Global societies

Please respond to both of the following two (2) questions (minimum 250 words).

1) Why does Farish Noor compare historical records that might appear contradictory in the way that they boastfully acknowledge OR erase colonial violence in Southeast Asia?

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2) Mann mentions that a “domestic racism” and an “international racism” are connected. What does this mean? How did the connection between these influence suffragists’ views of imperialism?

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Please look at the pictures and illustrations at bottom and respond to both of the following two (2) questions (minimum 250 words).

3) Said says that, “The relationship between the Occident (the West) and the Orient (the East) is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony…” (highlighted on p. 49).”

How do you believe that the Picture #1 (at bottom) of a Singapore port might illustrate this, alongside Said’s thesis of Orientalism?
Now, look at Picture #2, which is taken by a Chinese photographer. How do you think this picture might have challenged Orientalist views of its time?

Note: I found Pictures #1 & 2 during archival research and limited information is available on them. Picture #1 includes no British or white people. The manual laborers (without shirts) are Chinese. The public officers (working for the British colonial government; in white dress) are likely Malay (who are native to the peninsula where Singapore is located). Picture #2 is a Chinese laborer in Singapore.

(Links to an external site.)

4) Maryam Khalid states that: “[G]endered and orientalist identities, meanings, and images construct and organise the way we give meaning to and interpret our world, its people and events, and ‘the positions and possibiities for action within them’.” and then declares that “gendered narratives in the War on Terror have also relied on the (re)production of orientalist stereotypes.” Please provide (with brief explanation) two examples used by Maryam Khalid to support these statements.

Sociological Inquiry

, Vol. 78, No. 4, November 2008, 461– 48

Feminism and Imperialism, 1890–1920: Our
Anti-Imperialist Sisters—Missing in Action from

American Feminist Sociology*

Susan A. Mann,

University of New Orleans

This article retrieves part of our historical past to address two omissions in American
feminist sociology on the subject of global imperialism. The first section addresses the
inadequate attention feminist sociologists have paid to how major leaders of the
women’s movement responded to U.S. overseas expansion in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. It documents how these early feminists had both progressive
and reactionary responses to the anti-imperialist struggles of their era. Particular emphasis
is given to how issues of race, class, and gender were interwoven in their discourses on
imperialism

The second section focuses on how the writings of the most famous woman theorist
and critic of imperialism during this era—Rosa Luxemburg—are virtually ignored in
U.S. portrayals of feminist sociology and women founders of sociology. To address this
omission, Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism is examined, as well as how it has
influenced contemporary global feminist works. A critical analysis of these Luxemburg-
inspired works considers their implications for understanding global imperialism today.
In this way, the past is used to clarify the present.

Introduction

Beginning in the 1960s, reclaiming our historical past has been a major
activity and accomplishment of the feminist movement in the United States.
This excavation of earlier feminist writings and activism not only served to
legitimize feminism as a serious and ongoing political struggle, but it also
unearthed the subjugated knowledges of those whose theory and practice had
been buried, silenced, or deemed less credible by more androcentric historical
narratives. To the credit of those who have reclaimed our past, great efforts have
been made to discover the diverse standpoints, visions, and voices of our feminist
predecessors. By doing so, we have learned much about the relationship
between women’s oppression and other systemic forms of oppression that
affected U.S. women, such as racism, classism, and heterosexism (Cott 1987;
Giddings 1984; Lerner 1993; Rossi 1974).

However, even with this greater emphasis on diversity, our gaze has been
too inward and United States-centered. This myopic, nation-centered gaze has

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462 SUSAN A. MANN

deflected attention from the international issues that confronted feminists in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the United States emerged as
a global, imperialist power. Indeed, it is rare to find references in feminist
sociology to their views on imperialism despite the fact that many suffragists
entered the debates about U.S. overseas expansion during this era. This omission
is surprising given that so many feminists of the 1960s and 1970s who began
excavating our predecessors’ history cut their political teeth during the anti-
Vietnam war movement and had a profound interest in the issues of militarism
and imperialism. It is even more surprising today given the heated national
debates over our current military ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as
the seismic impacts that globalization and U.S. imperialism have had on our
contemporary lives. While feminist sociology has witnessed a considerable
increase in global and postcolonial analyses over the last two decades, rarely
have we looked back to see what we can learn from our past. Consequently, the
first section of this article addresses how leaders of the U.S. women’s movement
responded to global imperialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. It should be noted that these women did not use the term “feminist”
in this era,

but referred to themselves as suffragists or women’s righters. However,
I will interweave the more manageable term “feminist” with suffragist throughout.

