexual dichotomies constructed by evolutionist theories, while oppos-
ing the overt violence of political imperialism. Yet she took great care not to weaken
the foundation of Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy (which previously had been based on
assertions of biological sexual differences). These conflicting and competing theoreti-
FI GURE 6-1 An antidote to race suicide. What would Col. Roastwell Say to this? Six in one year! Postcard,
1903–1907. Roosevelt is credited with having popularized the term “race suicide” in his call to the white middle
classes to raise their birth rates, which had been falling steadily since the early nineteenth century. Feminists
like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary Smith Coolidge resented President Theodore Roosevelt’s (Col. Roast-
well) commandment to “propagate the race.”
FI GURE 6-2 Refiguring relations between white men and white women.
The White Man’s Burden. Postcard, c. early 1900s. The slogan “white man’s
burden” was generally used in this period by pro-imperialists to defend the
United States’ imperial and assimilationist policies. Using it to characterize
white men’s relation to white women was meant to be funny, but an edge
to the humor can be detected in this image of an oversized woman who
has practically pinned her partner to his seat, an unfriendly representation
of the woman’s movement’s political demands.
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 151

cal and political objectives account for many of the peculiar tensions in Gilman’s fem-
inist ideology, in which sexual differences (for whites) were simultaneously asserted
and discredited.
For Gilman, the key to the improvement of each race as a race-species and the key
to the improvement of the United States as a civilized nation inhered in the systemof
labor adopted by each racial group and by the country as a whole. Gilman reminded
her readers, “By labor the individual man [has] grown from a naked cannibal to a civi-
lized human being.”71 It was also through the system of labor that what were now
taken to be permanent racial and sexual differences would be shown up to be false and
would eventually disappear.72 The woman problem, as Gilman reformulated it, was
that (civilized) “woman,” denied the opportunity to engage in advanced forms of
labor, had not had the same chance for equivalent growth permitted to “the indi-
vidual man.” Thus she had not been able to develop the types of “cooperative” labor
for the domestic sphere that (civilized) man had developed in the industrial sphere.
Since cooperative labor was also what led to altruism, Gilman disputed the notion
that (white middle-class) women were more altruistic than men. The solution to the
woman problem, as Gilman saw it, was for (white middle-class) women to embrace
cooperative forms of labor for its ability to free them of their dependence on (white
middle-class) men.
Gilman’s peculiar and particular exemption of Anglo-Saxon men from responsi-
bility for the origins of patriarchal oppression and her granting to them the credit for
originating industrial civilization permitted her to support the United States’ efforts
to assert cultural and political supremacy over the “uncivilized” world. Yet her dis-
missal of sexual difference as the foundation of Anglo-Saxon civilization threatened
the entire racial hierarchy to which she adhered, so she substituted the organization of
labor as an alternative criterion on which to base assertions about the superiority of
Anglo-Saxon civilization. Gilman clearly did not intend her theories to prompt others
to reconsider the civilizationist hierarchy constructed by evolutionary theories. The
evolution from matriarchy to patriarchy—despite the decline in woman’s status and economic
freedomthat it produced—was, for Gilman, an example of evolutionary progress: she could
not recognize nonwhite or non-Christian women as laboring agents, as this would
have necessitated acknowledging their superior status in relation to nonlaboring
white women, which in turn would have required a fundamental rejection of the
civilization hierarchy that she was determined to support. Thus, although Gilman
posited that “human labour comes by nature from the woman [and] was hers entirely
for countless ages” and that “during all those ages of savagery the woman was the
leader,” still she believed that it was a good thing that savage men usurped savage
women’s labor. “Well it was for the human race,” Gilman declared, “that the male
savage finally took hold of the female’s industry . . . [for] in the hands of the male,
industry developed.”73 As was the case for Fletcher, Willard, Stanton, Jacobi, and so
many others in the woman’s movement, Gilman’s advocacy of Christian, Anglo-
Saxon civilization prevented her from altering her presumptions regarding the higher
status of (white) women in “civilized,” as opposed to “primitive,” societies.
 152 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Mary Roberts Coolidge on “Chinese Immigration” and

“Why [White] Women Are So”

Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge, an exact contemporary of Gilman, was also part of the
intellectual network described above. Mary Roberts received her bachelor’s and mas-
ter’s degrees from Cornell University in 1880 and 1882. She then assisted Marion Tal-
bot with her survey of the health of women college graduates, designed to disprove
Edward Clarke’s contentions that higher education wrecked the health of women.
From 1886 to 1890 she was an instructor of economics at Wellesley. In 1890, at the age
of thirty, she married Albert Smith, a professor of mechanical engineering, and left
her position at Wellesley to accompany her husband to Cornell and then to the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin, where he served on the faculty and she continued to research the
sexual practices of college women, with one of her former students, Clelia Duel
Mosher. By 1893, the Smiths had left Wisconsin for Stanford, where Mary Roberts
Smith studied for her doctorate under Edward Ross, as well as the historian George E.
Howard and the economist Amos Warner. In 1896 she received her doctorate from
Stanford and became an assistant professor of sociology, teaching in the same depart-
ment as Ross. Years later, Ross played a crucial role in getting Coolidge’s book Why
Women Are Soquickly accepted for publication.74
I have not been able to determine whether Gilman and Coolidge ever met one an-
other, although they moved within the same intellectual and reform circles. From
1893 to 1895, when Coolidge was studying at Stanford, Gilman was living in San Fran-
cisco and involved in women’s reform and nationalist clubs. By this time, Gilman had
secured a prominent local reputation, publishing hundreds of articles in a variety of
publications: the San Francisco Call, the Los Angeles Porcupine, the Pacific Monthly, the
California Nationalist, the Pacific Rural Press, Kate Field’s Washington, and the Oakland Times.
Coolidge also might have come across Gilman’s work in any of a number of nationally
circulating magazines: Woman’s Journal, Woman’sTribune, Cosmopolitan, Century, Harper’s Bazaar,
Scribner’s, and the Christian Advocate, among others. Moreover, Gilman’s divorce from
her first husband, Walter Stetson, in 1894 and her subsequent decision to send her
daughter east to live with her ex-husband and his second wife, Grace Ellery Channing,
Gilman’s best friend, were widely covered by the local press. In addition, Coolidge had
studied under Richard T. Ely at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1890s, close to
the time that Helen Campbell, a good friend of Gilman’s, was also enrolled at Wiscon-
sin as a graduate student of Ely. Through Campbell, Coolidge may have had an oppor-
tunity to meet Gilman. At any rate, by the late 1890s, if not before, Coolidge probably
had heard of Gilman, since Women and Economics (1898) brought its author national at-
tention. Gilman, in turn, may have read some of Coolidge’s writings, in particular Why
Women Are So (1912), which was published with the assistance of Ross, their mutual
friend and mentor.
Coolidge’s Chinese Immigration, published in 1909, was, simply, a remarkable book for
its time.75 In it, Coolidge positioned herself against those academics and reformers,
among them her mentor Ross, whose antipathy for the Chinese as an unassimilable
immigrant group was especially fierce. Coolidge’s goal was to rescue the Chinese from
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 153

the category of the “primitive”—to depict them as the “inheritors” of an ancient civi-
lization, one just as democratic and morally sound as that of Anglo-Saxons, despite
the adherence of the Chinese to non-Christian religions.
To prove her claim that the Chinese were a civilized people, Coolidge cited at
length the many ways in which the Chinese living in the United States conformed to
dominant constructions of civilized gender relations. Chinese men were kind to their
wives. Chinese women were excellent housekeepers. Chinese parents cared lovingly
for their children, sent them to public school, and protected them from “premature
labor.” In Coolidge’s words, “The Chinaman is above all a lover of home and children,
and if married men were allowed to bring in their wives freely the conditions of life of
the Chinese entitled to live in this country would become much more normal.”76
Furthermore, the Chinese, according to Coolidge, learned English; they dressed in
Western-style clothing; they fed their children American food; the men cut off their
queues to fit in with white middle-class notions of masculine appearance; and many
families adopted Christianity.
With these assertions, Coolidge was responding, one by one, to whites’ prejudices
concerning the Chinese. To the charge that Chinese labor lowered the wages of
“American” (i.e., white) labor, Coolidge presented a statistical survey showing that
the labor force was racially segregated so that the Chinese rarely held jobs that whites
desired. To the charge that the Chinese remained “heathens” and refused to convert
to Christianity, Coolidge pointed out that missionaries generally converted non-
Christians through the women of a race, and the Chinese who failed to convert were
generally single men without wives. Hence, the fault was not with the Chinese
men, Coolidge maintained, but with laws that made it illegal for them to bring their
wives and families to the United States. Coolidge advised simply that the laws
be changed and appealed to whites to put into practice their espousals of religious
tolerance.77
In short, Coolidge wanted to prove that the Chinese occupied a higher place on
the evolutionary hierarchy than most whites believed, and she offered example after
example to demonstrate that the Chinese assimilated as quickly as any other immi-
grant group. Coolidge insisted that emigration to the United States resulted in imme-
diate emancipation for Chinese women, which for her was symbolized in the unbind-
ing of their feet. (“In no one respect have the Chinese in America altered more than in
their ideas about women. Wives have a far greater amount of freedom in America
than in China. . . . The women like to live here, they say, because they have so
much more freedom.”)78
Even though Coolidge ostensibly took the side of the Chinese against those whites
who demanded harsher treatment and more restrictive immigration laws, nonethe-
less her arguments served to reinscribe the racial and gender hierarchies that placed
Anglo-Saxons at the pinnacle of civilization because of their supposedly superior ways
of treating women. To some extent, Coolidge’s assimilationism also prevented her
from formulating a more thoroughgoing critique of Western gender relations. For ex-
ample, in stressing that Chinese men married Chinese women who were “perfectly
chaste” and that they drew the same rigid “line between respectable and lewd women
 154 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

. . . as . . . Americans,” Coolidge wanted only to show that Chinese adhered to

American standards of domestic relations. She could not, at the same time, question
the constructions of respectability and chastity that were inherent in U.S. patriarchal
gender relations.79
Coolidge’s study of the Chinese and her use of the assimilationist paradigm also
shaped her analysis of the woman question. Her subsequent book, Why Women Are So,
surveyed the nineteenth-century woman’s movement. Preceding Mary Beard’s Woman
as a Force in History (1946) by thirty-two years, it is one of the earliest examples of the
genre now referred to as women’s history.80 The title immediately served notice that
Coolidge, like Gilman, embraced evolutionary notions of change and attributed
(white women’s) sexual differences to (their ) specific social functions. To use
Coolidge’s words, “the characteristic behavior which is called feminine” was not “in-
alienable” but rather “an attitude of mind produced by the coercive social habits of
past times.”81
Why Women Are Sohad a dual purpose. Coolidge’s first objective was to explore the
historical origins of the modern “feminist” movement, a term Coolidge used to de-
scribe both herself and a movement of women who were demanding careers outside
of middle-class domesticity. Yet Coolidge asserted continuity with the past, locating
the origins of her own contemporary feminism in the missionary, temperance, suf-
fragist, and literary movements of the nineteenth century. Although Coolidge be-
lieved that the missionary women had had a different ideology from suffragists, still,
she insisted, they had been the unwitting allies of these more explicit proponents of
woman’s rights. As Coolidge argued, missionary and temperance women both
demonstrated an “unconscious expression of precisely the same expanding spirit as
that displayed . . . [by] the suffragists . . . and the literary amateurs.” Of Willard’s
NWCTU, Coolidge stated simply: its “contribution to the feminist movement was also
considerable.” “Thousands of housemothers learned to work in small groups for the
public welfare outside the church and home; these women of a purely domestic type
emancipated themselves into a world of larger ideas.”82 In short, Coolidge’s criterion
for inclusion in the ongoing woman’s movement was the freeing of (middle-class
white) women from domestic ideology, enabling them to assume a public role outside
the church and home.
Yet Coolidge was also critical of what she saw as the limitations of the institutions
that she credited with the emancipation of (white middle-class) women from their
narrow domestic world. Her second objective was to expose the falsity of the ideolo-
gies of domesticity and sexual difference that were actively promulgated through
women’s missionary and temperance organizations. Like Gilman, Coolidge had per-
sonal reasons to be wary of these ideologies. In her first marriage to Albert Smith she
experienced conflicting emotions and much sexual dissatisfaction. According to histo-
rian Rosalind Rosenberg, she had previously been financially independent but found
herself upon this marriage “a dependent creature, keenly sympathetic with wives who
‘wept in secret humiliation’ to have to ask for what they considered their due.”83 Be-
cause she remained childless, she could not put her energies into the one avenue that
might have brought her social recognition, if not personal happiness. Her husband’s
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 155

career took priority over her own, and she constantly moved from one academic insti-
tution to another so that he could accept faculty promotions. After a decade of in-
creasing unhappiness, she surrendered to a nervous breakdown in 1903. She was dis-
missed from Stanford, institutionalized briefly, and then divorced. In 1906 she married
again, this time to Dane Coolidge, a writer who was fifteen years her junior—a mar-
riage that Coolidge described as “exceptionally happy.”84
Why Women Are Sofocused on what Coolidge recognized to be disjunctures between
the nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s movements. In particular, Coolidge
emphasized that the twentieth-century movement provided an essential corrective to
the earlier movement’s overemphasis on (white) women’s sexual difference. “Aside
from the monotony of such a society,” Coolidge wrote, “its worst aspect lay in the in-
breeding of sex characteristics.” She continued, “In village communities, in church
gatherings, and temperance and missionary societies, men herded with men and
women flocked with women, losing the stimulus of the social and intellectual com-
radeship enjoyed by the sexes in modern life.” For Coolidge this type of sex segrega-
tion accounted for the ongoing existence, biological transmission, and cultural rein-
forcement of (white) women’s sexual differences, which she now viewed primarily in
negative terms. Drawing on Lamarckian principles of sexual inheritance, Coolidge
wrote, “Men, associating constantly with men, perpetuated the standards and habits
inheritedfrom their fathers; women, corraled by themselves, gossiped of their narrower
experiences, perpetuating their own pettiness.”85
The “new” or “modern” (white) woman, by contrast, had become an entirely re-
constituted physiological entity from her nineteenth-century predecessor because her
life had been spent in heterosocial, as opposed to homosocial, institutions. “[T]here
has been developed in a single generation a large number of American women who
are less excitable than a Frenchman, less sentimental than a German, and less emo-
tional than an Italian—in short, almost as reasonable and self-poised as the men of
their own class and race.”86 By denying that sentimentality and emotionality inhered
in all women’s nature, Coolidge drew on a discursive strategy that proponents of
woman’s rights had articulated for over forty years. Julia Ward Howe, it may be re-
called, made this point in her debates with Edward Clarke in the early 1870s when she
argued that (the white) woman’s sensitivity to the cold climates of New England was a
trait she shared with men of her race and class, and that it was her racial sensitivity,
not her sexual difference, that accounted for whatever weakness of constitution edu-
cated women manifested. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Francis Willard, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and other suffragists invoked the same strategy
in their arguments for suffrage in the 1880s, urging opponents to remember that
white women had much more in common with white men than they did with other
races of women (and should be enfranchised on the basis of that racial similarity, in
addition to that of their sexual differences). Indeed, the argument that (white)
women’s sexual differences were either not sexual in nature, or that they were over-
shadowed by some other racial trait held in common with men of their race and class,
appealed to many white elite women in the woman’s movements of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries.
 156 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Like Gilman, Coolidge was concerned about the social outcry over increasing di-
vorce and falling birth rates. Like Gilman, she defended educated Anglo-Saxon
women against the charge that they were failing to reproduce the “race.”87 But where
Gilman insisted that (white) men take responsibility for the wars that led to declining
fertility among whites, Coolidge argued that these lower birth rates were a logical
consequence of the false teachings of domestic ideologies of the nineteenth century.
Coolidge found it no surprise that (white) women divorced their husbands more fre-
quently and took measures to limit the size of their families. “[T]he transition from
unalterable wedlock to more and more divorce, the resistance of many women to in-
voluntary motherhood, the entrance of protected women into wage-earning occu-
pations; these and many other symptoms,” declared Coolidge, “are phases of evolution
engendered in part by the hiatus between the high rank which women believed
motherhood should hold, and the realities of [white] married women’s lives in the
past generation.”88
Coolidge also pointed out that in the past, large families were often “produced at
the cost of the first wife’s life” and that when women managed to survive a large num-
ber of pregnancies, they were unable to “enjoy a vigorous, intelligent old-woman-
hood, but [lived] in a state of premature decrepitude, similar to that of women among
primitive races.”89 Coolidge’s invocation of the primitive, like Gilman’s, served fre-
quently as a gauge of the social evolution or racial progress of whites in the United
States. If the trait under scrutiny was present in both “modern” and “primitive”
women, Coolidge argued that the social practice under examination was a survival of
primitive times and needed to be eradicated. If the “modern” (Anglo-Saxon middle-
class) woman could be shown to differ from the primitive, then, Coolidge argued, so-
cial (racial) progress had occurred. Coolidge frequently used the term “modern” as a
substitute for the term “civilized,” but its meaning was established by the same evolu-
tionary discourses that prevailed into the early twentieth century.
In sum, white women’s racial difference from the primitive served as Coolidge’s re-
placement for sexual difference (among whites) as the touchstone of evolutionary
progress. For Coolidge, sexual differences were stigmatized as a quintessential feature
of primitive societies, even though they might be absent in present-day primitive so-
cieties.90 Evolutionary distance from the primitive enabled these white feminists in the
early twentieth century to demonstrate their equality—or potential for equality—
with (white) men.
As Gilman may have intuited when she titled her journal the Forerunner, she and
Coolidge were transitional figures in the emergence of early feminist discourses. They
were scornful of nineteenth-century ideologies of domesticity that revered (white)
women for their sexual differences, and they were leery of social practices that segre-
gated (white) women from (white) men. Yet they were equally uncomfortable with
the emerging theories of a younger generation of feminists that rose to cultural au-
thority after World War I destroyed both the physical and intellectual manifestations
of European civilization. This new generation, which eventually included women like
Elsie Clews Parsons (1875–1941), Ruth Benedict, (1887–1948), and Margaret Mead
 ELIMINATING SEX DISTINCTIONS FROM CIVILIZATION • 157

(1901–1978), rejected the evolutionism of Charles Darwin, Lester Ward, and Havelock
Ellis and looked to cultural anthropology and Freudian psychology for new intellec-
tual frameworks to help them in their reconceptualizations of the relations among
feminism, race, and civilization. My final chapter examines these developments
through the work and life of Margaret Mead.
 7

Coming of Age, but Not in Samoa
Reflections on Margaret Mead’s Legacy
to Western Liberal Feminism

In the case of anti-colonial critique, it is the similarity of past and

present that defamiliarizes the here and now and subverts the
sense of historical progress.
Nicholas Thomas,
Colonialism’s Culture (1994)

C oming of Age in Samoa, one of the most famous and popular works ever published by
an American anthropologist, first appeared in 1928, when its author Margaret
Mead was twenty-seven years old.1 By the mid-1930s, Mead had gained a national
reputation as an expert on “primitive cultures” and was recognized by the public, if
not by her colleagues, as one of the leading anthropologists of her day. Prolific, out-
spoken, charismatic, unconventional, provocative, controversial, and brilliant, Mead
achieved a widespread public renown that was remarkable for a woman who con-
structed herself as a scientist and intellectual. She recognized instantly that her audi-
ence extended far beyond the elite worlds of the university and museum, and she cul-
tivated her public by publishing hundreds of articles in such venues as American
Anthropologist, Natural History, Redbook, Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Seventeen, and the New York
Times Magazine, to name just a few. Mead also gave numerous interviews on domestic
issues and international politics. From the appearance of Coming of Age in Samoauntil her
death fifty years later, Mead was sought after for her opinions on marriage, homemak-
ing, childrearing, feminism, civil rights, and race relations.2
Among the general public old enough to remember her, Mead is probably best
known for the role she played in the 1930s in prompting Westerners to question their
sense of cultural superiority, using so-called primitive societies to critique patriar-
chal gender relations in the United States. Mead was not alone in this endeavor, as
she wrote at a moment when artists, professionals, and other elites were drawing
from such cultures to reinvigorate Western arts—literature, music, dance, visual arts,
photography, and film.3 Among historians of anthropology, Mead is remembered
as one of the many students of Franz Boas who helped bring about a paradigm shift
from evolutionism to cultural relativism by challenging biological explanations of

158
 COMING OF AGEe BUT NOT IN SAMOA • 159

cultural differences and refuting the explicit racism in eugenics and mainstream
anthropology.
In addition to seeing Mead as someone who helped foster cultural relativism
within anthropology of the 1930s, this chapter places Mead within a tradition of white
feminist thought on racial questions that I have been tracking throughout this book.
Mead’s work became (and remains) popular because it touched on the collective un-
conscious of a society long accustomed to ruminating on what it took to be the unre-
strained and unrestrainable sexuality of the primitive, which it then used (and still
uses) to form an identity of itself as a civilized nation. Mead’s brilliance was to redeploy
these constructions of primitive sexuality to prompt white Americans to reconceptu-
alize their understanding of sexual differences and gender relations.
Yet Mead’s credibility as a “scientific” authority on primitive societies would not have
been possible had not a renegotiation of the social relations between white women and
the primitive taken place during the late nineteenth century. For the profession of the
woman anthropologist even to exist, it first had to be demonstrated that single white
women could live safely among primitives without the protection of husbands or other
white authorities (something French-Sheldon had demonstrated during her safari to
East Africa and Alice Fletcher during her residences on Indian reservations) and that she
could have something of value to contribute to Western knowledge about the primitive.
Through exploration and ethnography, Anglo-Saxon women transformed themselves
from perceived victims of the sexual and physical aggression of savages into the civilizers
and protectors of peoples presumed to be facing physical and cultural annihilation.
Situating Mead in this context requires that we view Mead as an integral part of a
nineteenth-century tradition that combined notions of white or “civilized” women’s
sexual restraint and black or “primitive” men’s bestiality in order to reinforce the domi-
nant cultural taboo against miscegenation. Whereas Mead is usually understood as
challenging the racism of such constructions, these dualisms nonetheless informed her
work. In other words, this chapter highlights the continuities between the Victorian
ethnography exemplified by women like Alice Fletcher and May French-Sheldon, on
the one hand, and Mead’s modern anthropology, on the other hand, in order to recon-
sider the nature of Mead’s antiracism. To grasp my central point—that Mead’s work
was implicated in and shaped byVictorian race politics—we must be willing to embrace
the idea that opposition movements retain residues of that which they oppose.
Mead’s early monographs, Coming of Age in Samoa(1928) and Sex andTemperament inThree
Primitive Societies (1935), broke with an earlier tradition of evolutionary or Victorian an-
thropology that supported Anglo-Americans’ definitions of themselves as a superior
race because of their supposedly unique, race-specific, biological forms of sexual dif-
ference.4 Yet, while Mead challenged Anglo-Saxons’ beliefs in their inherent biological
superiority to primitive peoples, she did not challenge their belief in the cultural su-
periority of Western civilization. Mead invoked primitive societies to critique U.S. gen-
der relations, but at the same time she dismissed those primitive societies for lacking
freedom and circumscribing individual choice. For Mead, primitive societies provided
Americans with conceptual alternatives to reflect on, but she never advocated that
the United States remake itself in the image of the primitive.
 160 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

The nineteenth-century discourses linking race, sexual difference, and civilization

that I have traced in this book were central to Mead’s work, enabling her to transform,
without transcending, the racist formulations of evolutionary anthropology. Al-
though we are not used to contextualizing Mead’s work in this way, her corpus can be
understood as a logical culmination of three nineteenth-century traditions: that of the
woman missionary, the woman explorer, and the woman ethnographer. These tradi-
tions, as I showed in chapters 4 and 5, helped solidify a role for the Anglo-Saxon
woman as a legitimate practitioner of anthropological science, a role that emanated
from her previous role as Christian civilizer and governor of the primitive. Relating
Mead to these traditions will enable us to comprehend how she became so popular at
a time when many still questioned the suitability and capability of women as scientists
and will help us expose the vestiges of nineteenth-century racism that form part of
Mead’s legacy to U.S. feminist discourse today.

Margaret Mead’s Departure from Evolutionary

Anthropology: Invoking the Primitive to Reassess
Civilized Gender Relations

In the context of academic anthropology of the early twentieth century, both Coming of
Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies were extraordinary books,
helping to contribute to the dissolution of evolutionary anthropology.5 In these
works, Mead represented the “primitive” as having something valuable to teach “civi-
lized” society about reforming its present institutions, rather than serving merely as
an embarrassing reminder of a shared and discredited past. As Mead mentions in her
autobiography, Blackberry Winter, “We had, of course, had lectures on evolution. . . .
But we went to the field not to look for earlier forms of [our past] human life, but for
forms that were different from those known to us. . . . We did not make the mis-
take of thinking, as Freud [did] . . . that the primitive peoples . . . were equiva-
lent to our ancestors.”6
In this statement, Mead registers her rejection of Victorian evolutionary anthro-
pology—in particular, her disagreement with the presumption that all societies fol-
lowed the same path of development. Positing a unilinear, universal path of develop-
ment, most social Darwinists located primitive societies at an earlier stage of
development than civilized societies and often measured a society’s relative position in
the hierarchy of primitive-to-civilized nations by woman’s “status” or “condition.”
One justification for Western colonialism was formulated in terms of protecting
primitive women from various forms of social, economic, and sexual mistreatment.7
For over a century, Westerners had presumed that primitive women were over-
worked, sexually abused, or otherwise badly treated by men of their cultures.
Within evolutionist paradigms, another indicator of a society’s evolutionary rank-
ing was the existence of pronounced physical-moral-sexual differences: tall strong dis-
passionate men, small delicate emotional women. Evolutionist accounts held that the
 COMING OF AGE BUT NOT IN SAMOA • 161

“progress of a race” depended on the adoption of specific sex roles that were in turn
supposed to bring about specific manifestations of sexual differences. Mead challenged
the evolutionist beliefs that held primitive races as characterizable by either a lack of
sexual differentiation or by an uncontrollable, rampant sexuality. She argued in Sex and
Temperament that primitive societies differed substantially from one another in how
they understood sexual differences and in the ways they structured gender relations.
Mead concluded that sexual differences varied so substantially from one society to an-
other that they must be understood as culturally, not biologically, determined. Or, as
she put it, “the personalities of the two sexes are socially produced.”8
Following her teachers and mentors, Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, Mead helped
consolidate a new paradigm in anthropology, which scholars often refer to as cultural
relativism. Anthropologists working in this new paradigm understood cultures as de-
veloping along different, noncommensurable lines and no longer held up Western prac-
tices as the only morally legitimate forms of cultural arrangements. Nonetheless, Mead
was not a moral relativist, nor was she attempting to write value-free ethnographies.
Her understanding of cultural relativism did not prevent her from making moral dis-
tinctions among various cultural practices. Thus, I prefer the term “cultural compara-
tivism,” for it enables us to retain the idea that Mead did not validate indiscriminately all
other cultural practices but studied primitive cultures to determine whether other so-
cieties had created alternative ways of living from which the United States could learn.9
Such a perspective meant that Mead and others who worked within this paradigm re-
sisted normative judgments of the sort that automatically called for “primitives” to
adopt “civilized” gender roles—but these anthropologists did not suspend all judg-
ments. Mead wanted to expand Americans’ repertoire of conceivable alternatives, so
that Americans might envision new ways of reforming their social institutions.
Positing a distinction between “social constructs” (Mead’s term for culturally spe-
cific beliefs about sexual differences) and “biological facts” (universal aspects of sex dif-
ference manifest in all known cultures), Mead assisted modern anthropology in creat-
ing new distinctions between culture and biology. Evolutionary anthropology had
preferred the term “civilization” to culture and understood the former as comprising
social practices that were passed from one generation to another, partly through
learning and partly through heredity. As the term “culture” eventually replaced the
term “civilization,” culture became fully distinguishable from biology. The older term
“civilization” (which was still used) was eventually fully divorced from the idea of
heredity: that is, cultures (civilizations) were presumed to pass from one generation to
the next only by social processes, not through heredity.
Furthermore, in Mead’s anthropology, culture was generally used to account for
the differences among peoples and biology was used to account for the similarities.
The fact that all women lactated and could bear children was an attribute of biology
(or sex); the fact that only some women in some societies were passive or gentle was
an attribute of culture (or civilization). Mead’s particular contribution to this para-
digm shift was to show how varied were different societies’ views of sexual differences
(regardless of race), thus shifting both sexual and racial differences from the category
 162 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

of biology to the category of culture. According to Mead, Western nations were not
the only ones to consider (white) men and women fundamentally different from one
another; other cultures considered their men and women fundamentally different as
well. Indeed, constructions and manifestations of sexual differences varied so much
from one society to another that it was no longer possible to account for these by ap-
pealing to biological notions of innate maleness or femaleness. In other words, “racial
superiority” (of Anglo-Saxon whiteness) and “sexual difference” (of genteel Anglo-
Saxon womanhood), which had been fundamentally linked concepts in Victorian
evolutionary schema, were, in Mead’s work, separated and emptied of their usual
content.
In short, where nineteenth-century social evolutionists had believed that civiliza-
tion was a racial trait, inheritedby advanced white races, Mead assisted in redefining what
was culturally transmitted through teaching and learning (civilization, culture, many
sex-race differences) and what was genetically or biologically transmitted. Along with
other social scientists of the 1910s and 1920s, Mead argued that “sex” and “race” were
not significant variables of biological transmission. Mead wrote: “one by one, aspects
of behavior which we had been accustomed to consider invariable complements of
our humanity were found to be merely a result of civilization, present in the inhabi-
tant of one country, absent in another country, and this without a change of race.”10
These theoretical innovations had profound implications for the development of
subsequent feminist analyses, for they permitted new critiques of Western patriarchy.
As I have just shown, evolutionist feminists, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary
Roberts Coolidge, had invoked the primitive to argue for the elimination of the traces
of primitivism that remained in the patriarchal civilization of the United States. For
them, evolutionary or social progress meant increasing the distance (measured in
terms of cultural differences) of civilized peoples from existing primitive groups.11
Mead’s revaluation of primitive cultural arrangements made possible a new strategy
for Anglo-American feminists. The primitive could now be invoked as an alternative
to be emulated rather than a vestige to be eliminated—an idea that was incipient in
Fletcher’s thinking of 1900, but which she never fully articulated.

Studying the Primitive to Reform Western Civilization:

Coming of Age and Sex and Temperament

Mead’s intent in Coming of Age was to question the inevitability and intransigence of the
emotional “stress and strain” that others believed were inherent in the biological stage
of maturation known as adolescence. Mead explicitly situated her study in opposition
to works like G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence (1904), a book that, building on Edward
Clarke’s earlier works, ascribed young people’s restlessness and rebellion to in-
escapable maturation processes.12 Mead desired to show that behaviors and feelings
that Hall and others identified as intrinsic to adolescence were dependent on social
processes (culture) and not on physical development (biology and sex). Mead suc-
cinctly summed up her doubts about this biological-developmental explanation of
 COMING OF AGE BUT NOT IN SAMOA • 163

young people’s behavior: “Were these difficulties due to being adolescent or to being
adolescent in America?”13
In particular, Mead attributed the pain of adolescence for young American women
(thinking only of white, middle-class, heterosexual women) to the changing social
mores of the 1920s. These women, Mead argued, were no longer compelled to adhere
to traditional forms of heterosexual marriage, but could now choose from among a
broad range of marital arrangements: “half a dozen standards of morality,” to use her
phrase. Mead noted these alternatives as including premarital sex; open marriage
(marriages that included extramarital sexual relations); trial marriage (marriages that
could end voluntarily after a trial period without divorce proceedings); companionate
marriage; marriage without children; and marriage combined with a career.14
Another problem for Mead was that this “American girl” had little experience or
knowledge of sex. Once married, she was less likely than her Samoan counterpart to
experience a satisfying sexual life, in part, Mead believed, because U.S. society had such
a limited notion of what constituted acceptable sexual behaviors. Samoan society, in
contrast, was supposed to have a wider range of practices, which served to prevent
sexual problems of both an individual and social nature: guilt, frigidity, marital un-
happiness, and prostitution.15 Yet Samoan society, while it enabled its girls to enjoy sex
without shame or guilt, appeared to demand more “conformity” and allow less “indi-
viduality” among its women. This apparent contradiction troubled Mead greatly. The
Samoan girl appeared more content, but she also seemed to Mead to have less free-
dom than her American counterpart. In one sense, Samoa could serve as a model to
the United States demonstrating that young women there were able to enjoy sex, but
in another sense, Samoa offered Americans a warning: sexual enjoyment for Samoan
women entailed restrictions on their individuality and freedom. In Mead’s view, then,
the explanation for why adolescence was characteristically a pleasurable period of
sexual expression for Samoan girls and a painful period of sexual repression for Ameri-
can girls could be boiled down “to the difference between a simple, homogenous
primitive civilisation [where there was “but one recognised pattern of behavior” in
which all Samoan girls had no choice but to engage] . . . and a motley, diverse, het-
erogeneous modern civilisation” in which various types of sexual behavior for girls
were possible.16 In other words, Samoan culture served as a means of pointing out
what was wrong in U.S. gender relations but at the same time was devalued for ex-
hibiting a more extreme gender oppression than that which existed in the United
States.
Although Mead rejected certain assumptions of evolutionary anthropology, she
retained its tendency to use gender to encode and assess cultural “progress.” This prac-
tice of measuring the status of a society by the degradation of its women had a long
history in Western imperial and anthropological thought, in particular in the way
Westerners understood Pacific societies, including Samoa.17 Although Mead rejected
the crude judgments of nineteenth-century anthropologists that primitive women
were debased, nonetheless the belief was implicit in her work that Samoa was a flawed
society because it restricted the freedom of its women. In making this claim, Mead
helped foster a liberal feminist critique of U.S. society that attacked patriarchy for
 164 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

placing restrictions on women’s expression of sexuality and conceptualized a “free” so-

ciety as one that permitted women “choice” in how they lived their sexual lives.
Mead never advocated that the U.S. model itself after Samoa. For one thing, she
would have understood this as a practical impossibility. The United States could not
make its culture simpler or less diverse, and Mead would have seen an attempt to do
so as necessarily authoritarian and repressive, involving an elimination of social op-
tions and resulting in less freedom for women. Mead also believed that young women
in the United States had more freedom than young women in Samoa, and she would
not have been willing to trade freedom for happiness.
However, for Mead, individual freedom and personal happiness did not need to be
at odds, particularly if one defined these ideals in terms of being “free” to “choose”
what best suited one’s innate temperament. The American girl’s pain and suffering,
Mead argued, resulted not from having too many choices but from being unable to
live out, without social stigma or economic repercussions, the option(s) she was best
suited for by nature or temperament. Mead was a subtle enough observer of her own
society to realize that the array of alternatives that appeared to be available were often
not livable possibilities, and she realized too that class, race, ethnicity, and religion,
among other factors, prescribed the “choices” of particular groups and individuals.18
What the United States must do, Mead believed, was to make the sexual alternatives
that were conceptually available real options for all women.
In 1935, with the publication of Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Mead
moved from a perspective that emphasized sexual conformity within a given primitive
society—all men adhering to the same ideal of maleness; all women adhering to the
same ideal of femaleness—to a perspective that emphasized the differences among
primitive societies.19 Her analysis of the Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli
stressed that each had a different understanding of what constituted natural sexual
differences. The Arapesh and Mundugumor, Mead argued, both believed that men
and women shared a similar temperament, but the Arapesh assumed both sexes were
gentle and unassertive, while the Mundugumor understood men and women to be
violent, competitive, aggressively sexed, jealous, and quick to avenge insult. On the
other hand, the Tchambuli, like Americans, believed in innate or natural sexual dif-
ferences between men and women but had “a genuine reversal of the sex-attitudes of
our own culture, with the woman the dominant, impersonal, managing partner,
[and] the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person.”20
Mead drew an explicit lesson from her study of these three primitive societies, ar-
guing that they showed that many so-called sexual traits of American men and
women were arbitrary and not an inevitable emanation of biological difference. In
other words, it was possible to change how men and women behaved and to eliminate
many forms of apparent sexual difference.
[U.S.] society can take the course that has become especially associated with the plans of
most radical groups: admit that men and women are capable of being moulded to a sin-
gle pattern as easily as to a diverse one. . . . Girls can be trained exactly as boys are
trained, taught the same code, the same forms of expression, the same occupations.
. . . If this is accepted, is it not reasonable to abandon the kind of artificial standardiza-
 COMING OF AGE BUT NOT IN SAMOA • 165

tions of sex-differences that have been so long characteristic of European society and
admit that they are social fictions for which we have no longer any use?21

