AS205: Inbetween Peoples

As America left behind the carnage and terror of the Civil War, its citizens sought to recreate their nation. Despite such political acts as the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th amendments, America was still an unequal civilization. It claimed its civility based on its male population. After the loss in the South, men’s manliness was in question. As a result, American manhood changed throughout the latter half of the 19^th century. Moving from the Victorian model to connections with their primitive longings, men attempted to create the perfect manhood. White men exerted their poser over women and African Americans. Americans fought to create an ideal society. The rest of the world, however, did not view America with the same millennial hopes. America encountered the external world at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and through the writings of Ida B. Wells. The world saw the New World as an archaic mess of savage practices.

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was America’s moment to shine on the international stage. Congress called for the Chicago exhibition to be “an exhibition of the progress of civilization in the New World” (Bederman 31) – America claimed that it was the model for civilization. When visitors arrived at the Exposition, they sensed the segregation at once; the World Fair was in two parts: the White City which presented the hopeful “millennial future” (31) and the Midway Plaisance which displayed many savage cultures. Manhood marked the entire White City. Women were given one building despite their petition for more space to display their role in millennial achievement. Men, however, insisted upon upholding the “distinct demarcation” (34) between the sexes. The women’s building was on the border of the two distinct sections. In the Midway, visitors were instructed to view the contrasts with the sprawling White City. Many, on the other hand, enjoyed their time in the Midway. People were drawn to the foreign cultures; men flocked to see the exotic women and exert their racial and gender superiority. These savage cultures also received publicity when they attempted to fight back. The publication of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition suggested that the African American society was the true American civilization model because of the huge progress they had amassed in just 25 years since slavery.

Ida B. Wells changed the face of America both externally and internally. Because of her advocacy for the end of lynching while in Great Britain in 1893 and 1894, America changed its practices due to the high pressure from the British. Men feared the newfound power of African Americans, so they tried to bring them down by charging many of them with raping their white women. Lynching grew geometrically after the Civil war. According to American standards, African Americans were “the antithesis of both the white man and civilization itself” (49). They were “unmanly and uncivilized” (49). Ida B. Wells wrote many newspapers articles and pamphlets. She inverted the white man’s arguments. She blamed the black man’s image on the “carnal white woman” who would claim rape when their consensual sex was discovered. She also questioned the white man’s sudden interest in rape: black women raped by white men were forgotten. Great Britain at this time was the society to emulate. Many of the British were up in arms – the civilized American society was neither civilized nor manly: as one paper wrote, “we turn over in our minds whether it were not better to leave the [South Sea Islands’] heathen alone for a time and to send the gospel of common humanity across the Atlantic” (68). This was a great blow to America who wanted the British Anglo-Saxons to admire their Anglo-Saxon civilization.

American manhood was revered within, not without. As American civilization was put on display and traveled abroad, the primitive, savage nature of its manliness was put on display for the world. American men tried to create a perfect civilization in millennial hopes, but, as seen through the 1893 Exposition and Ida B. Wells’ work, a large part of their population was forgotten. The world had a different opinion of American manhood than Americans had.

Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization utilizes definitions of the masculine ideal from the late 19th, and into the early 20th century, in order to better convey her research into the processes of the changing descriptions of manhood that have resulted in American views of gender and racial superiority. Exploring the topic of the varying definitions of gender and race that were used to legitimize power and hierarchy, she begins to explain that with these contradictory terms invoked, one could essentially always point to the middle-class white man as holding power in this time period. Beginning with her examination of the controversy surrounding the Johnson vs. Jeffries prizefight of 1910, Bederman establishes the notion of physical power as an attribute of manliness with which white men had attempted to utilize to claim authority over Blacks.
With Jefferies as the “Hope of the White Race” (2), white men hoped to validate their claim to racial hierarchy as “the superior specimen of virile manhood”(2) through the defeat of Johnson, as the “Negroes’ Deliverer” (2). Johnson’s win called for a redefining and reconstruction of manhood on the part of the white community, who had previously claimed racial superiority by the physical standards which they had lost to, much based around the notion of civility. This turn to the language of civilization and conceptions of “civility” vs. “ ‘savagery’ and ‘primitivism’” (22) focused upon psychological and emotional restraints, rather than on physical type, to reinforce manliness and power. Control of the “powerful masculine passions through strong character” validated “authority over both women and the lower classes” (12).
Over time, the “civilized manliness” and “primitive masculinity” that Bederman points to as seemingly contradictory terms became consistent with each other to link race and gender together as superior trait. Ida B. Wells utilized this reconstruction of terms in her crusade for enforcement of anti-lynching laws by calling white Americans as uncivilized through their brutality against Blacks. They couldn’t control their primitive and barbarous ways and therefore Blacks actually reigned superior in their civilized ways. Bederman goes on to further explain, through the “developmentalism”(92) theories of G. Stanley Hall, that control and power are safeguarded through processes of the changing language of civilization. Growing up, Hall began to realize that the teachings of his childhood concerning complete self-restraint actually pushed him further away from achieving perfect moral character. In suggesting that young boys should be allowed a “savage boyhood”, evocative of the primitive evolutionary stage of lower races, in order to learn to develop a restraint in manhood, Hall suggested that civilization could be defined through a comparison to race and also manliness.
Bederman explains that power is being negotiated by whites not only claiming certain authority over others through definitions of manliness, but by changing the language of manliness to conform to white society’s changing views. Recreating not only “manliness”, but also the attributes of a “civilization”, allowed white men to continue to wield power during this period.

The Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries fight represented a struggle for power between races as determined by physical strength, a “contest to see which race had produced the most powerful, virile man.” The riots and controversy that ensued following Johnson’s win emphasize the amount of clout the people of the time period placed on this contest, and how important the claim to power was for them. It seems almost absurd to imagine a similar event taking place today—power being evaluated through a heavyweight prizefight. In my experience, American culture today places more value on characteristics that traditionally define “manhood” rather than “masculinity,” such as brute strength. “Logically there was no reason to see a heavyweight fighter’s claim to bodily strength as a claim to public power. Yet the metonymic process of turn-of-the-century manhood constructed bodily strength and social authority as identical” (8). Because it pitted two men against each other, testing their manhood/masculinity, but included the racial dimension, as well. The reading emphasized that male power was widely believed to stem from white supremacy, and so white middle class men believed that they were entitled to wield power and authority. The outcome of the Johnson-Jeffries fight, then, turned this previously widely held notion on its head; those who framed the fight in the context of racial supremacy were the ones whose theory of power belonging solely to white males disproved in the public arena. Johnson continued to display his manhood and power in and out of the ring, which went unappreciated by a population which was obsessed with the connection between power and racial dominance. It was already established that men held the power in society at this point, in basically every aspect of life, political and social. The fight, then, was a way of determining allowing certain men (Blacks) to get the chance to share in this power. When the wrong man proved victorious, it shook the racial hierarchy and challenged white manhood, and opened the door for black males to exert power over their white counterparts.

Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization effectively reiterates what we were taught by Kathleen Brown and Cary Carson in Civ I and Moby Dick in Civ II– that the idea, the epitome of “manhood” and “manliness”, is inherently rooted in the need for control. Man must control his fellow men (and women), his property (both tangible and human), his natural environment, his value, and most importantly, the way that others affect and impact him.

Bederman admits that “the middle class saw this ability to control powerful masculine passions through strong character and a powerful will as a primary source of men’s strength over both women and the lower classes. By gaining the manly strength to control himself, a man gained the strength, as well as the duty, to protect and direct those weaker than himself: his wife, his children, or his employees” (12). It is interesting that Bederman uses the word “protect” here as a justification for why men sought to establish dominance over women, children, and lower classes, when in reality man sought to CONTROL these forces around him. By establishing dominance, and ultimately this control, man could attempt to gain some sort of constancy within the changing times of the early 20th century.

As “manliness” evolved, the corollary to control became “civilization.” Just as the early American settlers viewed themselves as far more “civilized” than the Native Americans already living on the continent, neurasthenics “could be recognized by their European bodily traits, which contrasted utterly with the coarse features of the stereotypical ’savage’ ” (86). In this way, nervousness caused by the “tempo of business life” (87), was a mark of moral and intellectual strength, and seen as a result of hard work as opposed to one of weak physical composition. It is interesting that neurasthenia became such a defining hallmark of civilization– especially since it represented a LACK of control over one’s surroundings, as opposed to the outright dominance that had been so eagerly pursued earlier on.

The United States of America is largely a Christian nation. The Bible traces society’s sentiments concerning women back to the first man and woman, Adam and Eve. Christians are taught that Eve was born from Adam’s rib – an afterthought, God first created a world without benefit of female assistance. The story of man and woman goes on to Adam and Eve’s consumption of the forbidden fruit. Adam’s punishment for eating the fruit: to toil in the “sweat of his brow;” he is the laborer. Eve’s punishment: “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. And thy desire shall be thy husband. And he shall rule over thee.” This consistent story outlives its characters and transcends generations. Men and women alike listen to this lesson and apply these assigned roles to society and their personal lives.
While there are certainly a plethora of reasons that men and women traditionally occupied separate spheres, the story of Adam and Eve has long sparked an interest in promoting or discovering the depths of “manhood.” Many historians, sociologists, and psychologists have developed their own theories to explain the psychological and physical differences between man and woman. Gail Bederman, in her cultural work, Manliness & Civilization, traces the progression of gender and race relations in the United States between 1880 and 1917. Though numerous studies attempt to show trends in what manhood or womanhood entails, Bederman argues, “Attempting to define manhood as a coherent set of prescriptive ideals, traits, or sex roles obscures the complexities and contradictions of any historical moment.” (Pg. 6).
What first caught my attention in Bederman’s work were her definitions meant to clarify the origins of the words, “manliness” and “masculinity.” By showing their distinctions, both literally and practically, a man’s latitude was exhibited. Though there were undeniably a “correct” demeanor for 19th century men to exude, these adjectives help distinguish one’s morality, worth, sexuality, or aggressiveness. While a debate on American gender relations may exist, none can deny the meaning of the word “woman.”
The word “woman” is derived from the Anglo-Saxon “wifman” meaning “wife-man.” This implies that there is no such thing as a woman separate from wifehood. Because man’s “place” has never been defined, men are therefore allowed incredible versatility. On the other hand, women’s “place” has been deemed the home. Along with wifehood comes childbearing and domestic responsibilities, both of which confine women to the home and isolate her from the outside world. Much of what we identify as sexually assigned roles has nothing to do with biological sex but with tradition and culture, i.e. household cleaning, cooking, etc. Male supremacy, like other political creeds, does not finally reside in physical strength but in the acceptance of a value system which is not biological. Therefore, society, not sex, grants authority. As Bederman puts it, “Anatomy, identity, and authority have no intrinsic relationship.” (Pg. 8). Just as G. Stanley Hall encouraged “the process whereby children relived the primitive evolutionary stages of their ancestors” (Pg. 119) in the education of young boys, society recapitulates its formulaic traditions of sexual stereotypes generation after generation.