The second section discusses how U.S. portrayals of both feminist theory
and women founders of sociological theory have ignored the contributions of
the major woman theorist and critic of imperialism during this era—the European
feminist, Rosa Luxemburg. While Luxemburg’s work is better known in the
subfield of social change and development, it is rarely found in any feminist
discussions of the women founders of sociology even though other European
women with far less theoretical acumen are mentioned, such as Harriet
Martineau whose major claim to sociological fame was translating Auguste
Comte’s work (Finlay 2007; Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 1998; Ritzer
2007).

In turn, on examining the indexes of 20 feminist theory textbooks and
anthologies used in the United States today, I found only brief mention of
Luxemburg’s work (Caulfield 1984; Landry and MacLean 1993). In short, like
those U.S. suffragists who took an anti-imperialist stance, Luxemburg is virtually
missing in action (MIA) from U.S. feminist sociology. To address this omission,
I discuss how Luxemburg’s work on imperialism was not only influential during
her era but also continues to influence global feminist writings today.

This study specifically focuses on the period from 1890 to 1920. Hence, it
does not address the earlier U.S. imperialist and settler colonialist ventures
entailed in the annexation of Mexican lands or the appropriation of the lands of
Native Americans. However, this period witnessed some important changes
both within the U.S. women’s movement and in the responses of U.S. citizens to
a new form of U.S. imperialism—global imperialism. At the beginning of the

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FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 46

1890s the two major suffrage organizations in the United States combined to
form the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in an
effort to provide a more powerful, united front to win suffrage for American
women. This decade also witnessed the rise of U.S. overseas expansion and the
formation of the American Anti-Imperialist League. This organization was
established specifically to oppose the U.S. annexation of the Philippines, but
more generally opposed U.S. imperialism on economic, legal, and moral
grounds. The ending date of 1920 witnessed the demise of the Anti-Imperialist
League which formally disbanded in 1921, as well as the victory of women’s
suffrage through the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Over these same three decades, Rosa Luxemburg wrote her major works on
imperialism. I begin by grounding this study in the social and historical context
of the era.

The Rise of U.S. Global Imperialism

The Spanish-American War is generally considered to be the watershed in
American history that marked the translation of the United States’ growing
industrial might into military and political power on a global scale. From the
last decade of the nineteenth century to the First World War, the United States
took possession of Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Samoa. It
also established protectorates over Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican
Republic and mounted armed interventions in China, Haiti, and Nicaragua
(Fain 2003).

The emergence of the United States as a global imperial power in the Far
East and Latin America was closely related to the spectacular growth of both
the American economy and the federal government in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. These changes not only ushered in a modern, industrial
economy but also a centralized nation state. Between Reconstruction and World
War I, the American economy was transformed from one based largely on family-
owned and operated businesses and farms to one dominated by large-scale,
capitalist enterprises.

In key respects, American overseas expansion was rooted in periodic crises
of overproduction generated by the booms and busts in the economic cycles of
its highly volatile economy. Industrial leaders such as Andrew Carnegie and
John D. Rockefeller, as well as many farmers and politicians, argued that the
health of American industry depended on expansion. They claimed that the
failure to establish new foreign markets for the swelling output of U.S. goods
would result in industrial slowdowns and economic stagnation at home (Fain
2003). They feared that unemployment resulting from such stagnation would
only increase already growing working-class radicalism and militancy. Moreover,
overseas expansion was the logical sequel to the closing of the frontier and the

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464 SUSAN A. MANN

victory of U.S. settler colonialism over its own indigenous population. Indeed,
the United States had already succeeded in developing its own internal,
transcontinental empire before it expanded abroad to include intercontinental
conquests.