Mead tried to convince her society that there were other ways to structure gender re-
lations than the ways that most middle-class white Americans felt were natural, in-
evitable, and good. She also challenged Americans’ belief that men and women had
sex-linked differences in temperament that were impossible to change. “We are forced
to conclude,” Mead wrote, “that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, re-
sponding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions. . . . Stan-
dardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations,
to which each generation, male and female is trained to conform.”22
This finding that primitives differed in their attitudes about sexual difference and
sexuality represented a significant break from the evolutionary belief that all primi-
tives were blatantly sexual beings, unable to exercise any restraint over sexual im-
pulses, an idea that was still vestigially present in Coming of Age.23 Sex andTemperament was
thus a far more radical work (Mead commented later that it was her “most misunder-
stood book”) and unsettled readers in a way that Coming of Agehad not.24 Some readers
had difficulty grasping the distinctions that Mead was trying to make between sex and
temperament. Mead used sex to mean sex-associated differences, some of which were
innate (biologically transmitted through heredity), some of which were not. She used
temperament to designate innate individual endowments, which were not sex-linked
but were nonetheless biologically transmitted through heredity.
Some readers also mistakenly thought that Mead was denying the existence of any
biological sex differences, when all she hoped to show was that most so-called sexual
differences thought to be innate were not. Other readers found this point obvious,
even trite. The sociologist Hortense Powdermaker pointed out that the notion of cul-
tural or social conditioning of human character had been introduced over fifty years
earlier. As Powdermaker wrote in a review of Sex and Temperament, the idea “that men
and women follow roles culturally assigned to them is not . . . new . . . even to
the intelligent layman.”25 Powdermaker was disappointed that Mead had focused her
work on such an obvious point and called for additional work assessing the signifi-
cance of those sex differences that were innate and universal. Mead eventually an-
swered Powdermaker’s call with Male and Female, only to find that readers used this
book to discredit her earlier one. In a new preface to the 1950 edition of Sex andTempera-
ment, Mead responded to her critics: “In our present day and culture . . . there is a
tendency to say: ‘She can’t have it both ways, if she shows that different cultures can
mold men and women in ways which are opposite to our ideas of innate sex differ-
ences, then she can’t also claim that there are sex differences.’ Fortunately for
mankind, we not only can have it both ways, but many more than both ways.”26
Although Sex andTemperament represented a major break from Coming of Ageby intro-
ducing variability into primitive sexuality, it operated on the same premise that had so
fundamentally shaped the earlier book. For Mead, the point of intercultural compar-
isons (despite her often stated belief in the incommensurability of different cultures)
was to prove that alternatives to U.S. gender relations were possible. She used knowl-
 166 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

edge of these alternatives to argue that Americans could and should reform their cul-
ture and themselves—establishing a fundamental principle that still operates within
Western feminist anthropology today.
In short, Mead never relinquished the belief that intercultural comparisons could
be put to the use of social reform. Nor did she doubt or challenge Americans’ belief in
the cultural superiority of Western civilization. What she did instead was propose a
new set of criteria on which to base that judgment. Mead believed that the United
States was superior to the primitive societies she studied, not because of sexual differ-
ences, but because only it had the potential—due to a presumably greater complexity
and sophistication—to maintain a larger range of gendered behaviors from among
which individuals could pick and choose.27 Challenging the United States to eliminate
its rigid and “artificial” sex-typing, Mead ended Coming of Age with this injunction:
“Samoa knows but one way of life and teaches it to her children. Will we, who have
the knowledge of many ways, leave our children free to choose among them?”28

Cultural Resonances between Mead’s Work and

the Late-Nineteenth-Century Traditions of the Woman
Missionary, Woman Explorer, and
Woman Ethnographer

As I showed in chapter 1, Anglo-Saxon women came to be seen as central to the “civi-

lizing” process—in part because of their special attributes as moral guardians and
teachers; in part because they were held up as a model of gender relations imposed on
primitives for emulation; and in part because they were imbued with new biological
functions in the transmission of civilization-race traits.29 Anglo-Saxon women as-
sumed responsibility for transmitting civilization not just to their own children but
also to primitives, whom they presumed resembled children in their supposed sim-
plicity and naiveté.
Middle-class Anglo-Protestant women found missionary work especially appealing
because they could act as representatives for the primitive without violating their no-
tions of “woman’s sphere” or abrogating their conventional duties as wives and moth-
ers. But missionary work also terrified white women who were frightened of peoples
whose dark skin color and nakedness they interpreted in light of their preconceived
notions about primitives’ unrestrained and wanton sexuality. This fear was exacer-
bated in the post-Reconstruction era by the highly publicized lynchings of black men
that were often justified on the grounds that the black male victims had attacked or
molested white women. In this climate of racial tension, Anglo-Protestant women
often saw themselves as potential rape victims, even when no sexual interest was
shown them, and projected this sexual dynamic onto territories beyond the United
States. Missionary reports sent back to the United States contained stories of white
women having to fend off unwanted sexual advances of nonwhite men (similar types
of stories were also contained in Indian captivity narratives). Because of the cultural
taboo against miscegenation and the imperative to remain sexually chaste, any feel-
 COMING OF AGE BUT NOT IN SAMOA • 167

ings of sexual attraction that white women might have felt towards these men had to
be denied through the projection of an exaggerated and aggressive sexuality onto the
primitive.
A vivid illustration of how such repression and denial operated may be ascertained
from Mrs. M. F. Armstrong’s “Sketches of Mission Life,” written in 1881 during her
stay in Hawaii and sent back to the U.S. for publication in the Southern Workman, the
school newspaper of Hampton Institute. Armstrong was the wife of Samuel Arm-
strong, the founder of Hampton Institute, a vocational training school in Virginia es-
tablished to “civilize” blacks and, later, to help achieve the assimilation of Native
Americans during the postbellum era. In several of these sketches, Armstrong’s sexual
fascination with the primitive centers on Papatutai, a man she describes as “most sav-
age in his appearance, some six feet tall, erect, and with a fine athletic form.” Empha-
sizing his imposing height—his “erectness”—Armstrong’s selection of details re-
vealed how great an interest she takes in Papatutai’s physical person, an interest she
could never register so directly were she describing a white man. This type of descrip-
tion is possible only because Armstrong and her audience consider Papatutai not a
man but a savage.
Despite the fact that Armstrong expresses a strong dislike and feelings of repulsion
toward Papatutai, she nonetheless decides to sketch his portrait so that she can send a
picture of him home “for friends to see what sort of neighbors [she] had.” (Unfortu-
nately, the picture itself was not published but only described in the school newspa-
per.) For this purpose, she has “Papatutai stand, spear in his hand” as if he “were about
to thrust it into a victim.” At her request or insistence (we do not know whether she
formulated it as a question or command), Papatutai dons a war costume; “his appear-
ance as he thus stood . . . was revolting beyond expression.”30
Savagery is here quite literally Armstrong’s creation. She positions Papatutai in
what she thinks of as a suitable and typical pose—with little clothing, a fierce expres-
sion, and a weapon about to be launched. Clearly, the spear that Armstrong invokes is
the warrior’s long shaft, but another spear, one more phallic, is suggested by her de-
scription. Armstrong is simultaneously so attracted to Papatutai that she wants him
near her yet so afraid of him that she will only sketch him when her husband is close
by. Mr. Armstrong seems oblivious to his wife’s feelings and decides to hire Papatutai
to look after his wife and child when he goes on a brief expedition. Armstrong does
not protest or remonstrate with her husband about this decision. Describing her feel-
ings during her first evening alone with Papatutai, she writes:

Papatutai pompously accepted the proposal, and on the first evening came into the
house and was quite talkative and friendly. My heart throbbed with fear, but I had to
conceal it as best I could, and at length I mustered courage to say that my baby must be
put to sleep, and that little Hape [sic] would wake up if there was so much talking in the
house. Upon this he went, and I locked the door behind him, feeling that it was a frail
protection against savage passions. . . . My condition while under this wild guardian-
ship was no enviable one, but it was well to have trusted this man, for he was capable of
much evil, and the promise of the reward no doubt exercised a strong restraining influ-
ence over him.31
 168 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Armstrong projects her own feelings outward onto Papatutai. Although it is her heart
that is “throbbing,” she attributes the sexual tension in the air to his “savage passions.”
Although Papatutai seems unthreatening (“quite talkative” and “friendly”), Arm-
strong struggles to conceal her fear. Heart pounding, Armstrong turns the key in the
lock—the locked door serving as the symbol of a “civilized” patriarchal order, for the
moment still intact. In her view, to accept Papatutai as a temporary substitute for her
husband’s protection perverts a civilized Christian order—represents a “wild”
guardianship from which she cannot escape but which she does not support. Arm-
strong represents this experience in terms of having narrowly escaped a fate worse
then death, crediting her own ingenuity with having staved off an imminent sexual
attack. Although the anticipated rape never occurs, indeed is not even fully stated as a
possibility, it nonetheless serves as the backdrop to this account, adding drama and
tension to what otherwise would be an uninteresting and uneventful narrative.
Armstrong makes no reference to savage women in her account. Whether Papatu-
tai has a wife or family is never raised as an issue—a textual absence that reinforces his
place outside the “civilized” order of gender relations. Furthermore, Armstrong’s
sexual attraction to Papatutai surfaces through a subtext that strains against the
bounds of Victorian sexual propriety. By imagining that it is Papatutai who desires her
and not the other way around, Armstrong secures her identity as a sexually chaste
Christian woman, obscuring the source of what for her society was an illicit interracial
sexual attraction. Not having white male protectors (her husband is presented as en-
tirely oblivious to her profound sense of sexual danger), Armstrong believes that her
proper ladylike comportment, her Christian faith, and her civilized womanhood pro-
vide a shield around her through which Papatutai cannot penetrate.
For Armstrong, the possibility of having an intimate relationship with Papatutai is
automatically foreclosed, yet it constantly resurfaces as a dangerous threat. By reading
between the lines of Armstrong’s narrative, it may be surmised that Papatutai has no
personal interest in her but is merely fulfilling a promise to her husband to look after
her when he is away on one of his frequent trips. Mr. Armstrong, himself, is repre-
sented as entirely at ease in making this request of Papatutai (bonding with him as a
patriarch in their shared role of protecting the weaker sex), and Armstrong seems to
resent her husband for entrusting her to Papatutai. Thus the repressed attraction that
Armstrong feels for Papatutai but cannot express, given the bounds of Victorian pro-
priety, is born of a mixture of loneliness, frustration, anger at her husband, and dissat-
isfaction with her domestic life.
In these accounts, Armstrong experiences herself as powerless and a potential vic-
tim—two feelings she clearly was not accustomed to feeling in relation to her Hamp-
ton students back home—and the act of writing itself serves as a way to restore her
sense of control and autonomy. For other white women, like the Indian reformer and
ethnologist Alice Fletcher, and the explorer May French-Sheldon, contact with primi-
tive cultures represented opportunities to experience themselves as powerful political
and intellectual leaders, helping them to forget and overcome their frustrations with
the patriarchal aspects of white culture.
In the late nineteenth century, Anglo elites like Armstrong perceived primitives as
 COMING OF AGE BUT NOT IN SAMOA • 169

dangerous and wild, not in control of their sexual feelings, lusting after white women.
Margaret Mead tapped into this long-standing cultural fascination with primitive
sexuality and was accepted as an expert on the primitive because she skillfully maneu-
vered within a discourse that had come to recognize Anglo-Protestant women as the
ideal protectors (rather than the sexual victims) of the primitive. (See figs. 7-1–7-4.)

FI GURE 7-1 Parodying primitivism. Truly, Here is a Man After My Own

Heart. Postcard, c. early 1900s. In its lighthearted mockery of the primitive
rapist, this Valentine Day’s postcard indicates how deeply embedded white
fears of black men’s sexuality were in the United States’ popular and politi-
cal unconcious.
170

FI GURE 7-2 Post-assimilationist primitivism. I do not know the Indian tongue. Postcard, c. early 1940s. With the
United States government long past the point of trying to civilize Indians, popular culture began to look to ex-
otics to provide whites with vibrant but safe pleasures. Notice how the possible sexual tension between a white
woman and a primitive man is textually foreclosed by the infantilized primitive boy as her dance partner and the
voyeuristic white cowboy as her chaperone.
171

FI GURE 7-3 Whitening primitives and sexualizing violence. Ooh! You’re so Primitive. Postcard, c. 1960. Here’s
another way that mockery of the primitive rapist has figured in U.S. popular culture.
FI GURE 7-4 Gone primitive. Yes, We Find the Primitive Existance [sic]to be Quite Exhilarating. Postcard, 1982.
An effete upper-class man paired with a masculinized woman explorer, juxtaposed with a camping vehicle
sporting a church, chandelier, and television antenna—a hybrid mix of many of the symbolic motifs of colo-
nial adventuring—and the dangers thereof. Has decadence descended or is this an ironic vision of postimperi-
alism?
 COMING OF AGE BUT NOT IN SAMOA • 173

By the time that Mead embarked for Samoa in 1925, the belief that white women
could serve both as protectors and liberators of savages had received full play in the
U.S. print media. Although her upbringing was steeped in Protestant evangelicalism,
Mead was not a missionary and did not want to convert others to Christianity. Nor did
Mead conceive of her own scientific expeditions to primitive societies as a way to
demonstrate white women’s independence and courage to a skeptical world, although
the mainstream and feminist press reported on Mead’s achievements under headlines
(recalling French-Sheldon’s) like “‘Going Native’ for Science” and with lead phrases
like “Here’s the only white woman to live alone among cannibals.”32
Furthermore, Mead went to extreme lengths to differentiate her own “scientific”
practices from those of evolutionary anthropologists, including Alice Fletcher. Speak-
ing of the relationship between the modern fieldworker and her subject, Mead pro-
claimed, “[The ‘pure’ anthropologist] does not want to improve them, convert them,
govern them, trade with them, recruit them or heal them.”33 Opposed to what she
called “culture-wrecking,” Mead characterized this earlier anthropology as poor sci-
ence, distorted by assimilationist goals. She understood the role evolutionary anthro-
pology had played in accelerating the deculturation of Native American societies.
Mead differentiated her methodology from those of her predecessors, constructing
herself as an objective scientist, whose practice, in distinction to Alice Fletcher’s, was
politically detached, morally neutral, theoretically valid, and empirically sound.
Despite her disavowals, however, Mead depended on nineteenth-century tradi-
tions to construct her own authoritative relationship to primitive societies (as their
protector) and to maintain her authority as a scientific expert in the eyes of her West-
ern audience. Anthropology attracted Mead initially and continued to compel her al-
legiance because it empowered her to act as a cultural mediator (or barrier when nec-
essary) between the civilized and primitive. Like Fletcher in the 1890s, Mead believed
that anthropologists were under severe time pressure to provide knowledge about
primitive cultures before they were entirely subsumed within or destroyed by Western
societies. Although in Mead’s view, Fletcher had assisted in the annihilation of Native
American cultures, and Mead saw her role as somehow preserving what was left of
primitive cultures (or if not the cultures themselves, then Westerners’ knowledge of
them), the two positions were not that different. Mead’s anthropology was riddled
with the same tensions that existed in Fletcher’s (although the way they defined the
source of danger was very different.) Fletcher’s intervention into Indian societies was
justified, in her mind, by the necessity of protecting Indian women from brutish sav-
age men and protecting Indian men from white people’s rapaciousness (the gendered
metaphor that feminized the Indian as a violated object is hers, not mine); Mead was
willing to intervene in primitive cultures to “protect” them from “contamination” by
the West. Despite her avowals about the necessity of the “pure” scientist remaining
uninvolved, as a citizen sensitive to the injustices of Western imperialism, Mead some-
times found a neutral stance impossible.
Nor was Mead above taking advantage of imperialist power relations when it served
her purposes to do so. In 1932, for example, she explained how Reo Fortune, her hus-
band at the time, coerced unwilling men to help them carry their belongings by
 174 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

“unearth[ing] their darkest secrets which they wished kept from the government, and
then order[ing] them to come and carry.”34 Mead’s biographer, Jane Howard, also re-
lates how Mead was shouted down when she gave speeches in Manus and in Port
Moresby, Papua New Guinea, in 1953 (her first return since the 1930s) because she re-
fused to acknowledge that she had made her “fortune . . . telling their stories
around the world.”35 Howard tries to defend Mead, offering the observation that Mead
would have been the first to encourage New Guineans to write down their own stories.
Indeed, during the 1940s, Mead had urged Western anthropologists “to study with mem-
bers of other cultures,” cautioning them that it was “imperative to phrase every state-
ment about a culture so that those statements are acceptable to the members of the
culture itself.”36 Whether Mead called for this kind of collaboration because she be-
lieved it would promote more accurate accounts or whether she simply believed that
Westerners had a moral obligation not to offend their informants remains unclear.
Whichever the case, Mead seemed not to fully appreciate how imperialist dynamics
gave her power and authority over her informants, a power they clearly resented.
Like Armstrong and French-Sheldon before her, Mead played to Western fears that a
single white woman among primitives was always at some physical risk. This aspect of
Mead’s self-presentation can be most clearly discerned in her radio conversations with
James Baldwin (transcribed and published in 1971 under the title A RaponRace). In these
exchanges Mead recollected one incident from her field work in New Guinea in the
1930s, in which she thought she had to retrieve a book of matches that strange men
from another village had stolen from her. Recalling that she was all “alone in a village
where there wasn’t a single white person within two days’ walk,” Mead recounted:

I had to get that box of matches back. If I didn’t, I would have been as good as dead. White
people who let a thief go used to be killed; they had shown themselves as weak. So I
stormed up to the end of the village. This was a fine exercise of sheer white supremacy,
nothing else. . . . I walked up to the end of the village and they were all sitting around
in a circle and I said, “Give me those matches back.” And one man put his hand his bag
and said, “I didn’t steal them; I just took them,” and handed them back. Then we were all
safe. Now if I had made one misstep I’d have been dead, and then the administration
would have sent in a punitive expedition and they would have been dead.37

What interests me most in this account is the responsibility Mead invested in herself
for ensuring everyone’s safety—her ease with the Anglo-Saxon female role of protec-
tor. While she clearly feared for her life, she claimed greater fear for their lives and ar-
gued that their fate lay in her hands—not her fate in theirs. This sense of having greater
power, knowledge, and skill than the primitive at maneuvering within the primitive’s
own world links Mead to both French-Sheldon and Fletcher and attributes to the white
woman an agency and authority that simultaneously denies the “primitive” corre-
sponding agency, knowledge, and power. It does not occur to Mead that these men
might have understood the risks of retribution that the colonial government repre-
sented for them and that it might have been simply this recognition, and not any skill-
ful maneuvering on her part, that lay behind their compliance with her orders.
Yet Mead also felt burdened by what she understood to be her complicity in main-
 COMING OF AGE BUT NOT IN SAMOA • 175

taining the racist boundaries required by the strictures of white supremacy, for, as she
immediately added in her conversation with Baldwin, she imagined that this was what
it must have been like for white women in the antebellum U.S. South. “This is the
burden, in a sense, that in this country the black man and the white woman carried in
plantation days. If a white woman made a mistake, or didn’t remember who she was
every single second, everyone would suffer.”38
Finally, there is one other tendency in Mead’s work that owes its cultural reso-
nance to the embeddedness of nineteenth-century constructions and that continues
to be of great relevance to feminists in the late twentieth century. This has to do with
the responsibility that Mead vested in women as mothers to abolish racial discrimina-
tion and oppression. Although Mead did not believe in the theory of the maternal
transmission of racial traits, in the 1950s she set forth a cultural theory of mothering
that held that better mothering could eliminate racial prejudice. Downplaying eco-
nomic and social structures that perpetuated racial oppression, and conflating all
forms of racism with individual prejudice, Mead argued that prejudice developed and
served primarily as an “educational device” which the “average mother [uses] to bring
up her children.” Believing that all forms of racial oppression could be overcome
through an alteration in childrearing practices, Mead recommended that mothers be
taught not to make negative references to other groups as they raised their children.39
To illustrate the importance of unprejudiced childrearing methods, and in re-
sponse to the query “Do the children of mixed marriages usually grow into more tol-
erant adults?” Mead cited an anecdote she claimed to be “render[ing] from memory of
a story recorded on p. 168 in John Dollard’s Caste and Clan in a SouthernTown(1937).”

There is quite a good anecdote that is told of a group of Negro children in the South
who were picking on one sibling who was much lighter than the others. . . . [T]he
mother comes out and says: “you chillun stop apickin’ on dat pore white chile. He’d be
jes’ as black as you are if I hadn’t got behind in mah insurance.”40

Mead called this “a counter-racial joke,” “a Negro-American joke which denies the
fact that white people are the least interesting or attractive [to black people] except for
economic reasons.” Mead employed the joke in an attempt to allay fears among her
white audience that black people constantly desire and seek sexual intercourse with
white people. The context in which Mead repeated it suggested that it was a joke that
black people told about themselves, and she used it to allude to the information it
supposedly contained concerning actual childrearing practices among black people—
practices, Mead seemed to be saying, that white people might consider as a model in
raising their own children to be free of the racial prejudice that disparaged blackness.
However, when we compare Mead’s analysis to the one that Dollard provided
(since Mead gave the precise page number from Dollard, we can presume she knew of
his interpretation), we find that Mead dramatically revised the significance of the joke
by neglecting to mention that Dollard heard it from white women of the middle and
upper classes. Dollard’s interpretation, in fact, is quite different from Mead’s. He found
the joke interesting because it seemed to him “to convey an amusement [on the part
of white women] at the freedom with which Negro women do sexual things,” “to ex-
 176 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

press a rather simple sort of envy of the superior freedom of Negro women, who . . .
have access to men of both castes, as the white women do not.” In short, for Dollard,
the joke represented “the fleeting forms in which forbidden [sexual] interests can be
socially expressed although they could not be seriously declared.”41
This clearly, then, was not a joke that black people told about themselves, as
Mead’s reading implied, but a joke that elite southern white women told about black
women in the 1930s. The joke does not contain information concerning actual child-
rearing practices, as Mead’s citing of it suggested, but expresses white hostility toward
black women (masking the repression of white women’s interracial sexual desires).
Mead read “choice” into black women’s imputed behavior, seeing freedom from, not
entrapment within, racist economic structures, as the lesson the joke contained. Or to
put this point in even stronger terms, Mead’s analysis of “choice” transformed what
might have been interpreted as the disparagement and sexual victimization of the
black woman into a justification for her just punishment due to her own lack of in-
dustry and thrift (she should not have gotten behind in her insurance).
Had Margaret Mead been born several generations earlier, in 1850 rather than 1901,
she very likely could have been a missionary in the vein of Mrs. M. F. Armstrong, or
an ethnologist and advocate of Indian reform, like Alice Fletcher, or, with a little more
money, an explorer of Africa, such as May French-Sheldon. As it was, Mead came of
age at a moment when academic anthropology was consolidating its authority as a
modern “science” of “primitive” nature and society. Mead’s use of anthropology drew
on her culture’s longtime prurient fascination with the primitive as a racial other, on
whom white women projected or worked through their own sexual and racial anxi-
eties as they continued to reflect on what they should do about their own perceived
sexual oppression.
Mead’s insistence that the “pure” anthropologist was merely a neutral observer
was disingenuous—or rather, it was a point of considerable instability upon which she
seesawed throughout her career. The objectivity she insisted on when she claimed to
be merely observing and recording cultural practices of primitive societies (as a pure
anthropologist) was something she easily dispensed with in her critiques of both West-
ern and non-Western patriarchal relations (as a feminist). Mead’s relation to “primi-
tives” was equally complex. Part of Mead wanted to “protect” primitive societies from
what she saw as the contaminating influences of Western colonialism and moderniza-
tion, and part of her wanted to spur primitive societies, as well the United States, into
altering their gender practices.42 To get primitives to change immoral practices with-
out imposing Western values on them was not necessarily, for Mead, a contradiction,
as she believed that certain values were universal and that human beings were often in
agreement on moral questions. “Practices that are repugnant to our ethical system,
often [are] also to the natives who practice them. . . . It is very interesting to see the
way these practices which are most repugnant to humans disappear quickly when
primitive people are given a chance at something else.”43
As others have argued, by the standards of her day, Mead’s science was not just
competent, it was at the cutting edge of progressive anthropological practice. Yet,
while Mead conceived of her work as an antihegemonic challenge to social Darwin-
 COMING OF AGE BUT NOT IN SAMOA • 177

ism, eugenics, and evolutionary anthropology, this does not mean that her work was
devoid of racism. Mead offered a radical critique of evolutionary anthropology and its
political corollary, assimilationism, but her dependence on liberal constructs of
“choice” and “freedom” impeded her ability to critique domestic racism. Her work
was implicated in the history of Western imperialism in ways that she herself refused
to acknowledge.

Envisioning a Future for Feminist Ethnography

Feminist-inspired anthropological research and writing on gender rela-

tions, after two decades of practice, has come of age. . . . We now see
both the adjective of location—we are Western feminists . . . and the
noun’s contingent, historically determined existence. . . . It is necessary
to break out of the closed system of ethnographic liberalism, to recognize
that no ethnography is ever entirely nonevaluative, that ethnography itself is a
genre made possible by ongoingWestern imperialism.
Micaela di Leonardo,
Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge (1991)

Despite her profound impact on our society, Mead does not figure prominently in
most recent cultural histories, and she only occasionally appears among the pantheon
of elite women whose works now constitute the canon of early feminist writings for
the modern women’s movement in the United States. Although Mead wrote
columns about the women’s movement for Redbook Magazine in the 1970s, the history
of anthropology and feminism remain two separate and distinct fields of inquiry.44
The dismissal of Mead as properly belonging to an early feminist tradition may also
have been encouraged by Betty Friedan’s interpretation of Mead (post-1949) as a bio-
logical essentialist: Friedan comments in The Feminine Mystique that Mead’s writings, in-
fused with Freudian ideas, “glorif[ied] the mysterious miracle of femininity, which a
woman realizes simply by being female.” Still, Friedan herself recognized that Mead
had a “profound effect on the women in [her] generation, the one before it, and the
generation now growing up.”45
Unfortunately, much recent debate surrounding Mead’s work still centers on the
question of whether she wrote accurate or true ethnographies—in part because she
herself was so emphatic about defending anthropology as a positivistic science that pro-
duced “objective” accounts of other cultures, and in part because so many social scien-
tists today remain committed to positivism as an ideal to strive for, even if, as they un-
derstand, it can never be obtained. In the early 1980s, Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and
Samoa:The MakingandUnmakingof anAnthropological Myth sparked a controversy over the sci-
entific worth (accuracy) of Mead’s ethnography.46 As a result, Mead emerged once more
as a subject of intense public scrutiny and debate. Freeman argued that Mead did not
properly differentiate truth-telling and jesting among her adolescent informants and so
had produced an ethnography that inaccurately represented Samoan sexual practices.
 178 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

In response, academics published a flurry of articles reassessing the empirical

methods and scientific validity of Mead’s early work. The debate has tended to fixate
on whether Mead’s depictions of Samoan society correspond to other anthropologists’
knowledge about the “reality” or “truth” about Samoan society and cultural practices
in the early 1920s.47 The few feminist scholars who have defended Mead against
charges of shoddy science have done so from the perspective that no scientific practice
is ever fully “objective” and have argued that the ethnocentrism in Mead’s work was
unavoidable and insignificant in light of the dominant practices of her day.48
I would argue otherwise. Mead’s legacy for Western liberal feminism demonstrates
that what counts as “good” ethnography is neither self-evident nor measurable in any
objective sense, and most certainly does not derive from attempts to be “fair,” “ratio-
nal,” or “scientific.” Science cannot resolve the problems posed by the fact that the an-
thropological author-reader is always already historicallyas well as culturally positioned
in relation to the object of study, as Micaela di Leonardo perceptively notes that
“ethnography itself is a genre made possible by ongoing Western imperialism.”49 But
this statement, so subtly put, raises other significant questions. How precisely should
we characterize the relationship between ethnography and imperialism? If ethnogra-
phies are inescapably “evaluative,” are they inescapably ethnocentric?To try to under-
stand how previous forms of ethnography facilitated certain types of ethnocentric vi-
sions of the world, which in turn helped define the West and consolidate its power and
authority over what was constituted as the non-West, does not explain how ethnogra-
phy will function in the future, although it does focus our attention where it needs to
be: on the contemporary effects of ethnographies, assessed in relation to a range of po-
litical contexts. The problem we must engage, then, is whether some kind of new
ethnography can be created that might help undermine Western imperialism.50
Both the debates over Mead’s competency as a scientist as well as feminist histo-
rians’ relative neglect of her deflect us from examining how racism and ethnocen-
trism continue to inform an American liberal feminist tradition, not just in the most
esoteric realms of feminist theory but also in popular expressions of feminist politics.
The posing of the question, Was Mead’s science “objective” (free from cultural ethno-
centrism)? as well as the answer frequently offered by feminists today—No science is
ever “objective”—excuse us from having to examine the effectsof Mead’s comparative
cultural criticism on Western feminist thought today.
To identify these effects, it may be worth reflecting on an article that recently ap-
peared in the NewYork Times. This article, written by Susan Chira and entitled “Nursing
Becomes a Feminist Battlefield,” describes the emotional difficulty that some middle-
class U.S. women experience as they decide whether or not to breast-feed their in-
fants.51 The author attributes the dilemma to the psychological and cultural pressures
resulting from the medical community’s campaign to promote breast-feeding. Aware
that the medical profession did not always advocate breast-feeding as the best form of
infant care, Chira cautions American women against capitulating to the newest dog-
mas of scientific authority. Chira fears that the medical community’s injunction to
breast-feed will result in further restriction of U.S. women’s economic opportunities,
and she wants women to be able to resist, without guilt, the cultural pressure to nurse
 COMING OF AGE BUT NOT IN SAMOA • 179

their babies. Thus, she demands of U.S. society that mothers be given the greatest
“freedom of choice” in making such a decision.
So far, there is nothing particularly striking in the linkage of women’s freedom
with individual choice, which has become an intellectual mainstay of liberal feminism.
What is remarkable (or rather unremarkable, if we understand the historical an-
tecedents) is the way Chira attempts to defend “choice” as the basis of Westernwomen’s
freedom. She does so by invoking an implicit assumption that freedom of choice dif-
ferentiates the United States from the developing world. In a discussion that is, up
until this point, clearly focused on a conflict between U.S. mothers and U.S. physi-
cians, Chira introduces ethnographic evidence about breast-feeding practices of
women in unspecified “developing countries.” Desiring to show that breast milk is not
always the best milk, that breast-feeding does not necessarily or automatically pro-
mote the health of child and mother, Chira marshals her evidence from interviews
with Penny Van Esterik, an anthropologist from York University in Ontario, and Dr.
Nafis Sadik, the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund.
Both Esterik and Sadik go on record as advocates of breast-feeding, but they pro-
vide Chira with conflicting data about the significance of nursing practices in develop-
ing countries. Sadik offers Chira examples of nursing mothers who suffer anemia and
iron deficiencies, which for Chira serves as evidence that breast-feeding does not nec-
essarily promote women’s health. Esterik points out that bottle-feeding among
women in developing countries does not change their status as full-time childrearers.
For Chira, this fact serves as evidence that bottle-feeding does not liberate women
from restrictive gender roles.
The evidence, then, is both contradictory and meaningless. Chira has no interest in
determining whether breast-feeding or bottle-feeding is a better method of nursing
infants for a specific group of women, in a specific sociohistorical context. The cultural
logic and power of such an argument—why it is that Esterick’s and Sadik’s contradic-
tory testimony about women in developing countries is seen as relevant for assessing
U.S. cultural practices—only becomes evident when we reflect on Margaret Mead’s
legacy. For it was Mead who consolidated the idea for Western feminists that the
“primitive” could be used to critique western patriarchy, even as primitive societies
themselves were criticised for an even more extreme gender oppression. For Chira,
the same logic is operable: such evidence can point us in the right direction (be wary of
breast-feeding because women in developing countries who breast-feed suffer from
nutritional deficiencies), even as such societies are devalued for their extreme
misogynism (even when such women bottle-feed, they remain oppressed by restric-
tive gender roles). For these comparisons to have any meaning at all, we must un-
derstand ourselves as somehow connected to these women of developing coun-
tries (don’t breast-feed, or you too may suffer health problems) yet consider our
culture incommensurably superior in its gender relations (bottle-feeding would
promote freedom for women in the United States, even though it doesn’t pro-
mote freedom for women in developing countries). The developing world is in-
voked as capable of providing the United States with a critique of its own patriarchal
gender relations, while at the same time, such a critique discredits the developing
 180 • WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS

country as a model because of its own purported extreme and intransigent gender
oppression.
Chira’s assumption that situations in “developing countries” (generically and ab-
stractly conceived) are relevant to Americans’ assessment of their own patriarchal,
misogynistic gender practices is logically possible only because Western liberal femi-
nism has succeeded, since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in forging
analytical comparisons between “civilized” and “primitive” women.52 This tradition is
a deeply problematic one, as I have shown, not the least because Western feminist
theory has enabled the carving-out of a cultural space that empowers the “civilized”
woman as morally superior to those “primitives” with whom she seeks to compare
herself. In so doing, Western liberal feminism has perpetuated a cultural ethnocen-
trism that the Western speaker rarely intends and often cannot acknowledge. It’s not
simply that crosscultural forms of sisterhood are difficult to enact because of misun-
derstandings that stem from cultural differences. Rather, the history of Western lib-
eral feminism has produced theoretical claims that position Western societies as supe-
rior to non-Western ones in terms of women’s freedom from oppression, defined in
terms of “individuality” and “choice.”
I do not share di Leonardo’s optimistic assessment that in the last two decades
feminist anthropology has come of age. Too often, positivist feminist ethnography
continues to assert that empiricism will somehow solve these conundrums, positing
unproblematically that “systematic approaches” are better than “armchair reason-
ing.”53 Conversely, poststructuralist feminist ethnography too often assumes that ex-
posing contradictions within imperialistic discourses will somehow automatically
take the gale out of imperialist winds. Both traditions believe that writing “good” fem-
inist ethnography (now acknowledged to be inescapably “evaluative” rather than
value-free) is only a question of coming up with a better methodology or a more nu-
anced theory. Most practicing feminist anthropologists, I would suspect, would agree
with di Leonardo that our recognition that “we are westernfeminists” somehow moves
us beyond the ethnocentrism of Margaret Mead.
If Mead cannot be emulated as a capable scientist, neither can we reject her work on
the grounds that our own practices and theoretical insights have nothing in common
with hers (as she did in regard to her relation to evolutionists like Fletcher). Her ethno-
centrism notwithstanding, Margaret Mead was grappling with important questions,
that we still need to consider. If cultures are fundamentally untranslatable or incom-
mensurable, what then is the point of and how shall we conduct comparative analyses?
How does the attempt to understand other cultures help us grapple with our own?
Given that we are always already historically and culturally positioned in relation
to our objects of study, how do we write ethnographies that do not merely impose
our views and morals on an “other” (or rather, to adopt Ann duCille’s term, on the
“othered”)?54 We must not be too quick to deny our historical embeddedness within
the liberal feminist and anthropological traditions that Mead so centrally represents
and embodies. Mead helped give authority to and popularize a framework that invoked
the primitive for the articulation of Western feminist ideals—a framework that, if
Susan Chira’s article is any indication, we are still a long way from abandoning.
 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. Bride-
burning. 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 intro-
duction of a different discursive repertoire . . . [because] the line
of causality mov[es] in both directions.
Ruth Frankenberg,
White Women, Race Matters (1993)

T H I S BOOK H AS OFFERED A H I STORY 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: en-
slavement, 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 femi-
nism was part and parcel of the nation’s attempt to assimilate those peoples whom
white elites designated as their racial inferiors.
I have also argued that white women used evolutionist discourses—unintention-
ally 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 pa-
triarchal domesticity with ideologies of social evolution as they addressed the increas-
ingly momentous questions of citizenship and empire. Excluded from positions of

181
 182 • CONCLUSION

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 peo-
ples 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 pro-
tection 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, conceptu-
alized initially as the antithesis of politics and a transcendent moral realm, had be-
come synonymous with a political activism that was of critical importance to the na-
tion 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 com-
munities, 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. Assimila-
tion 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 evo-
lution 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 de-
clared, “I believe in imperialism because I believe 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 primi-
tive.” 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
 CONCLUSION • 183

their nature was mutable, and that white racial advancement could be engineered by
educating, enfranchising, and employing white women outside the home in coopera-
tive industries. Gilman reassured her audience that the abolition of sexual differences
would not bring about white racial degeneration, since sexual differences were an ar-
chaic 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” with-
out having to fear that they were jeopardizing “the race.” This was indeed a radical cri-
tique of patriarchy, but one that placed responsibility for patriarchal oppression
squarely on the primitive. Rather than subvert existing racial hierarchies that privi-
leged 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 nineteenth-
century 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, free-
dom 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 vul-
nerable 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 femi-
nism’s overall understanding of citizenship, democracy, political self-possession, and
equality. Feminism offered race-specific ideas about gender, citizenship, social devel-
opment, 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 reconfig-
ured in U.S. society to take account of this fact. Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, a self-
proclaimed feminist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s generation, put it most succinctly
when she wrote, “It is necessary, then, to understand Feminism as an evolutionary de-
velopment.”3 Or, as Elsie Clews Parsons explained in 1916, “the main objective of femi-
nism is . . . the defeminisation, the declassification of [white] women as women.”4
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 dis-
tinct cultural projectories, their own forms (or absence) of patriarchy? Was it a prob-
lem of limited vision? Of good intentions but inadequate analysis? Of false exclusions
or false inclusions?
 184 • CONCLUSION

Recently, similar questions have emerged in the debates within the National Orga-
nization for Women (NOW) over Tammy Bruce’s comments in reference to the rac-
ism 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 sep-
aration: “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 inter-
views in which she discussed the reasons for the reprimand. “[Bruce] violated very di-
rectly 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 re-
spond 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 Four-
teenth Amendment, and Stanton’s response, like Bruce’s, was to create a new organi-
zation—one that would focus solely on “woman” and not on “race.”
The problem facing NOW, however, is much larger than refusing to “create hierar-
chies” of oppression. Rather it is one of effective management of the irresolvable ten-
sions 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.
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 politi-
cal arena: in “objective” reporting of the news; in the composing of nonethnocentric
ethnographies; in the filming of documentaries; in representing “accurately” an-
 CONCLUSION • 185

other’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 previ-
ous chapter, we saw how such constructions of the “West is best” informed one jour-
nalist’s representation of breast-feeding debates in the United States. Similar construc-
tions 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, femi-
nists must find ways to challenge patriarchy without reinscribing discourses of West-
ern 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 dis-
courses. But we must not make the mistake of assuming that multiculturalism, post-
colonialism, antiracism, and Western feminism are hopelessly at odds. Multicultural-
ists 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 chal-
lenge structures of racial domination, and feminists struggle to expose and subvert
the patriarchal hierarchies that oppress women, whatever their cultural manifesta-
tion and geographic location. In their broadest formulations, feminism, antiracism,
multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and anticapitalism (the list could be expanded infi-
nitely) share a vision of a world free of domination, and thus the potential for interal-
liances 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.
 Notes

Introduction
1. Report of the International Council of Women, Assembled by the National Woman Suffrage Association,
Washington, D.C., U.S. of America, March 25 toApril 1, 1888(Washington, D.C.: Rufus H. Darby, 1888),
p. 48.
2. Cited without attribution in Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist
(New York: New York University Press, 1988), pp. 318–319.
3. Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, January 27, 1884, University of Rochester
Library Archives, cited in Barry, Susan B. Anthony, p. 319.
4. For an account of racial conflict within the suffrage movement, see Ellen Carol DuBois,
Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 162–202.
5. Anthony to Stanton, January 27, 1884, University of Rochester Archives, cited in Barry,
Susan B. Anthony, p. 319.
6. “Address to the National Woman Suffrage Convention,” Washington, D.C., January 19,
1869, reprinted in The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections fromthe Classic Work of Stanton, Anthony,
Gage and Harper, ed. Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978),
p. 254.
7. Stanton, “Address to the National Woman Suffrage Convention,” p. 254.
8. For a discussion of these associations, see Barry, Susan B. Anthony, pp. 322–323, 346–347.
9. Robert H. Terrell, “Our Debt to Suffragists,” Crisis10 (August 1915): 181.
10. Terrell, “Our Debt to Suffragists,” p. 181.
11. Terrell, “Our Debt to Suffragists,” p. 181.
12. See Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1987); Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Paula Giddings, When andWhere I Enter: The Impact of Black
Women on Race and Sex in America(New York: Bantam Books, 1984).

