Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars

by Kristin L. Hoganson

Book Overview

This groundbreaking book blends international relations and gender history to provide a new understanding of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. Kristin L. Hoganson shows how gendered ideas about citizenship and political leadership influenced jingoist political leaders desire to wage these conflicts, and she traces how they manipulated ideas about gender to embroil the nation in war.

She argues that racial beliefs were only...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300085540
• ISBN13: 9780300085549
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Spanish American War History

A well researched and written account of reasons for America's participation in the Spanish American War. The author stirs the reader's interest with numerous primary source citations to support her point and presents revealing information about the American perspective for participating in the Spanish American War.

An Alternative Perception of the Spanish-American and Philippine American War

In a somewhat flamboyant pose with his tails and pinstripe pants, Uncle Sam breaks out of his regular pose . Kristin L. Hoganson uses the illustration to depict a rather loose portrait of American symbolism in her examination of how gender and cultural studies ties in with the historical narrative of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, FIGHTING FOR AMERICAN MANHOOD: HOW GENDER POLITICS PROVOKED THE SPANISH-AMERICAN AND PHILIPPINE-AMERICAN WARS. Hoganson's study is unique, and is yet an additional perspective about US history's most overlooked conflicts and possible blunders. Her interdisciplinary approach defines the roots of the conflict, which relates to the political, social, and cultural atmosphere that occurred during the late nineteenth century - women's suffrage, social Darwinism, and imperialism. Hoganson's suggests that manhood is the premise of President Mckinley's personality and leadership. It was the driving force that exacerbated engagement in a war that was culturally and politically perplexing. Hoganson touches on noncombatant aspects of the war, jingoism, imperialists, anti-imperialist movement, and economic annexation. However, Hoganson does not indulge in a military study of the war, but she correlates the romanticism of the US Civil War as an inspiration for jingoist behavior during the Spanish-American War as well as the Philippine-American War. Hoganson continuously emphasizes that the war was a response to maintaining fraternalism during a period where social issues engendered the perception and participation in war activity. With the accompaniment of political cartoons, Hoganson interprets her premise of manliness. The political-propaganda cartoons serve as a metaphor for both the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. This was the period where the mass media and the telegraph emerged as effective means of communication, but also lent itself to misinformation and misconceptions. I doubt that FIGHTING FOR AMERICAN MANHOOD is supposed to interpret the entire purpose of US engagement in the war. However, it is yet another perspective that delves deep within the historical lens and shows the reader how social influences may have an effect on individual leadership and the actions that are taken to achieve successful results.

Murderous Pissing Contest

Studying how gender norms and ideals contribute to, and at times create, historical events is not a revolutionary idea; but applying gender norms and ideals to how late nineteenth and early twentieth century Americans understood war and empire comes very close to being just that. Professor Hoganson's short study of how bellicose ideals of male virility which glorify physical prowess and anxieties about an altering gender landscape in the years just before and after the Spanish and Philippine-American wars adds a new level of complexity to the study of those wars, and the path which American foreign policy took during the twentieth century. Using the time tested method of simply taking seriously what policy makers and popular media outlets said and wrote, she builds a rock solid case for reinterpreting American foreign policy in particular, and war in general, through humans' more visceral conceptions of themselves. Zeroing in on the language norms and the gender ideals which they espoused, Fighting for American Manhood recreates the sense of urgency that much of America's political and cultural elite felt concerning the declining stature of elite men in American society. For the generation of American men who had been either too young to fight in the Civil War, anxiety about their personal and political worth in comparison to the Civil War generation mixed with a personal resentment about being continually marginalized by that generation-especially in the political arena. Even more troubling to much of the elite was the perception that, unlike the Civil War generation, these men could not measure up physically to the working men who were demanding, often violently, greater participation in American life. Accompanying all of these criticisms that the young American elite leveled at themselves was a poisonous interpretation Darwin's evolutionary doctrine which argued that only the physically strong could survive in the dangerous game of international politics. Add to this a resurgence the early nineteenth century standard of honor where slights would require physical resolution and the closure of the frontier, and Americans already had powder keg in the persons of young men itching for a fight. The changing role of women in American society added some of the most profound anxiety which was making young men hope for a fight-one that would reassert their sense of manliness. The fact that women were arguing for suffrage, were highly visible, and vocal, in civic and moral reform movements which were challenging men's prerogatives in what were traditionally men's private spheres, was cause for even further concern. This concern was exacerbated by general gist of many women activists argument that an infusion of feminine sensibilities into the political dialogue was the best way to assure a better world for all mankind. These sentiments struck at the core of ideals of robust manliness that the young, increasingly belligerent, and politically a

An insightful twist to American Imperialism

This book has offered a very insightful twist to understanding American foreign policy and congressional thought during the Spanish-American and Phillipian-American wars. Hoganson has given a nice view of how manliness and the fear of losing it contributed to war ideas and how the rise of women's suffrage movements pushed a male dominated political cirle into thoughts of war in order to maintain their manhood. Very well written and her sources are extensive and flawless.