White Woman's Burden: Race, Empire, and Influence in Writing by US Women's Rights Activists, 1867-1936 (SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory)

Counters universalist narratives of mainstream feminism by examining the power exerted by four white women writer-activists to shape American society from the 1860s to 1930s. White Woman's Burden focuses on four American writer-activists who were significant if secondary actors in the historical push for two rights that disproportionately served elite women: suffrage and equal higher education.Reflecting regional ideas about whiteness and womanhood from Massachusetts to New Mexico, Elizabeth Agassiz, Annie Fields, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Nina Otero-Warren embodied and helped nationalize the domestically defined versions of their era's mainstream feminism.Through their participation in advances in science, literary culture, higher education, state government, and language rights, these four women advocated for the interrelated objectives of (white) women's rights, US imperialism, and white nationalism.In challenging the assumption that white women's political involvement supported and s