187
 188 • NOTES TO PAGES g1

13. Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, pp. 69–70.

14. Barry, Susan B. Anthony, p. 319.
15. “True womanhood” has become shorthand for the way the dominant white gender sys-
tem defined feminine virtue in the United States during the nineteenth century. See Barbara
Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966):
151–174.
16. Giddings, When andWhere I Enter, p. 93.
17. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, p. 5. The six women were Frances Harper, Fannie Barrier
Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Jackson Coppin, Sarah J. Early, and Hallie Quinn Brown.
18. Cited only as Nancy Boyd Willey interview in Jean Howard, Margaret Mead: A Life (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 53.
19. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, “Zenanas and Girlless Villages: The Ethnology of American
Evangelical Women, 1870–1910,” Journal of American History 69 (September 1982): 349. Brumberg
explains in n. 6 that a seraglio is the portion of a Muslim house where women are secluded,
similar to a Hindu zenana. A bagnio is a brothel or bathing-house. Suttee is the self-immolation
of the Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. Bastinado, a form of corporeal punishment,
means being beaten with a stick on the buttocks.
20. Woman’s Occidental Board of Foreign Missions, Annual Report, 1904, p. 53; cited in Peggy
Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Authority in the AmericanWest, 1874–1939(New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1990), p. 121.
21. “Address of Josephine St. P. Ruffin,” Woman’s Era2 (August 1895): 15, 13.
22. Anna Julia Cooper manipulated evolutionary paradigms to combat the racism implicit
in dominant ideologies, arguing that black women had the same evolutionary functions in rela-
tion to black racial progress as white women claimed for themselves in relation to white racial
advancement. See Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From the South (Xenia, Ohio: Aldine, 1982; reprint,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 9, 11, 18–21, 51–55, 91, 116–123, and Kevin Gaines,
Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 128–151.
23. Louis Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 2 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1972), p. 305; cited in Giddings, When andWhere I Enter, p. 99.
24. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, p. 2.
25. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, p. 4.
26. Azel Ames, Jr., Sex inIndustry: A Pleafor theWorkingGirl (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875), p. 9.
27. The term “Anglo-Saxon” was also sometimes used to mark the absorption of specific
European races, including the French, Dutch, Norwegian, and Italian races; see Sir Walter
Besant, “The Future of the Anglo-Saxon Race,” North American Review163 (August 1896): 136. Ac-
cording to Besant, Anglo-Saxon countries included England, the United States, Canada, Aus-
tralia, South Africa, and New Zealand (p. 139). For other uses of “white,” “Anglo-Saxon,” and
“Caucasian,” see Gail Hamilton, “Race Prejudice,” North American Review 141 (October 1885):
475–479, and “What is an American?” Atlantic Monthly 35 (May 1875): 561–567.
28. See, for example, Goldwin Smith, “Anglo-Saxon Union: A Response to Mr. Carnegie,”
North American Review157 (1898): 170–185, and Philip Schaff, “Protestantism and Romanism,” Inde-
pendent 26 (February 26, 1874): 1.
29. Matthew Jacobson argues brilliantly that “the civic story of assimilation (the process by
which Irishmen, Russian Jews, Poles, or Greeks became Americans) is inseparable from the cul-
tural story of re-racialization (the process by which Celts, Hebrews, Slavs, or Mediterraneans be-
came Caucasians).” See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Becoming Caucasian(Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, forthcoming).
 NOTES TO PAGES 9 • 189

30. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York:
Routledge, 1995), pp. 54–55; emphasis in original.
31. Gustave Le Bon, La Psychologie des Foules (1879), pp. 60–61; cited in McClintock, Imperial
Leather, p. 54; also cited in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981),
pp. 104–105.
32. Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, p. 13.
33. Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, pp. 17, 24.
34. My analysis here is drawn from Anne McClintock’s discussion of Victorian Britain in Im-
perial Leather, p. 34.
35. For an especially insistent espousal of this view, see David Starr Jordan, The Question of the
Philippines: An Address Delivered before the Graduate Club of Leland Stanford Junior University on February 14,
1899 (Palo Alto: John J. Valentine, 1899). Also see Felix Adler, “The Philippine War: Two Ethical
Questions,” Forum(June 1902): 387–399; Francis A. Brooks, The Unlawful and Unjustifiable Conquest of
the Filipinos(Boston: George H. Ellis, 1901); James L. Blair, Imperialism: Our NewNational Policy. An Ad-
dress Delivered before the Monday Evening Club, January 9, 1899(St. Louis: Gottschalk, 1899).
36. David Starr Jordan, “Lest We Forget”: An Address Delivered before the Graduating Class of 1898, Le-
land Stanford Jr., University on May 25, 1898 (Palo Alto: John J. Valentine, 1898), especially pp. 31–32.
For excellent secondary treatments of this issue, see Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian
Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American
Imperialism,” Journal of American History66 (March 1979): 821–822, and Robert Beisner, Twelve against
Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).
37. Mrs. Jefferson Davis, “The White Man’s Problem,” Arena23 (January 1900): 2; emphasis in
original.
38. Carl Schurz, American Imperialism: The Convocation Address Delivered on the Occasion of the Twenty-
Seventh Convocation of the University of Chicago, January 4, 1899 (Boston: Dana Estes, 1899), p. 4. Also see
Carl Schurz, “Imperialism,” Independent (July 14, 1898): 83–86. This debate lasted well into the
twentieth century. See, for example, Albert Ernest Jenks, “Assimilation in the Philippines, as In-
terpreted in Terms of Assimilation in America,” American Journal of Sociology 19 (May 1914):
773–791.
39. Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Norton,
1981 [1st ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 1965]), pp. 44–45, 86, 137. DuBois, Feminismand
Suffrage, pp. 187–189.
40. Suzanne Lebsock, “Woman Suffrage and White Supremacy: A Virginia Case Study,” in
Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 63.
41. Lebsock, “Woman Suffrage and White Supremacy,” p. 62. These scholars include Rosa-
lyn Terborg-Penn, “Discrimination against Afro-American Women in the Woman’s Movement,
1830–1920,” in The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, ed. Sharon Harley and Rosalyn
Terborg-Penn (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978), pp. 17–27; Angela Y. Davis, Women,
Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 70–86; Giddings, When and Where I Enter,
pp. 159–170; and Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, “Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks”: Racismand
American Feminism(Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986).
42. Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, p. 7.
43. Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, p. 19.
44. Jean Fagan Yellin, Women & Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989).
45. In addition to the works cited in n. 41, see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood; Evelyn
Brooks Higginbothan, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,”
 190 • NOTES TO PAGES 9–22

Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251–274; and Higginbothan, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the
Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
46. Carby, ReconstructingWomanhood, p. 18.
47. Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); T. J. Boisseau, “They Called Me Bebe
Bwana’: A Cultural Study of an Imperial Feminist,” Signs 21 (Autumn 1995): 116–146; Ruth
Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993); Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-
the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in
the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Peggy
Pascoe, Relations of Rescue;Laura Wexler, “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fic-
tion, and Educational Reform,” Yale Journal of Criticism 5 (Fall 1991): 151–188; and Jean Fagan
Yellin, Women & Sisters.
48. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class(New
York: Verso, 1991), and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working-Class History
(London: Verso, 1994); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); and
Matthew Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish and Jewish Immigrants in the
United States(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
49. Antoinette Burden, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture,
1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Nupur Chaudhuri and Mar-
garet Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992); Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex:
A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Poli-
tics,” University of Chicago Law Forum139 (1989): 139–167; Laura E. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms:
Race, Gender and Empire Building (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Donna
Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge,
1989); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather; Chandra Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’: Feminist
Scholarship and Colonial Discourse,” Feminist Review 30 (Autumn 1988): 61–88; Susan Thorne
“‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable’: Missionary Im-
perialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cul-
tures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1997), pp. 238–262; Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics(New York:
Routledge, 1988); George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987); Ann Laura
Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-
Century Colonial Cultures,” American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 634–660; Margaret Strobel, European
Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); and Vron Ware,
Beyond the Pale: WhiteWomen, Racismand History (London: Verso, 1992).

1. Evolution, Woman’s Rights, and Civilizing Missions

1. Richard T. Ely, Introduction to WomenWage-Earners: Their Past, Their Present and Their Future, by
Helen Campbell, (Boston: Roberts, 1893), p. v.
2. Jos Rodes Buchanan, “The Cosmic Sphere of Woman,” Arena1 (May 1890): 669, 679.
3. See, for example, Margaret W. Noble, “What Next in Women’s Societies?” Chautauquan 14
(February 1892): 600–602; Buchanan, “The Cosmic Sphere of Woman,” pp. 666–681.
4. Buchanan, “The Cosmic Sphere of Woman,” pp. 666–681.
5. Katharine Coman, “The College Settlement,” Southern Workman 29 (November 1900): 650,
652.
 NOTES TO PAGES !"#!$ • 191

6. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York:
Routledge, 1995), p. 33; emphasis in original.
7. For discussions of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, see Gail Bederman, Manli-
ness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917(Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 31–41, and Robert W. Rydell, All theWorld’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at
American International Expositions, 1876–1916(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For discus-
sion of the exhibits at the Museum of Natural History in New York, see Donna Haraway, “Teddy
Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–36,” in Primate Visions:
Gender, Race and Nature in theWorld of Modern Science(New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 26–58.
8. Such a box cover still exists and trades on the rare book/ephemera market. I thank Bar-
bara Walzer, a rare book dealer in Providence, Rhode Island, for providing me with a photo-
graph of it.
9. Cynthia Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989), p. 3.
10. Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1984), p. 75.
11. Noble, “What Next in Women’s Societies?” p. 601.
12. Clinton, The Other Civil War, p. 81.
13. Clinton, The Other Civil War, p. 90.
14. Nathaniel Shaler, “An Ex-Southerner in South Carolina,” Atlantic Monthly 26 (July
1870): 59.
15. Alice C. Fletcher, “The New Orleans Exposition,” SouthernWorkman14 (July 1885): 79.
16. Clinton, The Other Civil War, p. 125.
17. Historian James McPherson explains that of the total 620,000 soldiers killed, 360,000 were
Union and 260,000 Confederate. He does not break these statistics down by race but notes only
that a total of 179,000 black soldiers fought in the war. James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil
War and Reconstruction(New York: Knopf, 1982), pp. vii, 355, 488.
18. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 76–80.
19. Clinton, The Other Civil War, p. 127.
20. Clinton, The Other Civil War, pp. 91–92, 124.
21. David Starr Jordan, “Evolution: What It Is and What It Is Not,” Arena18 (August 1897): 146.
22. Tayler Lewis, “The Highest Thing in Humanity,” Independent 26 (January 8, 1874): 1.
23. Editor’s Literary Record, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 49 (September 1874): 591. For an
excellent overview of the development of evolutionary theory in Great Britain from the 1850s
through the 1910s, see George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987).
24. Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The
Rejection of Scientific Racism,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed.
Dominick La Capra (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 80.
25. Editor’s Literary Record, p. 591.
26. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology (New York: D. Appleton, 1864), p. 444. Although
Spencer was the first to use the terms “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest,” Dar-
win later adopted these phrases in subsequent editions of his own works. For a detailed explana-
tion of both Darwin’s and Spencer’s use of the phrase, see the later edition of Spencer, Principles of
Biology (New York: Appleton, 1898), p. 530.
27. The teleological cast to Spencer’s theory was evident as early as 1852 in his “Theory of
Population,” Westminster Review57 (April 1852): 499–500, and received its classic expression in Prin-
ciples of Biology (1864), p. 444.
 192 • NOTES TO PAGES %&'(1

28. Herbert Spencer, “Psychology of the Sexes,” Popular Science Monthly 4 (November 1873):
30–38; reprinted in Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities: Popular Science, 1870–1920, ed. Louise Michele New-
man, (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985), pp. 17–24. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in Ameri-
canThought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 195.
29. Louis Agassiz, “Evolution and Permanence of Type,” North American Review 33 (January
1874): 98–99.
30. For a good example of the racial significance that evolutionary theory had for early pro-
ponents, see “The Progress from Brute to Man,” North American Review117 (October 1873): 255,
259, 261.
31. Chauncey Wright, “The Genesis of Species,” North American Review(July 1871): 64, 63.
32. See Antoinette Brown Blackwell, The Sexes throughout Nature (New York: Putnam, 1875),
p. 21, and Margaret N. Wishard, “Sex Nature or Human Nature?” Chautauquan 15 (September
1892): 748–750; “The Weaker Sex,” Revolution 5 (February 10, 1870): 91. Also see Frances Emily
White, “Woman’s Place in Nature,” Popular Science Monthly 6 (January 1875): 292–301, Miss M. A.
Hardaker, “Science and the Woman Question” Popular Science Monthly 20 (March 1882): 577–584,
and Mary T. Bissell, “Emotions versus Health in Women,” Popular Science Monthly 32 (February
1888): 504–510, reprinted in Newman, Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities, pp. 25–53. For secondary
sources, see Marie Tedesco, “A Feminist Challenge to Darwinism: Antoinette L. B. Blackwell on
the Relations of the Sexes in Nature and Society,” in Feminist Visions: Toward aTransformation of the Lib-
eral Arts Curriculum, ed. Diane L. Fowlkes and Charlotte S. McClure (University, Al.: University of
Alabama Press, 1984), pp. 53–65.
33. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray,
1871), p. 64; cited in Sue V. Rosser and A. Charlotte Hogsett, “Darwin and Sexism: Victorian
Causes, Contemporary Effects,” in Feminist Visions, p. 44.
34. Spencer, “Psychology of the Sexes,” in Newman, Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities, pp. 17–18.
35. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Appleton, 1906
[1st ed. 1871]), pp. 568–569, 576–578. Spencer also adhered to this theory of “partial limitation of
heredity by sex”; see “Psychology of the Sexes,” in Newman, Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities, p. 21.
The theory was complicated, however, as not all sexual traits were acquired through sexual se-
lection or governed by the law of partial inheritance. Some sexual traits were passed from each
parent to offspring of both sexes, while other traits were sex-linked, that is, passed from father
to son or mother to daughter. Still other characteristics could be transmitted through both
sexes but would develop only in the offspring of the same sex. For example, via the “equal trans-
mission of characters,” a woman could pass along her father’s musculature to her sons, even
though she herself had not developed her father’s musculature. Her daughters, in turn, would
share either their mother’s or their paternal grandmother’s feminine musculature, yet still
have the capability of transmitting their father’s or their maternal grandfather’s musculature to
their own sons. These specifics attracted notice from women commenting on social Darwinian
theory in the 1870s. See Blackwell, Sexes throughout Nature, p. 21, and Frances Emily White,
“Woman’s Place in Nature,” in Newman, Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities, p. 25.
36. The most virulent expressions of woman’s intellectual inferiority are contained in Dar-
win, Descent of Man, p. 576. For women’s responses, see Blackwell, Sexes throughout Nature, and the
discussion in chapter 2.
37. Spencer, “Psychology of the Sexes,” in Newman, Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities, p. 18. Also
repeated in Herbert Spencer, Study of Sociology (New York, 1893), p. 373, cited in Jill Conway,
“Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Sexual Evolution,” in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Vic-
torian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 141. For An-
toinette Brown Blackwell’s repudiation, see Sexes throughout Nature, pp. 13–15.
 NOTES TO PAGES )1–35 • 193

38. Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education; Or, A Fair Chance for the Girls(Boston: Osgood, 1873), and
G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations toPhysiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime,
Religion and Education, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1904). See chapter 3 for a fuller discussion of
this debate.
39. Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson, The Evolution of Sex (London: Scott, 1889), p. 271;
see Stephanie Shields, “The Variability Hypothesis: The History of a Biological Model of Sex Dif-
ferences in Intelligence,” Signs7 (Summer 1982): 769–797.
40. See Rosalind Rosenberg, “The Dissent from Darwin, 1890–1930: A New View of Woman
among American Social Scientists,” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1974), p. 13.
41. For a discussion of ancient Greek thought on “Nature” and “woman’s nature,” see
Susan Moller Okin, Women inWestern Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
42. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Sum-
mer 1966): 151–174.
43. Lucretia Mott, Discourse onWoman(Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1850), p. 7.
44. Samuel Longfellow, “Speech to the Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention,” May
10–11, 1860, in History of Woman Suffrage, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and
Matilda Joslyn Gage, vol. 1 (Rochester, N.Y.: Susan B. Anthony, 1889), p. 712.
45. Abba Goold Woolson, Woman in American Society (Boston: Roberts, 1873), p. 50.
46. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Letter to George G. Cooper, Editor of the National Reformer,
Rochester New York, September 14, 1848,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and
Reminiscences, ed. Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, vol. 2 (New York: Harper, 1922;
reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 19.
47. See Gail Bederman, “‘Civilization,’ the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B.
Wells’s Antilynching Campaign (1892–94),” Radical History Review52 (Winter 1992): 5–30, and Bed-
erman, Manliness & Civilization.
48. W. I. Thomas, “On a Difference in the Metabolism of the Sexes,” American Journal of Sociol-
ogy 3 (July 1897): 41.
49. See Spencer, “Psychology of the Sexes,” in Newman, Men’sIdeas/Women’sRealities, pp. 19–20.
50. Barbara Welter, “She Hath Done What She Could,” American Quarterly 30 (Winter 1978):
627 n. 12. Also see Patricia Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Move-
ment and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985),
pp. 213–222.
51. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, “Zenanas and Girlless Villages: The Ethnology of American
Evangelical Women, 1870–1910,” Journal of American History 69 (September 1982): 350.
52. Brumberg, “Zenanas and Girlless Villages,” p. 350. In 1868 Congregational women orga-
nized the Woman’s Board of Missions; in 1869, the Methodist Episcopal women created the
Woman’s Foreign Mission Society; in 1870, Presbyterian women founded the Ladies Board of
Foreign Missionary Societies; and in 1873, Baptist women formed the Woman’s Baptist Foreign
Missionary Society. These were the most active of the postbellum organizations. The Woman’s
Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, North published the journal,
Heathen Woman’s Friend(Boston, 1869–1895); the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Pres-
byterian Church published the journal Woman’s Work for Woman (Philadelphia and New York,
1871–1885); the Woman’s Board of Missions, Congregational published the journal Life and Light
for Heathen Women (1869–1922); the Woman’s Baptist Foreign Mission Society published Helping
Hand(1872–1914); and the Woman’s Union Missionary Society in New York published Missionary
Link(1861–1893). See Brumberg, “Zenanas and Girlless Villages,” p. 352.
53. See Jean Fagan Yellin, Women & Sisters: The Anti-Slavery Feminists in American Culture (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
 194 • NOTES TO PAGES *+-./

54. See Hazel Carby’s discussion of black women’s protests at their exclusion from the
Woman’s Pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair in Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-
American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 3–7. Also see Paula Gid-
dings, When andWhere I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America(New York: Bantam,
1984).
55. Carby, ReconstructingWomanhood, p. 6.
56. Cited without full attribution in Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New
York: Norton, 1996), p. 167.
57. Cited without attribution in Painter, Sojourner Truth, p. 167. Various versions of this speech
also appear in several anthologies, including Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam
Schneir (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 94, and The Concise History of Woman Suffrage, ed. Mari Jo
Buhle and Paul Buhle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
58. Painter, SojournerTruth, pp. 169–173. Indeed, northerners often expressed shock when they
traveled to southern areas of the country, witnessing for the first time the arduous physical
labor that enslaved black women (and lower-class white women) were physically capable of and
were routinely compelled to do. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Black Country in theWinter of
1853–1854 (New York: Mason, 1860), p. 81; cited in Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow:
Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 16–17.
Travelers to Europe or to rural areas of New England were often struck by the “robustness” of
the women and associated their physical strength with either the invigorating effects of the cli-
mate or their lower-class heredity. See, for example, Nathaniel S. Shaler’s account of his trip to
Western Pennsylvania in “The Summer’s Journey of a Naturalist,” Atlantic Monthly 32 (August
1873): 182–183.
59. See an anonymous review of Edward B. Tyler’s classic work Primitive Culture (New York:
Henry Holt, 1871), Editor’s Literary Record, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 49 (September 1874):
590–591.
60. Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” North American Review 158
(March 1894): 274–275.
61. Mary Lowe Dickinson (1839–1914), born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and educated at
common schools and by private tutors, studied art and literature in Europe for three years be-
fore marrying John B. Dickinson, a New York banker. During her lifetime she held prominent
offices in the Female Bible Society (secretary), the Women’s National Indian Association (presi-
dent, 1885), the National Council of Women (president), and the International Order of the
King’s Daughters and Sons (general secretary, 1886–1914). In the 1800s she was active in the In-
dian reform movement, helping to edit Lend a Hand. She also developed a career as an author,
publishing two volumes of poetry, six works of fiction, and hundreds of short stories.
62. Mary Lowe Dickinson, Among the Thorns (New York: G. W. Carleton, and London: S. Low,
1880). Among the Thorns received two brief reviews published anonymously in the New York Inde-
pendent: Independent 32 (July 1, 1880): 10, and 32 (September 23, 1880): 12. Lydia Maria Child, A Ro-
mance of the Republic (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867). The best discussion of A Romance of the Re-
publicis in Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 510–527.
63. Stepan and Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science,” p. 80.
64. See Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
65. Blackwell, Sexes throughout Nature, pp. 11, 33–34.
66. Lizzie M. Holmes, “Woman’s Future Position in the World,” Arena 20 (September 1898):
342.
 NOTES TO PAGES 01203 • 195

67. Other examples of this position include Wishard, “Sex Nature or Human Nature?”
pp. 748–750, and “Statement of Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Stetson, of California,” in Hearing of the
National AmericanWoman Suffrage Association, Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives,
January 28, 1896 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896), pp. 5–6. Copy available in mi-
crofilm reel 5, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.
68. Wishard, “Sex Nature or Human Nature?” p. 749.
69. Ora Brashere, Science and Suffrage: An Inquiry into the Causes of Sex Differences (Salt Lake City:
n.p., 1909), pp. 8, 10. Copy available in Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History, (Glen Rock, N.J.: Micro-
filming Corp. of America, 1975).
70. Eliza Gamble, The Sexes in Science and History: An Inquiry into the Dogma of Woman’s Inferiority to
Man(New York: Putnam, 1916), pp. v, vii–viii; my emphasis.
71. “While it is doubtless true, in a certain sense, that ‘that which has been is that which
shall be,’” White declared, “nevertheless, [since] change (in accordance with law) underlies the very idea of
evolution, . . . the sphere of woman will be determined by the kind and degree of development
to which she shall attain.” “Woman’s Place in Nature,” Popular Science Monthly (January 1875): 301;
my emphasis.
72. This argument is further elaborated in chapter 3.
73. This ambivalence became most evident in White’s discussion of “woman” participating
in “man’s” work: “When we look around upon the great industries of [civilized] life, mining, en-
gineering, manufacturing, commerce, and the rest and consider how little direct agency
woman has had in bringing them to their present state of progress, we are compelled to believe
that she must not look toward direct competition with man for the best unfolding of her pow-
ers, but rather, while continuing to supplement him, as he does her, in the varied interests of their
common life, that her future progress, as in the past, will consist mainly in the development of a higher character of
womanhood through the selection and consequent intension [sic] of those traits peculiar to her own sex.” White,
“Woman’s Place in Nature,” p. 301; my emphasis.
74. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 145.
75. John Bascom, “The Gist of the Labor Question,” Forum4 (September 1887): 94.
76. See President Garfield’s inaugural message of 1881, in SouthernWorkman10 (March 1881): 29.
See also “The Education of the American Indians,” Indian’s Friend2 (November 1889): 1.
77. See J. Coleman Adams, “Is America Europeanizing?” Forum4 (September 1887): 190–200,
especially 192.
78. Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850 (Seattle: Uni-
versity of Washington Press, 1988), pp. 67–91.
79. See Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken, 1969)
pp. 253–286, especially p. 281. Shaler’s views on racial difference can be found in his “Ex-South-
erner in South Carolina,” Atlantic Monthly 26 (July 1870): 53–61; “Mixed Populations of North
Carolina,” North American Review(January 1873): 150–166; “The Negro Problem,” Atlantic Monthly 54
(November 1884): 697–706; “The African Element in America,” Arena 2 (November 1890):
660–673, and “The Nature of the Negro,” Arena3 (December 1890): 25. For biographical informa-
tion on Shaler, see Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race(Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1980), p. 6; David N. Livingston, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of
American Science (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987); and Stephen Jay Gould, “In a
Jumbled Drawer,” Natural History 97 (August 1988): 12.
80. Ward’s most important monographs, in order of publication, are: Dynamic Sociology, Or
Applied Social Science, as Based upon Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences, 2 vols. (New York: Apple-
ton, 1883 [2nd ed. 1897]); The Psychic Factors of Civilization(Boston: Ginn, 1893); Pure Sociology: A Trea-
tise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society (New York: Macmillan, 1903 [2nd ed., 1909]) and
 196 • NOTES TO PAGES 45671

Applied Sociology: A Treatise on the Conscious Improvement of Society by Society (Boston: Ginn, 1906). Also
see Gossett, Race, p. 166.
81. Shaler, “An Ex-Southerner in South Carolina,” p. 60.
82. Shaler, “An Ex-Southerner in South Carolina,” p. 60.
83. Shaler, “Mixed Populations of North Carolina,” pp. 161–162.
84. Shaler, “Mixed Populations of North Carolina,” p. 162.
85. Shaler, “Mixed Populations of North Carolina,” p. 163. Similar arguments were made to
demonstrate the evolutionary inferiority of (white) women in comparison to (white) men:
being less variable, white women’s potential for intellectual advancement was also assumed to
be more limited than white men’s. See Shields, “The Variability Hypothesis,” pp. 769–797.
86. Ward, Pure Sociology, pp. 210–211; my emphasis.
87. Ward, Pure Sociology, pp. 202, 204, 209–210. Also see Gossett’s summary of Ward’s theory in
Race, p. 165.
88. In Pure Sociology, Ward writes, “[T]he process of race mixture that has always gone on and
is still going on through the union of men of superior [races] with women of inferior races is at
least in the nature of a leveling up, and not a leveling down”(360; emphasis in original).
89. “When a woman of a superior race rejects and spurns the man of an inferior race,” Ward
explained, “it is from a profound though unreasoned feeling that to accept him would do some-
thing more than disgrace her, that it would . . . lower the race towhich she belongs. And when the man
of an inferior race strives to perpetuate his existence through a woman of a superior race, it is
something more than mere bestial lust that drives him to such a dangerous act. It is the same
unheard but imperious voice of nature commanding him at the risk of ‘lynch law’ to raise his
race to a little higher level.” Pure Sociology, p. 359; my emphasis.
90. Ward, Pure Sociology, p. 359.
91. Ward, “Our Better Halves,” Forum6 (November 1888): 274.
92. Ward, Psychic Factors of Civilization, p. 175.
93. Ward, “Our Better Halves,” p. 275; my emphasis.
94. Ward first began to develop his “gynaecocentric” theory—or what might more accu-
rately be called his theory of white racial conservation—through an exchange with a British
writer, Grant Allen, published in the Forumfrom 1888 through 1890, although Ward did not use
the term “gynaecocentric theory” until 1903. The exchange began with Ward’s “Our Better
Halves,” to which Allen responded with “Woman’s Place in Nature,” Forum 7 (May 1889):
258–263. A year later the debate continued with Allen’s “Woman’s Intuition,” Forum9 (May 1890):
333–340, in response to which Ward wrote “Genius and Woman’s Intuition,” Forum9 (June 1890):
401–408. The origin of this concept can be found in Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht
(Stuttgart: Krais and Hoffmann, 1861), of which Ward read the second edition, published in
Basel in 1897. See Pure Sociology, p. 336. Ward and Allen’s exchange was to prove extremely influ-
ential on future feminist thought. See chapter 7 for a discussion of Gilman’s response to and use
of Ward’s gynaecocentric theories.
95. Ward did not specify how women lost the power of sexual selection, but he located it in
a very early phase of human history, at a time when extant races were all situated in primitive
stages of development, even lower stages than those occupied by the “lowest races” alive in
Ward’s day. See Pure Sociology, p. 337.
96. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Feminism,” typescript, n.d., c. 1908, folder 175, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
97. See Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, by a Black Women of the South (Xenia, Oh.: Al-
dine, 1892; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969; New York: Oxford University Press,
1988).
 NOTES TO PAGES 81–53 • 197

98. “Scope and Content Note accompanying the Otis Tufton Mason Collection,” National
Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Also see Neil M. Judd, The Bureau of American
Ethnology: A Partial History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), pp. 3, 10, 11.
99. Nancy Oestreich Lurie, “Women in Early American Anthropology,” in Pioneers of American
Anthropology, ed. June Helm (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), pp. 36, 38. Mason’s in-
terest in the woman question can be seen in both the opening and closing statements of his
book. His first paragraph reads: “Of the billion and a half human beings on the earth, one half,
or about seven hundred million are females. What this vast multitude are doing in the world’s
activities and what share their mothers and grandmothers, to the remotest generation back-
ward, have had in originating culture, is a question which concerns the whole race. The answer
to this inquiry will benefit the living in many ways, especially if it can be shown that the
achievements of women have been in the past worthy of honor and imitation” Woman’s Share in
Primitive Culture(New York: D. Appleton, 1898), p. 1. At the end of this book, Mason concludes, “It
is not here avowed that women may not pursue any path in life they chose. . . . But before it
is decided to do that there is no harm in looking backward over the honourable achievements
of the sex. All this is stored capital, accumulated experience and energy. . . . All this benefi-
cent labour is the birthright of women, and much of it of women alone. Past glory therein is se-
cure, and it only remains to be seen how far the future will add to its lustre in the preservation
of holy ideals” (286).
100. Mason first presented the main themes of his book in a talk he gave at an annual meet-
ing of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Cleveland in 1888. See
Otis T. Mason, “Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture,” American Antiquarian 11 (January 1889):
3–13. Mason’s book was published by D. Appleton, as the first in a series designed to introduce
some aspects of recent anthropology to a lay audience.
101. Mason, Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture, p. 238.
102. See Kevin K. Gaines, UpliftingThe Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in theTwentieth Cen-
tury (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
103. I am indebted to Gail Bederman for clarification of this point. Also see Joan Jacobs
Blumberg, Mission for Life: The Story of the Family of AdoniramJudson, the Dramatic Events of the First American
Foreign Mission, and the Course of Evangelical Religion in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Free Press, 1980),
pp. 79–106.
104. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Educated Suffrage,” Independent (February 14, 1895): 2.
105. Mrs. J. B. [Mary Lowe] Dickinson, “Address of the President, at the Annual Meeting of
the Women’s National Indian Association, November 17, 1885” (Philadelphia, 1885), p. 2.
106. For an overview of white women’s activities as foreign missionaries, see Jane Hunter,
The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China(New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1984); Hill, The World Their Household; Brumberg, Mission for Life, pp. 79–106; Welter,
“She Hath Done What She Could,” 624–638; and Marion Kilson, Mary Jane Forbes Greene
(1845–1910), Mother of the Japan Mission: An Anthropological Portrait (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen
Press, 1991), pp. 1–8. See Hill, The World Their Household, p. 8, for the size of the foreign mission
movement.
107. “What Woman Will Do in War and after War,” Woman’s Protest 9 (1916): 8, cited in Susan E.
Marshall, “In Defense of Separate Spheres: Class and Status Politics in the Antisuffrage Move-
ment,” Social Forces65 (December 1986): 341.
108. This situation partially explains why African Americans were so hesitant to discuss
gender conflicts in public and why so much of the existing discourse on Indian rights, for exam-
ple, begins with testimonies of Indians who begin their arguments by assuring whites that they
as individuals have accepted whites’ civilization. See, for example, “Two Indian Speeches,” In-
 198 • NOTES TO PAGES 9:;9<

dian’s Friend 1 (March 1889): 4; Chas. W. Hoffman, “Compulsory Education from an Indian’s
Standpoint,” Southern Workman 30 (November 1901): 622–624; and Zallie Rulo, letter published in
SouthernWorkman14 (June 1885): 62.
109. E. D. Cope, “What is the Object of Life?” Forum4 (September 1887): 53.
110. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (New York: Harper, 1883;
reprint, Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1982), p. 56.
111. Kevin Gaines’ Uplifting the Race discusses attempts by the black middle classes to insert
class distinctions into a civilization discourse that downplayed the salience and significance of
class difference.
112. See Nicole Hahn Rafter, White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919 (Boston: North-
eastern University Press, 1989), for the influence of eugenics discourse on the branding of poor
whites with the stigma of moral deviance and mental deficiency.

