Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Women in Culture and Society)

When former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement on the fourth of July, 1910 to fight current black heavywight champion Jack Johnson in Reno, Nevada, he boasted that he was doing it "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro." Jeffries, though, was trounced. Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, Gail Bederman demonstrates, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance.

In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans—Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.

• American History: Connecting with the Past Volume 2
• At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
• Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early ... and the University of North Carolina Press)
• Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Gender and American Culture)
• All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s
• Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
• Men Like That: A Southern Queer History
• Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America (American Beginnings, 1500-1900)
• White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South
• The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West