Political and ideological factors also played key roles in U.S. expansionism.
Maintaining hemispheric security by keeping European powers out of the
Caribbean and Latin America was a prominent aim of the increasing enforcements
and extensions of the Monroe Doctrine during this era. The goal of spreading
the values of American Progressivism abroad, as well as the missionary zeal of
extending American Protestantism overseas, fostered ideologues from across
the political spectrum to join the pro-imperialist chorus. Even gender ideologies
reflecting concerns about the robust nature of American manhood chimed in
during this particular era of U.S. history (Hoganson 1998). Hence, a wide range
of economic, political, and ideological ambitions came together to fuel the
imperialist impulse. Our first question is: “What role did American feminists of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries play in fostering or resisting
this expansionist thrust?”

U.S. Feminism and Anti-Imperialist Struggles, 1890–1920

While it is tempting to use the term “first wave” as shorthand for describing
the feminists I am studying, there are numerous problems associated with
“wave approaches” to examining the U.S. women’s movement (Ruth 1998). The
problem most salient to this study is that wave approaches too often focus on
the hegemonic feminist organizations during each wave that were led by white,
middle-class women. Hence, they obscure the diversity of competing feminisms
within each wave, as well as the diversity of the women who were involved.
This latter tendency is particularly likely to obscure the contributions of more
radical feminisms and those feminists who were marginalized by race, ethnicity,
and social class.

To avoid this problem, I divided the so-called “first wave” into three camps
and selected famous leaders of these camps to reflect the diverse standpoints
and political perspectives of the U.S. women’s movement during this era. To
represent the white, middle-class, liberal camp, I examine the responses to
imperialism by the first three Presidents of the NAWSA: Elizabeth Cady Stanton
(1890–1892), Susan B. Anthony (1892–1900), and Carrie Chapman Catt (1900–
1904). Two major black feminist leaders whose works I examine are Anna Julia
Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. My exemplars of the more radical, left-wing
camp of the women’s movement include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams,
Emma Goldman, and Jeanette Rankin, all of whom represent a range of positions
that were inspired by socialism, anarchism, and pacifism. Major leaders of these
camps were chosen because most of their original writings are published and

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FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 46

this was a prerequisite to discerning their views on imperialism. Hence, their
published works set the boundaries and the limitations of this study.

While feminist sociologists have ignored the responses of suffragists to
U.S. overseas imperialism, feminist historians have been more attentive to this
issue. Particularly useful to this study are the works of Allison Sneider (1994,
2008) and Kristin Hoganson (1998, 2001).

Sneider documents how U.S.
expansion enabled feminists to keep the suffrage issue on the national political
agenda. She discusses how in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the
federal government maintained control over citizenship, while state governments
controlled voting rights. Most suffragists wanted these two issues united so that
as “citizens” they could automatically vote. As new lands were annexed to the
United States, legal and constitutional issues were reopened to deal with
citizenship and suffrage in these new territories and colonies. Hoganson’s works
excel in showing the role conceptions of manhood played in U.S. imperialist
ventures (Hoganson 1998) and in highlighting how class, race, and gender were
imbricated in suffragists’ responses to U.S. overseas expansion (Hoganson
2001). Together Hoganson and Sneider provide some of the most important
contributions to date for understanding the relationship between U.S. imperialism
and “the Woman Question” as it was known in that era. However, their works
tend to focus on suffragists in the more hegemonic liberal feminist organizations
of the U.S. women’s movement and to ignore the role of more radical feminists
during that era. Consequently, it is the intent of this study to include these more
radical feminist perspectives.

To feminists today, it might seem obvious that women’s suffrage and
struggles against colonialism and imperialism rested on the common principle
of self-government. However, the NAWSA did not side with anti-imperialists in
this heyday of America’s surge to acquire territories in the Far East and Latin
America. Rather, suffragists in the NAWSA split over this issue. My immediate
thought was that these suffragists did not want to ally with a small group of
radical, anti-imperialists and thereby endanger their chance to obtain the vote.
But in fact, the opposite was true. The major organization that protested U.S.
imperial policies—the Anti-Imperialist League—was a much larger organization
than the NAWSA. Founded in 1898, the League had more than 100 affiliated
organizations, approximately 30,000 members and over 500,000 contributors by
the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast, the NAWSA had less than 9000
members at this time (Beisner 1968; Hoganson 2001).