2. The Making of a White Female Citizenry

1. Kristi Andersen, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 1–20.
2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, article published in Revolution(January 14, 1869): 24–25, reprinted
as Document 8 in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches,
ed. Ellen Carol DuBois (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), pp. 122–123.
3. Andersen, After Suffrage, p. 13.
4. Margaret J. Evans, “The Woman Citizen a Woman First of All,” in The Woman Citizen’s Li-
brary, ed. Shailer Mathews, vol. 12 (Chicago: Civics Society, 1914), p. 2987.
5. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Where Social Progress Must Begin,” letter to the editor, NewYork
Sun (November 25, 1901). Copy in microfilm reel 2, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of
Congress.
6. See Stanton’s article in Revolution (January 11, 1869); reprinted as Document 8 in DuBois,
Stanton-Anthony Reader, pp. 119–124.
7. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address of Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Delivered at Seneca
Falls & Rochester, N.Y., July 19th & August 2nd, 1848,” Susan B. Anthony Scrapbook no. 1, mi-
crofilm reel 5, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers; my emphasis.
8. Cited without attribution in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda
Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1889), p. 551. Also
see pp. 699, 712, 874.
9. “Biology and ‘Woman’s Rights,’” Popular Science Monthly 14 (December 1878): 213, 214; em-
phasis in original. Also see Caroline Corbin, Letters froma Chimney-Corner: A Plea for Pure Hopes and Sin-
cere Relations between Men andWomen(Chicago: Fergus, 1886).
10. National Woman Suffrage Association, How Woman Won It (New York: Wilson, 1940),
pp. 161–164.
11. National Woman Suffrage Association, HowWomanWon It, pp. 161–164.
12. Mary Martha Thomas, The New Woman in Alabama: Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890–1920
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992).
13. In the case Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 627 (1875), Virginia Minor, a white woman, with her
husband acting as her attorney, brought suit against the state of Missouri, arguing that the state,
by denying her permission to register to vote, had abridged one of the “privileges” of citizen-
ship, to which she was entitled as a native-born resident of the United States. The Supreme
Court agreed that Virginia Minor was a citizen, with all the privileges and immunities of citizen-
ship, but specified that suffrage was not one of those privileges or immunities. The result of this
 NOTES TO PAGES =>?=@ • 199

ruling was to sanction two sexually differentiated constructions of citizenship: one for men, in
which the franchise was guaranteed by the Constitution, and another for women, in which it
was left up to the states to decide whether the franchise would be granted or not.
14. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 10.
15. See Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address to the National Woman Suffrage Convention,”
Washington, D.C., January 19, 1869, reprinted in The Concise History of Woman Suffrage, ed. Mari Jo
Buhle and Paul Buhle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), pp. 252–256.
16. First quotation: “Address to the National Woman Suffrage Convention,” p. 252; second
quotation: Stanton’s article in Revolution (January 14, 1869), reprinted as Document 8 in Stanton-
Anthony Reader, p. 121.
17. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “What Woman Suffrage Means,” Woman’s Tribune (August 30,
1890); copy available in microfilm reel 2, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers.
18. For example, in 1843 abolitionist Lydia Maria Child stated, “[I]n comparison with the
Caucasian race, I have often said that they [Negroes] are what woman is in comparison with
man. The comparison between [white] women and the colored race as classesis striking. Both are
exceedingly adhesive in their attachments; both, comparatively speaking, have a tendency to
submission, and hence, both have been kept in subjection by physical force, and considered
rather in the light of property, than individuals.” “The African Race,” National Anti-Slavery Standard
3 (April 27, 1843), n.p., cited in Jean Fagan Yellin, Women & Sisters: The Anti-Slavery Feminists in Ameri-
can Culture(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 58; emphasis in Yellin.
19. See Yellin, Women & Sisters, pp. 19 and 22, and the reproductions of abolitionist iconogra-
phy on pp. 11, 16, 18, 20.
20. Yellin, Women & Sisters, p. 19.
21. See Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New
York: Norton, 1984), and Deborah Gray White, Arn’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South
(New York: Norton, 1985), pp. 27–61.
22. Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, “Kneeling Slave,” Genius, 3rd series, 1 (May 1830): 41, 44;
cited in Yellin, Women & Sisters, p. 14.
23. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment reads in part: “But when the right to vote at
any election . . . is denied to any of the male inhabitants . . . being twenty-one years of age,
and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or
other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the
number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years
of age in such State.” The Fifteenth Amendment affirms that “the right of citizens of the United
States to vote shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of race, color, or previous con-
dition of servitude.”
24. Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Gerrit Smith, January 1, 1866 Gerrit Smith Collection,
George Arents Research Library for Special Collections, Syracuse University; cited in Ellen
Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America,
1848–1869(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 61.
25. Cited without clear documentation in Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of HerTime: Abby Kelley and
the Politics of Antislavery (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 348. Also see Stanton “Address to the Na-
tional Woman’s Suffrage Convention,” and Stanton’s article in Revolution (January 14, 1869),
reprinted as Document 8 in Stanton/Anthony Reader, pp. 122–123. Within the black community,
Stanton’s remarks about black racial inferiority seem to have been either not known or not
mentioned in public.
26. Cited without clear documentation in Sterling, Ahead of Her Time, p. 348. For an ex-
 200 • NOTES TO PAGES ABCAA

change between Lucy Stone and Abby Kelley on this issue, see Sterling, Ahead of Her Time,
pp. 347–348.
27. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Nineteenth-Century Black Women and Woman Suffrage,” Po-
tomac Review7 (Spring–Summer 1977): 15.
28. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, “Trust the Women!” Crisis(August 1915): 188. Mary Church
Terrell, president of the National Association of Colored Women, claimed that opposition to
woman suffrage rarely occurred among “intelligent” black men. Mary Church Terrell, “The
Justice of Woman Suffrage,” Crisis (September 1912): 243. Among a more conservative element
of black suffragists there was some concern about whether enfranchisement would mean that
women and men would be brought into closer association. One black woman, Mrs. M. E. Lee,
proposed that a separate “woman’s division” be established at the polls, similar to the “ladies’
delivery” at the post office, so that all women could cast their vote “without exposure.” Mrs. M.
E. Lee, “The Home-Maker,” AME Church Review8 (July 1891): 64.
29. N. H. Burroughs, “Black Women and Reform,” Crisis10 (August 1915): 187. This opinion
was shared by black writer Frances Watkins Harper and Mary McCurdy, a black temperance
leader and suffragist; see Terborg-Penn, “Nineteenth-Century Black Women and Woman Suf-
frage,” pp. 19–20.
30. Mary Church Terrell, cited in Terborg-Penn, “Nineteenth-Century Black Women,”
p. 20.
31. Mary Putnam-Jacobi, “Common Sense” Applied toWoman Suffrage (New York: Putnam, 1894),
p. 65.
32. Stanton, “Address to the National Woman Suffrage Convention,” p. 254.
33. Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and Freedmen’s Aid, Fifteenth Annual Report
(Rochester: William S. Falls, 1866), p. 16; cited in Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and theWork of Benevolence:
Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990), p. 180.
34. Putnam-Jacobi, “Common Sense” Applied toWoman Suffrage, p. 27.
35. Susan B. Anthony, Autobiography; cited without full attribution in Mary Roberts
Coolidge, Why Women Are So(New York: Henry Holt, 1912), pp. 258–259.
36. Coolidge, Why Women Are So, pp. 259, 268.
37. Ellen Carol DuBois, “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Bradwell, Minor, and Suffrage
Militance in the 1870s,” in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt and
Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 35 n. 4.
38. Yellin, Woman & Sisters.
39. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans(New York: John
S. Taylor, 1836), pp. 148, 171, 176.
40. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Educated Suffrage,” Independent (February 14, 1895): 198; Eliza-
beth Cady Stanton Papers, microfilm reel 2.
41. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Address delivered to the Twenty-third Annual Convention of
the National American Woman Suffrage Association, published as “The Degradation of Disfran-
chisement,” Woman’s Tribune(February 7, 1891); copy available in microfilm reel 4, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton Papers.
42. Stanton, “Educated Suffrage,” p. 198; my emphasis.
43. R. F. Dibble, Strenuous Americans(New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), p. 185.
44. Union Signal (May 14, 1891), p. 11; cited in Ian Tyrell, Woman’s World, Women’s Empire: The
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 103.
45. Frances E. Willard, A White Life For Two(Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publishing Asso-
 NOTES TO PAGES DDEF1 • 201

ciation: 1890); reprinted in Man Cannot Speak for Her, ed. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, vol. 2 (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989), pp. 317–319.
46. Frances E. Willard, “President’s Address,” Minutes of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union at the Nineteenth Annual Meeting (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association,
1892), p. 128.
47. Willard, “President’s Address,” p. 128.
48. Ware, Beyond the Pale, pp. 200, 202.
49. For historiographic treatments of Willard’s conflict with Wells, see Ware, Beyond the Pale,
pp. 200–205, and Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the
United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 66–67. Primary-source accounts of
this confrontation are contained in Ida B. Wells-Barmett, On Lynchings: “Southern Horrors,” “A Red
Record,” “Mob Rule in NewOrleans”(Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1987), pp. 80–90, and Ida B. Wells, Crusade for
Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1970), pp. 201–211. Quotation appears in Wells, A Red Record, p. 84, and is cited in Bederman,
Manliness & Civilization, p. 65.
50. Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Lawin All Its Phases(New York: Age, 1892), p. 6.
51. Ida B. Wells, “A Red Record,”in On Lynchings: “Southern Horrors,” “A Red Record,” “Mob Rule in
NewOrleans,”pp. 80, 81.
52. Frances Willard, “Draw no Color Line,” Chicago Daily Inter Ocean 17 (November 1894): 5,
cited in Bedermen, Manliness & Civilization, p. 66.
53. See Ware, Beyond the Pale.
54. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 66.
55. Published scholarship on antisuffragism includes Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The
Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap, 1959), pp. 294–305; Aileen Kradi-
tor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920(New York: Columbia University Press, 1965
[2nd ed., New York: Norton, 1981]), pp. 14–42; Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in
America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 328–361;
Louise L. Stevenson, “Women Anti-suffragists in the 1915 Massachusetts Campaign,” NewEngland
Quarterly 52 (1979): 80–93; Susan E. Marshall, “In Defense of Separate Spheres: Class and Status
Politics in the Antisuffrage Movement,” Social Forces 65 (December 1986); Manuela Thurner,
“‘Better Citizens without the Ballot’: American Antisuffrage Women and Their Rationale dur-
ing the Progressive Era,” Journal of Women’s History 5 (Spring 1993): 33–60; Jane Jerome Camhi,
“Women against Women: American Anti-suffragism, 1880–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Tufts University,
1973); Thomas James Jablonsky, “Duty, Nature and Stability: The Female Anti-suffragists in the
United States, 1894–1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1978); and James J.
Kenneally, “The Opposition to Woman Suffrage in Massachusetts, 1868–1920” (Ph.D. diss.,
Boston College, 1963). For a collective portrait of female antisuffragists, see Jablonsky, “Duty,
Nature and Stability,” pp. 278–301.
56. Paul Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
(New York: Bantam Books, 1984), pp. 119–120.
57. Edith Melvin, “A Business Woman’s View of Suffrage,” in Anti-Suffrage Essays by Massachu-
settsWomen(Boston: Forum, 1916), p. 41.
58. Mary A. M. M’Intire, Of NoBenefit toWoman: She Is a Far Greater Power without Suffrage(Boston:
Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women, n.d.),
pp. 7, 8.
59. Caroline F. Corbin, “The Antisuffrage Movement,” Chicago Daily News (November 24,
1908), reprint (pamphlet), The Antisuffrage Movement (Illinois Association Opposed to the Exten-
sion of Suffrage to Women, n.d.), p. 2.
 202 • NOTES TO PAGES G1–74

60. Marshall, “In Defense of Separate Spheres,” p. 330.

61. Kate Gannett Wells, An Argument against Woman Suffrage, delivered before the Special Leg-
islative committee (of the Massachusetts Legislature) (Boston, n.p., 1889), p. 3.
62. Ruth Lyman, “The Anti-Suffrage Ideal,” in Anti-Suffrage Essays, p. 118.
63. Lyman, “The Anti-Suffrage Ideal,” p. 118.
64. See Stevenson, “Women Anti-suffragists in the 1915 Massachusetts Campaign,” p. 8. Also
see Kenneally, “The Opposition to Woman Suffrage in Massachusetts, 1868–1920,” p. 342, and
William L. O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America(Chicago: Quadrangle
Books, 1969), p. 57. For an incisive reflection on the problem, see Allen, “Woman Suffrage vs.
Womanliness,” in Anti-Suffrage Essays, pp. 77–78.
65. Alice George, “Suffrage Fallacies,” in Anti-Suffrage Essays, pp. 27; Annie Nathan Meyer,
“Woman’s Assumption of Sex Superiority,” North American Review178 (January 1904), reprinted in
Why Women Do Not Want the Ballot, vol. 3. (Boston: Massachusetts Association opposed to the Fur-
ther Extension of Suffrage to Women, n.d.), pp. 3–4; Jeanette Gilder, “Why I Am Opposed to
Woman Suffrage,” Harper’s Bazaar (May 19, 1894, reprint (pamphlet), Massachusetts Association
Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women, n.d.).
66. For examples of male-authored evolutionary analyses of the physical and mental inferi-
ority of women, see Edward D. Cope, “The Relations of the Sexes to Government,” Popular Science
Monthly 33 (October 1888): 721–730, and George F. Talbot, “The Political Rights and Duties of
Women,” Popular Science Monthly 49 (May 1896): 80–97; both reprinted in Men’s Ideas/Women’s Reali-
ties: Popular Science, 1870–1920, ed. Louise Michele Newman (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985)
pp. 210–216, 220–228.
67. Lyman, “The Anti-Suffrage Ideal,” p. 120; emphasis in original.
68. For evidence that antisuffrage women clearly saw themselves as participants within the
woman’s movement, see Wells, An Argument against Woman Suffrage, p. 3; Minnie Bronson, The Wage
EarningWoman and the State, (Boston: Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension
of Suffrage to Women, 1910); and Mrs. A. J. George, “Suffrage Fallacies;” Mrs. Henry Preston
White, “The Ballot and the Woman in Industry”; Monica Foley, “How Massachusetts Fosters
Public Welfare”; and Catherine Robinson, “Massachusetts Compared with Suffrage States,” all
in Anti-Suffrage Essays, pp. 24, 31–37, 53–61, 62–66.
69. Annie Nathan Meyer, “Woman’s Assumption of Sex Superiority,” reprinted in Why
Women DoNot Want the Ballot vol. 3, p. 2; my emphasis.
70. Grace Duffield Goodwin, Anti-Suffrage: Ten Good Reasons (New York: Duffield, 1913),
pp. 4–5.
71. Catherine [sic] E. Beecher, Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions (New York: J. B. Ford,
1874), p. 201. Margaret Deland, “The Third Way,” cited in Kenneally, “The Opposition to
Woman Suffrage in Massachusetts, 1868–1920,” pp. 200–203. Also see Melvin, “A Business
Woman’s View of Suffrage,” p. 42.
72. In reference to immigrants, Goodwin added: “the majority toil incessantly, learn very
little, are exploited by the boss of the ward, know little and care less about the government of
their adopted country. . . . How will it help to add the foreign woman? All workers among
these peoples recognize how much more backward is the foreign woman than the foreign man.
. . . The . . . foreign women . . . would add greatly to the danger of the naturalized for-
eign vote.” Goodwin, Anti-Suffrage, pp. 43–46.
73. See Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), for an account of how white women writers of the
1830s through the 1850s dealt with their feelings about public visibility and financial indepen-
dence.
 NOTES TO PAGES H4–78 • 203

74. Katharine Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton,
1973), p. 134.
75. Catharine E. Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism (Philadelphia: Henry Perkins,
1837), p. 28; my emphasis.
76. For example, see Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called
Africans(New York: John S. Taylor, 1833); Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, “The Ladies Repository”,
a column in Lundy’s abolitionist newspaper The Genius of Universal Emancipation, 3rd series, 1 (May
1830): 41, 44 and 1 (February 1831): 171, and Sarah and Angelina Grimké, in William Lloyd Garri-
son’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, in the late 1830s.
77. Beecher, Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions, pp. 62–65.
78. Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville,
and St. Louis(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
79. By 1828, 2,258 blacks lived in Cincinnati, a significant increase from 1810, when there had
been less than 100, or less than 2 percent of the city’s population at that time. Wade, Urban Fron-
tier, pp. 124, 221.
80. Wade, Urban Frontier, pp. 224–228. Wade estimates that the number of blacks who left was
certainly no less than 1,100 and probably more. Lawrence Thomas Lesnick notes that the black
population had declined to less than 3 percent of the total population by the early 1830s.
Lawrence Thomas Lesnick, The Lane Rebels: Evangelicalism and Antislavery in Antebellum America
(Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980), p. 20.
81. Lesnick, Lane Rebels, pp. 77–82; Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters fromSouth Carolina: Pioneers for
Woman’s Rights and Abolition(New York: Schocken Books, 1967 [2nd ed. 1978)], pp. 117–118.
82. See Harriet Beecher Stowe’s account of this incident as reported in Charles Edward
Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled from Her Letters and Journals (Boston: Houghton Miff-
lin, 1889), pp. 83–88. My discussion is drawn from this account and Sklar, Catharine Beecher,
pp. 132–134.
83. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, p. 134.
84. Harriet Beecher Stowe is quoted without attribution in Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe,
pp. 83–84.
85. Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 87.
86. Catharine Beecher to “My dear Brethren and Sisteren,” January 24–February 18, 1838
Stowe-Day Foundation, Hartford, Conn., reprinted in Jeanne Boydston, May Kelley, and Anne
Margolis, The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina press, 1988), p. 336.
87. Lerner, Grimké Sisters, p. 124.
88. The Grimké sisters moved to New York in October 1836 and underwent two weeks of in-
tensive training at the Agents’ Convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society in November.
The Female Anti-Slavery Society of New York was organized the same month, and Angelina
spoke under its auspices. See entry for Sarah and Angelina Grimké in Notable American Women: A
Biographical Dictionary, 1607–1950, ed. Edward T. James, vol. 2, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971),
pp. 97–99; and Lerner, Grimké Sisters, pp. 147–148.
89. Beecher, Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, p. 3.
90. Beecher, Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, cited in Boydston et al., Limits of Sisterhood, pp. 126,
127.
91. Beecher, Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, p. 24; my emphasis.
92. Catharine E. Beecher, The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Woman; With a History of an Enterprise
HavingThat for its Object (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1851), pp. 235–236.
93. Beecher, True Remedy, pp. 235–236; my emphasis.
 204 • NOTES TO PAGES IJKJL

94. Beecher, True Remedy, pp. 240–241; emphasis in original.

95. Beecher, Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions.
96. Beecher, True Remedy, p. 241.
97. See Joan Burstyn, “Catharine Beecher and the Education of American Women,” NewEn-
gland Quarterly 47 (September 1974): 389.
98. These politicians included Rufus King, a senator from New York; James Doolittle of Wis-
consin; Owen Lovejoy of Illinois; Anson Burlingame of Massachusetts; Ezra Clark of Connecti-
cut; Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania; and Joshua Giddings of Ohio. Stanley Harrold, Gamaliel
Bailey and Antislavery Union(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), pp. 195–196.
99. Susan Coultrap-McQuinn, Introduction to Gail Hamilton: Selected Writings (New Bruns-
wick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. xvi.
100. Henry C. Vedder, American Writers of Today (New York: Silver, Burdett, 1894), p. 196, cited
in Coultrap-McQuinn, Gail Hamilton, p. xii.
101. Dodge was at the height of her power in the 1880s, when men and women routinely
wrote to her asking her for favors. See for example, a letter from Kate Field, a reformer from
New York, who wrote to Mary Dodge on April 21, 1880, to ask her to arrange a meeting with
President Hayes in order to enlist his support for her Dress Association. Kate Field to Miss
Dodge, April 21, 1880, folder 8, Dodge Papers, Essex Institute. Also see Charles E. Smith to Miss
Dodge, March 22, 1881; Benjamin J. Butler to M. A. Dodge, Jan. 29, 1883; and J. W. Manley to
Miss Dodge, November 9, 1881, all in folder no. 8, and Julian Hawthorne to Miss Dodge, Novem-
ber 27, 1886, folder 9, Dodge Papers, Essex Institute.
102. Dodge’s support of Blaine never wavered, not even when suspicion that Blaine had
wrongly profited from his office as Speaker of the House cost him his party’s presidential nomi-
nation in 1876. In the 1880s, Dodge helped Blaine write his memoirs, and after his death she
wrote a biography of him. Gail Hamilton, Biography of James G. Blaine(Norwich: Henry Bill, 1895).
103. Harriet Prescott Spofford, A Little Book of Friends(Boston: Little Brown, 1916).
104. In 1865, Dodge joked with Wood: “You, Mr. Wood, as I have often told you, are clean
given up to the pomps and vanities of this world. You use fine-sounding phrases in your letters,
but you know you would give every cent of your twenty thousand dollars, this minute, to have
me, a handsome woman, at the head of a marble Fifth Avenue sort of house-ruling society, and
you a witness and worshipper!” Miss Dodge to Mr. Wood, March 26, 1865 in Gail Hamilton’s Life and
Letters, ed. H. Augusta Dodge, vol. 1 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1901), p. 489.
105. Miss Dodge to Mr. French, December 19, 1864, in Dodge, Gail Hamilton’s Life and Letters,
vol. 1, p. 472. Elsewhere Dodge wrote, “Marriage contracted to subserve material ends . . . is
legalized prostitution.” A NewAtmosphere(Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), p. 21.
106. Dodge, A NewAtmosphere, especially pp. 5–22.
107. Gail Hamilton, “A Spasm of Sense,” Atlantic Monthly 11 (April 1863): 407.
108. As reported by Spofford, A Little Book of Friends, p. 95.
109. “Letter from Gail Hamilton,” February 9, 1886, Mary Abigail Dodge Papers, Smith Col-
lege Archives.
110. Susan B. Anthony to Mary Abigail Dodge, 1869, folder 5, Dodge papers, Essex Institute.
111. Reference to the misrepresentation by the Woman’s Journal is discussed by Mary Dodge in
“Letter from Gail Hamilton,” February 9, 1886.
112. Mary Roberts [Smith] Coolidge, Why Women Are So (New York: Henry Holt, 1912),
pp. 278–279.
113. Gail Hamilton, Woman’s Wrongs: A Counter-Irritant (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868),
pp. 6–7.
114. Hamilton, Woman’sWrongs, p. 93.
 NOTES TO PAGES MNOMM • 205

115. Hamilton, Woman’sWrongs, p. 87–88.

116. Hamilton, Woman’sWrongs, p. 104.
117. Hamilton, Woman’sWrongs, pp. 94–95, 104.
118. Hamilton, Woman’sWrongs, pp. 101–102.
119. See Gail Hamilton, “Race Prejudice,” North American Review141 (October 1885): 475–479,
and a response by Charlotte Forten, “One Phase of the Race Distinction,” Boston Commonwealth24
(January 16, 1886): 1. Forten began her criticism by saying that she would have been “surprised
that so brilliant and acute a writer [as Gail Hamilton] could be so illogical, were it not that so
many even more brilliant minds are beguiled into making the same mistakes when dealing with
this vexed race question.”
120. Hamilton, “Race Prejudice,” p. 477.
121. Hamilton, “Race Prejudice,” p. 477.
122. Although Dodge believed that “for the same work women ought be paid the same
wages as men,” she went on to qualify that statement so as not to contradict her arguments in
support of laissez-faire economics: “But it is a commercial ought, not a moral ought. . . .
Women ought to receive the same wages for the same work as men, if they can get it.” Hamil-
ton, Woman’s Worth and Worthlessness: The Complement to “A New Atmosphere”(New York: Harper, 1872),
pp. 105–106.
123. Mrs. Arthur M. Dodge, “Woman Suffrage Opposed to Woman’s Rights,” Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 5(November 1914): 99.
124. Dodge, “Woman Suffrage Opposed to Woman’s Rights,” p. 101; my emphasis.
125. Dodge, “Woman Suffrage Opposed to Woman’s Rights,” p. 99; emphasis in original.

3. The Politics of Patriarchal Protection

1. Azel Ames, Jr., Sex in Industry: A Plea for the Working-Girl (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875),
p. 11, and Caroline H. Dall, “Woman’s Right toLabor”: Or, LowWages and HardWork: InThree Lectures, De-
livered in Boston, November 1859 (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1860), p. 57. Helen Campbell believed that
some women worked in the trades because they were bored and wanted to earn a little extra
pocket or “pin” money. Campbell, Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-Workers, Their Trades and Their Lives
(Boston: Roberts, 1887; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), p. 17.
2. Accounts of this debate are contained in Mary Roth Walsh, “Doctors Wanted: NoWomen Need
Apply”: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977),
pp. 119–124; Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 5–27; Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science:Women
Physicians in American Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 54–56; and Barbara
Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 56–57.
3. These details about his Boston address are taken from Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres,
p. 5.
4. Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education; Or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: James R. Osgood,
1873 [2nd ed., 1873]), p. 19.
5. For an overview of this debate, see “The ‘Sex in Education’ Controversy” (Editorial), Scrib-
ner’s Monthly 9 (March 1875): 633–635.
6. Caroline H. Dall, untitled article in Sex and Education: A Reply toDr. E. H. Clarke’s “Sex in Educa-
tion”ed. Julia Ward Howe (Boston: Roberts, 1874), pp. 87–88.
7. Eliza Duffey, untitled article in Howe, Sex and Education, p. 117. Duffey had already pub-
lished a treatise on the woman question, What Women Should Know: A Woman’s Book about Women
 206 • NOTES TO PAGES PPQRS

(Cincinnati: Stoddard, 1873); she wrote two more books, NoSex in Education: Or, An Equal Chance for
Both Boys and Girls: A Review of Dr. E. H. Clarke’s “Sex in Education” (Philadelphia: J. Stoddard, 1874),
and The Relations of the Sexes(New York: Wood and Holbrook, 1876, 1886).
8. Many all-male state universities and some private schools were opening their doors to
women, including M.I.T. (1865), Wisconsin (1867), Indiana (1868), Boston University (1869),
Northwestern (1869), Kansas (1869), Minnesota (1869), Missouri (1870), Michigan (1870), Califor-
nia (1870), Illinois (1870), Syracuse (1871), Wesleyan (1872), Maine (1872), Cornell (1872), and
Ohio (1873), to name a few. Dates given in Louise Michele Newman, ed., Men’s Ideas/Women’s
Realities: Popular Science, 1870–1920 (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985), p. 64, and Solomon, In the
Company of EducatedWomen, p. 53.
9. On the significance of education in creating “a large and influential middle class [of
men],” see “Education” (Editorial), Atlantic Monthly 32 (September 1874): 379–380.
10. Newman, Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities, p. 107.
11. Newman, Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities, pp. 106–118.
12. Walker wrote, “The access of foreigners at the time and under the circumstances, consti-
tuted a shock to the principle of population among the native element. . . . [F]oreign immi-
gration into this country has, from the time it first assumed large proportions, amounted not to
a re-enforcement of our population, but to a replacement of native by foreign stock.” Francis A.
Walker, “Immigration and Degradation,” reprinted in Francis A. Walker, Discussions in Economics
and Statistics, vol. 2 ed. Davis R. Dewey (New York: Henry Holt, 1899), pp. 422–425; cited in New-
man, Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities, p. 108.
13. Universal Suffrage: Female Suffrage (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1867), pp. 103–104; cited in
Newman, Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities, p. 117.
14. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Americanized European,” Atlantic Monthly 35 (January
1875): 85.
15. Clarke, Sex in Education, pp. 129, 13–14; my emphasis.
16. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, untitled article in Howe, Sex and Education, p. 32.
17. Clarke, Sex in Education, p. 13.
18. Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, p. 5.
19. Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, p. 12.
20. Holmes, “The Americanized European,” p. 75. Some newspaper reviews were collected
and reprinted in Howe, Sex and Education. Also see “Dr. Clarke’s ‘Sex in Education,’” North American
Review 119 (January 1874): 140–152; “Education” (Editorial), Atlantic Monthly 35 (January 1875):
125–128; “Clarke’s Building of a Brain,” North American Review120 (January 1875): 185–188; Oliver
Wendell Holmes, “The Americanized European,” pp. 75–86; Rev. J. R. Herrick, “A Fair Chance
for Girls; or, A Word for American Women,” New England Journal of Education 1 (March 20, 1875):
133–135, and “The ‘Sex in Education’ Controversy,” pp. 633–635.
21. “The ‘Sex in Education’ Controversy,” p. 634. Clarke, preface to the 2nd edition of Sex in
Education, p. 7.
22. M. Carey Thomas, “Present Tendencies in Women’s College and University Education,”
Educational Review24 (1908): 68, cited in Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, p. 12.
23. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence2 (New York: Appleton, 1904), pp. 569–570, and Walsh, “Doctors
Wanted: NoWomen Need Apply,”pp. 119, 124. Also see Maxine Seller, “G. Stanley Hall and Edward
Thorndike on the Education of Women: Theory and Policy in the Progressive Era,” Educational
Studies11 (Winter 1981): 365–374.
24. Clarke, Sex in Education, pp. 12–13, cited in Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, p. 7.
25. Clarke, Sex in Education, pp. 11–12.
26. Clarke, Sex in Education, pp. 36–38.
 NOTES TO PAGES TUVTW • 207

27. Clarke was careful to point out that he did not think that educational methods alone
were the sole cause of (white middle-class) women’s reproductive troubles. He also faulted
women’s diets (“perpetual pie and doughnut”), dress (“as much to the omission of clothing
where it is needed as to excess where the body does not require it”), and inadequate exercise.
However, he thought these other factors were “indirect” causes and not nearly as important
as those arising from inattention to the “peculiarities of a woman’s organization.” See Clarke,
Sex in Education, p. 23. In coeducation, specifically, the “problem” as Clarke formulated it was that
the “periodicity” of women’s reproductive systems meant that they should not be subjected to
sustained intellectual work, as was required in men’s colleges. Women needed periodic remis-
sion of their studies to correspond with the onset of their periods, so as not to overtax and harm
their reproductive systems. “A careless management of this function [menstruation], at any pe-
riod of life during its existence, is apt to be followed by consequences that may be serious; but a
neglect of it during the epoch of development, that is, from the age of fourteen to eighteen or
twenty, not only produces great evil at the time of the neglect, but leaves a large legacy of evil to
the future. The system is then peculiarly susceptible; and disturbances of the delicate mecha-
nism we are considering, induced during the catamenial weeks of that critical age by con-
strained positions [sitting at tight desks], muscular effort [standing during recitations], brain
work, and all forms of mental and physical excitement, germinate a host of ills. . . . The host
of ills thus induced are known to physicians and to the sufferers as amenorrhoea, menorrhagia,
dysmenorrhoea, hysteria, anemia, chorea, and the like. Some of these fasten themselves on
their victim for a lifetime, and some are shaken off. Now and then they lead to an abortion of
the function, and consequent sterility. . . . The more completely any such school or college
succeeds, while adopting every detail and method of a boy’s school, in ignoring and neglecting
the physiological conditions of sexual development [of women], the larger will be the number
of these pathological cases among its graduates.” Clarke, Sex in Education, pp. 48–49.
28. Howe, Sex and Education; Duffey, No Sex in Education; George Fish Comfort and Anna Man-
ning Comfort, Woman’s Education and Woman’s Health (Syracuse: Durston, 1874); Anna Callender
Brackett, ed., The Education of American Girls(New York: Putnam, 1874). Also see “The ‘Sex in Edu-
cation’ Controversy,” pp. 633–635.
29. Mary Putnam Jacobi, The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation (New York: Putnam,
1877) as cited in Morantz-Sanchez, Women Physicians in American Medicine, p. 55.
30. Solomon, IntheCompany of EducatedWomen, p. 57; Rosenberg, BeyondSeparateSpheres, pp. 20–22.
Some college presidents spoke out in defense of coeducational systems, including John Bascom,
president of the University of Wisconsin. See Bascom, “Coeducation,” Independent 30 (January 17,
1878): 1. Every decade from the 1870s through the 1920s produced its own gloss on the issues that
Clarke first brought to national attention in 1873. In the 1880s, George J. Romanes and William
Hammond, physicians widely known for their work on insanity and nervous diseases, followed
up on Clarke’s arguments about “sex in brains.” Hammond argued that girls ought to be edu-
cated differently from boys because boys had heavier and more developed brains and could with-
stand more “brain work.” Debates ensued as to whether women’s smaller brains accounted for
their supposedly inferior mental abilities. See George J. Romanes, “Mental Differences for Men
and Women,” Popular Science Monthly 32 (July 1887): 383–401, William A. Hammond, “Woman in
Politics,” North American Review137 (August 1883): 137–146; and a response by Nina Morais, “Dr.
Hammond’s Estimate of Woman,” North American Review 137 (November 1883): 501–507. In the
1890s, sexual differences were identified with a variety of different aspects of (white) men’s and
women’s physical person: not just in reproductive organs or brains but also in metabolism, bone
structure, and so forth. For an excellent overview of sexual difference from the perspective of the
early twentieth century, see Willystine Goodsell, The Education of Women: Its Social Background and Its
 208 • NOTES TO PAGES XYZX[

Problems(NewYork: Macmillan, 1923). Indeed, Clarke’s views remained so influential that as late as
the 1920s white middle-class women were still contesting them. See Edna Yost, “The Case for the
Co-educated Woman,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine(July 1927): 194–202.
31. Mary R. Smith, “Statistics of College and Non-College Women,” Publications of the American
Statistical Association7 (March/June 1900): 11; cited in Newman, Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities, p. 116.
32. M. B. Jackson, untitled article in Howe, Sex and Education, pp. 150–151; 161, my emphasis.
Also see Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, “Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply,” Fortnightly Review15
(May 1874): 582–594; especially 583.
33. Duffey, What Women Should Know, pp. 17–18. Duffey is insistent on this point: “The larger
class of writers in regard to womanly functions, capabilities and incapabilities, have been men.
From Michelet, who regards the normal state of womanhood as one of pretty and useless inva-
lidism, to the unnumbered hosts of English and American authors and essayists, they all set up
before us a purely ideal creation, eliminated [sic] from their masculine brains, and differing as
widely from the reality as—well, say as man from woman” (18). Also see Julia Ward Howe and
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, untitled articles in Howe, Sex and Education, pp. 24, 129.
34. Howe, Sex and Education, p. 27.
35. Edward Jarvis, “Immigration,” Atlantic Monthly 29 (April 1872): 454–468. For additional in-
sight into how evolutionists used these arguments, see Holmes, “The Americanized European,”
especially pp. 78–80.
36. Howe, Sex and Education, p. 27.
37. Ames, Sex in Industry, p. 3. This study was begun at the instigation of Carroll D. Wright,
head of the Massachusetts State Bureau of Statistics of Labor. The State Bureau published an-
nual reports from 1870 onward, many of which exposed the inhumane working conditions to
which women were subjected in Massachusetts. See Mark Aldrich, “State Reports on Women
and Child Wage Earners, 1870–1906,” Labor History 21 (Winter 1979–80): 86–90, for a listing of re-
ports documenting the working conditions of women in the industrial labor force.
38. Susan Levine, “Labor’s True Woman: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of
Labor,” Journal of American History 70 (September 1983): 323–339, and Alice Kessler-Harris, A
Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky,
1990), especially p. 19. Although Kessler-Harris focuses on the period from 1900 to 1920, the
same assumptions were present in the 1870s and 1880s. See Frances Amasa Walker, The Wages
Question: A Treatise onWages and theWages Class(New York: Henry Holt, 1876).
39. One reformer, Alice Henry, exposed how conservatives used protective labor legislation
to reinforce cultural notions of patriarchy in her study, The Trade UnionWoman(New York: Apple-
ton, 1915). Henry believed that male unionists’ advocacy of protective legislation was part of a
strategy to prevent women from effectively competing with male workers. As evidence for this
assertion, Henry quoted the President’s [Strasser’s] Report of the International Cigarmakers for
1879: “We cannot drive the females out of the trade but we can restrict this daily quota of labor
through factory laws. No girl under eighteen should be employed more than eight hours per
day; all overwork should be prohibited; while married women should be kept out of factories at
least six weeks before and six weeks after confinement.” This position, had it been espoused by
Florence Kelley, might have been hailed as a progressive position on labor issues. Coming from a
union that excluded women from its ranks, it takes on a very different political cast. According
to Henry, male labor unions were willing enough to call for equal pay for equal work, but not at
all willing to see a “young girl worker . . . as well trained as the boy, in order that the girl may
be able with reason and justice to demand the same wage from an employer” (p. 24). Henry also
wrote: “Even under conditions of nominal equality the woman was so often handicapped by her
physique, by the difficulty she experienced in obtaining thorough training and by the additional
 NOTES TO PAGES \]^\\ • 209

claims of her home, that the men must have felt they were likely tokeep their hold on the best positions anyhow, and
perhaps all the more readily with the union exacting identical standards of accomplishment
from all workers, while at the same time claiming for all identical standards of wages”(p. 24; my emphasis).
See Kessler-Harris, A Woman’sWage.
40. Ames, Sex in Industry, p. 30.
41. Ames, Sex in Industry, p. 30.
42. Dall, “Woman’s Right toLabor,”pp. 6–7.
43. Dall, “Woman’s Right toLabor,”pp. 86, 104–105.
44. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (New York: Harper, 1883;
reprint, Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1982), p. 36; my emphasis.
45. In 1886, for example, a Pennsylvania state court struck down a statute that required la-
borers to be paid in cash at regular intervals (instead of in credit at a company store) on the
grounds that the legislation represented an “insulting attempt to put the laborer under a legis-
lature tutelage,” and was “degrading to his manhood” and “subversive of his rights.” Godcharles v.
Wigeman 113 Pa. St. (1886): 431, cited in Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 490.
46. As economic historian Martin Sklar has argued, beginning with the landmark Santa
Clara decision of 1886, corporations were granted the legal status of a person within the mean-
ing of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. In a series of decisions from
1886 through the 1890s, courts protected corporations against deprivation by either the federal
or state governments of their life, liberty, assets, or earnings, without due process of law. Sklar
lists the most important cases of the 1880s and 1890s, including Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific
Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886); Pembina Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181 (1888); Minneapolis & St.
Louis Railroad Co. v. Beckwith, 129 U.S. 26 (1889); Charlotte, Columbia & Augusta Railroad v. Gibbes, 142 U.S.
386 (1892); and Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. Ellis, 165 U.S. 150 (1897), among others. See
Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and
Politics(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 49 and p. 50 n. 7.
47. Nancy S. Erickson, “MullerV. OregonReconsidered: The Origins of a Sex-Based Doctrine of
Liberty of Contract,” Labor History 30 (Spring 1989): 228–250.
48. Erickson argues that the Muller v. Oregon(1908) decision, which some scholars see as em-
bodying an abrupt ideological change from Lochner v. N.Y. (1905), was in fact based on a sexually
differentiated notion of liberty for women that had its origins in the 1870s. I concur with this in-
terpretation of the legal history behind Muller v. Oregon, but this does not negate my other point
that sexually distinct notions of liberty were also strongly resisted through the period
1870–1920.
49. Commonwealth v. Hamilton Mfg. Company, 120 Mass. 383 (1876): 385. Massachusetts had begun
limiting the working hours of children in 1842; in 1874, it added the category “women” to the
provisions of the statutes that restricted children’s hours to ten per day. Alice Kessler-Harris
mentions the case briefly in “Protection for Women: Trade Unions and Labor Laws,” in Double Ex-
posure: Women’s Health Hazards on the Job and at Home, ed. Wendy Chavkin (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1984), p. 143. A more extended discussion is available in Erickson, “Muller V. OregonRecon-
sidered,” pp. 228–250.
50. Commonwealth v. Hamilton Mfg. Company, 120 Mass. 383 (1876): 385. Fined for employing a
woman, Mary Shirley, in its factory for sixty-four hours per week, Hamilton Manufacturing
Company, a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, argued that a Massachusetts statute, which
mandated that “no minor under the age of eighteen years, and no woman over that age, shall be
employed in laboring by any person, firm or corporation in any manufacturing establishment
in this Commonwealth more than ten hours in any one day . . . [or] sixty per week” was un-
 210 • NOTES TO PAGE __

