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Journal of Women's History 12.3 (2000) 218-226



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Book Review

Evolutionary Women: "Race" and Modernity at the Heart of White American Feminism, 1870s to 1930s

Fiona Paisley


Margaret D. Jacobs. Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. xiii + 273 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-780803-276093.

Louise Michele Newman. White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. vii + 261 pp.; ill. ISBN 9-780195-124668.

In 1895, American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton asserted that white women were the most deserving group yet to gain suffrage in America. She argued for enfranchisement not only as a matter of rights, but also because "'Women [were] the greatest factor in civilization.'" (Newton, 52). Working to improve the conditions of Native American women in 1902, administrator Clara True expressed her belief in the superiority of white civilization when she advised authorities that Pueblo Indians were to be "'pitied for their ignorance and for the injustice they suffer'" (Jacobs, 30). These two themes--the rights of elite white women and their involvement in the protection of nonwhite women--meet in the center of American feminism.

In their respective studies, Margaret D. Jacobs and Louise Michele Newman contribute to a growing body of work, which, over recent years, has interrogated the interstices of "race" and gender in early feminist campaigns. This body of work draws attention to the ambivalence of white women and early feminisms in national, colonial, and imperial history. Research has shown that British suffrage feminism, particularly in relation to Indian women, as well as settler colonial feminisms in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, must be read with attention to the racialized context of white women's various political mobilizations of their role as guardians of civilization within imperial and colonial societies. Although implicated in the hierarchy of colonial and imperial relations with indigenous peoples, elite women often struggled to make sense of their positions within dominant narratives of civilization and race, as they compared their own lives and worlds against those attributed to so-called primitive women. 1

Jacobs and Newman agree that (white) women, claiming to represent nonwhite women, assumed their authority as white women. They further demonstrate how white women contributed to the history of racial ideology [End Page 218] in American progressive thought through their work and writings. Their studies detail numerous white women campaigning for women's rights, administering government policy, or writing about their travels among women in preindustrial societies. One of the intriguing issues both authors pursue is how elite white women writers, reformers, and activists constructed narratives of personal transformation as they sought greater authority in a modernizing world. White women's ingenuity in aiming to resolve the tensions between conformity and selfhood in their work and writing reveals their modern subjectivities emerging against the backdrop of their differences from and interests in "primitive" women.

In Engendered Encounters, Jacobs considers women reformers and cultural relativists across sixty years of white women's interest in Native American communities, particularly the Pueblo Indians. She reflects upon such women government administrators as Mary Dissette and True-- ardent, yet highly critical, supporters of assimilation--who worked alongside white men in the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Among the "new women" of the early twentieth century, Jacobs includes sociologists Mary Hunter Austin and Mabel Luhan as examples of "antimodern" women, that is, women concerned with preserving Pueblo Indian life and culture rather than promoting assimilation. Jacobs contrasts their accounts with the writings of such Native American women as Polingaysi Qoyawayma and Helen Sekaquaptewa, who became missionary educated teachers, and Maria Martinez, a highly sought-after Pueblo Indian potter. In White Women's Rights, Newman examines evolutionary theory and nationalism and its place within early feminist thought. She traces this development from abolitionist Frances Willard's public disagreement with African-American activist Ida B. Wells over the question of lynching and white women's racial desires, to adventurer May French-Sheldon's accounts of her travels in...

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