Hoganson raises the interesting question of why, given how the suffrage
movement at this time was chronically short of cash, faced stiff opposition in
Congress, and elicited outright hostility from much of the general public, did so
few suffragists see the advantage of building a coalition with anti-imperialists
to broaden their base of support, much as they had done when they allied with

466 SUSAN A. MANN

Abolitionists in the pre-Civil War era? She provides a number of reasons why
suffragists split on this issue, but race- and class-based notions of citizenship
were among the most important factors (Hoganson 2001).

Because the late nineteenth century witnessed the concentration and
centralization of economic wealth alongside shrinking political rights for
minorities and the poor, classes and races were becoming increasingly polarized.
After Reconstruction, black men were being disenfranchised in the South, while
poll taxes and literacy tests marginalized white working-class and poor men as
well. As Hoganson (2001:21) writes: “Many white, middle-class suffragists
approved of this state of affairs, hoping they could parlay their positions of
social privilege into voting rights within a political system that favored whiteness,
wealth and education over manhood.”

These suffragists used the same argument against victims of U.S. imperialism
that they had used against black males during the heated debates over the 15th
Amendment—namely, that illiterate people were incapable of self-government
(Giddings 1984; Terborg-Penn 1998). They also did not hesitate to reveal their
fears of people of color as violent and savage. For example, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton writes: “The great public topic just now is ‘expansion,’ of which I am
in favor . . . I am strongly in favor of this new departure in American foreign policy.
What would this continent have been if we had left it to the Indians?” (Stanton
quoted in Sneider 2008:102). Indeed, Stanton held paternalistic views of many
people, including blacks, immigrants, workers, and Cubans (Griffith 1984). In a
similarly racist and elitist way, Susan B. Anthony states: “It is nonsense to talk
about giving those guerrillas in the Philippines their liberty for that’s all they
are that are waging this war. If we did, the first thing they would do would be to
murder and pillage every white person on the island . . .” (Anthony quoted in
Hoganson 2001:13–14). Even in later years when these feminists argued for
women’s suffrage in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, they made quite
clear that they supported suffrage with limits, such as educational and property
qualifications to vote (Sneider 2008). Such limits meant, for example, that of
the 110,000 inhabitants of Hawaii in 1893, the number of eligible voters would
have been around 2,700 (Sneider 2008).

These two early Presidents of the NAWSA had strategic reasons for
supporting imperialism (Hoganson 2001). Support for empire provided a good
opportunity for suffragists to demonstrate their own political worthiness as
citizens through their loyalty and allegiance to their government, much as many
pro-imperialist British feminists had done earlier (Burton 1994). Moreover, the
Republican Party was more pro-imperialist than Democrats in this era and
NAWSA members believed that continued support for the Republicans would
more likely lead to women’s suffrage. However, fearing that Filipino men might
get the vote before they did under American imperial rule, the NAWSA passed

FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 46

a resolution that Congress should grant Filipinas whatever rights it conferred on
Filipino men (Hoganson 2001).

By contrast, an issue that generated anti-imperialist sentiment among some
white, middle-class liberal suffragists during the Spanish-American War was
the revival of assertions that women should not vote because they did not render
military service. As Hoganson (1998) points out, gender divisions were heightened
by pro-imperialists’ claims that military service and war fostered a more robust
manhood. Anxieties about manhood in this era can be traced to urbanization,
industrialization, and corporate consolidation in the late nineteenth century.
Middle- and upper-class men who held “soft white-collar jobs” and who enjoyed
the comforts of modern life were anxious about becoming “overcivilized.” As
Hoganson (1998:200 –201) writes: “They feared that a decline in manly character
would impair their abilities to maintain not only their class, racial, and national
privileges, but also their status relative to women, especially when assertive
New Women scoffed at submissive ideas of womanhood.” The aging of the
Civil War generation and the end of the Indian Wars also focused attention on
the decline of manhood—especially for young men who lacked such “epic
challenges” (Hoganson 1998:201).

