>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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