"Sexually Egalitarian Imperialism"

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

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

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