The use of the gendered nature of military service to negate women’s suffrage
was condemned in Carrie Chapman Catt’s address as President of the NAWSA
in 1901. Here Catt argued that “militarism is the oldest and has been the most
unyielding enemy of woman” (quoted in Hoganson 1998:195).

As claims of male
privilege based on military service grew in strength, Catt recanted her earlier
jingoism

and formally endorsed Philippine independence while visiting Manila
for a suffrage meeting of Filipina and U.S. activists (Hoganson 2001). Notably, Catt
maintained her opposition to militarism and joined with more left-wing feminists in
1915 to form the first women’s peace organization—the Women’s Peace Party.

Throughout this era, white, middle-class suffragists were divided over the
issue of imperialist wars. There were those, like Susan B. Anthony, whose
Quaker background fostered her pacificism and whose experiences during the
Civil War made her recognize how wars distracted attention from the suffrage
movement (Sneider 2008). Other suffragists embraced the prevailing notion in
that era that women were more “peace-loving” than men. These suffragists used
women’s ostensible “tenderness” and “higher morality” to argue for women’s
right to suffrage (Sneider 2008:92). There also were suffragists, like Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, who thought it was a big mistake to argue for suffrage on any
ground other than social justice and seized every opportunity to speak in favor
of war to undermine this essentialized view of women (Griffith 1984; Sneider
2008). As Stanton wrote in a letter to her son, “I am sick of all this sentimental
nonsense about ‘our boys in blue’ and ‘wringing mother’s hearts’ ” (Stanton
quoted in Sneider 2008:92).

468 SUSAN A. MANN

Another issue that attracted suffragists to the pro-imperialist cause was the
so-called “civilizing mission” of imperialist ventures. For example, suffragists
in organizations such as the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA),
the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the American Woman’s
Foreign Mission Movement were sent abroad to spread American values and
culture (Tyrell 1991). These women were incensed to learn of the U.S. Army’s
regulation of prostitution in the Philippines as means of reducing venereal
diseases among soldiers.

The NAWSA joined with the WCTU in condemning
the military inspections of Filipina prostitutes and tried to use this “element of
savagery in Army circles” as another reason to give Filipina women the vote
(Sneider 2008:123). Although such “vice” on the part of the U.S. soldiers
undermined claims of U.S. imperialism’s “civilizing” mission abroad, these
suffragists were not critiquing imperialism, they simply wanted a “more chaste
imperialism” (Hoganson 2001:17).

African Americans also were enticed by the pro-imperialist ideologies of
fostering a more “robust manhood” and of “civilizing” foreign lands. Because
of their particular concern for their ancestral homeland of Africa, many African
Americans (including suffragists) were drawn to the missionary ideology of
imperialism (Jacobs 1981). Yet, even in Africa, these female missionaries faced
sexism from their male counterparts and racism from both white missionaries
and imperial officials (Jacobs 1995). The Spanish-American war offered the
opportunity for black males as soldiers to “claim U.S. masculinity for themselves”
(Sneider 2008:93 – 4). Many volunteered for the army even though the sight of
black men in uniform provoked violent responses from some white racists.

As the ties between domestic and international racism grew more apparent,
they became a major theme used by black feminists who condemned U.S.
expansionism during this era. Anna Julia Cooper ([1892] 1998) used this
theme to criticize U.S. expansion in the West and the injustices perpetrated on
American Indians in

A Voice from the South

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause
of human kind. . . . Why should woman become plantiff in a suit versus the Indian or the
Negro or any other race or class who have been crushed under the iron heel of Anglo-Saxon
power and selfishness. (Cooper [1892] 1998 quoted in Lemert and Bhan 1998:106, 108)

Cooper ([1925] 1998) also criticized global imperialism in her doctoral
dissertation, where she analyzed how colonial conflict was the result of internal
race and class differences that were aggravated and exacerbated by white colonizers
pursuing their own advantage. She concluded that the overall fate of the colonies
was not due to their “backwardness,” but to the ways colonizing powers exerted
their influence and appropriated natural and human resources (Lemert and Bhan
1998:268–9). While some scholars have likened her analysis to Neo-Marxist

FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 469

Dependency and World-Systems Theory (Lemert and Bhan 1998), Cooper’s
attention to race, gender, class, and geographic location is more similar to
contemporary U.S. Third World Feminism (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley
1998; Sandoval 1991).

