About
Community
Bad Ideas
Drugs
Ego
Erotica
Fringe
Society
Politics
Anarchism
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Corporatarchy - Rule by the Corporations
Economic Documents
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Foreign Military & Intelligence Agencies
Green Planet
International Banking / Money Laundering
Libertarianism
National Security Agency (NSA)
Police State
Political Documents
Political Spew
Right to Keep and Bear Arms
Terrorists and Freedom Fighters
The Nixon Project
The World Beyond the U.S.A.
U.S. Military
Technology
register | bbs | search | rss | faq | about
meet up | add to del.icio.us | digg it

What was politically correct 100 years ago?

by Ronald Mahler

One letter writer recently compared the Playboy ad that appeared in the [University] Daily to "racist and anti-Semitic propaganda," while another insisted, "The subtext... is, of course, rape." I was immediately reminded of a speech delivered in 1880 by feminist Susan B. Anthony in which she denounced anti-woman attitudes in Minnesota. Her speech illustrates how the "subtext" of political correctness can change over time. In Anthony's time, it was what we now call bourgeois cultural imperialism.

Anthony was explaining to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee why suffrage referenda had recently failed in various states. In Colorado, she argued, the large majority opposing the measure had consisted of "Mexican greasers." By way of contrast, the enlightened pro-woman minority consisted of "native-born white men, temperance men, cultivated, broad, generous, just men, men who think." Anthony then continued as follows:

"Right in the file of the foreigners opposed to woman suffrage... whom I have seen traveling through the prairies of Iowa, or... Minnesota, are the Bohemians, Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Irishmen, Mennonites... , every one of them going to vote 'no' against woman suffrage. You cannot convert them; it is impossible. Now and then there is a whiskey manufacturer, drunkard, inebriate, libertine, and what we call a fast man, and a colored man, broad and generous enough to be willing to let woman vote, to let his mother have her opinion counted as to whether there shall be license or no license, but the rank and file of all classes who wish to enjoy full license in what are termed the petty vices of men are pitted solid against the enfranchisement of women."

What this account demonstrates is that "political correctness" can be reactionary. In Anthony's day it often reflected, and was in part a vehicle for, the prevailing bigotries of the dominant WASP middle classes. As these classes became increasingly threatened by drastic economic and social change in the years between 1880 and 1914 they became increasingly intolerant, censorious, and morally self-righteous. Concurrently, the wing of middle-class feminism that came to prominence at this time adopted a parallel politics of WASP female moral superiority.

As Anthony's words illustrate, the most blatant example of this parallel politics was feminist "racist... propaganda." WASP America feared the electoral power of immigrants and Negroes, and suffragists capitalized on this fear. She also shows a more germane aspect of parallel politics, however: moral authoritarianism. To the WASP middle clarses, "vice" was a demonized symbol of everything that threatened their hegemony. By some stroke of coincidence, the primary irrational focal point of petty bourgeois WASP prejudice -- Demon Rum -- became the great symbol of "violence against women."

Likewise, Social Purity feminists imitated popular theories of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority by arguing that "women" were more evolutionarily advanced than men, because of their superior WASP moral values. On this basis they demanded the power to suppress the "animal" vices, especially evil "male" lust.

So what does this have to do with the great Playboy ad controversy?

The campaign against Demon Porn / Evil Male Lust is the only feminist-sponsored initiative to have both emerged and flourished during the Reagan-Bush era, and it is easy to see why. As Maggie Gallagher (a New Right activist and former National Review editor) has written, "what (Andrea) Dworkin observes is essentially true... Stubbornly, intransigently, courageously, Dworkin insists that sex is dangerous."

Despite such warning signs, the letter writers ask us to believe that they stand outside of their own class and its history. We are impervious to infection by class-imperialist agendas, they in effect say; whereas the rest of you are Western White Male automata who must be reprogrammed by force. And how can they justify this double standard? Only they, it appears, are as evolutionarily advanced as "native-born white men, temperance men, cultivated, broad, generous, just men, men who think."


Ronald Mahler is a former assistant professor of mathematics at the University.

 
To the best of our knowledge, the text on this page may be freely reproduced and distributed.
If you have any questions about this, please check out our Copyright Policy.

 

totse.com certificate signatures
 
 
About | Advertise | Bad Ideas | Community | Contact Us | Copyright Policy | Drugs | Ego | Erotica
FAQ | Fringe | Link to totse.com | Search | Society | Submissions | Technology
Hot Topics
Ed & Elaine Brown * Shots Fired *
george galloway what do you think of him?
Hinchey Amendment
why UK accepts US subjugation and infiltration?
George galloway suspended from HP
Why Marxism IS Economically Exploitive...
Situation in Turkey
Putin not playing nicely
 
Sponsored Links
 
Ads presented by the
AdBrite Ad Network

 

TSHIRT HELL T-SHIRTS