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

Ida B. Wells, later known as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, was born into slavery in 1862 in the state of Mississippi, eventually moving to Memphis, Tennessee. Wells recalled hearing her father and grandmother speak about how her grandmother was used by her enslaver for sexual exploitation. Wells began her career as an educator but was inspired to become an activist after a personal experience with racial injustice. At 22 years old, despite being in possession of a first class train ticket, she was thrown off a train. She took her case to court, and subsequent to her legal battles began working as a journalist, advocating for the rights of Black Americans. She eventually became an editor, owner, and author of Memphis’s Black newspaper, the Free Speech. When a close friend was lynched in 1892 by a Memphis mob, she turned her journalistic efforts toward eradicating the cruel and illegal practice.

She called for a boycott of the Worlds Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 for the organizing committee’s failure to include Black exhibitors in the event. Collaborating with Frederick Douglass and other activists, she wrote a pamphlet entitled The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, intended for a European audience and addressing this intentional omission. As a result of her antilynching publications, threats were made against Wells’s life and property, and she was forced to move out of Memphis, living first in New York and then Chicago before eventually returning to Memphis in 1922.

Throughout her life, and especially during her tours in England, Wells was meticulous in her dress, comportment, and behavior at all times, constantly aware of the standards of femininity she must uphold, as she was subjected to even more scrutiny than the average woman and could not afford to lose any credibility or respectability by leaving space for doubts as to her integrity. Still, this did not leave her impervious to gossip and scandal, but she maintained her professional and personal dignity through the challenges she faced.

Born in western Massachusetts in 1844, G. Stanley Hall’s life was steeped in traditional New England Protestant Puritanism, which imbued him with the ideals of chastity and self-restraint that were dominant in the Victorian period. His exposure to religion as a young man framed his early childhood outlook in terms of religiosity. Hall struggled with his emerging sexual desires as he approached adolescence, and in his later life he reconciled some of his moral dilemmas by devising a means through which young men could learn to harness their emergent adolescent sexual desires and channel them into energy that could be productively applied to intellectual and academic pursuits. He was particularly interested in developmental psychology, educational psychology, and educational reform.

Studying at Harvard University, Hall was awarded the first doctoral degree in psychology in the United States. He became a university-level academic lecturer in psychology and pedagogy. His experience as a teacher would inform the theoretical orientations he would develop that saw education as a vehicle for change in the lives of children and adolescents. He was the founder of the American Journal of Psychology and became the first president of both Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the American Psychological Association. Hall was heavily influenced by Darwinistic and eugenic principles in the development of his theoretical orientations.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Connecticut in 1860. Abandoned by her father, she witnessed her mother as a woman who desired to fulfill the expectations of her in her own home sphere but was denied the opportunity to do so because her husband refused to support her. One of the only contributions that Gilman’s father made to her development was to recommend a list of reading materials, all of which were on the subject of biology and evolutionary theory. Gilman absorbed the content of these works, and they became incorporated into her understanding of racial identity. Initially, Gilman believed she should not marry so she could pursue her passion for intellectual pursuits. Hesitantly, however, she eventually married, and found herself depressed and besieged by a period of neurasthenia. She underwent a rest cure under the famous psychologist S. Weir Mitchell, and when she had concluded her treatment she reasoned that she could not maintain both her career as a writer and fulfill her role as a wife and mother. She made the decision to leave her husband and child to pursue her passion. She attested that she battled against her propensity toward neurasthenia for the rest of her life and that it was caused by being forced to choose between the roles of mother and writer. She felt women had been subjugated to subservient roles that denied them their racially affiliated right to contribute to the advancement of white evolution, and through her works she advocated for greater opportunities for white women to take a larger role in the destiny of their race.

Gilman became a prolific author, publishing a total of “8 novels, 171 short stories, 473 poems, and 1,472 nonfiction pieces (nine of them book length)” (132). Her works The Home and Women and Economics were hugely influential, and her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the most widely read pieces of short fiction. She became involved in social reform movements and supported herself by lecturing professionally.