"Sexually Egalitarian Imperialism"

Jeet Heer jeetheer at hotmail.com
Fri Dec 7 09:17:07 PST 2001


But surely there is more than one form of sexual imperialism. If you have wealthy Saudis using their economic resources to spread their extremely partriarchal version of Islam to places like Afghanistan, is that not also a form of sexual imperalism? Everthing I've seen indicates that the extreme misogynist repression of the Taliban is an innovation in Afghan society....


>From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: M-Fem at csf.colorado.edu, rakowski.1 at osu.edu
>CC: Margaret Mills <mills.186 at osu.edu>,
>professors_for_peace at yahoogroups.com
>Subject: "Sexually Egalitarian Imperialism"
>Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 01:08:55 -0500
>
>Kristin Hoganson, "'As Badly off as the Filipinos': U.S. Women's
>Suffragists and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth
>Century," _Journal of Women's History_ 13.2
>
>[The full article is available at
><http://iupjournals.org/jwh/jwh13-2.html>. The article discusses
>anti-imperialist feminists & sexist anti-imperialists as well, but my
>excerpt below calls attention to "sexually egalitarian imperialism"
>-- a subject of particular significance today. Yoshie]
>
>
>...Despite anti-imperialists' condemnation of the drive for conquest
>in the Philippines, a number of suffragists continued to support U.S.
>policies, thereby lending their support to empire. [Susan B.]
>Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others maintained that U.S.
>civilizing obligations could best be met with political and military
>control over the islands. Wrote Stanton: "I am strongly in favor of
>this new departure in American foreign policy. What would this
>continent have been if left to the Indians?"13 At the 1890 NAWSA
>convention she had equated the U.S. women's suffrage movement with
>the Irish struggle for liberation, but less than a decade later she
>failed to draw a similar analogy with the Philippine independence
>movement. Although Stanton had initially cited her commitment to
>liberty to explain her support for the U.S. declaration of war
>against Spain, she backtracked from such claims as the war
>progressed.14 Anthony, a Quaker who professed support for
>arbitration and abhorrence of war, likewise refused to join
>anti-imperialists. "The only way to get out of this war is to go
>through with it," she argued in May 1899: "It is nonsense to talk
>about giving those guerrillas in the Philippines their liberty for
>that's all they are who are waging this war. If we did, the first
>thing they would do would be to murder and pillage every white person
>on the island, Spanish and American alike."15 She suggested that the
>anti-imperialists were treasonous because they were inciting the
>Filipinos to mutiny. Stanton's reference to Native Americans'
>political incapacity and Anthony's to the dangers that white
>residents would face in a Philippine republic show the racist
>assumptions that undergirded their support for the "new departure."
>But a second motive contributed to their imperialist stance - the
>belief that allying themselves with their nation's policies would
>prove their own worthiness as citizens.
>
>Just as British feminists hoped that their dedication to empire would
>testify to their political virtue, some American suffragists -
>Anthony and Stanton among them - appear to have endorsed imperialism,
>regarding it as politically astute. In particular, Anthony's
>implication that she was a better citizen than the treasonous
>anti-imperialists (not to mention the mutinous Filipinos) can be read
>as an effort to demonstrate her superior loyalty and hence political
>worth. That the Republican Party - the party of presidents William
>McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt - was behind the nation's imperial
>policies no doubt contributed to Anthony's and Stanton's support,
>since both suffragists had Republican sympathies at the time.16
>Believing that the Republican Party was most likely to endorse
>women's enfranchisement, they had suffrage-related reasons to toe the
>party line. But such political calculations were misguided - for
>neither the nation as a whole nor the Republican Party in particular
>jumped on the suffrage bandwagon as a result of suffragists'
>patriotism.
>
>Although imperialist suffragists did not object to the principle of
>imperialism, they did in many cases object to the implementation of
>U.S. rule. This resulted from apprehension that U.S. policies might
>hurt women's suffrage efforts. Fearful that imperial policies which
>denied women suffrage were setting precedents harmful to U.S. women's
>political prospects, suffragists called for Filipinas'
>enfranchisement. Members of NAWSA resolved that Congress should
>grant Filipinas whatever rights it conferred upon Filipino men
>because the islands could only be civilized by extending women's
>moral influence.17 Ironically, suffragists tried to prove Filipinas'
>worthiness to govern themselves by citing data used to prove
>Filipinos' unworthiness for self-government: evidence of Filipinas'
>economic and social standing. "Should any political rights be
>granted to the Filipino people, it would be better to give the ballot
>only to women," said Harriet Potter Nourse at a national suffrage
>convention. Why? Nourse mentioned reports that Filipinas displayed
>more interest in political affairs than Filipino men, and that they
>seemed more intelligent.18 Writing in the Woman's Standard, a
>suffrage publication, Elnora Babcock argued that Filipina women alone
>deserved political rights, citing the testimony of Archbishop
>Nozaleda of Manila: "The woman is better than the man in every way;
>in intelligence, in virtue and in labor. . . . If any rights or
>privileges are to be granted to the natives do not give them to the
>men, but to the women."19
>
>Anthony shared these sentiments. She was so concerned that
>patriarchal policies in the Philippines would set negative precedents
>for U.S. women that she raised the issue in a meeting with President
>Roosevelt. When Roosevelt reportedly replied: "What! Give the
>franchise to those Oriental women!" Anthony told him that they were
>better fitted for it than Filipino men.20 This argument accorded
>with U.S. suffragists' domestic claims: they commonly argued that
>American women were morally and intellectually superior to men.
