Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917

A fine set of case studies, this book elucidates Foucault's often opaque method of discourse analysis. Some of the analysis got repetitive, but for the most part the histories were fascinating, especially those of Jack Johnson, Ida B. Wells, the Columbian expo in Chicago, and G. Stanley Hall. The author demonstrates convincingly how the discourse of "civilization" interacts with the discourses of gender (i.e., manliness/masculinity) and of race, as well as how that interaction evolves over time.

I have a fascination with eras I would hate to live in (well some aspects I like but in general I would hate). This book is centered around ideas of masculinity in the late 19th century and early 20th. Most of the intellectual detritus at least the dominating bulk of the intellectual zeitgeist is terrible stuff. The racism, weird Social Darwinist ideas, prudery, violence, militarism, and sexism seemed to be at a local apogee. This book is about these ideas and the nexus around the idea of masculinity. My mind has been turning on this nub for most of my life since adolescence. I played along with masculine norms (mostly out of social cowardice) for my adult life but the resentment of playing this masquerade was building. Anyway, I read this a few years back on the social construction of ideals of masculinity on a very shaky biological foundation. Examining these values I had a sort of Nietzschean transvaluation of values and instead of becoming an ubermensch I decided to become a transwoman and this book was helpful in intellectualizing something I wanted to criticize and abandon for a long time. Excellent analysis and the material is funny because the nature and the form of the ideal of masculinity presented are so risible in the turn of the 20th century.

Very interesting work, more of a school type but still some fun parts about Teddy Roosevelt and the first black boxing Champion, Jack Johnson...very good stuff on him. I do not however believe many of her ideas, but her research is sound.

This is a good work of history that makes good points, but like some other recent(ish) historical works — thinking Herf’s “Reactionary Modernism” here — suffers somewhat from its own success, read twenty-five years after its release. It has somewhat an inversion of Herf’s problem: his book’s title became almost a cliche, but the arguments within it are varied enough to reach beyond the cliche. Bederman’s work constitutes a substantial pick-blow in the excavation of the sheer weirdness of the white world between 1870 and the outbreak of WWI. None of her phrases or ideas became cliches, and “Manliness and Civilization” still represents vital work, but the text itself tends towards a repetitive thesis-heavy show-and-tell. It probably doesn’t help that Bederman was publishing a decade or so after Herf, which is to say, a decade further into academia’s slide into caution and irrelevance. This was probably Bederman’s dissertation and those are generally cautious and schematic.

Wow! I’m making “Manliness and Civilization” sound bad, and also not saying what it’s about. It’s not bad! It’s good. And it’s about the extended freakout around race and gender that overtook the white bourgeoisie throughout the world in the last third of the nineteenth century, and running into the early twentieth. White men were in decline, people started thinking. They were under siege, supposedly, from the “lower races,” the lower classes, women, and most of all, their own comfort and prosperity. No more could manliness be understood as the sort of relatively sober-sided dispensation of responsibility. No, it had to get aggressive. It had to get primal! It had to rebuke femininity and softness and be outwardly aggressive. In many ways, we live with the masculinity we inherited from this period- it probably helps that mass culture as we know it came about during its high tide. The specifics fade in and out, or soft pedaled and hard-sold depending on circumstances, but the core is still there.

The great thought-worlds of the bourgeoisie draw strength from interactivity and choice-opportunities. I wouldn’t call the big bourgeois freakout “great” as in “good” but it was “great” as in “important and generative.” There was no one set way to participate in the freakout, to combine and recombine the elements. With education and platform, you could do what you wanted with them. Bederman discusses how four important cultural figures played with the central lineaments of the freakout.

Black journalist Ida B. Wells used racialized ideas of civilization to combat lynching. How can white men claim to have a monopoly on civilization (as they now did- earlier variants of civilization-thought were usually also racist but more involved) when they did such notably uncivilized things to black people? Psychologist Stanley Hall got in trouble for telling Chicago schoolteachers they had to let their boy children act like “savages,” on the basis of some needlessly complicated bullshit about how boys act out the racial past of their various races, and if they don’t, they get “neurasthenia” i.e. sad, soft, and potentially gay? Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of high school classic “The Yellow Wallpaper,” was apparently a racist psycho who thought that she had to stay unmarried so she could focus on uplifting the race, and that the problem with sexism is that it didn’t let women like her advance the white race? And of course, there’s Teddy Roosevelt, who LARPed his idea of white manhood all the way from a sickly boyhood to a belligerent presidency.

