White Women's Rights by Newman Louise Michele;

Author:Newman, Louise Michele; [Newman, Louise Michele;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0195086929
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 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.”

FIGURE 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.

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 system of 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 civilized 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 individual 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 responsibility 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 dismissal 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 freedom that it produced—was, for Gilman, an example

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