While reading Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization I was struck by the ways in which the social construction of male identity has evolved over the past century and a half. What particularly interested me was the fact that a man who in one decade could be viewed as the ideal male specimen could in another culture be grouped in a category possessing feminine characteristics. For example, the ideal “lean and wiry” male body of the 1960’s being replaced with the ideal male body with “physical bulk and well-defined muscles” of the 1890’s and beyond. (p.15)

Additionally, Bederman’s discussion of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago caused me to about what has changed in society since such racism and sexism was not just allowed but even publicly exhibited and advertised for. While reading the description of the Midway I could not help but wonder if the new National Museum of the American Indian that opened up about two years ago has even been seen as in the same light. I understand that the museum displays Native Americans as civilized people in their own right whose culture is alive still today. Nevertheless, I cannot help but also wonder if some visitors have ever misconstrued the museum’s different messages to create an idea of the ‘other’ instead of the concept of Native Americans as full Americans in their own rights.

However, this was not the first time that I had read about the 193 Chicago World exposition. Part of the syllabus for one of my past English classes included E.R. Burroughs’ Tarzan. In connection with Tarzan our teacher had us read an article about the Exposition. The chapter on Ida B. Wells reminded me of this because of the poorly concealed connection to lynching and the idea of African American men being know for the desire to defile white women by the black primitive man-like creatures constant attempts to try and steal away the pure while woman from Tarzan. Tarzan would then save Jane by killing the black man-like creature and then stringing it up to a tree with a rope. Thus, I was aware of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s social concept of “the new Negro crime”. Yet I did not know quite to what extent it was accepted in the US until learning about Well’s efforts against the drastic rise in lynching triggered by the false rumor.

In conclusion, despite the historical events that Bederman, Ida B. Wells and G. Stanley Hall addressed, I found myself wondering if the concept of manliness has really faded all that much. It would be dim, or perhaps simply cynical, to assert that society has made no progress in allowing for better equality over the decades since the early 1900’s. However, it is arguable that the concept of superior male ability being displayed in athletic feats such as football, boxing or, more contemporary, professional wrestling has not really changed that much.

In Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization, power is negotiated through nuances and interpretations of language and social roles as applied to gender norms of the Victorian era. While some men and women, such as Jack Johnson, Ida Wells, and G. Stanley Hall, worked tirelessly to adjust the meaning of “masculinity” and “manliness” to suit their own models of a better society, the majority of Victorian America was having a tough time simply adjusting their own lives to fit into the socially established norms of the day. This led to a fragile line between the accepted expressions of manhood (and womanhood) that was constantly in need of new limitations on gender roles in order to keep civilization in place.

It was interesting to hear the man’s side of the story in the Victorian era. There is much to be said about the limitations on women of the time, but it was surprising how much social pressure the men put upon themselves as well. They made themselves so anxious as to what actions made them “manly” vs. “effeminate” that they often made themselves sick, inventing diseases of “nervous energy” that fit their concern. The extremes of manliness changed often to fit new “scientific data” and social norms, leaving men scrambling to find a legitimate claim to their masculinity.

These men spent so much time defining and redefining what they should be that loopholes were bound to come up. Ida Wells took advantage of the fluid meanings of masculinity in taking up the case against lynching. The Southern double standard of interracial rape was an issue that was taking the lives of innocent black men, while looking the other way if a white man took a black mistress. The punishment without trial that these black men had to suffer was barbaric, but it took Wells’ tour of Britain to bring the truth home. Since she couldn’t get her point across in the white American press (being a mulatto woman), she went across the sea to bring her message to a “higher civilization”, one which the Americans respected. Coming from a woman, she was limited in the sense that she had to conduct herself in a “womanly fashion” (mannerly and soft spoken), but her message was heard loud and clear. Now, the Americans were being chastised of their terrible wrongdoing by a more respectable civilization that would put them in their place.

