White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (review)

White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States. By LOUISE MICHELE NEWMAN. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 . Pp. 304 . $19 .95 (paper).

Louise Michele Newman has written a book on the racial origins of nineteenth-century feminism in the United States that will anger many white feminists, both in the university and beyond, because, I suspect, they will see how white feminism today remains tied to the social evolutionary discourse that Newman implicates in the justification of nineteenth-century American imperialism abroad and racial hierarchy at home.

Through a detailed and clever analysis, Newman reveals how white women's rights proponents of a century ago viewed their work as part of a larger "civilizing mission" where converting savages to "Christianity" meant "Americanizing" Indians and uplifting Negroes and other non-whites. Because this mission was underpinned by assumptions of white superiority and victimization of people of color, the ideology of racism cast the black woman, for example, in the role of "debased victim," while portraying the free white woman in the role of "an empowered, sanctified uplifter."

Suffragists had much in common with missionaries, viewing themselves as superior human beings. Like their American compatriots, suffragists held anti-democratic and racist views toward immigrants and people of color in general. Of course, such sentiments were characteristic of white American society at the time, just as they are today. But it is instructive to read how white women and whiteness as an ideology shaped the suffrage movement as much as its opposition. Thus Newman explains how Catherine Beecher and Mary Abigail Dodge, two famous antisuffragists, shared with their suffragist opponents a "determination to create political roles for white women that would maintain white civilization and advance the race" (p. 75 )--the kind of political roles that would keep people of color in an oppressed and exploitable condition.

Newman underscores how the role of missionary did not merely reflect the racist origins of American culture. Practically, white suffragists used the role to escape the oppressive, domesticated conditions that came with their status as white, middle-class women. Ideologically, they argued that patriarchy was limiting their capacities as civilizers. They, too, could participate successfully in the colonial enterprise. Imperialism, in other words, was something white women could practice as effectively as white men.

In 1891 , May French-Sheldon, a forty-four-year-old American woman, undertook a three-month safari into a remote region of East Africa. She traveled as any rich white imperialist male would have: with wicker chairs, silk curtains, servants, silver cutlery, and linen tablecloths. The press feted her around the Western world as a heroine. She had demonstrated, like white men before her, the superiority of white civilization.

As Newman makes clear, French-Sheldon's success as an exemplar of liberated womanhood "was due directly to her deployment of whiteness within a master narrative of colonial domination, which authorized her to embody, for at least three generations of American women, what was best in white civilization" (p. 105 ).

Accomplishing what white men accomplished was a coveted goal for white feminists of the time. Thus white women embraced the evangelical mission to convert the heathen. At home, the "Indian problem" was reconceived, as Newman skillfully reveals, as a "Woman Question." Indian women were cast as saviors of their race and thus agents of the civilizing mission.

But this surface solidarity actually reinforced the superiority of white civilization. White women decided what Indian women should be and how they should proceed. While at work in the fields of the Lord, white female reformers furthered American imperialism. As Newman concludes, "In the end, the main beneficiaries of this civilizing work were white women themselves . . . their work among Indians brought white women great public visibility and political power" (p. 119 ).

Assimilationist policies, entrenchment of patriarchal gender roles, and an absolute belief in...