constitutional because it violated both its own and Mary Shirley’s right to enter freely into a labor
contract. The court ruled that the legislation in question was in fact legal and that no in-
fringement of freedom to contract had occurred. Yet the court recognized that the legislation in
question treated the employer and employee differently: it construed that the legislation re-
stricted Hamilton Manufacturing from hiring any woman for more than sixty hours per week,
but did not prevent the employee, Mary Shirley, from finding additional employment elsewhere
should she so desire.
As Erickson has pointed out, the ruling of the Massachusetts State Supreme Court was sig-
nificant as much for what it did not say as for its finding that no infringement of the individual’s
right to contract had occurred. First, it did not adopt the arguments proposed by labor reform-
ers such as Ames, even though it ended up upholding the type of legislation Ames was advocat-
ing. Second, it skirted the question of whether the state could single out women workers as a
“special class” of workers. The ruling merely explained that the statute in question had not vio-
lated Mary Shirley’s right to decide “in accordance with her own judgment as to the number of
hours she shall work,” because “the law does not limit her right to labor as many hours per day
or per week as she may desire. . . . [I]t merely prohibits her being employed continuously in
the same service [of Hamilton Manufacturing company] more than a certain number of hours
per day or week.” Erickson, “MullerV. OregonReconsidered,” pp. 228–250.
51. Ritchie v. People, 40 N.E. 454 (1895): 459. The case is discussed in Erickson, “Muller V. Ore-
gon Reconsidered,” pp. 228–250.
52. The Illinois State Supreme Court was asked to assess the constitutionality of a maxi-
mum-hour statute passed in 1893, which limited women’s hours of work in factories to eight
per day. The Illinois court wrote a long opinion in which it carefully analyzed whether there
were any legitimate grounds upon which it might be argued that the female individual’s right to
contract might be abridged. It did not need to do this in order to reach its ruling. The court
could have resolved the case on quite other grounds. The Illinois court ruled first that the
statute was unconstitutional because it singled out owners and employers of labor of a particu-
lar class—that is, manufacturers—rather than all owners and employers of labor. On these
grounds alone, the Illinois court could have declared the 1893 statute invalid and ended its dis-
cussion. But it went on to ask whether a revised version of the statute—one that did apply
equally to all employers and owners of labor—would be constitutional. This question, the
court argued, required analyzing more fully whether the state’s abridgment of individuals’ right
to make contracts was warranted on any grounds. In deciding this question, the court first ac-
knowledged that “police power” gave the state a legitimate right to pass ordinances that pro-
moted the “health, comfort, safety, and welfare of society.” The court then argued that it was
a recognized legal principle that “woman is entitled to the same rights, under the constitution,
to make contracts with reference to her labor, as are secured thereby to men.” It cited Minor v.
Happersett, the case cited in Chapter 2, n. 13 involving Virginia Minor’s argument that her Four-
teenth Amendment rights were violated when she was denied the right to vote. The Illinois
court also affirmed woman’s right to acquire and possess property, a right that, the court ar-
gued, guaranteed her the right to make and enforce contracts. The law, the Illinois court
summed up, “accords to her [woman], as to every other citizen, the right to gain a livelihood by
intelligence, honesty, and industry in the arts, the sciences, the professions, or other vocations.”
Thus, the Illinois court argued, the mere fact of woman’s sex was not enough to justify the leg-
islature’s invocation of the police power of the state. However, the Illinois Court continued its
analysis still further: “the question is whether . . . she shall be deprived of the right to deter-
mine for herself how many hours she can and may work during each day.” And the court ar-
 NOTES TO PAGES ``ab01 • 211

gued that women could not be so deprived unless the court could be convinced that the statute
under question “has at least in fact some relation to the public health, that the public healthis the end
actually aimed at, and that it [the legislation] is appropriate and adapted to that end.” The Illi-
nois court could not see any connection between limiting women’s hours and promoting pub-
lic health (that is, protecting the individual’s or a group of individuals’ health), and so it pro-
nounced Illinois’s statute unconstitutional and void. Ritchie v. People, 40 N.E. 454 (1895): 457–460.
53. Female antisuffragists were among those who supported protective labor legislation in
this period, and they frequently pointed out that suffragist arguments encompassed an ideology
that threatened the labor legislation already on the books.
54. Louis D. Brandeis and Josephine Goldmark, The Case against Nightwork for Women, Revised with
NewIntroduction toMarch 1, 1918(New York: National Consumers’ League, 1918).
55. In Muller v. Oregon, the Supreme Court stated: “As minors, though not to the same ex-
tent, [woman] has been looked upon in the courts as needing especial care that her rights may
be preserved. . . . Differentiated by these matters from the other sex, she is properly placed in
a class by herself, and legislation designed for her protection may be sustained, even when like
legislation is not necessary for men, and could not be sustained.” Muller v. Oregon 208 U.S. 412.
Maximum-hour legislation could not be easily enforced, however, if women were allowed to as-
sume a second job working during the night. Soon after the ruling in Muller v. Oregon, laws
restricting women from working at night also proliferated, and were again justified on the
grounds that they were essential to protect women’s health and preserve women’s morals in
order to ensure the well-being of children as yet unborn. Legislation barring women from
working at night was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1924, when it sustained a
New York State statute that prohibited women from working in restaurants between the hours
of 10 PpM. and 6 ApMp See Kessler-Harris, Out toWork, p. 195.
Limiting the number of daytime hours women were permitted to work during the week
and barring them altogether from night work created an even greater need for minimum
wage laws, since women could no longer increase their incomes by working longer hours.
Massachusetts passed the first minimum-wage law in 1912, and eight other states followed in
1913. For the most part, state courts upheld these laws on the grounds that “women and minors
should be protected from conditions of labor which have a pernicious effect on their health and
morals and inadequate wages have a pernicious effect.” But this time the United States Supreme
Court did not agree. In another landmark decision, Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), the Court
struck down the minimum-wage law for women in the District of Columbia. Justice Sutherland
again wrote the majority opinion: “It is quite simply and exclusively a price-fixing law, confined
to adult women . . . who are legally as capable of contracting for themselves as men.” Chief
Justice Taft, seeing a contradiction between this case and Muller v. Oregon, wrote a separate dissent:
“a sweating wage has as great and as direct a tendency to bring about an injury to the health and
morals of workers, as . . . long hours.” Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 261 U.S. 525; quoted in Eliza-
beth Faulkner Baker, ProtectiveLaborLegislationwithSpecial ReferencetoWomenintheStateof NewYork(New
York: AMS Press, 1969 [1st ed. 1925]), pp. 91, 92; also cited by Kessler-Harris, Out toWork, p. 198.
56. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage EarningWomen: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States,
1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Harris, Out toWork; Susan Lehrer, Origins of
Protective Labor Legislation for Women, 1905–1925 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987);
and Judith A. Baer, The Chains of Protection: The Judicial Response to Protective Labor Legislation(Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978).
57. Lizzie M. Holmes, “Woman’s Future Position in the World,” Arena 20 (September 1898):
339.
 212 • NOTES TO PAGES d02–107

4. A Feminist Explores Africa

1. The best published secondary account on May French-Sheldon is T. J. Boisseau, “‘They
Called Me Bebe Bwana’: A Cultural Study of an Imperial Feminist,” Signs 21 (Autumn 1995):
116–146; also see Dea Birkett, Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989),
p. 282, 117–119; Jeanne Madeline Moore, “Bebe Bwana,” American History Illustrated 21 (October
1986): 36–42; Julie English Early, “Unescorted in Africa: Victorian Women Ethnographers Toil-
ing in the Fields of Sensational Science,” Journal of American Culture 18 (Winter 1995): 69–70; and
brief biographical sketches in Jane Robinson, Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 27; Daniel B. Baker, ed., Explorers & Discovers of the World
(Detroit: Gale Research, 1993), p. 508; and Rita Volmer Louis, ed., Biography Index: A Cumulative Index
toBiographical Material in Books and Magazines(New York: Wilson, 1968), p. 608.
2. Fannie C. Williams, “A ‘White Queen’ in Africa,” Chautauquan18 (December 1893): 342.
3. “A White Lady Visits the Masai” (review of Sultan to Sultan), New York Times (December 11,
1892): 19.
4. Williams, “A ‘White Queen’ in Africa,” pp. 342–343.
5. Williams, “A ‘White Queen’ in Africa,” p. 342.
6. Award for “African Collection of Garments, Ornaments, Etc.” box 10, Mary [sic] French
Sheldon Papers, Library of Congress.
7. For a discussion of French-Sheldon’s reception in England, see Early, “Unescorted in
Africa,” pp. 69–70.
8. Scrapbook of newspaper clippings, Box 7, Sheldon Papers.
9. Williams, “A ‘White Queen’ in Africa,” p. 343.
10. Ladelle Rice, “Lions, Savages, White Eagles, Nothing before Woman Who Faces African
Trials Alone,” Daily Lariat (February 6, 1925); cited in Boisseau, “‘They Called Me Bebe Bwana,’”
pp. 116–117.
11. M[ay] French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan: Adventures among the Masai and Other Tribes of East Africa
(Boston: Arena, 1892), n. p.
12. Obituary of May French-Sheldon, NewYork Times(February 11, 1936), Scrapbook of news-
paper clippings, box 7, Sheldon Papers.
13. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, p. 85.
14. Quoted in “With Gayest Parisian Clothes She Travelled Alone through African Jungles,”
Evening Sun(February 15, 1915), Scrapbook of newspaper clippings, box 7, Sheldon Papers.
15. Quoted in “With Gayest Parisian Clothes She Travelled Alone through African Jungles.”
16. Boisseau, “‘They Called Me Bebe Bwana,’”p. 121.
17. “A White Lady Visits the Masai.” According to historian Julie English Early, the British
press scorned and ridiculed French-Sheldon as a vulgar American. Early, “Unescorted in
Africa,” p. 69.
18. Scrapbook of newspaper clippings, box 7, Sheldon Papers.
19. Scrapbook of newspaper clippings, box 7, Sheldon Papers, and Boisseau, “‘They Called
Me Bebe Bwana,’”p. 129.
20. Mrs. French-Sheldon, Customs among the Natives of East Africa, fromTeita toKilimegalia, with Spe-
cial Reference to their Women and Children (London: Harrison, 1892); “England’s Commercial and In-
dustrial Future in Central Africa,” Journal of the Tyneside Geographical Society 3 (May 1897): 415–418.
21. According to Boisseau, the Society admitted fourteen women in 1892 and then offered
memberships to seven more women in 1893, before reversing its decision and barring any addi-
tional women from membership until 1913. Boisseau, “‘They Called Me Bebe Bwana,’”p. 128.
22. According to Jeanne Madeline Moore, May French was married and divorced at a young
 NOTES TO PAGES f08–112 • 213

age before her second marriage to Sheldon. Moore, “Bebe Bwana,” p. 37. I have not yet found
any other sources that corroborate a prior marriage.
23. Henry Morton Stanley to May French-Sheldon, January 15, 1891, Correspondence, box
1, Sheldon Papers.
24. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, p. 66.
25. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, p. 105.
26. For a list of these people, see French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, pp. 387–390.
27. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, p. 170.
28. French-Sheldon, Sultan to Sultan, pp. 165–166. Boisseau writes that French-Sheldon was
also accompanied by a Swiss maid, whom she brought with her from Europe. Boisseau, “‘They
Called Me Bebe Bwana,’”p. 117.
29. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, pp. 170, 351.
30. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, pp. 112–113.
31. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, pp. 114–115.
32. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, pp. 115–116.
33. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, p. 105.
34. French-Sheldon, Sultan to Sultan, p. 136; emphasis in original. In the most serious cases,
French-Sheldon used corporeal punishment, flogging two men who threatened a revolt and
another who “came very near embroiling me with the natives” when he “brutally hurled to the
ground the daughter of a chief, for no greater offence than that she persistently offered some
sweet corn for sale, after he had ordered her to quit the encampment.” French-Sheldon, Sultan to
Sultan, pp. 174–176, 135.
35. There are at least two such incidents, one when Kara, a favorite porter, whom she ad-
mired for his extraordinary strength, lifted her up bodily to prevent her stepping on a mound of
vicious ants (French-Sheldon, Sultan to Sultan, p. 145); and a second when her night attendant
called on twelve porters to kill a deadly python that had wrapped itself around her palanquin
(pp. 311–312).
36. See List of Lectures, typescript, box 7, Sheldon Papers.
37. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, pp. 347–348.
38. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, pp. 380, 381.
39. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, p. 366.
40. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, p. 373.
41. L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 1884–1914(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1979), p. viii.
42. William Stead to French-Sheldon, September 23 and September 26, 1903, box 1, Corre-
spondence, Sheldon Papers.
43. Boisseau, “‘They Called Me Bebe Bwana,’”p. 130.
44. French-Sheldon’s husband died some time during 1892, while she was writing her ac-
count of her safari, and she never remarried. Her most significant emotional relationship after-
ward was with Miss Nellie Butler, a British woman who was her personal assistant and compan-
ion and with whom she lived for over two decades. This woman’s existence is only indirectly
documentable through existing primary sources. French-Sheldon seems to have destroyed all
of her personal papers that touched upon this crucial relationship.
45. “Woman Explorer Finds Sex Has Achieved Economic Independence in Africa Jungle,”
NewYork Press(April 4, 1915), n.p.; cited in Boisseau, “‘They Called Me Bebe Bwana,’”p. 132.
46. Correspondence, box 1, and Scrapbook of newspaper clippings, box 7, Sheldon Papers,
and Boisseau, “‘They Called Me Bebe Bwana,’”p. 132.
47. Scrapbook of newspaper clippings, box 7, Sheldon Papers.
 214 • NOTES TO PAGES h13–119

48. M. French-Sheldon, “Congratulatory Message of Mme. M. French-Sheldon,” Baylor Tow-

ers2 (1925): 3–4; cited in Boisseau, “‘They Called Me Bebe Bwana,’”p. 135.
49. Boisseau, “‘They Called Me Bebe Bwana,’”pp. 134–135.
50. “Feminine Views, Reviews and Interviews of Interest to Men and Women,” NewYork Press,
April 4, 1915, Scrapbook of newspaper clippings, box 7, Sheldon Papers.
51. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, p. 94.
52. French-Sheldon, Sultan toSultan, pp. 246–247.
53. Obituary of May French-Sheldon, London Evening News, Lunch Edition, February 1, 1936,
Scrapbook of newspaper clippings, box 7, Sheldon Papers. Another paper reported: “close on
half-a-century ago, just at the time when the world was being thrilled by the chronicles of Stan-
ley’s adventurous exploits in Darkest Africa, news of the journey of Mrs. French Sheldon . . .
unaccompanied by any white companion, came as an astonishing feat of intrepid courage and
daring.” Obituary of May French-Sheldon, West London Observer, February 21, 1936, Scrapbook of
newspaper clippings, box 7, Sheldon Papers.
54. Obituary of May French-Sheldon, NewYork Times, February 11, 1936, Scrapbook of news-
paper clippings, box 7, Sheldon Papers.

5. Assimilating Primitives
1. The Women’s National Indian Association chose not to take part in this conference. See
Helen M. Wanken, “Woman’s Sphere and Indian Reform: The Women’s National Indian Asso-
ciation” (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, 1981), pp. 5–6.
2. Frances E. Willard, “Address to the National Council of Women, 1888,” in National Coun-
cil of Women, Transactions of the National Council of Women of the United States Assembled in Washington,
D.C., February 22 to25, 1891, ed. Rachel Foster Avery (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1891), p. 39.
3. Willard, “Address to the National Council of Women, 1888,” p. 39; emphasis in original.
4. David D. Smits, “The ‘Squaw Drudge’: A Prime Index of Savagism,” Ethnohistory 29 (1982):
281–306.
5. A. S. Quinton, untitled article, Indian’s Friend(March 1888): 1, cited in Deborah A. Kallina,
“‘There’s Nothing a Woman Can’t Do If She Undertakes To Do It’: The Women’s National In-
dian Association, 1879–1951” (B.A. thesis, Brown University, 1986), p. 57. Biographical informa-
tion on Quinton is available in Lamb’s Biographical Dictionary of the United States, vol. 7 (Boston: Federal
Book Company of Boston, 1903), p. 389, and Notable American Women, 1607–1950, ed. Edward T.
James (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), pp. 108–110.
6. According to Fletcher, this was a dominant view, but not one she shared. See Alice C.
Fletcher, “The Indian Woman and Her Problems,” Woman’s Journal (November 10, 1900): 354.
7. Quinton, “The Annual Address of the President, Mrs. A. S. Quinton,” Indian’s Friend 1
(January 1889): 3.
8. Joan Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians(Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 105.
9. Sara Kinney, Home Building Report (1890), p. 7, cited in Kallina, “‘There’s Nothing a Woman
Can’t Do If She Undertakes To Do It,’” p. 56; my emphasis.
10. “Incidents of Indian life at Hampton,” SouthernWorkman10 (January 1881): 7.
11. Otis T. Mason, Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture (New York: Appleton), p. 274. Also see
chapter 1 of this book.
12. “Incidents of Indian Life at Hampton,” p. 7.
13. “Letter from Alice C. Fletcher,” Seventh Annual Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian
(1889), p. 14.
 NOTES TO PAGES j19–121 • 215

14. I have chosen to focus on Alice Fletcher, rather than Elaine Goodale Eastman or Helen
Hunt Jackson, for several reasons. First, Fletcher had much more power and visibility in her cul-
ture than did Eastman. Jackson had tremendous visibility, as a result of the publication of A Cen-
tury of Dishonor (1881) and Ramona(1884), but she died (for my purposes) early, in 1885, before the
Dawes legislation was passed. Fletcher, on the other hand, was influential into the first decade of
the twentieth century. For biographical work on Eastman, see Ruth Ann Alexandedr, “Finding
Oneself through a Cause: Elaine Goodale Eastman and Indian Reform in the 1880s,” South Dakota
History 22 (Spring 1992): 1–37, Eastman’s memoirs, Sister to the Sioux: The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale
Eastman, 1885–91, ed. Kay Graber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978); and Elaine
Goodale Eastman, “All the Days of My Life,” South Dakota Historical Review2 (July 1937): 174–177.
For biographical treatment of Jackson, see Valerie Sherer Mathes, Helen Hunt Jackson and Her In-
dian Reform Legacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Ruth Odell, Helen Hunt Jackson (New
York: Appleton-Century, 1939); and Thurman Wilkins’s entry in Notable American Women, vol. 2,
pp. 259–261.
15. Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890 (Albuquerque: Univer-
sity of New Mexico Press, 1984), pp. 157–201; Mathes, Helen Hunt Jackson, pp. 4–5, 23–25.
16. See, for example, Alice C. Fletcher, “Economy of Justice,” Lend a Hand 1 (July 1886):
528–530.
17. See Alice C. Fletcher, “Tribute to Helen Hunt Jackson,” Third Annual Lake Mohonk Conference
of the Friends of the Indian(1885), p. 71.
18. Historians have referred to these policies collectively as Grant’s peace policy, a phrase
that can only be understood ironically, since the period immediately following the implemen-
tation of these policies was characterized by coercion, violence, and unofficial but bloody wars.
In the late 1860s, Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act of April 10, 1869, which em-
powered the president to appoint ten people “eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy”
to a Board of Indian Commissioners, who, together with the Secretary of the Interior, were to
oversee the treatment of Indian tribes. Congress also outlawed the appointment of army officers
to civil posts, putting an end to the assignment of military officers as Indian agents on reserva-
tions. These positions were now divvied up among the nation’s principal religious denomina-
tions, who recommended individuals for the jobs, who were then formally nominated by the
president and ratified by the Senate. Utley, The Indian Frontier, pp. 129–133. Details of the new pro-
cedure in the appointment of Indian agents can be found in Alice Fletcher, Civilization and Educa-
tion(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1888).
19. As far as I know, no published monographs on the WNIA exist. In my view, the best un-
published sources are Helen Marie Bannan, “Reformers and the ‘Indian Problem,’ 1878–1887
and 1922–1934” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1976), Wanken, “‘Woman’s Sphere’ and Indian
Reform.” Also see Kallina, “‘There’s Nothing a Woman Can’t Do If She Undertakes To Do
It.’” The best primary source on the history of the WNIA that I have found is Amelia Stone
Quinton, “The Indian,” in The Literature of Philanthropy, ed. Frances A. Goodale (New York: Harper,
1893), pp. 116–140.
20. Irene Joanne Westing, entry for Amelia Stone Quinton, Notable American Women, vol. 3,
p. 108.
21. Irene Joanne Westing, entry for Mary Lucinda Bonney, Notable American Women, vol. 1,
p. 197.
22. Alice S. Fletcher, “Standing Bear,” SouthernWorkman38 (1909): 75–78.
23. Westing, entry for Quinton, p. 108.
24. Much of the following discussion is drawn from Joan Mark’s superb biography A Stranger
in Her Native Land. Also see Wilkins, entry on Fletcher, pp. 630–632. According to Mark, Fletcher,
 216 • NOTES TO PAGES kl1–128

more than any other single person, bears ultimate responsibility for the final form that the
Dawes Act of 1887 eventually assumed. Henry Dawes himself alluded to Fletcher’s importance
with the quip, “I stand in reference to that [legislation] very much as Americus Vespuscious [sic]
stands to Columbus.” Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, p. 119.
25. Fletcher, “Standing Bear,” p. 78.
26. Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, pp. 13, 18, 28–29. For an example of her views on class
differences among women at this time, see Alice C. Fletcher, “Feminine Idleness,” Woman’s Journal
4 (September 13, 1873): 291.
27. Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, pp. 39, 42, 45. Alice Fletcher to Lucian Carr, August 3,
1881, Peabody Museum Papers, cited in Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, p. 42.
28. Mark, Stranger in Her Native Land, p. 63.
29. See for example, Alice C. Fletcher, “Between the Lines,” Lend a Hand 1 (July 1886):
429–431, especially 431.
30. Alice C. Fletcher, “Among the Omahas,” Woman’s Journal 13 (February 11, 1882): 46.
31. Fletcher, “Among the Omahas,” p. 46; also cited in Mark, Stranger in Her Native Land, p. 62.
32. Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, pp. 89, 91.
33. Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, p. 93.
34. Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, p. 93.
35. Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, p. 93.
36. Philip Garrett, 18th Annual Report, 1886 (Washington, D.C., Board of Indian Commission-
ers, 1887), p. 51, as cited in Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, p. 105.
37. A. C. Fletcher, “On Indian Education and Self-Support,” Century 26 (May 1883): 314;
Fletcher, “Between the Lines,” p. 430.
38. Alice C. Fletcher, On the Lawlessness of the Indian Reservation System (Boston: Frank Wood,
1884), p. 33. The same passage also appears in Alice C. Fletcher, “Land, Law, Education—The
Three Things Needed by the Indian,” SouthernWorkman14 (March 1885): 33.
39. Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, p. 106.
40. Senator Richard Coke of Texas, chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee (Dawes’s pre-
decessor) had introduced the first general allotment bill in the Senate, which passed the Senate
floor during the winter of 1880–1881. Over the next seven years, several different versions of the
Coke-Dawes bill were debated in Congress. Some versions of the bill did not make the severalty
policy mandatory but permitted tribes to choose whether they wanted to continue to hold
their land in common or receive individual allotments. Other versions of the bill created a tribal
patent for those Indians within a tribe who did not wish to accept individual allotments. The
Dawes Act was implemented on a case-by-case basis, beginning with tribes who appeared to
whites to be more eager for individual land ownership. See Frederick E. Hoxie and Joan T. Mark,
introduction to E. Jane Gay, With the Nez Perces: Alice Fletcher in the Field, 1889–92 (Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1981), pp. xiv–xvi.
41. “The Cherokee Protest,” Independent 30 (February 1878): 16.
42. Fletcher, “Between the Lines,” p. 430. Also see Fletcher, “Land, Law, Education,” p. 33.
43. Alice Fletcher, “The Crowning Act,” Morning Star7 (March 1887): 1.
44. Fletcher, On the Lawlessness of the Indian Reservation System, p. 33; my emphasis.
45. Fletcher, On the Lawlessness of the Indian Reservation System, p. 33.
46. Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, pp. 293–295, 307–308.
47. Fletcher, On the Lawlessness of the Indian Reservation System, pp. 10–11.
48. Mark, A Stranger in her Native Land, pp. 265–268.
49. Alice C. Fletcher, “Flotsam and Jetsam from Aboriginal America,” Southern Workman 28
(January 1899): 13.
 NOTES TO PAGES mnoqm38 • 217

50. Fletcher, “Flotsam and Jetsam from Aboriginal America,” p. 13.

51. Fletcher, “Flotsam and Jetsam from Aboriginal America,” p. 13.
52. Alice C. Fletcher, “The Indian Woman and Her Problems,” Southern Workman 28 (May
1899): 175. This anecdote reverberated for white women at the turn of the twentieth century.
The incident was fairly well known—another account of it appears in Josephine E. Richards,
“The Training of the Indian Girl as the Uplifter of the Home,” Southern Workman 29 (September
1900): 507.
53. Fletcher, “The Indian Woman and Her Problems, p. 354.
54. Mary C. Collins, “The Dependence of the Indian,” SouthernWorkman29 (July 1900): 427.
55. Collins, “The Dependence of the Indian,” pp. 427–429. Also see Alice Rollins Crane,
“Why the Indians Break Out,” Arena20 (October 1898): 491–498; Mary E. Dewey, Historical Sketch of
the Formation and Achievements of theWomen’s National Indian Association in the United States(n.p., 1900).
56. Crane, “Why the Indians Break Out,” pp. 496, 497.
57. Fletcher, “The Indian Woman and Her Problems,” p. 354.
58. Fletcher, “The Indian Woman and Her Problems,” p. 354.

6. Eliminating Sex Distinctions from Civilization

1. Charlotte Perkins Stetson, “Masculine, Feminine, and Human,” Kate Field’sWashington(July
6, 1892): 7.
2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” American Journal of So-
ciology 14 (July 1908): 78–85. This article is reprinted within an anonymous response, entitled “To
Make the Negro Work,” Literary Digest 37 (October 10, 1908): 499–500.
3. Gilman, “Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” p. 83; cited in Gail Bederman, Manliness &
Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), p. 123.
4. Gilman, “Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” p. 83.
5. “To Make the Negro Work,” pp. 499–500.
6. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 122.
7. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Biological Anti-Feminist” (written in response to an in-
terview by William B. Sedgwick in the NewYork Times), Forerunner5 (March 1914): 65.
8. Mary Roberts Coolidge, Why Women Are So(New York: Henry Holt, 1912), p. 311; my em-
phasis. Copy available in Gerristen Collection of Women’s History (Glen Rock, N.J.: Microfilming Cor-
poration of America, 1975).
9. Charlotte Perkins Stetson, “Masculine, Feminine and Human,” p. 7.
10. Coolidge, Why Women Are So, p. 300.
11. Gilman, “Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” p. 80.
12. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home(New York: McClure, Phillips, 1903; reprint, Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 217.
13. Coolidge, Why Woman Are So, p. 300.
14. “Personal Problems,” Forerunner 1 (July 1910): 23–24, cited in Susan S. Lanser, “Feminist
Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America,” Feminist Studies 15 (Fall
1989): 433.
15. Lanser, “Feminist Criticism,” p. 433.
16. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World, or, Our Androcentric Culture (New York:
Charlton, 1911), p. 31; my emphasis.
17. Coolidge, Why Women Are So, p. 24.
18. Charlotte Perkins Stetson, “Masculine, Feminine, and Human,” p. 7.
 218 • NOTES TO PAGES r38–143

19. Gordon argues that “the emotional significance of this usage lay in the fact that it con-
noted both meanings simultaneously encouraging a tendency to identify the human race with
the white race.” Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America
(New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 142.
20. Coolidge, Why Woman Are So, p. 316; my emphasis. For similar expressions, see Mary
Putnam-Jacobi, “Common Sense” Applied toWoman Suffrage(New York: Putnam 1894), pp. 26, 65, 75.
21. The best biographical treatments include Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 121–169;
Ann J. Lane, To“Herland” and Beyond: The Life andWork of Charlotte Perkins Gilman(New York: Pantheon
Books, 1990), and Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
22. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 124.
23. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 125.
24. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, An Autobiography (New York: Appleton-Century, 1935),
p. 37 and Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 126.
25. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 126–127.
26. See Living, p. 39, and Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 128.
27. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 128.
28. Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, p. 83; cited in Bederman, Manliness & Civiliza-
tion, p. 129.
29. See Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper,” Forerunner4 (October
1913): 271, and Lane, To“Herland” and Beyond, pp. 110–111.
30. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 128–134.
31. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, pp. 122, 135.
32. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 122.
33. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, p. 135.
34. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898; reprint,
New York: Harper, 1966), p. 8.
35. Gilman, Women and Economics, pp. 8–9, 11.
36. Gilman, Women and Economics, p. 29.
37. Gilman, Women and Economics, p. 38.
38. Gilman, Women and Economics, p. 46.
39. Gilman, Women and Economics, p. 46.
40. See Lester Ward, “Our Better Halves,” Forum6 (November 1888): 266–275, and “Genius
and Woman’s Intuition,” Forum9 (June 1890): 401–408; Edward Alsworth Ross, “The Causes of
Race Superiority,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science18 (July 1901): 67–89; So-
cial Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: Macmillan, 1901); and The Old World in the
New(New York: Century, 1914); Thorstein Veblen, “The Barbarian Status of Women,” American
Journal of Sociology 4 (January 1899): 503–514, and The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1st ed. (New York:
Macmillan 1899; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1953).
Many other people were members of this intellectual community, including the sociologist
William I. Thomas at Columbia University; the historian George E. Howard at Stanford Univer-
sity; and the economist Richard Ely. Ely trained Ross when the latter was a graduate student at
Johns Hopkins in 1890–1891, and he also taught Helen Campbell, a close friend and mentor of
Gilman, at the University of Wisconsin in 1893. Gilman met Ely around 1895 through her con-
nection with Jane Addams. The philosopher John Dewey and the sociologist Albion Small at
the University of Chicago were also part of these intellectual circles, and Gilman met both men
in Chicago in 1895 while she was staying at Hull House.
Other women of Coolidge and Gilman’s generation who had similar views include Anna
 NOTES TO PAGES tuwxtuy • 219

Garlin Spencer, a leader in the American Purity movement, an active member in the temper-
ance movement, and author of Woman’s Share in Social Culture (New York: Mitchell Kennerley,
1913); Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, author of What Women Want: An Interpretation of the Feminist
Movement (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914); and Jane Addams, founder of Hull House and
author of Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902), and A New Conscience and an An-
cient Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1912). Two younger feminist women, Winnifred Harper Cooley
and Elsie Clews Parsons, also discussed the relation of the civilized to the primitive in ways that
were similar to Gilman and Coolidge.
41. Lane, To“Herland” and Beyond, p. 186. My discussion of Gilman’s life draws heavily on Lane
and, to a lesser extent, Gilman’s autobiography The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published
posthumously in 1935. Gilman’s papers are housed on microfilm at the Schlesinger Library at
Harvard University.
42. See Ward, “Our Better Halves,” pp. 266–275; “Genius and Woman’s Intuition,” pp. 401–
408; The Psychic Factors of Civilization(Boston: Ginn, 1893), especially chapters 14 and 26; “The Course
of Biologic Evolution,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 5 (c. 1893): 23–55; and Pure
Sociology: A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society (New York: Macmillan, 1909),
especially pp. 290–377.
43. See also chapter 1 for a discussion of Ward’s gynaecocentric theories of racial conservation.
44. Gilman, preface to Man-Made World, n.p. The other evolution theorist who had an enor-
mous impact on Gilman was Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, a British anthropologist and historian
whose Primitive Culture, Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and
Custom(1871 [2nd ed., New York: Henry Holt, 1881]) was probably the source of Gilman’s notion
of primitive survivals.
45. Gilman, Man-MadeWorld, preface, n.p., and p. 255.
46. Gilman, Man-MadeWorld, pp. 38–39.
47. Gilman, The Home, p. 275.
48. From the mid-1890s on, Gilman wrote regularly to both Ward and Ross. Her correspon-
dence suggests that she revered Ward and, as he was thirteen years her senior, maintained some
deferential formality in her relationship with him. There was also some tension in this relation-
ship; Gilman once chastised Ward for not appreciating how much she had done to popularize
his work. See Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), pp. 266–267.
49. Ward and Ross remained close intellectual associates and friends throughout Ward’s life.
See Julius Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism(Madison: State Historical
Society of Wisconsin, 1972), p. 31, and Edward Alsworth Ross, Seventy Years of It: An Autobiography
(New York: Appleton, 1936).
50. See Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social
Science, 1865–1905(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), pp. 233–253.
51. Charlotte Perkins Gilman to E. A. Ross, November, 28, 1900, microfilm reel 17, E. A.
Ross Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison.
52. Charlotte Perkins Gilman to E. A. Ross, November 28, 1900, reel 17, Edward A. Ross
Papers.
53. Over the years, deep feelings of love and respect developed between Gilman and Ross.
After Gilman’s suicide (at seventy-six) in 1936, Ross wrote of the friendship that had lasted over
forty years: “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, niece of Henry Ward Beecher, was a dear intimate of
ours. She was the most brilliant woman I have known and had the most beautiful woman’s
head I ever laid eyes on.” Two days before she killed herself, Gilman sent Ross a last letter, which
he cherished, reprinting a portion of it in his memoirs. Ross, Seventy Years of It, p. 60.
 220 • NOTES TO PAGES z{|}z51

54. Gilman to E. A. Ross, November 28, 1900 and February 1, 1900, reel 17, Edward A. Ross
Papers. For the influence of Veblen on Gilman’s discussion of women and labor, see The Home,
pp. 106–109, 119, 220; HumanWork(New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904), p. 179; and Man-MadeWorld,
pp. 36–37, 234.
55. See Gilman’s correspondence with Edward A. Ross, especially her letters to him of
February 1, 1900, March 15, 1906, October 17, 1907, and October 17, 1915, reel 17, Edward A. Ross
Papers
56. Mrs. Jane Lathrop Stanford demanded Ross’s dismissal on the grounds that his expres-
sion of his political views (about free silver in the 1890s) jeopardized his production of objective
scholarship, but David Starr Jordan (1851–1931), president of the university, prevailed on her to
give Ross a sabbatical leave in 1898–1899 so that he could look for another position. Ross agreed
to resign at the end of that academic year, 1898–1899, if Stanford still demanded his dismissal
at that time. However, as Jordan had hoped would happen, tensions abated between Ross
and Stanford, and Ross was reappointed for the following academic term, 1899–1990. During
1900, however, Ross continued to express political opinions that Stanford continued to find
objectionable—this time his support of legislation restricting Chinese immigration so as to pro-
tect “American” labor. For an account of the events leading to Ross’s dismissal from Stanford
University, see Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity, pp. 233–253.
57. President Theodore Roosevelt gave national currency to the term “race suicide” in
speeches delivered in 1905. See Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right, p. 142.
58. Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross, pp. 88–89.
59. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, pp. 150.
60. Gilman to E. A. Ross, November 28, 1900, February 1, 1900, reel 17, Edward A. Ross
Papers.
61. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, p. 168.
62. Ross, Social Control, p. 21.
63. Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life: Address delivered to the Appomattox Day Banquet of
the Hamilton Club, April 10th, 1899” in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses(New York: Century,
1918), pp. 6–7, 9. Also see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), and Gail Bederman, “Manly Civi-
lization/Primitive Masculinity: Race, Gender and the Evolution of Middle-Class American Man-
hood, 1880–1915” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1993).
64. See discussion of Ward, “Our Better Halves” in chapter 1.
65. Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” pp. 67–89, especially p. 75. Some anti-imperial-
ists of this period exposed the fallacy of the claim that the United States needed more land to
continue its own racial evolution. See for example, James L. Blair, Imperialism: Our National Policy.
An Address Delivered before the Monday Evening Club, January 9, 1899(St. Louis: Gottschalk, 1899), p. 6.
66. Gilman, Man-MadeWorld, p. 216.
67. Gilman, Man-MadeWorld, p. 216.
68. Gilman, Man-MadeWorld, p. 217.
69. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Men’s Babies,” Gilman mss., Schlesinger Library; cited in
Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right, p. 145.
70. Gilman, Man-MadeWorld, p. 217.
71. Charlotte Perkins Stetson, “The Labor Movement,” a prize essay read before the trades
and labor unions of Alameda County, September 5, 1892 (Oakland, Ca.: Alameda County Feder-
ation of Trades, 1893), p. 7.
72. Gilman exempted one occupation and one set of character traits, which she believed
were distinctively masculine: fighting and aggression. “The business of slaughter,” Gilman
 NOTES TO PAGES ~51–156 • 221

wrote, “belongs by inherent sex-distinction to the male; and there has never been any danger of
women’s ‘competing with man’ in this field.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Competing with
Men,” Woman’s Journal 35 (February 6, 1904): 42.
73. Gilman, The Home, p. 89.
74. Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge to Edward A. Ross, August 16, 1912, reel 6, Edward A.
Ross Papers. My discussion of Coolidge’s life is pieced together from Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond
Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982),
pp. 179–189, 194–196; James McKeen Cattell, ed., Leaders in Education: A Biographical Dictionary (New
York: Science Press, 1932); and some of my own research, part of which is contained in Men’s
Ideas/Women’s Realities: Popular Science, 1870–1920, ed. Louise Michele Newman (New York: Perga-
mon Press, 1985), pp. 116, 170. Documents pertaining to Coolidge’s life are sparse and scattered.
Some of her personal papers are at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berke-
ley, filed under her husband Dane Coolidge’s name, and there are some newspaper clippings
about her life in the archives at Cornell University in New York and Mills College in California.
75. Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: Holt, 1909). Gilman mentioned
Coolidge’s book Why Women Are So in her “Comment and Review” column for Forerunner 13
(March 1913): 82, but it is not possible to tell from the context whether Gilman had actually
read the book.
76. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, p. 446.
77. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, pp. 436–440, 454–458.
78. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, pp. 446, 437
79. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, pp. 419–420.
80. Another early example is Hale, What Women Want. Coolidge dedicated her book to “D.C.
[Dane Coolidge] and other new men who set Human quality above femininity in women,” and
she offered an account of the nineteenth-century woman’s movement from the perspective of a
woman who identified herself as a “feminist.” Although Coolidge did not list other “new men”
by name, she was probably also thinking of men like Edward Ross and Floyd Dell. Ross ex-
plained his attitudes toward women in his autobiography: “I laugh at the notion that the other
sex is ‘inscrutable.’ . . . I . . . have no difficulty in quickly getting on a sympathetic basis
with them. . . . Once they realize that I am quite free from the silly notion that the male sex
is ‘superior’ or that the female is ‘of finer clay,’ they feel no call to fence with me but allow the
riches of their heart to appear.” Ross, Seventy Years of It, p. 20.
81. The only commentary I could locate on Why Women Are So was a brief discussion in
Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, pp. 194–95.
82. For Coolidge, temperance women were forerunners of the modern muckrakers in
journalism. See Why Women Are So, p. 204. Quotations are from p. 206.
83. Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, p. 184.
84. Coolidge in an appendix, c. 1910, to the Mosher sex survey she initially filled out in 1892,
Mosher Survey, case no. 2; cited in Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, pp. 195–96. A letter from
Coolidge to Edward Ross in 1912, thanking him for his help in securing a publisher for Why
Women Are So, reiterates this view of her second marriage. Coolidge to E. A. Ross, August 10, 1912,
reel 17, Edward A. Ross Papers.
85. Coolidge, Why Woman Are So, p. 24; my emphasis.
86. Coolidge, Why Woman Are So, p. 107.
87. See Mary Roberts Smith [Coolidge], “Recent Tendencies in the Education of Women,”
Popular Science Monthly 48 (November 1895): 27–33.
88. Coolidge, Why Women Are So, pp. 63–64.
89. Coolidge, Why Women Are So, p. 58.
 222 • NOTES TO PAGES 56–162

90. Coolidge, like Gilman, was willing to acknowledge that there had existed a “few primitive
peoples where men and women were approximately equal in status.” Why WomenAre So, p. 91.