The meaning of manliness and civilization changed so much over the Victorian time period that contradiction was inevitable. In one short span, the ideal civilization went from one of order and control (the “White City” of the Chicago World’s Fair) to one based on the tapping of young boys’ barbaric tendencies to create a “super-man”. When the “natural” man began to emasculate the man of self-control, however, white men found new ways to bring themselves up and beyond the level those different than themselves, manipulating the laws of science and logic to their benefit. As science would prove later, however, white man’s reasoning as to why they were better developed than women and other races would prove to be groundless and, frankly, ridiculous.

Bederman’s analysis of individual events and actors at the turn of the 20th century provides an interesting examination of the dynamic sexist nature of American society. By defining ‘manliness’ as an ever changing and reshaping concept rather than a static criteria, she looks at the interplay between Victorian ideals and biological realities, and how the inherent conflict between the two forced a change in the perception of what ‘manliness’ is.

Perhaps the most telling example of Bederman’s point is the description of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. It is, in a way, a road map to the racist/sexist turn-of-the-century world that she is attempting to describe. At the center is “The White City,” (even the name is a blatant plug for white culture) in which the “great basin” showcases all of the technological and social achievements of the white-male world. Literally on the outskirts of this mini-city are the Midway Plaisance and the Women’s Building: miniscule acknowledgments that women and non-white races exist in the world, but they are clearly inferior to the white-male in both cultural development and biological, as indicated by their position in relation to The White City, and their scope (Bederman notes that the women’s building was one of the smallest at the fair, second only to the administration building). A bird’s eye view of the exposition gives an accurate view of the white American male’s perception of his own manliness: certainly a part of a greater humanity that includes women, people from Egypt, Turkey, and Africa, and Irish Catholics, but clearly the centerpiece of that same worldview.

This worldview was challenged, however, in 1910 when James Jeffries suffered a violent defeat (by knock-out, no less) at the hands of Jack Johnson, an African American. Economic downturns in the latter part of the 19th century had changed the definition of manliness from that of economic provider to being physically fit, and Jeffries’ loss not only challenged the white-male’s monopoly on manliness, but when coupled with a increasingly fearful observation of the American male (taking a look at homosexuality, the issue of “neurasthenia”, and G. Stanley Hall’s emblematic fear of his own sexuality), indicated the potential downfall of American manliness.

Thus ‘manliness’ had to be redefined again, and it is in this redefinition that Bederman’s argument becomes most clear. ‘Manliness,’ was in a sense, a wildcard for the white American male. It could be handily changed or adjusted to put the white American male back at the top of the false human pyramid. Victorian values could be thrown into the mix, as could economic, racial, or familiar roles, in a dizzying mix of requirements that kept ‘the man’ on top. Challenges to this authority could easily be negated by simply changing the definition all over again, just as G. Stanley Hall did when he suggested that it would be best for young American boys to fight each other in their youth (‘teaching the young to do what we teach the uncivilized not to do’). Manliness is therefore a construct rather than a truth, in much the same way that race is. When these two concepts are coupled, they create a template through which the turn of the 20th century must be viewed.

In the first three chapters of Manliness and Civilization, Gail Bederman outlines the multitude of power struggles which existed during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. While defining the white middle-class male as the primary unit attempting to exert his power, Bederman simultaneously depicts the struggles of the white middle-class to exert power over African Americans, immigrants, and women. In attempting to demonstrate their power as a class, the men who composed the middle-class of society became involved in a fight to not only demonstrate their power as the all white middle-class, but they had to defend their very manhood and the changing ideas surrounding that concept.

When Jack Johnson first challenged Jim Jeffries to fight in 1903, Jeffries declined, saying “‘When there are no white men left to fight, I will quit the business… I am determined not to take a chance of losing the championship to a negro’” (1). In refusing to fight, Jeffries displays his determination to not allow African Americans to demonstrate themselves to be a superior race. The idea that Jeffries’ loss of a boxing match would demonstrate white inferiority, rationalizes the efforts of the white man to defend his race through the defense of his very manhood by exhibiting his power and strength. In accepting the public’s pleas to fight Johnson, Jeffries said that “‘I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro’ From its inception, then, the Johnson-Jeffries fight was framed as a contest to see which race had produced the most powerful, virile man… With few exceptions, predictions of the fight’s outcome focused on the relative manliness of the white and black races” (2). The Johnson-Jeffries fight is a prime example of men attempting to exert their superiority over one another, not only for the individual glory of winning the fight, but to demonstrate the power of their entire race as dominant over the other’s; Johnson sought to prove African American power in America, while Jeffries fought to defend white supremacy. In fighting for their respective races, both Johnson and Jeffries sought to demonstrate the superiority of their individual races.

