Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917

Throughout the text white middle-class Anglo-Saxon male attitudes toward women and people of color fluctuate, generally in proportion to how diligently and deferentially these individuals follow the code of expectations placed on them by those men. As feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman began to demand equal participation outside the home and defy the expected life progression from wife to mother, men who might otherwise extoll the virtues of women as sweet, virtuous defenders of hearth and home can be seen to devolve into aggressive, primitive brutes who allude to their willingness and perhaps eagerness to put women back in their designated place if they decide to step outside the bounds set for them and in which white middle-class Anglo-Saxon men were comfortable corralling them.

The same can be said for the intention to contain men and women of color. Perceptions of these individuals varied between romanticizing and fearmongering in the narratives they constructed about those whose cultures and values they did not understand. People of color were either children who required protection, intervention, and management by white Americans acting on their behalf, or they possessed aspects of primitive, barbaric characterization that was romanticized as essential by white people yet considered a source of anxiety and a threat to white men, particularly in the case of the fictional “negro rapist” created during the South’s reconstruction period.

Taking this romanticization further, middle-class men wanted to maintain and reintegrate savage, primitive values into their conception of themselves but not to an extent so great they lost their civilized superiority. They saw Indigenous peoples and people of color in their community as examples of earlier iterations of their own evolutionary process. These people were stagnant in a status they had already evolved past, and in these values and aspects they shared with them they embraced the aspects of themselves they did not want to abandon. When they became a threat, however, as in the case of the Indigenous American tribes Roosevelt insisted should be conquered and subjugated, their value plummeted as these individuals exercised their autonomy and were no longer a screen upon which white men could project their own visions of a stereotypical savage adversary. When these individuals offered resistance in their attempts to preserve their way of live and defend their communities, they became the villains in literal and metaphorical hero’s tales, foils against which white men could test their mettle and reinforce their senses of self-worth and confirm their virility, even if only vicariously through the written works of others.