American New Women Encountering China: the Politics of Temporality and Paradoxes of Imperialism, 1898–1927

Abstract

American New Women Encountering China: the Politics of Temporality and Paradoxes of Imperialism, 1898–1927 Motoe Sasaki On March 13 1905, Theodore Roosevelt began his speech before the National Congress of Mothers by warning “[i]n our modern industrial civilization there are many and grave dangers to counterbalance the splendors and the triumphs.” One such “grave danger,” he pointed out, was the emergence of women “who deliberately forego” “the supreme blessing of [having] children.” The existence of such women “in American life,” he continued, was “made unpleasantly evident by the statistics as to the dwindling families” as a result of women not marrying and not bearing children. With a palpable level of apprehension in his words, Roosevelt asserted that “[t]he existence of women of this type” was an ominous sign that Anglo-Saxons had become “a race that practiced race suicide.”1 Roosevelt singled out college-educated New Women, many of whom were from women’s colleges in the Northeast, as the main perpetrators of this “race suicide.”2 During the early part of the twentieth century, these women and their Alma Maters became targets of rebuke because more than half of their graduates remained single.3 The rationale behind this castigation was clear: although many came from Protestant middle-class backgrounds and were thus seen as being the ‘prime stock’ of the Anglo-Saxon race, they were not fulfilling their duty to reproduce. This led to the fear that, if such conditions persisted, America would soon be dominated by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who would not at all be bashful about reproducing. The ultimate result, as some feared, was an America in which Anglo-Saxons would one day became a minority. Such views, espoused by Roosevelt and other like-minded figures, were also linked to ideas of civilization driven by the ideology of Social Darwinism prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries.4 Popularized versions of Social Darwinism basically sought to utilize ideas of biological evolution in terms of “survival of the fittest” and, more precisely, competition not only within human societies between individuals and races, but as well among nation-states and civilizations themselves.5 Those who embraced some of the tenets of Social Darwinism thought American civilization might indeed lose the struggle against other civilizations in the world if, as a consequence of social or racial degeneration, the Anglo-Saxon race lost in its struggle with newer immigrants inside the U.S. In this respect, the emergence of the New Woman from within the old-stock of white Americans was a bleak signal that pointed to the eventual degeneration of the Anglo-Saxon race in America. As a result of this growing disquiet about the future of America during the late nineteenth century, controversy arose among white male Americans over the legitimacy of the New Woman. At the time, the majority of white middle-class Americans thought that the domestic sphere – as a timeless reservoir of purity and moral standard – was the proper place for women. This view was also supported by popular evolutionary theories which saw distinctive demarcation between sexes, most notably in the form of separate spheres, as proof of a higher stage of civilization America had already reached. According to such views, moreover, women’s bodies came to be seen as vessels for preserving and enhancing the capacity of the race. As static ahistorical subjects, women were thus kept institutionally and symbolically outside a public sphere which was experiencing rapid transformation from the forces of modernity. Under such circumstances, some college-educated women saw a way around this exclusion by inserting themselves in the historical development of American civilization as active and significant participants in the vanguard of the modern world. While shunning their reproductive duty, these women began, in Julia Kristeva’s words, an effort “to gain a place in linear time.” According to Kristeva, however, such attempts were often quite problematic because they were grounded on a vision of masculine time of “project, teleology, linear, and prospective unfolding,” rather than on that of cyclical and repetitive “women’s time” rooted in the reproduction process.6 Yet, in the period when this “women’s time” was the main...