However, what it meant to exhibit manhood and bring glory to an entire race changed throughout time. Particularly interesting is the fact that manhood transitioned from the ability to control one’s emotions and desires and bring pride to one’s family, to being able to exert strength and power and true male dominance. In the early to mid 1800s, “… the middle-class had begun to differentiate itself from other classes by stressing is gentility and respectability” (11). At that time, the middle-class placed particular value on the “… ability to control powerful masculine passions through strong character and a powerful will as a primary source of men’s strength and authority over both women and the lower classes” (11-12) This concept of man’s repression of his passions came into play with the idea of “the Negro rapist.” The African American man appeared uncivilized and unmanly by failing to control the sexual passions that the civilized white man could control with his dominant manhood.

Interestingly, despite the continuing attempts of the middle-class to exert themselves as dominant over the lower classes, and the attempts of whites to demonstrate their superiority over African Americans, eventually the concept of what constituted civilized manhood changed. As a result of the concept of neurasthenia, society began to reject the idea of self-restraint as the manly ideal. “‘Neurasthenia’ was… an effort to construct the cultural weakness of self-restrained manliness as a bodily weakness, and to ‘cure’ it” (84). Respectable manhood changed from the ability to overcome and repress passions, to the idea of “powerful manhood in a primal, untamed ‘masculinity’” (74). Despite the continuing idea of whiteness as supreme over blackness, the definition of whiteness changed to allow for the emotional aspect of man which “civilized” white males once condemned in African Americans. Despite the continuing power struggle between class and race, Bederman demonstrates in the first three chapters of Manliness and Civilization that these struggles are consistently defined and redefined by the essence of what constitutes manhood.

Albert Einstein said that when the solution is simple, God is answering. Apparently, God isn’t much for manliness. In one of the most important points of Manliness & Civilization, Gail Bederman describes the underlying tension between sheer physical power and self-restraint, between the desire to be a man and the importance of will. She describes the complex sexual code of the Victorian era, in which men who were able to remain sexually pure were held in higher esteem than those who succumbed to their physical desires. She points out that those who stooped to the depths of masturbation or commercial sex were regarded as being composed of inferior moral fiber. A man who was able to control his passions was not seen as being deficient in physical desire, but instead as of being a high-minded man who could restrain himself.

This tension is also evident in her discussion of lynchings. Bederman illustrates that mobs who lynched suspected black rapists were depicted in a very complex way. On the one hand, they were punishing black men who were unable to control their all-consuming libido. Yet if a white woman had actually been raped, the men who, as men, were supposed to protect her were seen as being to some extent culpable. Thus, by taking part in a lynching, they were able to reassert their own physical superiority over the black man who could otherwise be seen as intimidating them. Still, it was important that they were not seen as giving into passion themselves. Newspapers often “depicted white lynch mobs as paragons of disciplined, self-restrained manliness” (50). Thus, by taking part in a lynching, white men were able to act not as slaves to their passion, but rather as agents of righteous justice.

Bederman also points out that some newspapermen were able to depict themselves as more manly than both the lynch mob and the man being lynched. In disapproving of the entire affair, or by offering jeering criticism of the lynching itself, these men were able to assert their own superior manliness by placing themselves above the entire process. However, in condemning some lynchings, the press was by no means standing up for racial justice. Generally, they scolded the mobs for sinking to the level of the black man, one who was unable to control himself.

Tension seems as though it will be the watchword throughout the book. There is a tension between civilization and savagery, tension between white and black, and tension between men and women. Indeed, there is even tension between the words “manliness” and “masculine.” Yet such tension seems inevitable whenever there is a discussion about such fluid concepts. Bederman acknowledges that the difficulty in trying “to define manhood as a coherent set of prescriptive ideals, traits, or sex rules obscures the complexities and contradictions of any historical moment” (6). When studying a concept that is so multifaceted that even people at the time were unsure of its true meaning, it is best to regard tension and complexity not as a problem to be solved, but an inevitable part of the topic.

Appropriately, Gail Bederman seizes the example of political power struggles of the turn of the century as a lens for demonstrating the struggle for manliness to remain synonymous with civilization. Nationally, “New Women,” as Bederman labels suffragists and other female activists, assailed not only the male realms of college education, the clergy, the social sciences, and medicine, but also the all-male “bailiwick” of “electoral politics” (13). Moreover, his New Women affront to the existing hegemony of the middle- and upper- ruling class of politics was not conducted in isolation. Rather, with the internal tumult that the working and immigrant classes were causing both in urban and national politics, “manly” politics found itself in a period of redefinition.

On the urban level in particular, “male power and male identity” are integral to the construction of the political machine and the patronage system (13). From the role of provider that machine bosses embodied to even the root of the word patronage–father, in Latin– manliness pervaded urban politics. On the level of individual cities, the control over those political manifestations of male identity transitioned, through hotly contested elections, from the middle-class men (who would define civilization elsewhere at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago) to the working and immigrant classes now forming the majority in certain cities.

Nationally, as Bederman writes, this manifested itself in nearly “imminent” class warfare: here, between the working classes of the labor unions and those sympathetic to socialist and anarchist causes, and the middle and upper managerial and ruling political classes. The challenges to the middle class’s “manly authority” impeded its ability to “shape the future of the nation.” Such challenges to authority, rather than weaken the influence of manhood on political and social power, only “reinforced… focus on manhood” within the middle class (14). As its grasp on political power faded, its grip on emphasizing manliness only tightened.