7. Coming of Age, but Not in Samoa

1. Margaret Mead, Preface to the 1973 edition of Coming to Age: A Psychological Study of Primitive
Youth for Western Civilisation(1st ed., New York, W. Morrow, 1928; Morrow Quill, 1973), n. p. All fu-
ture citations from Coming of Age are from the 1973 edition. This book was reissued with at least
five new prefaces—in 1939, 1949, 1953, 1961, and 1973.
2. In the 1930s, in the midst of the Depression, Mead gave advice about homemaking and
childrearing. During World War II, she became an expert on “national character” and argued
that the United States could defeat totalitarian regimes without jeopardizing its own demo-
cratic institutions. After the war, with the nation’s attention focused on domesticity, Mead lec-
tured on marriage and the family. At the height of the civil rights and women’s movements in
the 1960s, Mead spoke and published on racial and gender issues. Mead discusses her publishing
venues and decisions in the introduction to a bibliography of her corpus; see Joan Gordan, ed.,
Margaret Mead: The Complete Bibliography, 1925–1975(The Hague: Mouton, 1976), pp. 1–21.
3. As other historians have pointed out, Mead’s work coincided with an ongoing social
movement in the 1920s to overcome the Victorian prudery and repression endemic in middle-
class Anglo (hetero)sexual relations. See Stephen O. Murray, “On Boasians and Margaret Mead:
Reply to Freeman,” Current Anthropology 32 (August–October 1991): 488; Paula S. Fass, The Damned
and the Beautiful: AmericanYouth in the 1920’s(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); and James R.
McGovern, “The American Woman’s Pre–World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals,” Journal
of American History 55 (September 1968): 315–333.
4. The best treatment of evolutionist anthropology is George W. Stocking, Jr.’s classic works,
Victorian Anthropology(New York: Free Press, 1987), and Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968, 1982).
5. For an account of how Elsie Clews Parsons challenged evolutionist paradigms in anthro-
pology, see Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 147–177.
6. Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York: William Morrow, 1972;
reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1975), pp. 151–152.
7. For over one hundred years, Westerners had presumed that primitive women were over-
worked, sexually abused, or otherwise badly treated by the men of their cultures. As historian
Nicholas Thomas has pointed out, “the degradation of women was a measure for the degrada-
tion of a society and enabled it to be mapped against others in a region. Gender was thus central
to the evolutionary ranking of societies.” Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 102.
8. Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York: William Morrow,
1935; reprint, Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963), p. 310. All citations of this work hereafter are
from this edition unless otherwise indicated.
9. I thank Todd Gernes for suggesting the term “cultural comparativism” as a substitute for
“cultural relativism.”
10. Mead, Coming of Age, p. 4; my emphasis.
11. See Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home: ItsWork and Influence(New York: McClure Phillips,
1903), and The Man-Made World, or, Our Androcentric Culture (New York: Charlton, 1911); Mary
Roberts Coolidge, Why Women Are So(New York: Henry Holt, 1912); and Elsie Clews Parsons, “Fac-
ing Race Suicide,” Masses6 (June 1915): 15, and The Family (New York: Putnam, 1906).
 NOTES TO PAGES €62–166 • 223

12. By the early 1900s, Hall had achieved prominent status as one of the founding fathers
and current leaders of American psychology, having taught first at Johns Hopkins and then at
Clark University, a graduate institution in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he served both as a
professor of psychology and as its first president, from its inception in 1888 until 1920. Dorothy
Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Cynthia
Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood(Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1989), p. 57.
13. Mead, Coming of Age, p. 5.
14. Mead, Coming of Age, p. 201.
15. “This acceptance of a wider range as ‘normal’ provides a cultural atmosphere in which
frigidity and psychic impotence do not occur and in which a satisfactory sex adjustment in mar-
riage can always be established. The acceptance of such an attitude without in any way accept-
ing promiscuity would go a long way towards solving many marital impasses and emptying our
park benches and our houses of prostitution.” Mead, Coming of Age, p. 223.
16. Mead, Coming of Age, p. 206.
17. According to historian Nicholas Thomas, gender relations was “a crucial dimension of
difference that often encode[d] or valorize[d] other differences such as those based in ‘race’ or
geographic location.” Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, p. 100.
18. Mead, Coming of Age, pp. 236–237.
19. This book drew many readers for over four decades. As late as the 1960s, Sex and Tempera-
ment was still routinely being taught in introductory psychology and anthropology courses in
U.S. colleges.
20. Mead, Sex and Temperament, p. 279; cited in Jane Howard, Margaret Mead: A Life (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 162.
21. Mead, Sex and Temperament, p. 313. Numerous reviewers read this book avidly, accepted
most of its conclusions, and strongly recommended that others read it because “of its theoretic
importance to the subject of the relations of the sexes.” C. H. Wedgwood, review of Sex and Tem-
perament, Oceania6 (September 1935): 113.
22. Mead, Sex andTemperament, pp. 280–281.
23. For example, Freda Kirchwey’s review was published under the headline “Sex in the
South Seas,” Nation127 (October 24, 1928), p. 427.
24. Mead, preface to the 1950 edition of Sex andTemperament inThree Primitive Societies(New York:
New American Library 1950), n.p.
25. Hortense Powdermaker, review of Sex and Temperament, Annals of the American Academy of Po-
litical and Social Science181 (September 1935): 221–222.
26. Mead, preface to the 1950 edition of Sex andTemperament, n.p.
27. Readers in the 1930s understood and embraced this point. Jeannette Mirsky, a reviewer
for the Survey, wrote: “the author concludes that by assigning definite and different traits to the
sexes or by setting a single pattern for men and women, we get misfits, persons of either sex who
cannot fit into their defined roles. Her plea is for a variety of roles open to both men and women
so that everyone will have institutionalized backing to express his temperament and talents.”
Jeanette Mirsky, “Review of Sex andTemperament, Survey 71 (October 1935): 315.
28. Mead, Coming of Age, p. 248.
29. The clearest presentation of these ideas can be found in Otis T. Mason, “Woman’s Share
in Primitive Culture,” American Antiquarian 11 (January 1889): 3–13, and Woman’s Share in Primitive
Culture (New York: Appleton, 1898); and Lester Ward, “Our Better Halves,” Forum6 (November
1888): 266–275, and The Psychic Factors of Civilization, 1st ed. (Boston: Ginn, 1893; reprint, New York:
Johnson, 1970).
 224 • NOTES TO PAGES 67–177

30. Mrs. M. F. Armstrong, “Sketches of Mission Life, No. IV,” SouthernWorkman10 (April 1881): 44.
31. Armstrong, “Sketches of Mission Life, No. IV,” p. 44.
32. Frances Drewry McMullen, “‘Going Native’ for Science,” Woman’s Journal 15 (July 1930): 8,
and American Magazine120 (September 1935): 42. The NewYork Times reported on a dinner held to
honor Dr. Mead in 1934 with the headline “Women Explorers Held Equal to Men.” The lead to
this article began, “Whether in the steaming jungles of Central Africa or atop the frozen sum-
mits of some of the world’s highest peaks, the modern woman explorer ‘can more than hold
her own.’” NewYork Times, March 14, 1934, p. 9.
33. Margaret Mead, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World(New York: William
Morrow, 1949), p. 39.
34. Mead to unidentified recipient, January 15, 1932, reprinted in Margaret Mead, Letters from
the Field, 1925–1975(New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 103.
35. Howard, Margaret Mead, p. 398. Although Howard is not clear on this point, it appears
that this quotation comes from an interview that she held with Leonora Foerstel, who it seems
was an eyewitness to the event.
36. Margaret Mead, “The Comparative Study of Cultures and the Purposive Cultivation of
Democratic Values, 1941–1949,” in Perspectives on a Troubled Decade: Science, Philosophy, and Religion,
1939–1949(New York: Harper, 1950), p. 91.
37. Margaret Mead and James Baldwin, A Rap on Race (New York: Laurel Books, 1971),
pp. 27–28.
38. Mead and Baldwin, A Rap on Race, p. 28.
39. Mead was aware that many would find this an oversimplified and inadequate analysis,
and to ward off criticism, she wrote, “You perhaps think that I am constantly bringing this back
to simple family points and not facing the major issues, but the big differences that exist in any
society, like . . . between the three races, are all originally worked out in the home.” Mead,
“Race Majority—Race Minority,” in The People inYour Life: Psychiatry and Personal Relations by Ten Lead-
ing Authorities, ed. Margaret M. Hughes, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1951; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.:
Books for Libraries Press, 1971), p. 132.
40. Mead, “Race Majority—Race Minority,” p. 147.
41. John Dollard, Caste and Class in a SouthernTown(New York: Harper, 1949), p. 168.
42. An excellent and early example of this complex and ambivalent position can be found in
Margaret Mead, “Americanization in Samoa,” American Mercury 16 (March 1929): 264–270.
43. Margaret Mead, “Human Differences and World Order,” in World Order: Its Intellectual and
Cultural Foundation, ed. Ernest Johnson (New York: Harper, 1945), pp. 42–43.
44. There is an excellent, burgeoning scholarship historicizing and critiquing anthropology,
including James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnog-
raphy(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer,
Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1986); Stocking, Victorian Anthropology; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Marc
Manganaro, ed., Modernist Anthropology: FromFieldwork toText (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990); Micaela di Leonardo, ed., Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmod-
ern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography,
History, Literature(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture.
A feminist historiography on the history of social science is just beginning to emerge. See
Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, and Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Practicing feminist anthropologists are currently en-
gaged in specifying the theoretical contributions of their feminist predecessors; see Micaela di
 NOTES TO PAGES ‚77–178 • 225

Leonardo, Introduction to Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, pp. 1–50, and Louise Lamphere,
“Feminist Anthropology: The Legacy of Elsie Clews Parsons,” American Ethnologist 16 (August
1989): 518–533.
45. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 145, 135. Activist-
scholars who produced the first round of histories of the so-called second wave of feminism
scarcely took notice of Mead’s presence. For example, Aileen Kraditor, who edited one of the
earliest collections of second wave feminist writings, Up Fromthe Pedestal: SelectedWritings in the His-
tory of American Feminism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), included entries for Charlotte
Perkins Gilman (1912), Mary Bunting (1960), and the National Organization for Women’s state-
ment of purpose (1966), along with several less well-known figures. Miriam Schneir ended her
anthology, Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (New York: Random House, 1972), with selec-
tions from Margaret Sanger (1920), Clara Zetkin (1925), and Virginia Woolf (1929). Only sociolo-
gist Alice Rossi recognized that there was “much in the work of Margaret Mead that can con-
tribute new qualities to the thinking of contemporary feminists” and saw fit to place Mead in
the company of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir in her collection, The Feminist Papers: from
Adams to de Beauvoir(New York: Columbia University Press 1973). Margaret Rossiter, in Women Sci-
entists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982),
dealt peripherally with Mead, largely because her career, along with Ruth Benedict’s, presented
counterevidence to Rossiter’s central and valid purpose, which was to demonstrate the mar-
ginalization of women in science from 1920 to 1940. Even Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lam-
phere’s pathbreaking collection Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1974), which arrayed the most promising work in feminist anthropology up until that time,
makes only slight mention of Mead, although Rosaldo points out that Mead was among the
first to use crosscultural analysis to argue that Westerners’ conceptions of “natural” sexual dif-
ferences were not in fact natural, necessary, or universal. My quick perusal of the most promi-
nent journals—Feminist Studies, Signs, the Journal of Women’s History, Gender and Society, and Gender and
History— turned up no articles on Mead. Prominent secondary-source collections, such as Mary
S. Hartman and Lois Banner, eds., Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women
(New York: Row, 1974); Nancy Cott and Elizabeth Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own; Toward a New
Social History of American Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), and Ellen Carol DuBois
and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multi-cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History (New York:
Routledge, 1990), contain no articles on Mead. The major exception is Rosalind Rosenberg, who
in Beyond Separate Spheresidentifies Mead as part of a generation that, in distinguishing itself from
those politics of its suffragist mothers, “rejected the public side of feminism, with its ideology of
female uniqueness and its organizational focus on female interests” (p. 209).
46. Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
47. Jane Howard gives a list of some of these articles in her bibliography in Margaret Mead,
pp. 505–506. A good review of this scholarly debate can be found in Ray A. Rappaport, “Dese-
crating the Holy Woman: Derek Freeman’s Attack on Margaret Mead,” American Scholar55 (Sum-
mer 1986): 313–347.
48. For example, feminist theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain accepts Freeman’s charge that
Mead’s study of Samoa was fundamentally shaped by her own cultural preoccupations.
Elshtain writes, “It should neither surprise nor shock us that [Mead’s] perspective and politics
helped gear her expectations and color her interpretations. . . . Science provides no correc-
tive lens that adjusts automatically for the ‘distortions’ inherent in the fact that the researcher
is, after all, from another culture.” Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Coming of Age in America: Why the
Attack on Margaret Mead?” Progressive (October 1983): 33–35. Despite Elshtain’s caution that the
 226 • NOTES TO PAGES ƒ78–182

issue of scientific accuracy takes us down an unproductive line of inquiry, some scholars con-
tinue to tread this path. See Eleanor Leacock, “Anthropologists in Search of Culture: Margaret
Mead, Derek Freeman, and All the Rest of Us,” in Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy: Scholarship,
Empire and the South Pacific, ed. Leonora Foerstel and Angela Gilliam (Philadelphia: Temple Univer-
sity Press, 1992), pp. 3–30.
49. Micaela di Leonardo, introduction to Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, p. 27.
50. I use the ambiguous term “author-reader” purposefully to suggest a double meaning:
first, that anthropological researchers read their subjects before they author accounts, and sec-
ond, that all subsequent readers of ethnography are just as actively involved and implicated in
the act of anthropological interpretation. Ethnographies are always contested political acts. This
is true regardless of the cultural origin or affiliation of the author-reader. Native anthropolo-
gists (cultural insiders) are no more advantageously positioned to produce “objective,” “true,”
or “authentic” narratives than nonnative ones (cultural outsiders), although one might want
to consider whether one should grant indigenous or insider accounts greater claims to au-
thority on moral grounds as a sort of anthropological corollary to the political right to self-
determination. In short, ethnography, like history, is always already an interpretative act that
imposes on its subject and thus always requires further interpretations (impositions). These in-
terpretations are in response to and derive their meanings from the past and help direct the
meanings of the future. The subsequent rereadings and reinterpretations are as important as
the original anthropologist’s—indeed more so, for it is through these rereadings, reinterpreta-
tions, and rewritings that the relationship between feminism and imperialism might be
changed. So the sooner Western feminists begin to try to understand how our feminism, as well
as our ethnographies, derive from and are connected to the history of imperialism, the sooner
we may be able to envision a nonimperialistic feminist ethnography. Joan Scott makes a similar
argument in relation to the category of “experience” for feminist historiography. See Joan Scott,
“Experience,” in FeministsTheorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1992), pp. 22–40. Also see Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences:
Insights, Inroads and Intrusions(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 40, 88, and especially
105–106. For an interesting discussion of the problem of the native anthropologist see Indira
Karamcheti, review of Nita Kumar, Friends, Brothers and Informants, Women’s Reviewof Books9 (Septem-
ber 1992): 16–17.
51. Susan Chira, “Nursing becomes a Feminist Battlefield” (op. ed.), NewYork Times(October
10, 1993).
52. I am singling out Chira’s article because it represents a compact example of a tendency
I find common in contemporary feminist discourse. For other examples, see Mary Daly,
Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism(Boston: Beacon Press, 1978) and Marilyn French, The
War against Women(New York: Summit Books, 1992).
53. See, for example, Nadine R. Peacock, “Rethinking the Sexual Division of Labor: Repro-
duction and Women’s Work among the Efe,” in di Leonardo, Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge,
pp. 339–360.
54. Ann duCille, SkinTrade(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

Conclusion
1. Harriet B. Bradbury, “War as a Necessity of Evolution,” Arena21 (January 1899): 94–96.
2. Rev. Wallace Radcliff, “Presbyterian Imperialism,” Assembly Herald1 (1899): 5–6; quoted in
Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 18.
 NOTES TO PAGES „83–185 • 227

3. Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, What Women Want: An Interpretation of the Feminist Movement
(New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914), p. 34.
4. Elsie Clews Parsons, Social Rule: A Study of theWill toPower(New York: Putnam, 1916), p. 54.
5. The statement was originally made on Nightline in 1995, but I am drawing my account
from media reporting of the incident afterwards, in particular from an interview with Patricia
Ireland by Teresa Moore, “Taking NOW into the Future,” San Francisco Chronicle (April 21, 1996):
n.p. (Lexis/Nexis).
6. As cited in Patricia J. Williams, “American Kabuki,” Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and
Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, ed. Toni Morrison and Claudia Brodsky Lacour (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1997), pp. 273–274.
7. Cited in Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist (New York: New
York University Press, 1988), pp. 318–319.
8. Moore, “Taking NOW into the Future.”
9. Searching Lexis/Nexis turned up hundreds of articles on these issues, in which these types
of constructions were rampant.
 Selected Bibliography

Manuscript Collections
Mary Abigail Dodge [Gail Hamilton] Papers, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
Mary Abigail Dodge [Gail Hamilton] Papers, Women’s Rights Biography, Smith College
Archives, Northampton, Mass.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Otis Tufton Mason Collection, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
Mary [sic] French Sheldon Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Lester Ward Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I.

Manuscript Collections on Microfilm

Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History. Glen Rock, N.J.: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1975.
History of Women MicrofilmCollection.
National Woman’s Party Papers MicrofilmCollection.
The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Ed. Patricia G. Holland and Ann D. Gordon.
Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1991.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
Wisconsin Progressives: The Edward A. Ross Papers: Guide to a Microfilm Edition. Ed. Harold L. Miller and
Lynn Buckley Aber. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1986.

Published Primary Sources

Allen, Grant. “Plain Words on the Woman Question.” Popular Science Monthly 36 (December 1889):
170–181. Rpt. from Fortnightly Review(October 1889).
———. “The Romance of Race.” Popular Science Monthly 53 (August 1898): 511–521.

229
 230 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. “Spencer and Darwin.” Popular Science Monthly 50 (April 1897): 815–827.
———. “Woman’s Place in Nature.” Forum7 (May 1889): 258–263.
———. “Woman’s Intuition.” Forum9 (May 1890): 333–340.
Ames, Azel, Jr. Sex in Industry: A Plea for theWorking-Girl. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1875.
Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett. “Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply.” Fortnightly Review15 (May
1874): 582–594.
Anthony, Susan B. “The Status of Woman, Past, Present, and Future.” Arena 17 (May 1897):
901–908.
Anti-Suffrage Essays by MassachusettsWomen. Ed. J. A. Haien. Boston: Forum, 1916.
Armstrong, Mrs. M. F. “The Negro Problem in Virginia.” Nation16 (February 20, 1873): 131–132.
———. On Habits and Manners. Hampton: Normal School Press, 1888.
———. “Sketches of Mission Life, No. IV.” SouthernWorkman10 (April 1881): 44.
Armstrong, Mrs. M. F., and Helen W. Ludlow. Hampton and Its Students. New York: Putnam, 1874.
Association for the Advancement of Women. Historical Account of the Association for the Advancement of
Women, 1873–1893. Dedham: Association for the Advancement of Women, 1893.
———. Reports. Syracuse, 1873–1893. Copies of the reports for 1878–1893 available in Gerritsen
Collection of Women’s History MicrofilmCollection.
Association of Collegiate Alumnae. Health Statistics of Women College Graduates. Boston: Wright and
Potter, 1885.
Beecher, Catharine E. Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions. New York: J. B. Ford, 1874.
———. An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism. Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1837.
———. The True Remedy for theWrongs of Woman. Boston, 1851.
———. Woman’s Profession as Mother and Educator, With Views in Opposition to Woman Suffrage. Philadel-
phia: George MacLean, 1872.
———. Woman Suffrage andWoman’s Profession. Hartford, 1871.
Blackwell, Antoinette Brown. “The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction.”
Popular Science Monthly 5 (September 1874): 606–610.
———. “Comparative Mental Power of the Sexes Physiologically Considered.” Paper read be-
fore the Woman’s Congress, 1877. Rpt. in Victoria Magazine28 (March 1877): 405–416.
———. “The Relation of Woman’s Work in the Household to the Work Outside.” In Papers and
Letters Presented at the First Woman’s Congress of the Association for the Advancement of Woman. New York,
1874. Rpt. in Up Fromthe Pedestal: SelectedWritings in the History of American Feminism. Ed. Aileen S.
Kraditor. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970. 150–159.
———. The Sexes Throughout Nature. New York: Putnam, 1875.
Blair, James L. Imperialism: Our National Policy. An Address Delivered Before the Monday Evening Club, January
9, 1899. St. Louis: Gottschalk, 1899.
Boas, Franz. “The Methods of Ethnology.” American Anthropologist 22 (1920): 311–321.
———. The Mind of Primitive Man. 1st. ed., 1911; rev. ed., New York: Macmillan, 1938.
Brackett, Anna Callender, ed. The Education of American Girls. New York: Putnam, 1874, 1886.
Brandeis, Louis D., and Josephine Goldmark. The Case Against Nightwork for Women, Revised with New
Introduction toMarch 1, 1918. New York: National Consumers’ League, 1918.
Brashere, Ora M. Science and Suffrage: An Inquiry intothe Causes of Sex Differences. Salt Lake City, 1909.
Bronson, Minnie. The Wage Earning Woman and The State. Boston: Massachusetts Association Op-
posed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women, 1910.
Buchanan, Joseph. “The Cosmic Sphere of Woman.” Arena1 (May 1890): 666–681.
Buhle, Mari Jo and Paul, eds. The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections fromthe ClassicWork of Stan-
ton, Anthony, Gage and Harper. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.
Bushnell, Horace. Women’s Suffrage: The ReformAgainst Nature. New York: Scribner, 1869.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • 231

Calverton, V. F., and S. D. Schalhausen. Sex in Civilization. New York: Macaulay, 1929; Garden City,
NY: Garden City, 1929.
Campbell, Helen. Household Economics: A Course of Lectures in the School of Economics of the University of Wis-
consin. 1st. ed., 1896; 2nd ed., New York: Putnam, 1898.
———. Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage Workers, Their Trades and Their Lives. Boston: Roberts, 1887.
Rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970.
———. WomenWage Workers: Their Past, Their Present, andTheir Future. Introduction by Richard T. Ely.
Boston: Roberts, 1893.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, ed. Man Cannot Speak For Her. 2 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1989.
Ceplair, Larry, ed. The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: SelectedWritings, 1835–1839. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989.
Chandler, Lucinda B. “The Woman Movement.” Arena4 (November 1891): 704–711.
Child, Lydia Maria. An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans. New York: John S.
Taylor, 1833.
———. A Romance of the Republic. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
Claflin, Tennie C. Constitutional Equality: A Right of Women. New York: Woodhull, Claflin, 1871.
Clarke, Edward H. Sex in Education; Or, A Fair Chance for the Girls. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873.
“Clarke’s Building of a Brain.” North American Review120 (January 1875): 185–188.
Cobbe, Frances Power. The Duties of Women. Boston: G. H. Ellis, 1881.
Collins, May L. A Plea for the NewWoman. An Address Delivered Before the Ohio Liberal Society. New York:
Truth Seeker, 1896.
Collins, Mary C. “The Dependence of the Indian.” SouthernWorkman29 (July 1900): 427–429.
Coman, Katharine. “The College Settlement.” SouthernWorkman29 (November 1900): 650–653.
Cooley, Winnifred Harper. “The Eternal Feminine.” Arena27 (April 1902): 375–380.
———. The NewWomanhood. New York: Broadway, 1904.
———. “The Younger Suffragists.” Harper’sWeekly 58 (September 27, 1913): 7–8.
[Coolidge,] Mary Roberts Smith. Almshouse Women: A Study of 228 Women in the City and County
Almshouse of San Francisco. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1896.
Coolidge, Mary Roberts Smith. Chinese Immigration. New York: Holt, 1909.
[Coolidge,] Mary Roberts Smith. “Education for Domestic Life.” Popular Science Monthly53 (August
1898): 521–525.
———. “Recent Tendencies in the Education of Women.” Popular Science Monthly 48 (November
1895): 27–33.
———. “Statistics of College and Non-College Women.” Publications of the American Statistical Asso-
ciation7 (March–June 1900): 1–26.
Coolidge, Mary Roberts Smith. Why Women Are So. New York: Henry Holt, 1912. Copy available on
Gerristen Collection of Women’s History MicrofilmCollection.
Cooper, Anna Julia. A Voice Fromthe South, by a BlackWomen of the South. 1st ed., Aldine Publishing Co,
1892. Rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969; New York: Oxford University Press,
1988.
Cope, Edward D. “The Relations of the Sexes to Government.” Popular Science Monthly 33 (October
1888): 721–730.
Corbin, Caroline F. “The Antisuffrage Movement.” Chicago Daily News. November 24, 1908. Rpt.
as a pamphlet by the Illinois Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women,
n.d.
———. Letters from a Chimney-Corner: A Plea for Pure Hopes and Sincere Relations Between Men and Women.
Chicago: Fergus, 1886.
 232 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crane, Alice Rollins. “Why the Indians Break Out.” Arena20 (October 1898): 491–498.
Dall, Caroline Wells Healey. The College, The Market and the Court; Or, Woman’s Relation toEducation, Labor,
and Law. 1st ed., 1867. Rpt: Boston: Memorial Edition, 1914.
———. ‘Woman’s Right toLabor’; or, LowWages and HardWork. InThree Lectures, Delivered in Boston, Novem-
ber 1859. Boston: Walker, Wise, 1860.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or the Preservation of the Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life. 1st ed., 1859; 5th ed., London: John Murray, 1869.
———. The Descent of Man and Selection In Relation toSex. 1st ed., 1871; 2nd ed., New York: Appleton,
1906.
Davis, Mrs. Jefferson. “The White Man’s Problem.” Arena23 (January 1900): 1–4.
Davis, Paulina Wright. A History of the National Women’s Rights Movement. 1st. ed., 1871. Rpt. New
York: Kraus Reprint, 1971.
Deland, Margaret. “The Change in the Feminine Ideal.” Atlantic Monthly 105 (March 1910):
289–302.
Delauney, G. “Equality and Inequality in Sex.” Popular Science Monthly 20 (December 1881):
184–192.
Dewey, Mary E. Historical Sketch of the Formation and Achievements of the Women’s National Indian Association
in the United States. N.p., 1900.
Dickinson, Mary Lowe. “A Half Century of Progress.” Arena15 (February 1896): 361–370.
———. Mrs. J. B. “Address of the President, at the Annual Meeting of the Women’s National
Indian Association, November 17, 1885.” Philadelphia: Women’s National Indian Associa-
tion, 1885.
———. Among the Thorns. New York: G. W. Carleton, and London: S. Low, 1880.
———. “The National Council of Women.” Arena17 (February 1897): 478–493.
Dodge, Mary Abigail [pseud. Gail Hamilton]. A Battle of the Books. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1870.
———. A NewAtmosphere. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865.
———. Biography of James G. Blaine. Norwich, Conn.: Henry Bill, 1895.
———. Country Living and Country Thinking. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862.
———. Gala-Days. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863.
———. The Insuppressible Book. Boston, 1885.
———. “Race Prejudice.” North American Review141 (October 1885): 475–479.
———. Skirmishes and Sketches. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866.
———. “A Spasm of Sense.” Atlantic Monthly 11 (April 1863): 407.
———. Stumbling Blocks. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.
———. Summer Rest. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866.
———. Woman’s Worth and Worthlessness: The Complement to “A New Atmosphere.” New York: Harper,
1872.
———. Woman’sWrongs: A Counter-Irritant. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868.
Dodge, H. Augusta, ed. Gail Hamilton’s Life in Letters. 2 vols. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1901.
Dodge, Mrs. Arthur M. “Woman Suffrage Opposed to Woman’s Rights.” Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science5 (November 1914).
“Dr. Clarke’s ‘Sex in Education.’” North American Review119 (January 1874): 140–152.
DuBois, Ellen Carol, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings,
Speeches. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.
Duffey, Eliza Bisbee. NoSex in Education: Or, An Equal Chance for Both Boys and Girls. A Reviewof Dr. E. H.
Clarke’s “Sex in Education.”Philadelphia: J. Stoddard, 1874.
———. The Relations of the Sexes. New York: Wood and Holbrook, 1876, 1886.
———. What Women Should Know: A Woman’s Book About Women. Cincinnati: Stoddard, 1873.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • 233

Eastman, Elaine Goodale. “How to Americanize the Indians.” New Englander and Yale Review 52
(May 1890): 452–455.
———. “The Indian—A Woman Among the Indians.” The Literature of Philanthropy. Ed. Frances A.
Goodale. New York: Harper, 1893. 129–140.
———. Sister to the Sioux: The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman, 1885–91. Ed. Kay Graber. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
———. “The Waste of Life.” Popular Science Monthly 87 (August 1915): 187–194.
———. “Wives and Property.” Indian’s Friend4 (December 1891): 1.
Ellis, Havelock. “The Changing Status of Women.” In The Woman Question by Ellen Key, Dickinson and
Others. Ed. T. R. Smith. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918. 219–229.
———. Man andWoman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters. London: Walter Scott, 1894; 6th
ed., London: A. & C. Black, 1930.
———. “Mind of Woman.” Atlantic Monthly 118 (September 1916): 366–374.
———. “Variation in Man and Woman.” Popular Science Monthly 62 (January 1903): 237–253.
Fletcher, Alice C. “Among the Omahas.” Woman’s Journal 13 (February 11, 1882): 46–47.
———. “Between the Lines.” Lend a Hand1 (July 1886): 429–431.
———. Civilization and Education. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1888.
———. “The Crowning Act.” The Morning Star7 (March 1887): 1.
———. “Economy of Justice.” Lend a Hand1 (July 1886): 528–530.
———. “Flotsam and Jetsam from Aboriginal America.” Southern Workman 28 (January 1899):
12–14.
———. “Indian Characteristics.” SouthernWorkman29 (1900): 202–205.
———. Indian Education and Civilization. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1888.
———. “The Indian Woman and Her Problems.” Southern Workman 28 (May 1899): 172–176. An-
other version is published in Woman’s Journal 31 (November 10, 1900): 353–354.
———. “Land and Education for the Indian.” SouthernWorkman14 (1885): 6.
———. “Land, Law, Education—The Three Things Needed by the Indian.” Southern Workman 14
(March 1885): 33.
———. “Land, Law, Education—The Three Things Needed by the Indian. Indians Ready for
Land in Severalty.” SouthernWorkman14 (April 1885): 45.
———. “The New Orleans Exposition.” SouthernWorkman14 (July 1885): 79.
———. “On Indian Education and Self-Support.” Century 26 (May 1883): 312–315.
———. On the Lawlessness of the Indian Reservation System. Boston: Frank Wood, 1884.
———. “The Preparation of the Indian for Citizenship.” Lend a Hand9 (1892): 190–198.
———. “Standing Bear.” SouthernWorkman38 (1909): 75–78.
———. “Tribal Life Among the Omahas.” Century Magazine51 (January 1896): 450–461.
[Flower, E. O.] “The Era of Woman” [editorial]. Arena4 (August 1891): 382–385.
Forten, Charlotte, “One Phase of the Race Distinction.” BostonCommonwealth24 (January 16, 1886): 1.
French-Sheldon, M[ay]. Sultan toSultan: Adventures among the Masai and otherTribes of East Africa. Boston:
Arena, 1892.
French-Sheldon, Mrs. Customs among the Natives of East Africa, fromTeita toKilimegalia, with Special Refer-
ence totheirWomen and Children. London: Harrison, 1892.
———. “England’s Commercial and Industrial Future in Central Africa.” Journal of the Tyneside
Geographical Society 3 (May 1897): 415–418.
Frothingham, Octavius B., et al. Woman Suffrage Unnatural and Inexpedient. Boston, 1886.
Gage, Matilda Josyln. Woman, Church and State: A Historical Account of the Status of Woman Through the
Christian Ages: With Reminiscences of the Matriarchate. 2nd ed., New York: Truth Seeker, 1893. Rpt.
Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1985.
 234 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Galton, Francis. “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims [Address Read Before the Sociological
Society, at a Meeting in the School of Economics, London University, May 16, 1904].”
American Journal of Sociology 10 (July 1904): 1904–05.
Gamble, Eliza B. TheSexesinScienceandHistory: AnInquiry IntotheDogmaof Woman’sInferiority toMan. New
York: Putnam, 1916. Copy available on GerritsenCollectionof Women’s History MicrofilmCollection.
Gay, E. Jane. With the Nez Perces: Alice Fletcher in the Field, 1889–1892. Ed. Frederick E. Hoxie and Joan
T. Mark. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.
Geddes, Patrick, and J. Arthur Thomson. The Evolution of Sex. 1st ed., London: Scott, 1889; New
York: Humboldt, 1890, and New York: Scribner, 1897.
Gilder, Jeanette. “Why I Am Opposed to Woman Suffrage.” Harper’s Bazaar(May 19, 1894). Rpt. as
a pamphlet by Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to
Women, n.d.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Are Women Human Beings?A Consideration of the Major Error in
the Discussion of Woman Suffrage.” Harper’sWeekly 56 (May 25, 1912): 11.
———. “The Biological Anti-Feminist [written in response to an interview by William B. Sedg-
wick in NewYork Times].” Forerunner5 (March 1914): 65.
———. “Comment and Review.” Forerunner13 (March 1913): 82.
———. “Competing With Men.” [Vital Issues] Woman’s Journal 35 (February 6, 1904): 42.
———. Concerning Children. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1901.
———. The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ed. Denise D. Knight. Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1994.
———. Herland. First published serially in Forerunner, 1915. Rpt. New York: Pantheon, 1979.
———. The Home: Its Work and Influence. 1st. ed., New York: McClure, Phillips, 1903; New York:
Charlton, 1910. Rpt. University of Illinois Press, 1973.
———. HumanWork. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904.
———. In This Our World and Other Poems. 1st ed., San Francisco: J. H. Barry, 1893; Boston: Small
Maynard, 1898, 1899. Rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1974.
———. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, An Autobiography. New York: Appleton-Century, 1935.
———. The Man-MadeWorld, or, Our Androcentric Culture. New York: Charlton, 1911.
———. “Masculine, Feminine and Human.” Woman’s Journal 35 (January 16, 1904): 18.
———. “Suggestion on the Negro Problem.” American Journal of Sociology 14 (July 1908): 78–85.
———. “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper.” Forerunner4 (October 1913): 271.
———. Women and Economics. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898. Rpt. New York: Harper, 1966.
———. Women and Social Service. Warren, Ohio: National American Woman Suffrage Association,
c. 1907. Copy available on Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History MicrofilmCollection.
———. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” New England Magazine (May 1891): Rpt. Old Westbury, Conn.:
Feminist Press, 1973.
[Godkin, E. L.] “A Neglected Side of the Woman’s Rights Question.” Nation 7 (November 26,
1868): 434–436.
———. “Another Delicate Subject.” Nation11 (July 14, 1870): 21–23.
———. “The Feud in the Woman’s Rights Camp.” Nation11 (November 24, 1870): 346–347.
———. “Sex in Politics.” Nation12 (April 20, 1871): 270–272.
Goodale, Frances A., ed. The Literature of Philanthropy. New York: Harper, 1893.
Goodwin, Grace Duffield. Anti-Suffrage: Ten Good Reasons. New York: Duffield, 1913.
Grand, Sarah. “The New Aspect of the Woman Question.” North American Review 158 (March
1894): 270–276.
Grimké, Angelina. An Appeal totheWomen of the Nominally Free States. Issued by an Anti-Slavery Con-
vention of American Women. New York: W. S. Dorr, 1837.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • 235

———. Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. New York: n.p., 1836. Rpt. New York: Arno Press
and NewYork Times, 1969.
Grimké, Sarah. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman. Addressed to Mary S. Parker,
President of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838.
Gruening, Martha. “Two Suffrage Movements.” Crisis4 (September 1912): 245–246.
Hale, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson. What Women Want: An Interpretation of the Feminist Movement. New
York: Stokes, 1914.
Hall, Florence Howe, ed. JuliaWard Howe and the Woman Suffrage Movement: A Selection FromHer Speeches
and Essays, with Introduction and Notes by her Daughter. Boston: Dana Estes, 1913. Rpt. New York:
Arno Press, 1969.
Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations toPhysiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime,
Religion and Education. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1904.
Hamilton, Gail. See Dodge, Mary Abigail.
Hanaford, Phebe A. Women of the Century. Boston: B. B. Russell, 1877.
Hanson, J. W., ed. The World’s Congress of Religions: The Addresses and Papers Delivered Before the Parliament
. . . held in the Art Institute, Chicago Illinois, August 25 to October 15, 1893 under the Auspices of the
World’ Columbian Exposition. Chicago: International Publishing, 1894.
Harper, Frances E. W. “Duty to Dependent Races.” In Transactions of the National Council of Women of
the United States. Ed. Rachel Foster Avery. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1891. 86–91.
———. “Woman’s Political Future” in World’s Congress of Representative Women. Ed. May Wright
Sewell. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894. 433–37.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Common Sense About Women. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1881.
———. Higher Education of Woman: A Paper Read Before the Social Science Convention, Boston, May 14, 1873.
Boston: Woman’s Journal, 1873.
Holmes, Lizzie M. “Woman’s Future Position in the World.” Arena20 (September 1898): 333–343.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “The Americanized European.” Atlantic Monthly 35 (January 1875):
75–86.
Howe, Julia Ward. A Trip toCuba. Serialized in Atlantic Monthly, 1859. Ticknor and Fields, 1860. Rpt.
New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.
———. Reminiscences, 1819–1899. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899.
———. “Shall the Frontier of Christendom be Maintained?” Forum 22 (November 1896):
321–326.
Howe, Julia Ward, ed. Sex and Education: A Reply to Dr. E. H. Clarke’s “Sex in Education.” Boston:
Roberts, 1874.
Howe, Julia Ward, et al. “The Other Side to the Woman Question.” North American Review129 (No-
vember 1879): 413–446.
Illinois Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage: A Protest Against the Granting of Municipal Suffrage to
Women in the City of Chicago. Chicago, 1906.
Illinois Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women. Publications. 1886–1913.
Copies available in Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History MicrofilmCollection.
International Council of Women. Report of the International Council of Women Assembled by the National
Woman Suffrage Association, March 25–April 1, 1888. Washington, D.C.: Rufus H. Darby, 1888.
Jacobi, Mary Putnam. “Common Sense” Applied toWoman Suffrage. New York: Putnam, 1894.
———. The Question of Rest forWomen During Menstruation. New York: Putnam, 1877.
———. “Status and Future of the Woman Suffrage Movement.” Forum 18 (December 1894):
406–414.
———. “Women in Medicine.” In Woman’s Work in America. Ed. Annie Nathan Meyer. New York,
1891. 139–205.
 236 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jarvis, Edward. “Immigration.” Atlantic Monthly 29 (April 1872): 454–468.

