Manliness & Civilization A Cultural Hi

When former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement on the fourth of July, 1910 to fight current black heavywight champion Jack Johnson in Reno, Nevada, he boasted that he was doing it "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro." Jeffries, though, was trounced. Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, Gail Bederman demonstrates, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance.

In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americansand#8212;Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilmanand#8212;she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-296) and index.

Gail Bederman is associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. She isand#160;currently writing aand#160;history ofand#160;early public advocacy of contraception in Great Britain and the United States, and especially theand#160;activities of seven individuals: William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, T.R. Malthus, Francis Place, Richard Carlile, Robert Dale Owen, and Frances Wright.

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Ch. 1: Remaking Manhood through Race and "Civilization"

Ch. 2: "The White Man's Civilization on Trial": Ida B. Wells, Representations of Lynching, and Northern Middle-Class Manhood

Ch. 3: "Teaching Our Sons to Do What We Have Been Teaching the Savages to Avoid": G. Stanley Hall, Racial Recapitulation, and the Neurasthenic Paradox

Ch. 4: "Not to Sex - But to Race!" Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Civilized Anglo-Saxon Womanhood, and the Return of the Primitive Rapist

Ch. 5: Theodore Roosevelt: Manhood, Nation, and "Civilization"

Conclusion: Tarzan and After

Notes

Bibliography

Index