Much as Bederman emphasizes both female- and male-led challenges on the nexus between manliness and civilized discourse, she also highlights female and male challengers who specifically undermined the existing power structure. Ida Wells and Frederick Douglass– both marginalized under the middle class-led power structure of the turn of the 20th century– validate the implied emphasis in Bederman’s discourse methodology “…on human agency and the possibility of intentional change.” While, in Bederman’s own words, “Wells could not force white Americans”– who dominated both the legal structure she railed against and the media structure she attempted to speak out within– “to oppose lynching,” she effectively presented the issue so that lynching pervaded the consciousness of white Americans (70). Similarly, Douglass, while working with Wells on The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, could not convince the creators of the Exhibition to include black Americans in the exhibits, he managed to present an alternative view of manliness altogether: one with an insistence on black manliness (39). As the marginalized social groups to which they belonged challenged middle class manliness doubling as the power structure of society, so too did Wells and Douglass seek individual, intentional action.

In “Manliness and Civilization,” Bederman explores the ideas of racial and gender equity in the time period starting around 1880. While she starts off with the Jeffries- Johnson prizefight as a way to establish masculinity and physical power, once the white public realizes that Blacks are the physical equals she shows how psychological control of physical abilities come to be an even more important way to express masculinity.

At the onset of this era, Whites tended to think that their advantage in level of civilization, that is to say their heightened acclimation to the culture which they created, would allow for them to dominate other races, Blacks in particular, physically. However, what they learned through their prize fight was that there was no real genetic difference between their racial counterparts and themselves. In this way, they had to construct another way to remain at a physical sort of advantage, thus retaining their superiority in manliness.

In these ways then, Whites constructed the ideas about Blacks raping women in the south to justify their feelings of savagery. Despite the lack of veracity, as Ida B. Wells proves, finally to the public on her second tour of England, it was one way which permitted the psyches of white, American men to feel the physical superiority that they had lost with the Jeffries-Johnson fight.

Also, G. Stanley Hall constructs the ideology of self-restraint as a way to develop a civilization and manliness through physical means. The way that he constructed this certain type of manliness, at least the way that he himself was taught, was that to restrain your own desires in order to achieve a level of manliness. Although he supported for savagery in the classroom as a way to rough up the young males for their continued manliness, it was still a sort of masculinity and manliness that was different from the ideals that preceded the Jeffries vs. Johnson prize fight. But even this idea of what manliness consisted of was a construct of the same people who more closely associated physical domination with manliness before there was any sort of racial (though clearly not gender) equality.

These sorts of constructs created the ideas about power and manliness in the time period. The people who had the power created and recreated the rules such that, even in the face of new challenges, they were able to retain their own perceived dignity, thus putting a continuing the power struggle between white and black, which African-Americans it seemed, were unable to win.

Bederman in Manliness and Civilization explores the links between gender and race especially in the discourse of civilization and how the concept of manliness was used to reinforce white male power and authority. Manliness is not a static concept, but rather one that changes over time as social and cultural changes occur. During the time period Bederman focuses on, 1890 thru 1917, manliness was understood mainly through Victorian ideas of self-restraint, although later on a slightly different concept would be proposed by G. Stanley Hall. The dominant understanding of civilization was “a precise stage in human racial evolution – the one following the more primitive stages of “savagery” and “barbarism”.”(P. 25) Further, only the white race was considered to have reached civilization. Bederman looks at the ways discourses of civilization were used to both support and resist white male power.

She opens with the example of the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries fight in which it is clear that Americans were deeply invested in proving that one race was in fact superior to another and that superiority could be defined in terms of male power. What is especially intriguing about this episode was that despite the win by Jack Johnson, the fight proved that white male power continued to reign supreme in the U.S as “within three weeks, a bill suppressing fight films had passed both houses and was soon signed into law” even though before the fight Congress had refused to consider such a bill. (P. 3) Although the fight was posed as a way to determine racial supremacy, in the end the dominant power structure prevailed over the outcome of the match, leading to those in power with the need to justify their position in other ways. The prosecution of Johnson under the Mann Act was one way in which those in power could keep Johnson and thereby other blacks from claiming equality with whites. With behavior that was in direct opposition to the paradigm of manly self-restraint hailed by the white middle-class, Johnson continuously challenged the dominant views of power.

Ida B. Wells is another example Bederman presents as a challenger to white male authority. In her opposition to the lynching of black men, many falsely accused of being rapists, Wells inverted the typical thought on civilization and proposed that it was the white men who were uncivilized. “Thus, in her account, the Southern lynch mob did not embody white, manliness restraining black lust; it embodied white men’s lust running amok, destroying true black manliness.” (P. 59) Wells succeeded in bringing lynching to the attention of the American public. However, as was pointed out earlier cultural ideas about manliness were not static. A new concept of manliness was being developed in which self-restraint was not as important as the notion of masculinity. Rather than being only for the civilized, the notion of masculinity actually involved the idea that even civilized men had a sort of primitive underpinning.