In contrast, Ida B. Wells-Barnett initially saw great opportunities for
African Americans abroad and encouraged them to go to Africa to assist with
its development. When the link between domestic and international racism
became clearer to her, she dropped this support for black involvement in imperialist
goals (Hoganson 2001). Overall, the black press and African American activists
were more likely than were their white counterparts to take an anti-imperialist
stance during this era (Gatewood 1975; Jacobs 1981). However, it took some
time for this stance to develop. Sneider (2008) notes how the initial silence of
black suffragists at the start of the Spanish-American War changed over the
course of this war as they began to see more clearly the links between imperialism
abroad and white racism at home.

By the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. imperialism had a significant
number of opponents that crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and social class lines.
While the settler colonial campaign against Native Americans and the Mexican-
American War had generated only mild resistance from most American “citizens”
(Foner and Winchester 1984:xix, 3), Americans from all walks of life expressed
apprehension and resistance to the U.S. establishing formal political control
overseas. As I noted above, the Anti-Imperialist League had garnered a huge
following within the span of only a few years. The League was not, however, a
cohesive group, but rather a confederation of local organizations that included
extremely diverse people (Foner and Winchester 1984:xix).

The anti-imperialist motives of League members spanned the political
spectrum. They included leftists, such as W. E. B. Dubois who was committed
to self-government and equality domestically and abroad, as well as racists such
as Varina Howell Davis (Jefferson Davis’ wife) who stated that her “most serious
objection to making the Philippines American territory is because three-fourths
of the population is made up of Negroes” (Davis quoted in Foner and Winchester
1984:235). The vast majority of League members, however, genuinely objected
to the antidemocratic nature of U.S. imperialism and to the irony that a former
colony would become a colonial master. Despite this consensus on the principle
of self-government, the League never extended its political critique to cover
women’s disenfranchisement. For most League members, suffrage and self-
determination, whether at home or abroad, were the provinces of men.

Even in the face of this sexism, many American feminists were active in
the Anti-Imperialist League and /or spoke out against U.S. imperialism. For
example, Jane Addams who was active in Chicago’s Anti-Imperialist League,
spoke adamantly against the brutality of the armed interventions undertaken by

470 SUSAN A. MANN

the United States. As a member of the women’s college of the Chicago School
of Sociology, she was part of the “new sociology of race” that focused on the
social dimensions of race as opposed to biology and addressed such matters as
urbanism, immigration, and imperialism. Indeed this link between domestic
racism and what they called the “racial frontier” of imperialism was a laudable
feature of the Chicago School’s analysis of race. In contrast, its more conservative
counterparts in the sociology of that era were committed to a biological model
of racial difference that tended to racialize premodern peoples and treated them
as lesser, uncivilized savages in their evolutionary views of human development
(Winant 2007).

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a member of the Anti-Imperialist League
although she did not write extensively on the issue of imperialism. In

Women
and Economics

, she notes how soldiers in the modern industrial era are
“ruthlessly exploited to some financial interests” and criticizes how many of
her counterparts uncritically and contemptuously use the term “savages” to
describe people in premodern societies (Gilman [1898] 1966:320, 322). Indeed,
her socialist-inspired, materialist approach to values and ethics pointed to a
more enlightened view of premodern peoples subjected to colonialism and
imperialism at this time than did the racist and ethnocentric views of many of
her feminist counterparts.

The prominent feminist and pacifist, Jeannette Rankin, also was active in
the Anti-Imperialist League. Rankin was the first woman elected to the U.S.
House of Representatives in 1916 and was one of only 50 Representatives to
cast votes against the United States entering World War I. This unpopular vote
not only resulted in many suffrage groups canceling her speaking engagements,
but also shortened Rankin’s tenure in the House. Indeed, she was not successful
in being elected to Congress again until 1940. After this election, she again
earned notoriety by being the only member of the House to vote against U.S.
involvement in World War II. In later years, Rankin practiced her principles of
nonviolence and self-determination in the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War
Movements (Lopach and Luckowski 2005; Woelfe 2007).

The anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman was among the most vocal U.S.
feminists in condemning U.S. expansionism (Goldman 1910). In her piece,
“Patriotism, a Menace to Liberty” (Goldman 1911), she specifically attacked
U.S. policies in the Mexican-American War, in Cuba, and in the Spanish-American
War. In regard to patriotism, she writes:

Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. . . . Patriotism assumes that
our globe is divided into little spots. . . . Those who have had the fortune of being born on some
particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings
inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight,
kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others. (Goldman 1911:2)

FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 471

While jailed many times for her activism, Goldman’s longest jail term was the
direct result of her organizing efforts against the involuntary conscription of
men during World War I. Generally speaking, among first-wave feminists, those
who held more left-wing political views and those who were more attuned to
racism and the needs of working-class and poor women were the most active in
the anti-imperialist struggles of this era.

Notably, some U.S. feminists kept up the struggle against imperialism
throughout World War I and even after the American Anti-Imperialist League
disbanded in 1921. Feminists, such as Carrie Chapman Catt and Jane Addams,
formed the Women’s Peace Party (WPP) in 1915 that approved a platform calling
for the extension of suffrage to women and for U.S. women to take part in an
international conference to offer continuous mediation as a way of ending war.
That same year representatives were sent to the International Women’s Congress
for Peace and Freedom held in The Hague, where over 1000 participants from
both neutral and belligerent nations adopted the WPP platform and established
the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP) with
Jane Addams as president. In later years the WPP became the U.S. section of
the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) which is
the oldest, international women’s peace organization in the world (Alonso 1993;
Rupp 1997; Schott 1997). While it is beyond the scope of this article to address
the history of the women’s peace movement, this internationalist stance on
peace was a significant development in feminists’ struggles against imperialism.

What is more surprising is that U.S. feminists in the 1960s and 1970s who
came out of the New Left and the Anti-Vietnam War movement did not give
adequate attention to Luxemburg’s work. No doubt her Marxism made her less
visible in the Cold War freeze that affected mainstream sociological theory in

STOP HERE

472 SUSAN A. MANN

America for many decades, just as her unorthodox Marxism led her work to be
vilified by Stalin and, at best, treated condescendingly by U.S. Leftists (Sweezy
1965). While Luxemburg clearly had stature as a major leader and theoretician
of the international socialist movement during her lifetime, I discuss below how
her unique standpoint/political perspective made her what feminists today call
an “outsider/within” the socialist movement of her era (Collins 1990).

Luxemburg and Feminism

Luxemburg was born in Poland in 1871 but spent most of her adult life in
Germany working as a journalist and teaching in the party school of the German
Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands [SPD]). In
the early 1900s, the SPD was the largest socialist organization in the world and
represented the vast majority of industrial workers in Germany (Hudis and Anderson
2004). Luxemburg broke with the SPD in 1916 on the issue of their support for
war bonds during World War I and founded the Spartacus League that later
became the German Communist Party (Merrick 1988). She was arrested in 1919
for her participation in the Sparticist uprising against the German government
and was killed by soldiers while being transported to prison. Over her relatively
short life, Luxemburg produced 700 publications that included articles, pamphlets,
speeches, and books. Her major works on imperialism include

The Accumulation
of

Capital

(Luxemburg [1913] 1951), and two works written while she was in
prison for opposing World War I,

The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in German
Social Democracy

(Luxemburg [1915] 2004) and

The Accumulation of Capital:
An Anti-Critique

(Luxemburg [1915] 1972). Recently translated are her writings
on the imperialist destruction of natural economies from

Introduction to Political
Economy

, a book she began in 1908, but never completed (Luxemburg [1908]
2004). Her writings specifically on women’s issues are relatively sparse and all
of them can be found in

The Rosa Luxemburg Reader

(Hudis and Anderson
2004). While these writings have received inadequate attention in U.S. feminist
sociology, they are well known in European academic circles.

