|
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.
|
|