G. Stanley Hall was important to understanding the relation of masculinity and manliness. He was raised with rigid ideas about what a man was; however, his experiences sort of indicate to him that manly self-restraint was not necessarily easy to translate into reality. Hall re-conceptualized the dichotomies of barbarian and civilized, masculine and manly, and primitive race and white race by thinking of them not as opposites but as different stages. As an example, boys started out as savage but then grew up to be civilized. I thought this section was particularly interesting as Bederman shows how change can take place within a culture in order to keep other things such as power relations static.

Bederman’s first three chapters of Manliness and Civilization explore the terms of ‘manliness’ and ‘civilization’ and how these concepts evolved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Power is constructed based on gender and race with white ‘manly’ men being the epitome of evolutionary power. Bederman argues the position that white men retained this power through the habitual learned repression of any other race or gender that threatened their hegemony. By advancing the argument through the eyes of those who challenge the status quo (and did not typify white male hegemony), Bederman provides first hand circumstances of how white men were obsessed with maintaining power. Manliness and Civilization also tracks the ways in which those who advocate white male hegemony justify their beliefs and offer scientific ‘evidence’ that white men are more advanced and civilized than their female or ‘dark’ counterparts.

Bederman begins with the famous Jeffries vs. Johnson prizefight that captivated the male nation. Jack Johnson, the African American heavyweight champion handily beat the hero of the time, the white Jim Jeffries. Racial uproar ensued as white men raced to defend their status in society and avenge the devastating loss. As Bederman explains, white male dominance hinged on the outcome of the fight and when Jeffries was handily beaten, the dumbfounded white American male took action.

Jack Johnson rubbed salt in the wounds when he appeared richly dressed and exuded manliness with his physical prowess. He flaunted money and women while overstepping what white men believed to be the boundaries of his inferior race. The fact that the women Johnson surrounded himself with were white made him an even bigger target, as this was as threatening as his defeat of the hero Jim Jeffries. This behavior was unacceptable to white men who assumed that Johnson must have seduced or forced these innocent young girls to remain in his company and parallels the trend that Ida Wells would later exploit.

Wells challenged the notion of the ‘Negro rapist’ that many whites used in justification of lynching practices throughout the south. Her position was that black men had been charged with rape only when they were discovered to have been having sexual relations with white women who were oftentimes the seducer. These women were neither innocent nor exploited and were ultimately protected by their race.

Ida Wells’ championed her cause of anti-lynching in a surprising way. She understood that no matter how cruel the details of lynching, she could not simply write about its horrors and expect to find sympathy in a white audience. She instead challenged the white man’s sense of civilization and traveled abroad to give lectures on how this uncivilized practice was plaguing American culture. She hit a nerve when she evoked the white American male’s sense of self-restraint, a thread that Bederman follows throughout these chapters. Wells understood that self-restraint was considered a virtue of male manliness and that whites felt it exclusive to their race. Before Wells’ was arguing her views Johnson beat Jeffries in the famous prizefight, white men were sure that Jeffries would outlast Johnson based on his calculating self-restraint, of which Johnson was surely incapable. Blacks were thought to be overcome by emotion and whites were believed to have had the reasoning powers that made them superior. Wells took this idea and turned it on its head, forcing white American men to reevaluate their practices.

Self-restraint again makes an appearance in the third chapter when G. Stanley Hall, a professor of pedagogy and psychology focused his studies on the pervasive “neurasthenia” which plagued white men of the age. Instead of believing that self-restraint was a virtue of white men that should be exercised throughout their lives, Hall advocated letting young boys behave in an uncivilized manner. By acting on their primitive instincts, Hall believed that white men would prevent the draining affects of neurasthenia. The evolution of the white male race depended upon reliving the evolution of previous generations and building self-restraint into boys at a later age to advance the race.

Throughout each of her case studies, Bederman links self-restraint directly to masculinity. This term surfaces again and again throughout the text and warrants further attention. By following the thread from the Jeffries vs. Johnson fight (where Jeffries’ supposed self-restraint should have won him the match) to Ida Wells anti-lynching movement (where Wells’ develops her argument around a notion that white men are supposed to exhibit self-restraint) to G. Stanley Hall’s different opposing views on self-restraint (that young boys shouldn’t have to control their behaviors), self-restraint becomes a dominant theme throughout the first three chapters. This attention to self-restraint, though seemly intuitive, points to the larger image that white American men had of themselves as paternal and benevolent. By evoking the characteristic of self-restraint, Bederman highlights a paradoxical trait that proved problematic for white American men at the turn of the century.

