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Full Description
Counters universalist narratives of mainstream feminism by examining the power exerted by four white women writer-activists to shape American society from the 1860s to 1930s.
White Woman's Burden focuses on four American writer-activists who were significant if secondary actors in the historical push for two rights that disproportionately served elite women: suffrage and equal higher education. Reflecting regional ideas about whiteness and womanhood from Massachusetts to New Mexico, Elizabeth Agassiz, Annie Fields, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Nina Otero-Warren embodied and helped nationalize the domestically defined versions of their era's mainstream feminism. Through their participation in advances in science, literary culture, higher education, state government, and language rights, these four women advocated for the interrelated objectives of (white) women's rights, US imperialism, and white nationalism. In challenging the assumption that white women's political involvement supported and supports universal goals that serve other marginalized groups, White Woman's Burden revisits mainstream feminist responses to the nineteenth-century "theory of influence," arguing that elite women's practices of social power developed during that period continue to shape our ideas about womanhood and activism into the present—from the contemporary belief in (white) women's innate civic-mindedness to white women's voting patterns in recent US presidential elections.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Revisiting Influence
1. Hemispheric Domestic Science: Elizabeth Agassiz in Boston and Brazil
2. "Unchecked Animal Creation": Annie Fields's Diary of a West Indian Island Tour
3. Black Souls and Jewish Whiteness: Annie Nathan Meyer and Zora Neale Hurston in New York
4. Revisions of Whiteness: Nina Otero-Warren in New Mexico
Conclusion: Solidarity at the Centenary of Suffrage
Notes
Bibliography
Index



