“A tinge of effeminacy”: masculinity and national manhood in the Mosely report, 1904

Abstract

Alfred Mosely, a wealthy South African diamond mine owner and British industrialist, financed an Educational Commission that travelled to the United States during the winter of 1903. Its purpose was to ascertain how far education in the United States was responsible for the country’s industrial progress, and its report was published in England in 1904. This article examines the Mosely report as a gendered script, specifically as it identifies and discerns traits and behaviours of masculinity. Drawing on gendered colonial discourses and on prevailing ideas about gender and race, the Mosely commissioners defined men against women, divided and marked out spaces as male and female, and demonstrated a core belief in Anglo-Saxon racial and political superiority. The gendered rhetoric of the Mosely report suggests that the complex multiplicities of masculinity (and indeed femininity) were distilled into an agreed vocabulary of manhood that found expression in the national and political rhetoric of the era.