Gail Bederman, in Manliness and Civilization, examines the interplay between race and gender in American society from 1880 to 1917. In particular, Bederman focuses on the way in which white males drew a connection between male power and white supremacy to assert their authority over African Americans. White males claimed that they were naturally more masculine than blacks. Middle class white males often defined masculinity in terms of their ability to practice self-restraint and develop a strong character. Blacks “lacked the racial genius” to exercise these civilized qualities and were perceived as less masculine and inferior (Bederman 22). By the end of the twentieth century, however, men embraced a more “primitive” definition of masculinity. Although their conception of masculinity changed, white males, through the rhetoric of civilization, remained in power.

In dealing with the distribution of power, Bederman focuses on the lives of certain historical figures. The first chapter deals with Jack Johnson, a black heavyweight champion who upset the balance of power by defeating a white boxer. The author also examines the work of Ida B. Wells, a black activist who fought against lynching, and G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist and professor concerned with the effects of Victorian ideals. Case studies help the reader understand the social, economic, and political aspects of the period on a more personal level. Bederman’s book is ambitious in scope and the focus on key individuals makes the work more manageable. However, Bederman’s approach is not without flaw. In particular, her “brief tangent on methodology” in Chapter One seems out of place (Bederman 24). Also, Bederman describes the outline of her work in the conclusion of the first chapter. I would prefer the author to include her method and stylistic techniques in an introduction before the first chapter.

In terms of the author’s sources, the inclusion of photographs contributes to an overall understanding of the disparities between black and white society. Photographs taken at the World’s Columbian Exposition depict the dichotomy between the “White City” section, showcasing the achievements of the white world, and the Midway Plaisance area. The photograph of the Court of Honor in the White City shows a resplendent scene of prominent buildings, grand fountains, and structured architecture. The White City is a celebration of the power and “civilization” of the white world. In contrast, a photograph of an area in the Midway Plaisance depicts a rustic, “savage” setting, devoid of the “civilized” characteristics of the White City.

In my opinion, the most interesting part of the reading is the fact that a boxing match between Jack Johnson and the white boxer Jim Jeffries sparked the emergence of urban riots, newspaper sensationalism, and government intervention. The opening paragraph immediately draws attention to the heated controversy over race and power in the beginning of the twentieth century. Prior to this reading, I was not aware of the extent to which the white desire to assert their masculinity moved the entire population on such a national level into opposing teams. According to one account, “three thousand white men took possession of Eight Avenue and held against police as they attacked every negro that came into sight” (Bederman 3). Jeffries and other whites hoped to beat Johnson to prove white virility and dominance

I was also interested by the fact that Ida B. Wells worked to expose racial cruelties in the United States by seeking the help of European nations. She hoped that European criticisms of America’s barbaric practices towards blacks would lead Americans to question their “civilized” behavior. Americans respected Europeans as their racial equals and were aware of their moral authority. Even though Well’s campaign failed as the white conception of masculinity embraced more primitive qualities, Wells was extremely resourceful in using a variety of tactics to expose lynching and question the way in which white society defined “civilization.”

As I was reading the first three chapters of Manliness and Civilization I was struck by historical interpretations of ‘manliness’ that surprised me because they seem contrary to my understanding of our culture’s more current depictions of masculinity. It did not surprise me so much that the definition–or shared cultural understanding of the term– had changed–as this has probably happened for a large part of our cultural vocabulary. Rather I was surprised at what the definition had once been, and how it had fluctuated over time to reach today’s understanding.

A prevalent theme, especially in Chapter 3, was equating manliness with civility. Today I see our culture as pervaded by images of what in an earlier day might have been deemed ‘primitive’ behaviors equated with masculinity. For example: sex, violence and alcohol consumption are typical “manly” behaviors that in some–if not many segments (lower class, as well as priviledged young upperclass males)– of American culture are deemed respect-worthy–or at least accepted as “boys-will-be-boys behavior.” Bederman writes, “Hall’s parents described character as a muscle which needed to be strengthened and exercised through a program of moral calisthenics. By repeatedly holding fast to his good resolutions and eschewing any temptation to momentary pleasures, Stanley could exercise his will and build up a manly character” (79). But in today’s American culture it is not considered particularly “manly” to abstain from the temptations of drinking or sex. In fact, the opposite is true. Many males prove themselves to each other by drinking heavily and engaging in (and bragging about) casual sex with many partners. What accounts for the development in the definition? Hall’s thesis which equates children with primitives–and which encourages children to be allowed to act like primitive peoples, does not seem to explain how it is that these days it is adult males who are generally held to expectations of a lower level of civilized behavior.

My only answer to this question is that all along our cultural conception of manliness seems to have varied and even in the days of “civilized manliness” involved aspects of brutality and physicality that were also equated–or at least associated with–manliness.

The chapter on the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries boxing fight suggests that manliness was by perceived by a middle class audience as including elements of physical strength, willingness to subject onesself to physical harm, and the audience’s willingness to witness the boxing match. All these behaviors are the antithesis of the “effeminate” civilized behavior that Bederman describes as being encouraged of young males, like Hall. Still, the fact of Johnson-Jeffries match stands not only as a lesson of race relations in American history, but also an instance from an earlier period in which ‘manliness’ took on a physical face (much like today) even in a time when a different type of ‘manliness’ was generally accepted.