Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (Yale Historical Publications Series) [Paperback]

Dr. Kristin L. Hoganson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 11, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0300085540 | ISBN-13: 978-0300085549

This study of international relations and gender history reveals how gendered ideas about citizenship and political leadership influenced jingoist political leaders' desire to wage conflicts, and traces how they manipulated ideas about gender to embroil the nation in war.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In 1898, the United States entered a war with Spain to liberate Cuba from the European power's imperialist grasp. A few years later, it waged war against the PhilippinesAbut this time to further its own imperialist agenda. Over the last 100 years, historians have pondered the causes of these conflicts, basing their theories on economics, politics, or culture. Here, Hoganson (history/literature, Harvard) adds a new dimension to the historiography of the wars by examining how gender beliefs may have been motivational factors for leaders in both struggles. This unique work, based on the author's dissertation and relying on a host of primary and secondary sources, might go well with John Tebbel's more popularly written America's Great Patriotic War with Spain (LJ 10/15/96) and Ivan Musicant's Empire by Default (LJ 12/97), a readable military history. A useful addition to any academic or larger public library.ATheresa McDevitt, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

Blending gender, political, and foreign policy history, this groundbreaking book offers a new understanding of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. The author shows how gender concerns influenced political leaders and how gendered arguments helped shape turn-of-the-century debates over war and empire.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (August 11, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300085540
• ISBN-13: 978-0300085549
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #40,534 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #10 in Books > History > Asia > Philippines
  • #21 in Books > History > Europe > Spain

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32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Taken a Bit Too Far, August 31, 2001

By 

"timdavin" (Las Vegas, NV United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (Yale Historical Publications Series) (Hardcover)

Kristin L. Hoganson's Fighting for American Manhood does an interesting job of walking the thin line between gender definitions, interpretations of discourse and traditional explanations of behavior in two fields that have been difficult for many newer historians to break into, international relations and military history. Although primarily a work explaining American motives in the first, Hoganson does bring some new insights on the latter to light. The work is a somewhat successful attempt to synthesize the various answers historians have previously put forward to the question, "Why did the United States go to war in 1898?" Hoganson suggests that by understanding the very real phenomenon of cultural perceptions of "manliness," and how these perceptions affected the nation as a whole and those in power in particular, we may reach a more well defined answer.
Acknowledging the validity of many of the previous explanations put forward by historians, Hoganson weaves many of them together. For example, while acknowledging that annexationist aspirations were relevant to the political actors of the day, she points out that many of the underlying reasons for these aspirations may be ascribed to gender fears. Politicians wanted to appear "manly," and there was no better way to appear this way to the voting populace than to adapt a "jingo" platform. With a similar stroke she places explanations revolving around Social Darwinists in a broader picture by illustrating that at the root of many of the fears of social degeneracy and racial competition were definitions and discourse which is clearly painted with gender based pigments. In these areas Hoganson hits her stride and in large part succeeds in redefining the scope of our understanding to include gender.
She does not, however, hit the mark in a few areas. Primarily because it appears that she never really aimed in that direction. Specifically, her treatment of the economic and strategic explanations for the Spanish-American War appear to be missing. While she does make a series of valid observations about the gender biases of several of the key actors in these areas, these observations are not relevant as causation. Naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan was almost certainly extremely gender biased, and in all likelyhood was also a racist, but neither of these were central to his reasoning. As evidence that the strategists carried little weight she points to the fact that the Army was not expanded in conjunction with the massive naval expansion of the period. One is left wondering why naval officers and supporters would have pushed for a large army when their whole theory of geostrategic influence and security rested not upon the occupation of land, but on the domination of sea lanes. Many of the same problems apply when she addresses economic factors. Overall, her dismissal of geostrategic and economic factors rests primarily upon a loose scaffold of secondary sources and the very real gender biases of the primary actors.
This is a moderate work of synthesis that potentially serves as the starting point for a new generation of interpretation. Hoganson has met her goal, she set out to lay a new cornerstone for the interpretation of American imperialism at the turn of the century and she has largely succeeded. Gender is a valid lens through which we may view many of the factors contributing to the American imperialist experiments. What now remains is for Hoganson or others to follow this up with a valid and in-depth gender based analysis of the factors she dismissed or glossed over, military and economic.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Murderous Pissing Contest, May 13, 2005

By 

Daniel A. Stone (Schenectady, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (Yale Historical Publications Series) (Paperback)

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 ambitious generation of American He-men found most dear.

Enter Cuba. Though it is something of an overstatement to argue that insurgent Cuba represented for Jingoes an ideal land where men were men and women were women in the most reactionary sense imaginable, it is not complete overstatement. In recounting the political rhetoric used by the Congressional supporters of Cuba libre and the press coverage Spanish atrocities in the penny dailies, Hoganson recreates the image of a noble island of honorable fighters and dainty women that were more likely found to be in The Art of Courtly Love or the more middle-brow romances that were popular fare in the late nineteenth century. This was more the creation of fanciful imagination than it was of a product of reflection on the conditions of the Cuban insurrection, but like many myths it was taken very seriously even by those who helped to create it. Wanting to believe the officers and soldiers of Cuba libre were knights and squires in need of fraternal assistance from their powerful brothers to the north was overwhelmingly attractive to men who were questioning their own worth by the standards they believed Cubans exemplified. Only interaction with Cuban irregulars would alter the romantic conceptions fostered by government and popular media.

Most interesting in Professor Hoganson's account of the period leading up the Spanish war is her argument, recounted with very solid evidence, that respect for the supposed valor and nobility on the part of Cuban soldiers trumped racism. Cuba was rightly understood to be an island of black and brown people and the fact that racist Southern papers like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution could describe the martyred Afro-Cuban General Antonio Maceo as "one of the world's greatest warriors," while the Prussian descended Spanish General Valeriano Weyler was characterized as a contemptible gun thug is something which is remarkable to the modern reader familiar with how race relations were in the United States at this time (45-48). Myths of white supremacy, whether believed because of supposed scientific rigor or simply taken on faith, were capable of being trumped by a mythos just as dangerously pernicious. Just as the nobility myth came under a deadly scrutiny when American soldiers encountered Cuban conditions, the oddly unhistorical anti-racism of the Jingoes would die with exposure to Cuban conditions-even if unfairly.

Overall, the book is a creative look at what is an unjustly overlooked period in American history. Furthermore it is a creative look at what motivates young men, and increasingly young women, to pine for war without particularly caring about the cause for which they are fighting.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Alternative Perception of the Spanish-American and Philippine American War, March 14, 2006

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R. DelParto "Rose2" (Virginia Beach, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (Yale Historical Publications Series) (Paperback)

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.