These are all interesting and compelling stories. This would probably get a higher rating if Bederman allowed their stories to breathe a little more away from the schemas she cautiously laid out in the introduction (which is mainly about boxer Jack Johnson, who became an obsessive focus for many of these questions- could have used more on him, his case is fascinating). Race, gender, and ideas of “civilization,” the three frames and by god each section will laboriously bring in all three, cite the relevant authorities, tie in with earlier examples, and then say that all that was said, no matter what it does to the flow of the book. Class gets wedged in there with the slightly panicked air of someone who forgot to add the bay leaf to the roast (can you tell this a feeling I have experienced, because I have?). And I’m like… just let loose, Professor Bederman! I believe in you! Hell, I’m probably a victim of having thought too much (and I bet too loosely- I am no expert on the period) about this freakout. If I had read it back during comps when I was supposed to… still. A good and important book! ****

Manliness and Civilization is a classic Foucauldian study of the Discourse (capital D intended) around gender and race in the Progressive period. Bederman tracks a shift from a Victorian conception of manliness as based around self-restraint of urges to a more modern one of active and powerful sexuality, using case studies of anti-lynching activist Ida Wells, psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall, feminist author and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and president Theodore Roosevelt, rounding out the detailed case studies with Black boxer Jack Johnson and the fictional character Tarzan.

Bederman's analysis shows that these three major themes of civilization, race, and masculinity, are impossible to separate. Civilization, the way not just in which we live now, but the better ways in which we intend to live tomorrow, as exemplified by the Chicago World's Fair, was tied up with the idea the civilization is a product of a biologically distinct racial universe. In the thinking of the times, Americans are the preeminent White Race, at the head of humanity as a whole, with a mission to civilize and lead the lesser races of the world. Civilization is a product of men primarily.

This book is at its best when it digs at the contradictions of the era's idea of civilization. The digressions on the deprecated mental illness neurasthenia, and how both Hall and Gilman struggled with it as individuals are fascinating stuff (though to be fair, also closest to my own scholarly interests). Wells, using the discourse of civilization to shame Americans about lynchings via the British press, is a fascinating ploy.

Unfortunately, the core case studies of the book don't quite connect, or at least don't make it beyond the first level. Once you accept that both Roosevelt and Gilman saw their political reforms in thoroughly racist frames, the racism is unsurprising. Whiteness is hoary nonsense, but extremely powerful hoary nonsense, and Bederman isn't critical enough.

While it's a convincing argument, I think the order of support leaves something to be desired.

Wow, this is an incredible book, a truly revelatory piece of scholarship about the formation of "manliness" and "masculinity" at the turn of the 20th century – and therefore the creation of the values that continue to reflect what our culture considers "manly" today.

Bederman compellingly and clearly argues that a discourse of "civilization" between Reconstruction and World War I essentially required that to be civilized meant to be a White man charged with "caring for" (ruling over) those who were less civilized – i.e., women and all non-White people. To be a true man, therefore, was to be White, and to be White, one had to be a true man – or a woman in her proper domestic sphere.

Focusing on four key figures in the era, Bederman shows how they used this discourse to subvert, reify, or otherwise enshrine these interlaced concepts of gender, race, and civilization. Ida B. Wells used the discourse to shame northern Whites into condemning lynching as unmanly behavior against manly, civilized Blacks. Pioneering feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman used the discourse to argue an alliance between White men and women would benefit "the race" while rejecting any potential alliance between White and Black women. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall used the discourse to advocate that boys be allowed to return to a state of "primitive savagery" so they could appropriately develop into true men. And Theodore Roosevelt wedded the discourse to nationalist ambitions and justified imperial expansion as a way to uplift uncivilized, unmanly races.

Overall, the story Bederman tells is fascinating, disturbing, and altogether important. Well worth reading as an academic, as a normal person, or anything in between.

Sickeningly relevant