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Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. By Gail Bederman. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. xiv, 307 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-226-04138-7.)
In the decades around the turn of the century, Americans were obsessed with the connection between manhood, race, and "civilization." Civilization was explicitly understood as a racial and gendered concept--a stage in human evolution reached only by the Anglo-Saxon races and characterized by sexual differences remarkably similar to those celebrated by the Victorian doctrine of separate spheres. The most advanced, "civilized" races were those that had evolved the most perfect "manliness" and "womanliness." Middle-class white men articulated the most influential version of this ideology. They explained white supremacy in terms of male power and, conversely, male supremacy in terms of white racial dominance; to them civilized manhood meant white manhood. In different hands, however, "civilization" could legitimate other, even contradictory political positions; some white women could use it to oppose male supremacy, and some Blacks to oppose white racism.
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