The Men and Women We Want: Gender, Race, and the Progressive Era Literacy Test Debate

Abstract

Jeanne D. Petit's new monograph on Progressive Era debates over immigration restriction through the lens of the literary test is a well-researched, thoughtful, and provocative addition to the historiography. Petit is one of the first historians of this subject to focus on the intersection of gender and race as central, intertwined elements in the arguments for and against immigrant restriction. She is also one of the first historians to de-center the forces that promoted immigration restriction—namely the Immigration Restriction League (IRL)—and to highlight instead the groups that fought exclusion. In her monograph both the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers (AAFLN) and the Immigrants’ Protective League (IPL) take center stage in the literacy test debate, and the interplay among the three groups helps Petit tease out the ways racial thinking, gender constructs, sexual ideologies, and visions of an activist state intertwined in this discourse. Petit grounds her work in the “racial nativism” analysis pioneered by John Higham and utilizes “whiteness studies” to discuss the shifting meaning of white racial identity, but she points out that “most historians of immigration restriction … have not systematically considered” how much the discourse in immigration restriction utilized ideas about gender and sexuality (pp. 9–10). One of her central arguments is that those involved in the literacy test debates “used ideologies of manhood, womanhood, and sexuality to infuse their arguments about race with greater power,” and they deployed these to “either amplify or diminish the racial threat that southeastern European immigrants were believed to pose” (p. 11).