Jordan, David Starr. The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races Through the Survival of the Unfit.
Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902.
———. “Evolution: What It is and What it is Not.” Arena18 (August 1897): 145–159.
Kraditor, Aileen S., ed. Up From the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism.
Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968, 1970.
Lee, Mrs. M. E. “The Home-Maker.” AME Church Review8 (July 1891): 63–66.
Loewenberg, Bert James, and Ruth Bogin, eds. Black Women in Nineteenth Century American Life: Their
Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976.
Man-Suffrage Association Opposed to Political Suffrage for Women. Publications 1–22. New York:
1914–1916. Copy available in Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History MicrofilmCollection.
Martin, Wendy, ed. The American Sisterhood: Writings of the Feminist Movement From Colonial Times to the
Present. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
Mason, Otis T. The Origins of Invention: A Study of Industry Among Primitive Peoples. New York: Scribner,
and London: Walter Scott, 1915.
———. “Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture.” American Antiquarian11 (January 1889): 3–13.
———. Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture. New York: Appleton, 1894, 1898.
Mathews, Shailer, ed. The Woman Citizen’s Library: A Systematic Course of Reading in Preparation for the
Larger Citizenship. 12 vols. Chicago: Civics Society, 1913–1914.
Maudsley, Henry. “Sex in Mind and in Education.” Popular Science Monthly 5 (June 1875): 198–215.
Rpt. from Fortnightly Review15 (April 1874): 466–483.
McMullen, Frances Drewry. “‘Going Native’ for Science.” Woman’s Journal 15 (July 1930): 8.
Mead, Margaret. “Americanization in Samoa.” American Mercury 16 (March 1929): 264–270.
———. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: William Morrow, 1972. Rpt. New York:
Pocket Books, 1975.
———. Coming of Age: A Psychological Study of PrimitiveYouth forWestern Civilisation. 1st. ed., 1928; Mor-
row Quill Paperbacks, 1928, 1955, 1961, 1973.
———. “The Comparative Study of Cultures and the Purposive Cultivation of Democratic
Values, 1941–1949.” In Perspectives on a Troubled Decade: Science, Philosophy, and Religion, 1939–1949.
New York: Harper, 1950. 87–108.
———. “Human Differences and World Order.” In World Order: Its Intellectual and Cultural Foundation.
Ed. Ernest Johnson. New York: Harper, 1945. 42–43.
———. Letters fromThe Field, 1925–1975. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
———. Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a ChangingWorld. New York: William Morrow, 1949.
———. “Race Majority—Race Minority.” In The People inYour Life: Psychiatry and Personal Relations by
Ten Leading Authorities. Ed. Margaret M. Hughes. 1st ed. Knopf, 1951. Rpt. Freeport, New
York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971, 120–157.
———. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: William Morrow, 1935. Rpt. Mor-
row Quill Paperbacks, 1963.
Mead, Margaret, and James Baldwin. A Rap on Race. New York: Laurel, 1971.
Meyer, Annie Nathan. “Woman’s Assumption of Sex Superiority.” North American Review 178
(January 1904): 103–109. Rpt. as a pamphlet in Why Women Do Not Want the Ballot. Vol. 3. Bos-
ton: Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women,
n.d.
Mirsky, Jeannette. “Review of Sex andTemperament.” Survey 71 (Oct. 1935): 315.
Montgomery, Helen Barrett. Western Women in Eastern Lands: An Outline Study of Fifty Years of Woman’s
Work in Foreign Missions. New York: Macmillan, 1911.
Morgan, John T. “The Race Question in the United States.” Arena12 (September 1890): 385–398.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • 237

Mott, Lucretia. Discourse on Woman. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1850. Copy available in National
Woman’s Party Papers MicrofilmCollection.
National Association of Colored Women. Lifting as They Climb. Ed. Elizabeth Lindsay Davis. Wash-
ington, D.C.: National Association of Colored Women, n.d.
National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. The Case Against Woman Suffrage. Boston: Na-
tional Anti-Suffrage Association, 1916.
National Council of Women. History and Minutes of the National Council of Women of the United States.
Organized in Washington, D.C., March 31, 1888. Ed. Louise Barnum Robbins. Boston:
E. P. Stillings, 1898.
———. Transactions of the National Council of Women in the United States. Assembled in Washington,
D.C., February 22–25, 1891. Ed. Rachel Roster Avery. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1891.
Nearing, Scott and Nellie M. S. Woman and Social Progress: A Discussion of the Biologic, Domestic, Industrial,
and Social Possibilities of AmericanWomen. New York: Macmillan, 1912.
“New Woman Under Fire.” Reviewof Reviews10 (December 1894): 656–657.
Newman, Louise Michele, ed. Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities: Popular Science, 1870–1915. New York:
Pergamon Press, 1985.
Noble, Margaret W. “What Next in Women’s Societies.” Chautauquan 14 (February 1892): 600–
602.
Olmsted, Frederick Law. A Journey in the Back Country in the Winter of 1853–1854. New York: Mason,
1860.
Parkman, Francis. “The Failure of Universal Suffrage.” North American Review 127 (July–August
1878): 7.
———. Some of the Reasons Against Woman Suffrage. New York, n.p., c. 1896.
———. “The Woman Question.” North American Review129 (October 1879): 303–321.
———. “The Woman Question Again.” North American Review130 (January 1880): 16–30.
Parsons, Elsie Clews. “The Aversion to Anomalies.” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific
Methods12 (April 1915): 212–219.
———. “Circumventing Darwin.” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 12 (October
1915): 610–612.
———. “Facing Race Suicide.” Masses6 (June 1915): 15.
———. The Family. New York: Putnam, 1906.
———. “Feminism and Sex Ethics.” International Journal of Ethics26 (July 1915): 462–465.
———. “When Mating and Parenthood are Theoretically Distinguished.” International Journal of
Ethics26 (January 1916): 207–216.
Powdermaker, Hortense. “Review of Sex and Temperament.” Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science181 (September 1935): 221–222.
Prucha, Francis Paul, ed. Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the ‘Friends of the Indian’
1880–1900. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.
Quinton, Amelia Stone. “Care of the Indian.” In Woman’s Work in America. Ed. Annie Nathan
Meyer. New York: Henry Holt, 1891.
Robinson, Helen Ring. PreparingWomen for Citizenship. New York: Macmillan, 1918.
Romanes, George J. Darwin and After Darwin. 4th ed. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1910. Origi-
nally given as lectures from 1888 through early 1890s.
———. “Mental Differences of Men and Women.” Popular Science Monthly 31 (July 1887): 383–401.
Roosevelt, Theodore. The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses. New York: Century, 1902.
Ross, Edward Alsworth. “The Causes of Race Superiority.” Annals of the American Academy of Politi-
cal and Social Science 18 (July 1901): 67–89. Rpt. in Foundations of Sociology, New York, 1905,
353–385.
 238 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. Changing America: Studies in Contemporary Society. New York: Century, 1912.
———. The Changing Chinese: The Conflict of Oriental and Western Cultures in China. 1st ed., 1911; New
York: Century, 1914.
———. Foundations of Sociology. New York: Century, 1905.
———. The OldWorld in the New. New York: Century, 1914.
———. The Principles of Sociology. New York: Century, 1920.
———. Sin and Society: An Analysis of Latter-Day Iniquity. With a Letter from President Roosevelt. 1st. ed.,
1907. Rpt. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1965.
———. Seventy Years of It: An Autobiography. New York: Appleton-Century, 1936.
———. Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order. New York: Macmillan, 1901.
———. Social Psychology: An Outline and Source Book. New York: Macmillan, 1908.
Rossi, Alice S., ed. The Feminist Papers: FromAdams tode Beauvoir. New York: Bantam, 1976.
Scharlieb, Mary. Womanhood and Race-Regeneration. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1912.
Schreiner, Olive. “The Woman Question.” Cosmopolitan28 (November 1899): 45–54, 182–192.
Schurz, Carl. American Imperialism: The Convocation Address Delivered on the Occasion of the Twenty-Seventh
Convocation of the University of Chicago, January 4, 1899. Boston: Dana Estes, 1899.
Sewall, May Wright, ed. TheWorld’s Congress of RepresentativeWomen. 2 vols. Chicago: Rand, McNally,
1894.
“The ‘Sex in Education’ Controversy” [editorial]. Scribner’s Monthly 9 (March 1875): 633–635.
Shaler, N. S. “The African Element in America.” Arena2 (November 1890): 660–673.
———. “An Ex-Southerner in South Carolina.” Atlantic Monthly 26 (July 1870): 53–61.
———. “Mixed Populations of North Carolina.” North American Review 116 (January 1873):
150–166.
———. “The Nature of the Negro.” Arena3 (December 1890): 23–35.
———. “The Negro Problem.” Atlantic Monthly 54 (November 1884): 696–709.
———. “The Summer’s Journey of a Naturalist, Part I.” Atlantic Monthly 32 (August 1873):
181–183.
———. “The Summer’s Journey of a Naturalist, Part II.” Atlantic Monthly 32 (August 1873):
349–357.
Smith, Goldwin. “Female Suffrage.” Popular Science Monthly 5 (August 1874): 427–443.
———. “Woman’s Place in the State.” Forum9 (January 1890): 515–530.
———. Woman Suffrage. New York: Macmillan, 1894.
Smith, Mary Roberts. See Coolidge, Mary Roberts Smith.
Spencer, Anna Garlin. “Is the Declaration of Independence Outgrown?” Woman’s Journal (January
14, 1899): 12.
———. Woman’s Share in Social Culture. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912, 1913.
Spencer, Herbert. Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical. New York: Appleton, 1860.
———. The Principles of Biology. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1864.
———. The Principles of Ethics. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1892, 1893.
———. The Principles of Psychology. London: Williams and Norgate, 1855.
———. The Principles of Sociology. 3 vols. New York: Appleton, 1898.
———. “Psychology of the Sexes.” Popular Science Monthly 4 (November 1873): 30–38.
———. Social Statics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Devel-
oped. New York: Appleton, 1865.
———. Social Statics, Abridged and Revised: Together with The Man Versus the State. New York: Appleton,
1892.
———. “The Status of Women and Children.” Popular Science Monthly 8 (January 1876): 433–455.
———. The Study of Sociology. New York: Appleton, 1896.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • 239

———. “A Theory of Population Deduced From the General Law of Animal Fertility.” Westmin-
ster Review57 (April 1852): 468–501.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. “Divorce Versus Domestic Warfare.” Arena1 (April 1890): 560–569.
———. “Educated Suffrage.” Independent (February 14, 1895): 2.
———. Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897. Fischer Unwin, 1898. Rpt. New York:
Schocken, 1975.
———. “Nursery Names Unfit for Women.” Woman’s Journal 29 (October 22, 1898): 342–343.
———. Suffrage A Natural Right. Chicago: Open Court, 1894.
———. TheWoman’s Bible: Part I. New York: European, 1895.
———. TheWoman’s Bible: Part II. New York: European, 1898.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, et al. eds. The History of Woman Suffrage. 6 vols. Rochester: Susan B. An-
thony, 1881–1922.
Stanton, Theodore, and Harriot Stanton Blatch, eds. Elizabeth Cady Stanton As Revealed in Her
Letters, Diary and Reminiscences. 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1922. Rpt. New York: Arno Press,
1969.
Sterling, Dorothy, ed. Turning theWorld Upside Down: The Anti-Slavery Convention of AmericanWomen Held
in NewYork City, May 9–12, 1837. New York: Feminist Press, 1987.
———. We AreYour Sisters: BlackWomen in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton, 1984.
Stowe, Charles Edward. The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled From Her Letters and Journals. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1889.
Sumner, William Graham. Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs,
Mores, and Morals. Boston: Ginn, 1906.
———. What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. 1st ed., 1883. Rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1979, and
Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1982.
Taft, Jessie. The Woman Movement From the Point of View of Social Consciousness. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1915.
Tarbell, Ida. The Business of Being A Woman. New York: Macmillan, 1912.
Terrell, Mary Church. A ColoredWoman in aWhiteWorld. Washington, D.C.: Randsell, 1940.
———. “Club Work of Colored Women.” SouthernWorkman30 (1901): 435–438.
———. “The International Congress of Women.” Voice of the Negro2 (October 1904): 454–461.
———. “The Justice of Woman Suffrage.” Crisis4 (September 1912): 243–245.
———. “Progress and Problems of Colored Women.” Home Mission College Review2 (March 1929):
41–48.
———. “The Progress of Colored Women.” Voice of the Negro1 (July 1904): 291–294.
———. The Progress of Colored Women . . . An Address Delivered before the National American Women’s
Suffrage Association at the Columbia Theater, Washington, D.C., February 18, 1898. Washington, D.C.:
Smith, 1898.
———. “Society Among the Colored People of Washington.” Voice of the Negro1 (April 1904):
150–52.
———. “Susan B. Anthony, The Abolitionist,” Voice of the Negro3 (June 1906): 411–416.
———. “Votes for All: A Symposium.” Crisis15 (November 1917): 19–21.
———. “Votes for Women.” Crisis4 (September 1912): 234.
Terrell, Robert H. “Our Debt to Suffragists.” Crisis10 (August 1915): 181.
Thomas, William Isaac. “Is the Human Brain Stationary.” Forum36 (October 1904): 305–320.
———. “On a Difference in the Metabolism of the Sexes.” American Journal of Sociology 3 (July
1897): 31–63.
———. “The Mind of Woman and the Lower Races.” American Journal of Sociology 12 (January
1907): 435–469.
 240 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. “Race Psychology: Standpoint and Questionnaire with Particular Reference to the Im-
migrant and Negro.” American Journal of Sociology 17 (1912): 726.
———. Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1907.
———. Sex in Primitive Morality.” American Journal of Sociology 4 (May 1899): 774–787.
———. “The Significance of the Orient for the Occident.” American Journal of Sociology 13 (May
1908): 729–755.
———. Votes forWomen. Boston: Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, n.d. Copy available
in History of Women MicrofilmCollection, # 9229.
Tiedeman, Christopher. A Treatise on the Limitations of Police Power in the United States. Boston: 1886.
“Twenty-five Answers to Antis.” Reports of speeches delivered on March 11, 1912, New York.
Copy available in National Woman’s Party Papers MicrofilmCollection.
Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Lan-
guage, Art and Custom. 2 vols. 1st ed., 1871; New York: Henry Holt, 1881.
Veblen, Thorstein. “The Barbarian Status of Women.” American Journal of Sociology 4 (January 1899):
503–514.
———. “The Economic Theory of Woman’s Dress.” Popular Science Monthly 46 (December 1894):
198–205.
———. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1st ed., New York: Macmillan 1899; New York: New Ameri-
can Library, 1953.
Walker, Francis Amasa. The Indian Question. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1874.
———. TheWages Question: A Treatise onWages and theWages Class. New York: Henry Holt, 1876.
Ward, Lester F. Applied Sociology: A Treatise on the Conscious Improvement of Society by Society. Boston:
Ginn, 1906.
———. “The Career of Herbert Spencer.” Popular Science Monthly 74 (January 1909): 5–18.
———. “The Course of Biologic Evolution.” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 5 (c.
1893): 23–55.
———. Dynamic Sociology, or Applied Social Science as Based Upon Statistical Sociology and the Less Complex
Sciences. 2 vols. 1st ed., 1883; 2nd ed., New York: Appleton, 1907.
———. “Genius and Woman’s Intuition.” Forum9 (June 1890): 401–408.
———. “Individual Telesis,” American Journal of Sociology 2 (March 1897): 699–717.
———. “Our Better Halves.” Forum6 (November 1888): 266–275.
———. Pure Sociology: A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society. 1st ed., 1903; New
York: Macmillan, 1909.
———. The Psychic Factors of Civilization. Boston: Ginn, 1893.
Wells, Kate Gannett. An Argument Against Woman Suffrage. Boston, 1889.
———. “The Transitional American Woman.” Atlantic Monthly 46 (December 1880): 817–823.
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Ed. Alfreda M. Duster. Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1970.
———. On Lynchings: “Southern Horrors,” “A Red Record,” “Mob Rule in New Orleans.”New York: Arno
Press and the NewYork Times, 1969.
“White Woman’s Burden.” Nation(February 16, 1921): 257.
White, Carlos. Ecce Femina: An Attempt toSolve theWoman Question. Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1870.
White, Frances Emily. “Dr. Van de Warker on ‘The Relations of Women to the Professions and
Skilled Labor.’” Penn Monthly 6 (July 1875): 514–528.
———. “Woman’s Place in Nature.” Popular Science Monthly 6 (January 1875): 292–301.
Why Women Do Not Want the Ballot. Boston: Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Ex-
tension of Suffrage to Women, n.d.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • 241

Willard, Frances E. A White Life For Two. Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association,
1890. Rpt. in Man Cannot Speak For Her: Key Texts of the Early Feminists. Vol. 2. Ed. Karlyn Kohrs
Campbell. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1989. 317–338.
———. “Arousing the Public Conscience.” Arena11 (December 1894): 198–201.
———. “The Coming Brotherhood.” Arena6 (August 1892): 317–324.
———. Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman. Chicago: Woman’s Temper-
ance Publication Association, 1889.
———. “President’s Address.” Minutes of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union at the Nine-
teenth Annual Meeting. Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1892. 128.
———. “Scientific Temperance Instruction in the Public Schools.” Arena 12 (March 1895):
10–16.
———. Woman and Temperance, or, The Work and Workers of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Hart-
ford: Park, 1888.
———. “The Woman’s Cause is Man’s.” Arena5 (May 1892): 712–725.
Williams, Fannie Barrier. “The Club Movement Among Colored Women.” Voice of the Negro 1
(March 1904): 99–102.
———. “The Club Movement Among Colored Women of America.” In A New Negro for a New
Century. Ed. Booker T. Washington, N. B. Wood, and F. B. Williams. 1st ed., 1900. Rpt. New
York: Arno Press, 1969. 379–405.
———. “The Colored Girl.” Voice of the Negro2 (June 1905): 400–403.
———. Present Status and Intellectual Progress of Colored Women. Address Before the Congress of Representative
Women. World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Chicago: n.p.,
1898.
———. “The Woman’s Part in a Man’s Business.” Voice of the Negro1 (November 1904): 543–547.
———. “Work Attempted and Missed in Organized Club Work.” Colored American Magazine 14
(May 1908): 281–285.
Woolson, Abba Goold. Woman in American Society. Boston: Roberts, 1873.
Wright, Carroll Davidson, The Working Girls of Boston. Boston: Wright and Potter, 1889. Rpt. New
York: Arno Press, 1969.

Secondary Sources
Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Woman’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and
Women’s Rights. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993.
Andersen, Kristi. After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the NewDeal. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1996.
Andolsen, Barbara Hilkert. “Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks”: Racismand American Feminism.
Macon, Ga: Mercer University Press, 1986.
Anthony, Katharine. Susan B. Anthony: Her Personal History and Her Era. New York: Doubleday, 1954.
Baker, Paula. “The Domestification of Politics: Women and American Political Society,
1780–1920,” American Historical Review(June 1984): 620–647.
Bannan, Helen, M. “The Idea of Civilization and American Indian Policy Reformers in the
1880s.” Journal of American Culture1 (1979): 787–799.
———. “Reformers and the ‘Indian Problem’ 1878–1887 and 1922–1934.” Ph.D. dissertation,
Syracuse University, 1976.
———. “True Womanhood’ and Indian Assimilation.” In Selected Proceedings of the Third Annual
Conference on Minority Studies. Vol. 2. Ed. George Carter and James R. Parker. LaCrosse, Wis: In-
stitute for Minority Studies, 1976. 187–194.
 242 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banner, Lois. Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical forWoman’s Rights. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.
Barry, Kathleen. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. New York: Ballantine Books,
1988.
Baum, Dale. “Woman Suffrage and the ‘Chinese Question’: The Limits of Radical Republican-
ism in Massachusetts, 1865–1876.” NewEngland Quarterly 56 (March 1983): 60–77.
Beasley, Maurine. “Mary Abigail Dodge: ‘Gail Hamilton’ and the Process of Social Change.” Essex
Institute Historical Collections116 (1980): 82–100.
Beaver, R. Pierce. All Loves Excelling: American Protestant Women in World Mission. Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans, 1968.
Becker, Susan D. The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism Between the Wars. West-
port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.
Bederman, Gail. “‘Civilization,’ the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells’s Anti-
lynching Campaign (1892–94).” Radical History Review52 (Winter 1992): 5–30.
———. Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
———. “Manly Civilization/Primitive Masculinity: Race, Gender and the Evolution of Middle-
Class American Manhood, 1880–1915.” Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1993.
Beisner, Robert. Twelve Against Empire:The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900. New York: McGraw Hill, 1968.
Berg, Barbara J. The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism: The Woman and the City, 1800–1860.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Birkett, Dea. Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Blair, Karen J. The Club Woman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914. New York: Holmes
and Meier, 1979.
Blocker, Jack S., Jr. “Separate Paths: Suffragists and the Women’s Temperance Crusade.” Signs10
(Spring 1985): 460–476.
Boisseau, T. J. “‘They Called Me Bebe Bwana’: A Cultural Study of an Imperial Feminist.” Signs21
(Autumn 1995): 116–146.
Boller, Paul F., Jr. American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865–1900.
Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971, 1969.
Bolt, Christine. American Indian Policy and American Reform: Case Studies of the Campaign to Assimilate the
American Indians. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987.
———. Victorian Attitudes toRace. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.
Bordin, Ruth. FrancesWillard: A Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
———. Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900. Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 1981.
Boydston, Jeanne, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margolis. The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on
Women’s Rights andWoman’s Sphere. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Brown, Wendy. “Finding the Man in the State.” Feminist Studies18 (Spring 1992): 7–34.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Mission for Life: The Story of the Family of AdoniramJudson. New York: Free Press,
1980.
———. “Zenanas and Girlless Villages: The Ethnology of American Evangelical Women,
1870–1910.” Journal of American History 69 (September 1982): 347–371.
Buechler, Steven M. The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illinois, 1850–1920.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986.
———. Women’s Movements in the United States. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Buhle, Mari Jo. “Gender and Labor History.” In Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problem of
Synthesis. Ed. J. Carroll Moody and Alice Kessler-Harris. Dekalb: Northern Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 1989. 55–79.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • 243

———. Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981, 1983.
Burstyn, Joan. “Catharine Beecher and the Education of American Women.” New England Quar-
terly 47 (September 1974): 386–403.
Butler, Judith, and Joan W. Scott, eds. Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Camhi, Jane Jerome. “Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880–1920.” Ph.D.
dissertation, Tufts University, 1973.
Campbell, Helen. Prisoners of Poverty: WomenWage-Workers, Their Trades andTheir Lives. Boston: Roberts,
1887. Rpt. Greenwood Press, 1970.
Carby, Hazel V. “‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire and Sexuality in Black
Feminist Theory.” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985). Rpt. in “Race” Writing and Difference. Ed.
Henry Louis Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 301–316.
———. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1987.
Chambers-Schiller, Lee Virginia. Liberty, A Better Husband. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Clifford, Deborah Pickman. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Biography of JuliaWard Howe. Boston: Lit-
tle, Brown, 1978, 1979.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1988.
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Clinton, Catherine. The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1984.
Coleman, Willie Mae. Keeping the Faith and Disturbing the Peace: Black Women from Anti-Slavery toWomen’s
Suffrage. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California-Irvine, 1981.
Conway, Jill. “Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870–1930.” Journal of Social History 5
(Winter 1971–1972): 164–177.
Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
———. “Feminist Politics in the 1920s: The National Woman’s Party.” Journal of American History
71 (June 1984): 43–68.
———. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
———. “What’s In a Name?The Limits of ‘Social Feminism’; or, Expanding the Vocabulary of
Women’s History.” Journal of American History 76 (December 1989): 809–829.
Cott, Nancy, and Elizabeth Pleck. A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a NewSocial History of AmericanWomen.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
———. “Legacy Profile: Gail Hamilton (1833–1896).” Legacy 4 (Fall 1987): 53–58.
Coultrap-McQuin, Susan, ed. Gail Hamilton: Selected Writings. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1992.
Curtis, Bruce. WilliamGrahamSumner. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1988.
Davis, Angela. Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage, 1983.
Degler, Carl N. At Odds: Women and the Family in America fromthe Revolution tothe Present. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1980.
di Leonardo, Micaela, ed., Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Dorr, Rheta Childe. SusanB. Anthony:TheWomanWhoChangedtheMindof aNation. NewYork: Stokes, 1928.
 244 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

DuBois, Ellen Carol. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America,
1848–1869. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
———. “Making Women’s History: Activist Historians of Women’s Rights, 1880–1940.” Radical
History Review49 (Winter 1991): 61–85.
———. “The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement: Notes Toward the Reconstruc-
tion of Nineteenth-Century Feminism.” Feminist Studies3 (Fall 1975): 63–71.
———. “Women’s Rights and Abolition: The Nature of the Connection,” in Antislavery Reconsid-
ered: NewPerspectives on the Abolitionists. Ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman. Baton Rouge, La:
Louisiana State University Press, 1979. 238–251.
———. “Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance: Harriot Stanton Blatch and
the New York Woman Suffrage Movement, 1894–1909.” Journal of American History 74 (June
1987): 34–58.
DuBois, Ellen Carol, and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s His-
tory. New York: Routledge, 1990.
duCille, Ann. SkinTrade. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Dyer, Thomas G. Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1980.
Earhart, Mary. FrancesWillard: FromPrayers toPolitics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.
Early, Julie English. “Unescorted in Africa: Victorian Women Ethnographers Toiling in the
Fields of Sensational Science.” Journal of American Culture18 (Winter 1995): 67–75.
Elshtain, Jean Bethke. “Coming of Age in America: Why the Attack on Margaret Mead?” Progres-
sive(October 1983): 33–35.
———. “The Feminist Movement and the Question of Equality.” Polity 7 (Summer 1975): 452–
477.
Emmerich, Lisa E. “‘Right in the Midst of My Own People’: Native American Women and the
Field Matron Program.” American Indian Quarterly 15 (Spring 1991): 201–216.
———. “‘To Respect and Love and Seek the Ways of White Women’: Field Matrons, the Office
of Indian Affairs, and Civilization Policy, 1890–1938.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Maryland, 1987.
Epstein, Barbara Leslie. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelismand Temperance in Nineteenth-Century
America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.
Erickson, Nancy S. “Muller V. Oregon Reconsidered: The Origins of a Sex-Based Doctrine of Lib-
erty of Contract.” Labor History 30 (Spring 1989): 228–250.
Fass, Paula S. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920’s. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977.
Fields, Barbara J. “Ideology and Race in American History.” In Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays
in Honor of C. VannWoodward. Ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1982. 143–75.
Fitzpatrick, Ellen. Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1990.
Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: TheWoman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge: Belk-
nap, 1959.
Foerstel, Leonora, and Angela Gilliam, eds. Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy: Scholarship, Empire
and the South Pacific. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.
Frankfort, Roberta. Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America. New York:
New York University Press, 1977.
Freedman, Estelle B. “The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s.” Journal of
American History 61 (September 1974): 372–393.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • 245

———. “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism,

1870–1930.” Feminist Studies5 (Fall 1979): 512–529.
———. Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1981.
Freeman, Derek. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963.
French, Marilyn. TheWar against Women. New York: Summit, 1992.
Furner, Mary O. Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science,
1865–1905. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975.
Gabel, Leona C. FromSlavery tothe Sorbonne and Beyond: The Life andWritings of Anna J. Cooper. Northamp-
ton: Smith College, 1982.
Gaines, Kevin Kelly. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Gann, L. H., and Peter Duignan. The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 1884–1914. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1979.
Giddings, Paula. When andWhere I Enter: The Impact of BlackWomen on Race and Sex in America. New York:
Bantam, 1984.
Gifford, Carolyn DeSwarte. “Home Protection: The WCTU’s Conversion to Woman Suffrage.”
In Gender, Ideology and Action: Historical Perspectives in Women’s Public Lives. Ed. Janet Sharistanian.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. 95–120.
Ginzberg, Lori. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Class, and Politics in the Nineteenth-Century
United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Gordan, Joan, ed., Margaret Mead: The Complete Bibliography, 1925–1975. The Hague: Mouton, 1976.
Gordon, Linda. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Pen-
guin, 1974, 1976.
Gossett, Thomas. Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York: Schocken, 1969.
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1981.
Green, Rayna. “The Pocahantas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture.”
Massachusetts Review16 (1976): 698–714.
Greenwald, Maurine Weiner. “Working-Class Feminism and the Family Wage Ideal: The Seattle
Debate on Married Women’s Right to Work, 1914–1920.” Journal of American History 76 (June
1989): 118–149.
Griffith, Elisabeth. In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1984.
Grimes, Alan P. The Puritan Ethic andWoman Suffrage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Grimshaw, Patricia. Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1989.
Haller, John S., Jr. Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1971.
Haller, Mark. Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in AmericanThought. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1963.
Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, andWomen: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
———. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–36.”
Social Text, no. 11 (Winter 1984–1985): 20–64. Rpt in Donna J. Haraway. Primate Visions: Gender,
Race and Nature in theWorld of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989. 26–58.
Hardesty, Nancy A. Women Called to Witness: Evangelical Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1984.
 246 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harding, Sandra. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Harley, Sharon. “Anna Julia Cooper: A Voice For Black Women,” in The Afro-American Woman:
Struggles and Images. Ed. Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. Port Washington, N.Y.:
Kennikat Press, 1978. 87–96.
Harper, Ida. The Life andWork of Susan B. Anthony. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1899.
Harrison, Cynthia. On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988.
Harrold, Stanley. Gamaliel Bailey and Antislavery Union. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1986.
Hartman, Mary, and Lois W. Banner, eds. Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of
Women. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
Helm, June, ed. Pioneers of American Anthropology. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966.
Hersh, Blanche Glassman. The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1978.
———. “The ‘True Woman’ and the ‘New Woman’ in Nineteenth-Century America: Feminist-
Abolitionists and a New Concept of True Womanhood.” In Woman’s Being, Woman’s Place: Fe-
male Identity andVocation in American History. Ed. Mary Kelley. Boston: Hall, 1979. 271–282.
Hewitt, Nancy A. Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester New York, 1822–1872. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984.
Hewitt, Nancy A., and Suzanne Lebsock, eds. Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism. Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Higham, John. StrangersintheLand:Patternsof AmericanNativism, 1860–1925. NewYork: Atheneum, 1970.
Hill, Mary A. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896. Philadelphia: Tem-
ple University Press, 1980.
Hill, Patricia R. The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural
Transformation, 1870–1920. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985.
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Hodes, Martha. “Wartime Dialogues on Illicit Sex: White Women and Black Men.” In Divided
Houses: Gender and the Civil War. Ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992.
Hoff-Wilson, Joan, ed. Rights of Passage: The Past and Future of the ERA. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1986.
Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinismin AmericanThought. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
Howard, Jean. Margaret Mead: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign toAssimilate the Indians, 1880–1920. Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1984.
Hunter, Jane. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Hutchinson, Louise D. Anna Julia Cooper: A Voice Fromthe South. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian In-
stitution Press, 1981, 1982.
Ignatiev, Noel. Howthe Irish BecameWhite. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Jablonsky, Thomas James. “Duty, Nature and Stability: The Female Anti-Suffragists in the
United States, 1894–1920.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1978.
Jacobson, Matthew. Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish and Jewish Immigrants in the
United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Jones, Beverly W. “Mary Church Terrell and the National Association of Colored Women,
1896–1901.” Journal of NegroHistory 67 (Spring 1982): 20–33.
Jones, Jacqueline. Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • 247

———. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New
York: Basic, 1985.
Judd, Neil M. The Bureau of American Ethnology: A Partial History. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1967.
Kallina, Deborah A. “‘There’s Nothing a Woman Can’t Do If She Undertakes To Do It’: The
Women’s National Indian Association, 1879–1951.” B.A. thesis, Brown University, 1986.
Kaplan, Amy. “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the
Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s.” American Literary History 2 (December 1990): 659–690.
———. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Karcher, Carolyn L. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1994.
Keasy, W. R. “The Lane Seminary Rebellion.” Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio9
(April 1951): 141–160.
Keller, Rosemary Skinner, Louise L. Queen, and Hilah F. Thomas, eds. Women in NewWorlds. 2 vols.
Nashville: Abingdon, 1982.
Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1984.
Kenneally, James J. “The Opposition to Woman Suffrage in Massachusetts, 1868–1920.” Ph.D.
dissertation, Boston College, 1963.
———. “Women and Trade Unions, 1870–1920: The Quandary of the Reformer.” Labor History14
(Winter 1973): 83–91.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences. Louisville: Univer-
sity Press of Kentucky, 1990.
———. “The Just Price, The Free Market, and the Value of Women.” Feminist Studies14 (Summer
1988): 235–250.
———. Out ToWork: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1982.
———. “Women’s Wage Work as Myth and History.” Labor History 19 (Spring 1978): 287–301.
Kilson, Marion. Mary Jane Forbes Greene (1845–1910), Mother of the Japan Mission: An Anthropological Por-
trait. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.
Kraditor, Aileen S. The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1965; 2nd ed., New York: Norton, 1981.
———. “Tactical Problems of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the South.” Louisiana Studies 5
(1966): 289–305.
Krichmar, Albert. The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, 1848–1970: A Bibliography and Source-
book. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972.
Kugler, Israel. From Ladies to Women: The Organized Struggle for Woman’s Rights in the Reconstruction Era.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.
Lamphere, Louise. “Feminist Anthropology: The Legacy of Elsie Clews Parsons.” American Ethnolo-
gist 16 (August 1989): 518–533.
Lane, Ann J. To‘Herland’ and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Pantheon,
1990.
Lanser, Susan S. “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in
America.” Feminist Studies15 (Fall 1989): 415–442.
Leach, William. True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society. New York: Basic,
1980.
Lears, T. J. Jackson. NoPlace of Grace: Antimodernismand theTransformation of American Culture, 1880–1920.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.
 248 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lerner, Gerda. The Grimké Sisters fromSouth Carolina: Pioneers forWoman’s Rights and Abolition. 1st ed., 1967;
New York: Schocken Books, 1978.
Lesnick, Lawrence Thomas. The Lane Rebels: Evangelicalism and Antislavery in Antebellum America.
Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980.
Liestman, Daniel. “To Win Redeemed Souls from Heathen Darkness: Protestant Response to the
Chinese of the Pacific Northwest in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Western Historical Quarterly
24 (1993): 179–201.
Livingston, David N. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science. Tuscaloosa: Univer-
sity of Alabama Press, 1987.
Lubove, Roy. The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880–1930. New York:
Atheneum, 1983.
Lumpkin, Katharine Du Pre. The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1974.
Lunardini, Christine A. From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party,
1910–1928. New York: New York University Press, 1986.
Lutz, Alma. Created Equal: A Biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815–1902. New York: John Day, 1940.
———. Crusade for Freedom: Women of the Antislavery Movement. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.
———. Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959.
Manganaro, Marc, ed. Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork toText. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990.
Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment
in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Mardock, Robert Winston. The Reformers and the American Indian. Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1971.
Mark, Joan. A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1988.
Marshall, Susan E. “In Defense of Separate Spheres: Class and Status Politics in the Antisuffrage
Movement.” Social Forces65 (December 1986): 327–351.
Mathes, Valerie Sherer. Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1990.
———. “Nineteenth Century Women and Reform: The Women’s National Indian Associa-
tion.” American Indian Quarterly 14 (1990): 1–18.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1995.
McPherson, James M. “Abolitionists, Woman Suffrage, and the Negro, 1865–1869.” Mid-America:
An Historical Review47 (January 1965): 40–47.
———. Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Knopf, 1982.
Melder, Keith E. Beginnings of Sisterhood: The American Woman’s Rights Movement, 1800–1850. New York:
Schocken, 1977.
Miller, Stuart C. Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1982.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. ThirdWorldWomen and the Politics
of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Moore, Jenane Madeline. “Bebe Bwana.” American History Illustrated21 (October 1986): 36–42.
Morantz-Sanchez, Regina. “Feminism, Professionalism, and Germs: The Thought of Mary Put-
nam Jacobi and Elizabeth Blackwell.” American Quarterly 34 (Winter 1982): 459–478.
———. Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • 249