>However, political claims couched in terms of fitness rather than
>natural rights lent themselves to the acceptance of racial and
>class-based hierarchies at home and in the nation's new colonies.
>Intended as a critique of men's entitlement, suffragists' arguments
>accommodated policies that denied men the right to self-government.
>
>Anthony's refusal to protest the fundamental injustice of imperial
>policies is striking given her apparent unease with the nature of
>U.S. policies. Other suffragists too worried that rather than
>uplifting Filipinas, imperial policies might subject them to
>semicivilized men who had not yet learned to govern righteously.
>Minister and reformer Anna Garlin Spencer suggested that the
>Filipinos were still in the "matriarchate state of development." She
>expressed concern that if the United States failed to grant Filipinas
>suffrage, then it would force them into a position of subjection.21
>NAWSA members echoed this concern in a letter to Congress: "Justice
>demands that we shall not offer to women emerging from barbarism the
>ball and chain of a sex qualification while we hold out to men the
>crown of self-government."22 This letter revealed a sense of
>trepidation that U.S. governance would end up shackling rather than
>elevating Filipina women. Despite a general commitment to imperial
>policies, imperialist suffragists confronted the uncomfortable
>thought that U.S. rule might undermine Filipinas' position relative
>to Filipino men.
>
>The great irony that faced the believers in the civilizing mission
>was that U.S. rule appeared, at times, more corrupting than
>elevating. Not only did the governmental systems established by the
>occupying forces seem to endanger women's traditional liberties and
>subject them to men barely fit to govern, but U.S. troops also seemed
>downright degenerate to some. A number of American women, foremost
>among them WCTU members, questioned how civilized the supposed
>civilizers were when the United States Army began to regulate
>prostitution in the Philippines. Concerned with the high incidence
>of venereal disease, the army instituted a system of testing,
>treating, and, in effect, licensing prostitutes who had dealings with
>U.S. troops. This led WCTU members, already incensed about the
>existence of intemperate military canteens, to lobby for the policy's
>abolition and higher moral standards among the U.S. forces.
>Suffragists joined this crusade. At the September 1900 NAWSA
>business meeting, delegates adopted a memorandum to President
>McKinley that protested against the "European system of State
>regulation of vice, which has been introduced in Manila by the United
>States Army authorities." Positioning themselves as loyal U.S.
>citizens, in contrast to those who had adopted the "European" system
>of regulated vice, they vehemently objected to these military
>policies.23 The demoralization they deplored involved not only the
>American "boys" in uniform but also Filipinas. Rather than being
>protected by U.S. forces, Filipinas were being degraded, turned into
>sexual objects to gratify male desires....
>
>...In their agitation against U.S. policies in the Philippines, most
>suffragists merely called for a more sexually egalitarian imperialism
>that would accord colonized women the same rights as colonized men
>and a more chaste imperialism that would not involve the sexual
>degradation of women. In both cases, their concern was the
>implications of U.S. rule for American women.
>
>In addition to protecting their own interests, the rhetoric of
>sisterhood masked another motive: the hope that assuming a protective
>role vis-à-vis colonized women could aggrandize U.S. women's power.
>In becoming colonized women's protectors, imperialist suffragists
>positioned themselves in a role that presumably would have gone to
>Filipino men were it not for the U.S. intervention. As citizens of a
>rising imperialist nation, U.S. women's suffragists could take some
>comfort in their power relative to colonized men, whose positions, in
>effect, they imagined themselves usurping. But this psychic
>empowerment did not last long - in 1902, the U.S. government moved
>toward granting Filipino men self-government. Stung by the prospect
>that Filipino men would gain the franchise before American women,
>leading suffragists did not hesitate to draw on racist and
>ethnocentric assumptions to argue that cultivated women (meaning such
>white, middle-class women as themselves) were more capable of
>self-government. In a hearing before the Senate Select Committee on
>Woman Suffrage, Anthony declared: "I think we are of as much
>importance as are the Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Hawaiians, Cubans, and
>all of the different sorts of men that you have before you.
>[Laughter.] When you get those men, you have an ignorant and
>unlettered people, who know nothing about our institutions."28 As
>her audience's responsive laughter indicates, Anthony played on a
>sense of belonging to show the relative merit of American women. In
>another hearing, Anthony admonished the House Judiciary Committee not
>to subject wealthy and intelligent American women to the men of the
>new possessions by enfranchising the latter without enfranchising the
>former. "Shame on a government that permits such an outrage!" she
>exclaimed.29 Although Anthony did not explicitly argue against
>allowing Filipino men self-government in these hearings, depicting
>Filipino men as ignorant savages promoted imperialists' arguments
>about Filipinos' incapacity to govern themselves. Just as many white
>suffragists opposed enfranchising African American men while white
>women remained voteless, those who endorsed U.S. control of the
>Philippines felt their own victimization too keenly to identify with
>the plight of others. This absorption in their own cause, added to
>their tactical sense that supporting the nation (and its dominant
>party) in a time of conflict would be politically beneficial, kept
>the majority of suffragists from allying themselves with
>anti-imperialism....
>--
>Yoshie
>
>* Calendar of Anti-War Events in Columbus:
><http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
>* Anti-War Activist Resources:
><http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html>
>* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
>* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>

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