White Woman's Burden

Kathryn Wichelns is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Revisiting Influence 1. Hemispheric Domestic Science: Elizabeth Agassiz in Boston and Brazil 2. "Unchecked Animal Creation": Annie Fields's Diary of a West Indian Island Tour 3. Black Souls and Jewish Whiteness: Annie Nathan Meyer and Zora Neale Hurston in New York4. Revisions of Whiteness: Nina Otero-Warren in New MexicoConclusion: Solidarity at the Centenary of SuffrageNotes BibliographyIndex

"White Woman's Burden is a beautifully written book about the stories we tell about women's rights in the United States. Given its historical focus, one might expect to find the suffrage battle at its center. To the contrary: White Woman's Burden seeks to deflate the significance of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in US women's history. In Wichelns's telling, it is not that the suffrage movement somehow fell short of its goals in being racist and classist; rather, promoting Anglo-American nationalism was always among the movement's goals. Through extremely well-researched and convincing examinations of four American authors, Wichelns reads feminist history and women's literary history in light of this necessary corrective to the way we tend to remember, and explain away, the biases and oversights of the feminist past." — Laura R. Fisher, author of Reading for Reform: The Social Work of Literature in the Progressive Era