Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917University of Chicago Press, 1996 - 307 pages When former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement on the fourth of July, 1910 to fight current black heavywight champion Jack Johnson in Reno, Nevada, he boasted that he was doing it "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro." Jeffries, though, was trounced. Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, Gail Bederman demonstrates, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance. In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans—Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve. |
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adolescent boys adolescent races advanced civilization African Americans Anglo-Saxon antifeminist antilynching argued barbarism British Brute Charlotte Perkins Gilman civiliza civilized manliness civilized races civilized white civilized women Columbian Exposition culinity cultural danger depicted discourse of civilization energy evolution evolutionary evolved female feminine feminism feminist gender Gilman Hall believed Hall's human ideologies insisted Jack Johnson Jeffries Lady Managers linked lynch law lynch mobs male body male power manly self-restraint masculine passions masturbation Memphis men's middle-class millennial moral natural Negro rapist nervous force neurasthenic paradox overcivilized powerful manhood primal rapist primitive masculinity racial advancement racial recapitulation rape recapitulation theory savagery Sedgwick sexual difference sexuo-economic Southern white Stanley Hall super-man tion traits uncivilized unmanly Victorian violence virile weak white Americans White City white male white man's white races white supremacy white women woman Woman's Building woman's sphere womanhood womanliness Women and Economics World's Columbian Exposition