Morgan, David. Suffragists and Democrats: The Politics of Woman Suffrage in America. East Lansing: Michi-
gan State University Press, 1972.
Morrison, Toni, and Claudia Brodsky Lacour, eds. Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script and Spectacle in the
O.J. Simpson Case. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
Mosedale, Susan. “Science Corrupted: Victorian Biologists Consider the Woman Question.”
Journal of the History of Biology 11 (Spring 1978): 1–55.
Murray, Stephen O. “On Boasians and Margaret Mead: Reply to Freeman.” Current Anthropology 32
(August–October 1991): 488.
The National Woman Suffrage Association. HowWomanWon It. New York: Wilson, 1940.
Newcomer, Mabel. A Century of Higher Education for AmericanWoman. New York: Harper, 1959.
Noun, Louise R. Strong MindedWomen: The Emergence of theWoman Suffrage Movement in Iowa. Ames: Iowa
State University Press, 1969.
Oakley, Mary Ann B. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Old Westbury Conn.: Feminist Press, 1972.
O’Neill, William L. Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America. Chicago: Quadrangle,
1969.
Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol. New York: Norton, 1996.
———. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919. New York: Norton, 1987.
Papachristou, Judith. “Woman’s Suffrage Movement: New Research and New Perspectives.”
OAH Newsletter(August 1986): 5–8.
Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search For Female Authority in the American West, 1874–1939. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Pearce, Roy Harvey, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953, 1965.
Pomerantz, Linda. “The Chinese Bourgeoisie and the Anti-Chinese Movement in the United
States, 1850–1905.” Amerasia Journal 11 (1984): 1–34.
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900. Nor-
man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976.
Quarles, Benjamin. “Frederick Douglass and the Women’s Rights Movement.” Journal of Negro
History 25 (January 1940): 35–44.
Rabkin, Peggy. Fathers to Daughters: The Legal Foundations of Female Emancipation. New York: Greenwood
Press, 1980.
Rafter, Nicole Hahn. White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919. Boston: Northeastern Uni-
versity Press, 1989.
Rappaport, Ray A. “Desecrating the Holy Woman: Derek Freeman’s Attack on Margaret Mead.”
American Scholar55 (Summer 1986): 313–347.
Reuther, Rosemary Radford, and Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds. Women and Religion in America.
Vol. 1. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981.
Riley, Glenda. Women & Indians on the Frontier, 1825–1915. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1984.
Robinson, Jane. WaywardWomen: A GuidetoWomenTravellers. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York:
Verso, 1991.
———. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working-Class History. London:
Verso, 1994.
Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist, and Louise Lamphere. Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1974.
 250 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rosenberg, Rosalind. Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1982.
———. “The Dissent from Darwin, 1890–1930: A New View of Woman Among American So-
cial Scientists.” Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1974.
Ross, Dorothy. G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
———. The Origins of American Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Russett, Cynthia Eagle. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989.
Ryan, Mary P. Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1990.
Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition.”
Representationsn. 24 (Fall 1988): 28–59.
Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-
Century America. London: Verso Books, 1990.
Sayers, Janet. Biological Politics: Feminist and Anti-Feminist Perspectives. London: Tavistock, 1982.
Scharnhorst, Gary. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985.
———. “Making Her Fame: Charlotte Perkins Gilman in California.” California History 64 (1985):
192–201.
Scott, Anne and Andrew. One Half the People: The Fight forWoman Suffrage. New York: Lippincott, 1975.
Seidman, Steven. “Sexual Attitudes of Victorian and Post-Victorian Women: Another Look at
the Mosher Survey.” Journal of American Studies23 (April 1989): 68–72.
Seller, Maxine. “G. Stanley Hall and Edward Thorndike on the Education of Women: Theory
and Policy in the Progressive Era.” Educational Studies11 (Winter 1981): 365–374.
Shields, Stephanie. “The Variability Hypothesis: The History of a Biological Model of Sex Differ-
ences in Intelligence.” Signs7 (Summer 1982): 769–797.
Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New York: Norton, 1973.
———. “‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation’: American and British Women Compared
at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840.” Pacific Historical Review 59 (1990):
453–499.
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender inVictorian America. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
Smits, David. “The ‘Squaw Drudge’: A Prime Index of Savagism.” Ethnohistory29 (Fall 1982): 281–306.
Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in
America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Spelman, Elizabeth V. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press,
1988.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Sterling, Dorothy. Aheadof HerTime: Abby Kelley andthe Politics of Antislavery. New York: Norton, 1991.
Stevenson, Louise L. “Women Anti-Suffragists in the 1915 Massachusetts Campaign.” NewEngland
Quarterly 52 (1979): 80–93.
Strachey, Ray. FrancesWillard: Her Life andWork. New York: Revell, 1913.
Stocking, Jr., George W. Race, Culture and Evolution. New York: Free Press, 1968.
———. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1987.
Strom, Sharon Hartman. “Leadership and Tactics in the American Woman Suffrage Movement:
A New Perspective from Massachusetts.” Journal of American History 62 (September 1975):
296–315.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY • 251

Takaki, Ronald. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Knopf, 1979.
Tax, Meredith. The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1980.
Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn. “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage.” Ph.D. disserta-
tion, Howard University, 1977.
———. “Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment.” In Decades of Discontent: The Women’s Movement, 1920–1940. Ed. Lois Scharf and
Joan M. Jensen. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. 267–278.
———. “Discrimination Against Afro-American Women in the Women’s Movement,
1830–1920.” In The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images. Ed. Sharon Harley and Rosalyn
Terborg-Penn. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978.
———. “The Historical Treatment of Afro-Americans in the Women’s Movement, 1900–1920.”
A Current Bibliography of African Affairs7 (Summer 1974): 245–259.
———. “Nineteenth Century Black Women and Woman Suffrage.” Potomac Review7 (Spring–
Summer 1977): 13–24.
Thomas, Mary Martha. The NewWoman in Alabama: Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890–1920. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1992.
Thomas, Nicholas. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1994.
Thurner, Manuela. “‘Better Citizens Without the Ballot’: American Antisuffrage Women and
Their Rationale During the Progressive Era.” Journal of Women’s History5 (Spring 1993): 33–60.
Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990.
Trowbridge, Lydia Jones. FrancesWillard of Evanston. Chicago: Willett, Clark, 1938.
Tyrrell, Ian. Woman’sWorld, Woman’s Empire: TheWoman’s ChristianTemperance Union in International Perspec-
tive, 1880–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Utley, Robert M. The Indian Frontier of the AmericanWest 1846–1890. University of New Mexico Press,
1984.
Wade, Richard C. The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and
St. Louis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
Wagner, Sally Roesch. A Time of Protest: Suffragists Challenge the Republic, 1870–1887. Sacramento:
Spectrum, 1987.
Walsh, Mary Roth. “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply”: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession,
1835–1975. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
Wang, L. Ling-Chi. “The Structure of Dual Domination: Toward a Paradigm for the Study of the
Chinese Diaspora in the United States.” Amerasia31 (1995): 149–169.
Wanken, Helen M. “‘Woman’s Sphere’ and Indian Reform: The Women’s National Indian Asso-
ciation, 1879–1901.” Ph.D. dissertation, Marquette University, 1981.
Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History. London: Verso Routledge, Chapman
and Hall, 1992.
Washington, Mary Helen. “A. J. Cooper—The Black Feminist Voice of the 1890s.” Legacy 4 (1987):
3–15.
———. Introduction. A Voice From the South, by a Black Women of the South. By Anna Julia Cooper.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Weinberg, Julius. Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism. Madison: State Historical So-
ciety of Wisconsin, 1972.
Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860.” American Quarterly 18 (Summer
1966): 151–174.
 252 • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. “She Hath Done What She Could: Protestant Women’s Missionary Careers in Nine-
teenth-Century America.” In Women in American Religion. Ed. Janet James. Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1980. 111–125.
Welter, Barbara, ed. TheWoman Question in American History. Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1973.
White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton,
1985.
Williams, Walter L. “United States Indian Policy and the Debate Over Philippine Annexation:
Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism.” Journal of American History 66 (March
1979): 810–831.
Williamson, Joel. NewPeople: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States. New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 1984.
Wolgast, Elizabeth H. Equality and the Rights of Women. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. Women & Sisters: The Anti-Slavery Feminists in American Culture. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989.
 Index

Abbott, Lyman, 124 African American women

abolitionism African American women’s club move-
Catharine Beecher and, 76–78 ment and, 63, 64
Cincinnati and, 75–77 Anthony and, 6
Dodge and, 83 attitudes of toward African American
Angelina Grimké and, 77 men, 6, 9
white women and, 4, 5 domesticity and, 8, 9, 10
abolitionist-suffragists, 18–19, 35, 60–62, 65 evolutionist discourse of civilization and,
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments 8–14, 188n. 22
and, 62–63 Mead and, 176
Addams, Jane, 12, 53, 85 racial purity and, 51
Africa, French-Sheldon’s safari in, 102–15, rights of, 35
104 fig. as suffragists, 63–64, 200n. 28
African American men white culture stigmatizing, 6
Anthony and, 3–6 white women and, 19
attitudes of African American women to- women’s movement and, 6–10
ward, 6, 9 Agassiz, Louis, 30, 47
franchise to, 2, 3–5, 6, 28, 46, 56–57, 59, 60, American Anti-Slavery Society, 77
62–65, 83, 199n. 23 American Women Suffrage Association
woman suffrage and, 3, 4, 6, 63, 200n. 28 (AWSA), 63
women’s movement and, 3–6 Ames, Azel, 10, 87, 95–96, 97, 98, 99
African Americans Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett, 91
assimilation of, 42, 43 fig., 46, 47–50, 55, 133, Anthony, Susan B., 3, 4, 6, 60, 63, 65, 81, 141, 184
135, 136, 197n. 108 anthropology. SeeMead, Margaret
See alsoAfrican American men; African antisuffragism, 56, 69–85, 70 fig.
American women; race antidemocratic sentiments of, 73, 202n. 72

253
 254 • NDEX

antisuffragism, (continued) Boas, Franz, 158, 161

Catharine Beecher and, 72, 73–74, 75–79 Boisseau, Tracey, 19
Dodge and, 73–74, 79–85, 204nn. 101, 102, Bonney, Mary Lucinda, 120, 121
104, 205n. 122 Brackett, Anna Callender, 93
protection and, 84–85 Bradbury, Harriet B., 182
race and, 73–85 Brandeis, Louis, 99
sexual differences and, 55 Brashere, Ora, 40–41
Armstrong, M. F., Mrs., 167–69 breast-feeding, 178–80
Armstrong, Samuel, 167, 168, 174 Bronson, Minnie, 72
assimilation, 29, 36, 42–52, 182 Bruce, Tammy, 184
of African Americans, 42, 43 fig., 46, 47–50, Brumberg, Joan Jacobs, 7, 34, 193n. 52
55, 133, 135, 136, 197n. 108 Buchanan, Joseph Rodes, 22–23
of Chinese, 46–47, 135, 136, 139, 152–54 Buffon, George Louis Leclerc, 95
commodity racism and, 24 Burnet, Jacob, 76
elimination of sexual differences and, Burroughs, Nannie, 64
132–57 Butler, Nellie, 112, 141
imperialism and, 15, 42–52, 43 fig., 44 fig.,
45 fig., 150 fig. Cameron, Donaldina, 8
of Indians, 46, 47, 51–52, 116–33, 173, 215n. Carby, Hazel, 7, 19, 35
18, 216n. 40 Carlisle Institute, 24, 117, 118, 120, 121
of Philippines, 43 fig., 44 fig., 45 fig., 128, 182 Cary, Mary Ann, 63
racial differences and, 42–52, 43 fig., 44 fig., Catholic Church, 11, 29
45 fig., 132–57 Catt, Carrie Chapman, 85
suffragists and, 56 Caucasians, as white race, 11
white women and, 20 Chandler, Elizabeth, 61–62
See alsoMead, Margaret Channing, William E., 58
Association for the Advancement of Women charity organization movement, 54
(AAW), 72, 122 Chase, Samuel P., 76
Child, Lydia Maria, 32, 36–37, 60, 65, 199n. 18
Bailey, Gamaliel, 79–80 Chinese
Baker, C. Alice, 93 assimilation of, 46–47, 135, 136, 139, 152–54
Baldwin, James, 174, 175 whites versus, 28
Baptists, missionary movement and, 193n. 52 white women and, 8, 12
Barnard, Kate, 72 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 47, 60
Barnard College, 72, 73 Chinese Mission Home (San Francisco), 12
Bascom, John, 207n. 30 Chira, Susan, 178–80
Beard, Mary, 154 Christianity
Bederman, Gail, 19, 34, 69, 134, 139–40 missionary activities and, 23, 28, 34, 52, 53,
Beecher, Catharine, 72, 73–74, 75–79, 88, 139 72, 154, 166–69, 193n. 52
Beecher, Henry, 77 sexual differences and, 34
Beecher, Lyman, 76, 139 church groups, 28
Benedict, Ruth, 156, 161 Cincinnati, Ohio, 75–76, 203n. 80
Birney, James, 76, 77 Cincinnati Colonization Society, 76
birth rates. Seefertility civilization–work, 8–10, 12, 13 fig., 14, 20,
Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, 39, 40, 93 23–24, 25 fig., 26–27, 27 fig., 34, 52–55,
Blackwell, Denny, 184 166, 182
Blackwell, Henry, 63 French-Sheldon African safari and, 102–15,
Blaine, James G., 80, 204n. 102 104 fig.
 †NDEX • 255

with immigrants, 8, 12, 23, 53 Davis, Jefferson, Mrs., 15

imperialism and, 144, 145–47, 148, 151, 182 Dawes, Henry L., 121
Indian reform movement, 8, 116–31, Dawes Act of 1887, 60, 117, 121, 122, 124, 125,
215n. 18, 216n. 40 216n. 40
with Indians, 12, 24, 25 fig., 53, 197n. 108 (see Deland, Margaret, 73
alsoIndian reform movement) Dickinson, Mary Lowe, 36–37, 53, 194n. 61
missionary activities, 8, 23, 28, 34, 52, 53, 72, Di Leonardo, Micaela, 177, 178, 180
103, 154, 166–69, 193n. 52 Dodge, Mary Abigail, 73–74, 79–85, 130,
settlement houses, 8, 23, 53 204nn. 101, 102, 104, 205n. 122
with urban poor, 53 Dollard, John, 175–76
civil rights, women’s movement and, 3–6 domesticity, 182
Civil War African American women and, 8, 9, 10
missionary movement and, 34, 193n. 52 Catharine Beecher and, 74, 75–79
women’s movement and, 26–28 Coolidge and, 156
Clarke, Edward H., 31, 86, 87–89, 91–95, 152, Fletcher and, 129
155, 162, 207n. 27 Gilman and, 135–36, 141
Clinton, Catherine, 26 primitives and, 129–31
coeducation. Seehigher education for white women and, 8, 9, 10, 14
women Douglass, Frederick, 3, 4, 63, 184
college education. Seehigher education for Downing, George T., 63
women DuBois, Ellen, 17
Collins, Mary, 129 Duffey, Eliza Bisbee, 88, 91, 93, 94, 208n. 33
colonization. Seeimperialism
Colonization Society, 78 East Africa, French-Sheldon’s safari in, 102–15,
Colorado Cottage Home, 12 104 fig.
Coman, Katharine, 23 education. Seehigher education for women
Comfort, Anna Manning, 93 egalitarian arguments
Comfort, George Fish, 93 white women and, 20
commodity racism, 23–24 woman suffrage and, 18
Commonwealth v. Hamilton Mfg. Company, 99, Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 225n. 48
209nn. 49, 50 Ely, Richard T., 22
Congregationalists, missionary movement employment of women, after Civil War,
and, 193n. 52 27–28. See alsolabor legislation for
Coolidge, Mary Roberts Smith, 20, 65, 81, 82, women
93, 131, 132, 133–39, 141, 149 fig., 152–56, Equal Rights Amendment, 85, 100–101
162, 182–83, 221n. 80 Equal Rights Association, 62
Cooper, Anna Julia, 9, 35, 51 Erickson, Nancy, 99, 209nn. 48, 50
Cope, Edward D., 54 ethnocentrism. Seewhite supremacy
Coppin, Fannie Jackson, 35 ethnography, 159, 160, 178, 180, 226n. 50. See
Corbin, Caroline Fairfield, 70–71, 72 alsoFletcher, Alice; French-Sheldon,
Cott, Nancy, 17–18 May; Mead, Margaret
Crane, Alice, 129 eugenics, 30, 43, 45, 138, 148, 159
cultural relativism. SeeMead, Margaret Evans, Margaret, 57
Custer, George, 122 evolution
assimilation and, 42–52, 43 fig., 44 fig.,
Dall, Caroline, 84, 88, 91, 93, 96, 97–98 45 fig.
Darwin, Charles, 17, 29, 30, 41, 50–51 civilization-work and, 53–55
Davidson, Olivia, 9 sexual differences and, 30–34, 57, 192n. 35
 256 • ‡NDEX

evolution (continued) Gay, Jane, 127

suffragists and, 56, 57, 58 General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 101
white women’s civilization-work and, George, Alice N., 72
52–55 Gilder, Jeanette L., 72
women’s rights and, 22–55 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 17, 20, 40, 51, 81,
working classes and, 54 131, 132, 133–48, 149 fig., 151, 152, 156,
See alsosocial evolutionary discourses 162, 182–83, 219nn. 48, 53, 220n. 72
explorer, woman as. SeeFrench-Sheldon, May Gilman, Sander, 29
Goldmark, Josephine, 99
Farmers’ Alliances, 29 Goodale, Elaine, 119, 215n. 14
feminism, 181, 185. See alsoCoolidge, Mary Goodin, Grace, 73
Roberts Smith; Gilman, Charlotte Gordon, Linda, 138
Perkins; Mead, Margaret; women’s Grand, Sarah, 36
movement; women’s rights Grimké, Angelina, 60, 75, 77, 203n. 88
fertility Grimké, Sarah, 33, 60
of immigrants, 89, 206n. 12 gynaecocentric theory, 50–51, 143–44,
of white women, 15, 31, 88–89, 90 fig., 91 196n. 94
fig., 144, 145, 148, 149 fig., 156, 207n. 27
Fifteenth Amendment Hale, Beatrice Forbes-Roberston, 132, 183
African American male franchise and, 3–4, Hall, G. Stanley, 31, 92, 162, 223n. 12
5, 6, 62–65, 199n. 23 Hamilton, Gail. SeeDodge, Mary Abigail
African American women on, 6 Hammond, Charles, 76, 77
suffragists and, 60 Hammond, William, 207n. 30
Fletcher, Alice Cunningham, 26–27, 53, 103, Hampton Institute, 24, 117, 118, 120, 121, 167,
104 fig., 117, 118, 119, 121–31, 133, 134, 168
141, 151, 159, 162, 173, 174, 180, 182, Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 5, 35, 63
215n. 14 Hartford Female Seminary, 72, 74
Forten, Charlotte, 83 Hayes, Rutherford, 121
Fourteenth Amendment Henry, Alice, 208n. 39
African American male franchise and, 3–4, Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 63, 91, 93,
5, 62–65, 199n. 23 138, 155
African American women on, 6 higher education for women, 15, 28, 31, 86
labor legislation and, 98 Catharine Beecher and, 72
suffragists and, 60 protection and, 86–89, 90 fig., 91–95,
franchise. Seesuffrage 206n. 8, 207nn. 27, 30, 208n. 33
Frankenberg, Ruth, 19, 181 Hofstadter, Richard, 29
Freedmen’s Bureau, 8, 26 Hogsett, Charlotte, 30
Freeman, Derek, 177 Holmes, Lizzie, 40, 101
French-Sheldon, May, 102–15, 104 fig., 141, Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 89, 145
159, 174, 182 Howe, Julia Ward, 3, 6, 60, 63, 87, 91, 92,
Friedan, Betty, 177 94–95, 122, 155
Hull House, 23
Gage, Frances Matilde, 35–36, 61 Hunter, Jane, 19
Gaines, Kevin, 10 Hunton, Addie, 6
Galton, Francis, 43
Gamble, Eliza B., 41 Ignatiev, Noel, 19
Garfield, James, 46 immigrants, 15
Garrett, Philip, 124 antisuffragism and, 73, 200n. 72
 ˆNDEX • 257

birth rates of, 89, 206n. 12 Jim Crow, 47

as citizens, 59, 60 Johnson, Helen Kendrick, 72
racial conflicts and, 28 Jordan, David Starr, 28–29
restriction on, 43, 46, 47, 144
white women’s civilization-work with, 8, Karcher, Carolyn, 19
12, 23, 53 Kelley, Abby, 62, 184
imperialism, 182, 185 Kelley, Florence, 85, 96, 208n. 39
assimilation and, 15, 42–52, 43 fig., 44 fig., Kiernan, Louise, 181
45 fig., 150 fig. Kinney, Sara, 118
civilization-work and, 144, 145–47, 148, 151, Kirkland, Caroline, 88
182 Kraditor, Aileen, 17, 18
French-Sheldon’s African safari and,
102–15, 104 fig. labor legislation for women, protection and,
Mead and, 173 86, 87, 95–99, 208nn. 37, 39, 209nn. 45, 46,
race and, 14–17, 16 fig. 48–50, 210n. 52, 211nn. 53, 55
white women and, 14–17, 16 fig., 19–20 La Flesche, Francis, 121, 122, 123, 126–27, 141
Indian Allotment Act. SeeDawes Act of 1887 La Flesche, Joseph, 123
Indian reform movement, 8, 116–33, 173, 182, La Flesche, Suzette, 121, 122
215n. 18, 216n. 40 Lake Mohonk Conferences of Friends of the
Indian Rights Association, 121 Indian, 121, 124
Indians Lane Seminary, 76
army subjugating, 28 Lanser, Susan, 137
assimilation of, 46, 47, 51–52 Le Bon, Gustave, 12
Catharine Beecher and, 75 Lebsock, Suzanne, 17
reform movement and, 8, 116–33, 173, 182, Leonard, Clara, 72
215n. 18, 216n. 40 Little Big Horn, 122
white women’s civilization-work with, 12, Livermore, Mary, 122
24, 25 fig., 53, 197n. 108 Longfellow, Samuel, 33
Indian Treaty-Keeping Protective Associa- Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 53, 98
tion, 120 Lubbock, John, 30
Industrial Christian Home (Salt Lake City), Lyman, Herbert, Mrs., 72
12 Lyman, Ruth, 71
industry, women working in after Civil War,
27–28. See alsolabor legislation for McClintock, Anne, 11, 23
women McLoughlin Brothers, 24, 25 fig.
International Council of Women, 72 Mann, Horace, Mrs., 93
interracial marriage Mark, Joan, 122–23, 128
Anthony on, 4 Mason, Otis T., 17, 22, 51–52, 118–19, 197n. 99
Dodge on, 83 Massachusetts Association Opposed to the
See alsomiscegenation Further Extension of Suffrage to
Ireland, Patricia, 184 Women, 71
Irish Catholics, inferiority of, 11 Mead, Margaret, 105, 127, 131, 156–57, 158–80,
183, 222nn. 2, 3, 223n. 15, 224n. 39,
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 120, 215n. 14 225nn. 45, 48
Jackson, Mercy B., 91, 93–94 Methodists, missionary movement and,
Jacobi, Mary Putnam, 151, 155 193n. 52
Jacobson, Matthew, 19 Meyer, Annie Nathan, 72, 73
Jews, social evolutionary theory on, 11 Minor v. Happersett, 198n. 13
 258 • ‰NDEX

M’Intire, Mary A. M., 69–70 Pascoe, Peggy, 19

miscegenation, 36 patriarchy, 182
Dodge on, 83 African American women and, 6, 8, 10
eugenics and, 46 feminism and, 185
evolution and, 29, 47, 49 Gilman and, 137–38, 151
imperialism and, 16 fig., 16–17 white women and, 6, 8, 10, 14, 19, 26, 33, 36
missionary activities and, 166–67 woman suffrage and, 36
Ward on, 49, 196n. 89 See alsoprotection
Willard on, 68–69 Paul, Alice, 6
missionary activities, 8, 23, 28, 34, 52, 53, 72, Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 93
103, 154, 166–69, 193n. 52 Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, 77
Mitchell, Maria, 122 Philippines, 145
Montgomery, Helen, 53 assimilation and, 43 fig., 44 fig., 45 fig., 128,
Morgan, Henry Lewis, 30 182
motherhood Pitts, Helen, 4, 184
Catharine Beecher and, 74, 75–79 politics
Mead and, 175 Catharine Beecher and, 72, 73–74, 75–79
Mott, Lucretia, 26, 32 as competitive and corrupt business, 59–60
Muller v. Oregon, 99, 209n. 48, 211n. 55 Dodge and, 73–74, 79–85
multiculturalism, 185 See alsoprotection
Poovey, Mary, 60
National American Woman Suffrage Associa- Popular Science Monthly, 29, 58, 140
tion, 64, 143 Populism, 29
National Association for the Advancement of postbellum suffragists, 18, 19
Colored People (NAACP), 6 Powdermaker, Hortense, 165
National Association of Colored Women, 6, prejudice, Mead and, 175
8–9 Presbyterians, missionary movement and, 34,
National Association Opposed to Woman 193n. 52
Suffrage, 71 primitives, 181
National Consumers’ League, 101 blackness linked with, 7
National Council of Negro Women, 6 civilized races versus, 34
National Council of Women, 72, 116, 129–30 protection of (seecivilization-work;
National Negro Race Conference, 6 French-Sheldon, May; Indian reform
National Organization for Women (NOW), 184 Movement)
National Woman’s Christian Temperance sexual differences and, 31, 132, 133–48
Union (NWCTU), 12, 53, 66, 100, sexuality and, 166–69, 169 fig., 170 fig.,
100 fig., 154 171 fig., 172 fig.
National Woman’s Party, 6, 100–101 white women and, 42
National Woman’s Rights Convention (1860), 33 See alsoassimilation; civilization-work; im-
National Woman Suffrage Association perialism; Mead, Margaret
(NWSA), 63, 81 protection, 86–101, 100 fig.
National Woman’s Trade Union League, 101 antisuffragism and, 84–85
Native Americans. SeeIndians higher education and, 86–89, 90 fig., 91–95,
Newman, Angie, 12 207nn. 27, 30, 208n. 33
Nineteenth Amendment, 84–85 labor legislation for women and, 86, 87,
95–99, 208nn. 37, 39, 209nn. 45, 46, 48–50,
Painter, Nell, 35 210n. 52, 211nn. 53, 55
Parsons, Elsie Clews, 156, 183 Mead and, 174–75
 ŠNDEX • 259

Nineteenth Amendment and, 85 women’s rights and, 39–41

of primitives (seecivilization-work; French- See alsomiscegenation
Sheldon, May; Indian reform move- racism
ment) commodity, 23–24
woman suffrage and, 100, 100 fig. feminism and, 185
Protestantism of women’s movement, 6–10
Catholicism versus, 11 Red Cross, 26
missionary movement and, 34, 193n. 52 religion, social evolutionary discourses and, 11
woman’s rights and, 33 See alsomissionary activities
Purvis, Harriet, 63 Richie v. People, 99, 210n. 52
Purvis, Robert, 3–4, 63 Robinson, Catherine, 72
Putnam-Jacobi, Mary, 64, 65, 93 Roediger, David, 19
Romanes, George J., 207n. 30
Quakers, woman’s rights and, 32, 33 Roosevelt, Theodore, 144, 145, 147, 149 fig.
Quinton, Amelia Stone, 116, 117, 118, 119, Rosenberg, Rosalind, 154
120, 121 Ross, Edward A., 16, 140, 143, 144–45, 146, 147,
152, 219n. 48, 219n. 53, 220n. 56
race Rosser, Sue, 30
antisuffragism and, 73–85 Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre, 8–9, 63
Catharine Beecher and, 72, 73–74, 75–79 Russett, Cynthia, 26
Dodge and, 73–74, 79–85
higher education for women and, 86–89, Sanitary Commission, 26, 28
90 fig., 91–95, 207nn. 27, 30, 208n. 33 Schurz, Carl, 15
imperialism and, 14–17, 16 fig. Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, 3, 26, 57–58
sexual differences and, 35–36, 194n. 58 settlement house movement, 8, 23, 53
social evolutionary discourses and, 8–14, sexual differences
20, 188n. 22 abolition of, 183
suffrage and, 57–59, 60–69 antisuffragists and, 55
woman suffrage and, 17–18, 39–40 elimination of, 132–57
women’s rights and, 17–19 evolution and, 26, 29, 30–34, 57, 192n. 35
See alsounderAfrican American higher education for women and, 86–89,
race suicide, 144, 145, 148, 149 fig. 90 fig., 91–95, 207nn. 27, 30, 208n. 33
racial conflict labor legislation for women and, 86, 87,
Cincinnati and, 76–77, 203n. 80 95–99, 208nn. 37, 39, 209nn. 45, 46, 48–50,
urbanization and, 28 210n. 52, 211nn. 53, 55
racial differences Mead and, 161–62, 164–65, 166
assimilation and, 42–52, 43 fig., 44 fig., primitives and, 31, 132, 133–48
45 fig., 132–57 race and, 35–36, 194n. 58
Dodge and, 82–83 suffrage and, 55, 57, 58–59, 198n. 13
evolution and, 29–31, 34 white women and, 10
Indian reform movement and, 116–31, woman suffrage and, 18
215n. 18, 216n. 40 women’s movement and, 18
in women, 35–36, 194n. 58 women’s rights and, 30–34, 39–42, 192n. 35,
See alsoMead, Margaret 195n. 73
racial purity, 49 sexuality
African American women and, 51 Mead on, 160–61, 163–64, 165, 169, 223n. 15
white women and, 36–37, 38 fig., 50–51, primitives and, 166–69, 169 fig., 170 fig.,
196n. 94, 197n. 99 171 fig., 172 fig.
 260 • ‹NDEX

Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 26, 47–49, 55 Sumner, William Graham, 54, 98

Simpson, O. J., 184 Supreme Court
Singer Sewing Machine, 44 fig. on labor legislation, 98, 99, 209nn. 46, 48,
Sitting Bull, 122, 123, 128 211n. 55
Sklar, Kathryn Kish, 74 on sexual differences, 198n. 13
Sklar, Martin, 209n. 46
slavery, white women and, 60–62. See also temperance movement, 23, 53, 72
abolitionism; abolitionist-suffragists Terrell, Mary Church, 9, 64, 200n. 28
Smiley, Albert, 121 Terrell, Robert H., 5–6
Smith, Gerrit, 62 Thomas, M. Carey, 92
social Darwinism, 23. See alsosocial evolution- Thomas, Nicholas, 158, 222n. 7, 223n. 17
ary discourses Thomas, William I., 34
social evolutionary discourses, 22, 181–82 Tibbles, Thomas H., 121, 122
African American women versus white Truth, Sojourner, 35–36, 36, 61, 63
women and, 8–14, 188n. 22 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 147
elimination of sexual differences and, Tylor, Edward, 30
132–57 Tyrrell, Ian, 66
race and, 8–14, 20, 188n. 22
religious hierarchies and, 11 university education. Seehigher education for
See alsoprotection women
Spanish-Cuban-Filipino-American War of urbanization, racial conflicts and, 28
1898–1902, 15, 128 urban poor, white women’s civilization-
Spencer, Herbert, 17, 29, 30–31, 39, 40, 50, 140, work with, 53
145, 146, 192n. 35
Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 80 Veblen, Thorstein, 16, 143, 144, 145–46
Standing Bear, 120–21, 122
Stanley, Henry Morton, 103, 107–8 Walker, Francis A., 89, 206n. 12
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Wallace, Alfred Russel, 30
African American male franchise and, 3, 4, Ward, Lester F., 17, 47, 49–51, 55, 140, 143–44,
5, 6, 62, 63, 64, 65, 184 145, 196nn. 90, 94, 219n. 48
Anthony and, 141 warfare, Gilman on, 148
civilization-work and, 52 Washington, Booker T., 5
education and, 68 Weld, Thomas, 76
evolution and, 39 Wells, Ida B., 5, 9, 35, 66, 68–69
race and, 19, 57–58, 66, 151, 155 Wells, Kate Gannett, 71, 72, 73
Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and, 26 Welsh, Herbert, 121
sexual differences and, 33, 56 Welter, Barbara, 32
slavery and, 60 Western Female Institute, 76
Stepan, Nancy Leys, 29 Wexler, Laura, 19
Stevenson, Louise, 71 White, Frances Emily, 41–42
Stocking, George W., Jr., 46 white men, concern of over racial purity,
Stone, Lucy, 3, 63 36–37, 38 fig.
Stowe, Calvin, 76–77 white supremacy, assimilation and, 132–57.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 74, 76–77, 139 See alsoMead, Margaret
suffrage, to African American men, 2, 3–5, 6,
28, 46, 56–57, 59, 60, 62–65, 83, 199n. 23. white women
See alsoabolitionist-suffragists; antisuf- abolitionism and, 4, 5
fragism; woman suffrage African American women and, 19
 ŒNDEX • 261

assimilation and, 20 protection and, 100, 100 fig.

domesticity and, 8, 9, 10, 14 race and, 17–18, 39–40, 57–59, 60–69
employment of, 28 regional differences and, 58–59
fertility of, 15, 31, 88–89, 90 fig. 91 fig., 144, sexual differences and, 18, 55, 57, 198n. 13
145, 148, 149 fig., 156, 207n. 27 sisterhood and uplift and, 60–62, 199n. 18
imperialism and, 14–17, 16 fig., 19–20 superior moral character of women and, 39
moral superiority of, 7–8, 10, 12, 19, 39 (see See alsoantisuffragism
alsocivilization-work) women’s history, WhyWomenAreSoand, 154, 155
nature of, 32–33, 34–35, 39, 40, 194n. 58 women’s movement, 150 fig., 181
patriarchy and, 6, 8, 10, 14, 19, 26, 33, 36 African American women and, 6–10
primitive women and, 42 civil rights and, 3–6
protection by (seeFrench-Sheldon, May; Civil War and, 26–28
Indian reform movement) racism of, 6–10
protection of (seehigher education for sexual differences and, 18
women; labor legislation for women) Women’s National Indian Association
racial purity and, 36–37, 38 fig., 50–51, (WNIA), 26, 53, 117, 118, 119–20, 121,
196n. 94, 197n. 99 133, 137
sexual differences and, 10 women’s rights, 181
social evolutionary discourse of civilization African American women and, 35
and, 8–14, 30, 188n. 22 antebellum, 22–55
social policy and, 57 antisuffragists and, 71–73
against suffrage (seeantisuffragism) evolution and, 22–55
theological conception of, 32–34 higher education and, 86–89, 90 fig., 91–95,
working-class women and, 19, 23 207nn. 27, 30, 208n. 33
See alsocivilization-work; woman suffrage historiography of, 17–19
Wiegman, Robyn, 3, 20 labor legislation for women and, 86, 87,
Wilbur, Julia, 65 95–99, 208nn. 37, 39, 209nn. 45, 46, 48–50,
Willard, Emma, 88 210n. 52, 211nn. 53, 55
Willard, Frances, 53, 66, 67 fig., 68–69, 71, racial purity and, 36–37, 38 fig., 39–41
100 fig., 116–17, 119, 129, 130, 151, 154, 155 sexual differences and, 30–34, 39–42, 192n.
Williams, Fannie C., 102, 103, 105 35, 195n. 73
Woman’s Education Association of Boston, 72 See alsowoman suffrage
Woman’s Municipal League, 71 Wood, George, 81
woman suffrage, 14, 15, 154 Woolson, Abba Goold, 33, 39
abolitionist-suffragists and, 18–19, 35, working classes
60–63, 65 antisuffragism and, 73
African American men’s attitude toward, evolution and, 54
3, 4, 6, 63, 200n. 28 working class women
African American suffragists and, 63–64, protection of (seelabor legislation for
200n. 28 women)
assimilation and, 56 white women and, 19, 23
civilization-work and, 52, 53 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago,
evolution and, 56, 57, 58 1893), 7, 103, 104 fig.
moral superiority of women and, 59–60 World’s Congress of Representative Women, 7
patriarchy and, 36 Wright, Nathaniel, 76
politics as competitive and corrupt and,
59–60 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 18, 19, 61
postbellum, 18, 19 Youmans, Edward Livingston, 29