As a woman, Luxemburg had to fight for her position in the forefront of
the international socialist movement because the leadership of European radical
and revolutionary organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
was almost exclusively male (Haug 1992). She angered some male leaders for
refusing to assume the stereotypical roles women usually filled in political
organizations at that time (Frolich 1972). For example, on joining the German
SPD, Luxemburg rejected the party leaders’ suggestion that she turn her attention
to their organization for women where she would be sidetracked from the
mainstream of the party’s political life (Merrick 1988). As one analyst writes:
“While she understood the importance of organizing women to take part in the
revolutionary struggle . . . she steadfastly refused to be forced into any traditional

FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 473

women’s role in within the party” (Waters 1970:8). Rather, she encouraged
left-wing women to take an independent role in politics and to free themselves
from their husband’s domination (Howard 1971). Ironically, this feminist stance
against embracing traditional women’s roles within radical parties led her away
from focusing on women’s issues.

While Luxemburg refused to be marginalized in the women’s section of
SPD, she was a close friend and ally of that section’s leader, Clara Zetkin, and
shared her concern with projecting women’s emancipation as an integral dimension
of socialist transformation. Luxemburg’s writings on women show how she
viewed women as part of the exploited population, which, for her, also included
the working class, national minorities, and peasants (Merrick 1988). She was
critical of liberal feminism (which she termed “bourgeois feminism”) and made
demands for women that were far more radical than those of the hegemonic
liberal feminist organizations at this time (Abraham 1989:67). However,
Luxemburg believed that women could achieve their full liberation only with
the triumph of a socialist revolution. Consequently, she devoted her energies to
addressing the key issues of imperialism, social class, and revolutionary strategies/
tactics that were being debated by the male leadership of the international
socialist movement.

Given that these issues trumped gender in Luxemburg’s writings, she more
likely would be labeled as a Marxist Feminist than as a Socialist Feminist in
contemporary feminist terms. Some recent feminists have praised her class
perspective on feminism as offering a theoretical grounding that is lacking in
contemporary, postmodern politics of difference (Nye 1999). I consider her
work on imperialism to be her most important contribution although it took a
circuitous, international route to reach U.S. feminists. Most contemporary global
feminist analyses inspired by Luxemburg’s ideas were written by European and
East Asian women, read by American feminists, and then incorporated into U.S.
feminism. The goal of the next section is to bypass this circuitous international
route in the future by encouraging U.S. feminists to become more familiar with
Luxemburg’s writings.

Luxemburg on Imperialism

Luxemburg’s major treatise on imperialism,

The Accumulation of Capital

(Luxemburg [1913] 1951), focused on the economic factors that compelled
capitalist enterprises to expand beyond their national borders. Uncovering the
economic roots of imperialism was an urgent task at this time in history when
the scramble for global territories created severe tensions among the major
European powers—tensions that eventually erupted in the First World War.
While other leaders of the German SPD, such as Karl Kautsky and Eduard
Bernstein, viewed imperialism as an aberrant form that was not intrinsic to

474 SUSAN A. MANN

capitalist development, Luxemburg argued that capitalism was driven to expand
to noncapitalist areas to protect its very existence. These political debates were
not simply academic, but had serious implications as to whether the SPD and
the large, German labor movement it represented would support imperialist
ventures.

Unlike more orthodox Marxists, Luxemburg’s analysis of imperialism was
based on an underconsumptionist model of capitalist development. She argued
that capitalism was severely restricted and ultimately would be destroyed by its
need to accumulate capital by ever expanding the number of goods it produced.
Eventually, capitalists would run out of effective demand to buy the growing
number of commodities produced for their own home markets and, thus, they
had to rely on people outside of the capitalist system:

Thus the immediate and vital conditions for capital and its accumulation is the existence of
non-capitalist buyers of surplus value . . . the accumulation of capital, as an historical process,
depends in every respect upon non-capitalist social strata and forms of social organization.
(Luxemburg [1913] 1951:366)

For Luxemburg, this meant that the capitalist system was locked in an
inescapable contradiction. On the one hand, it depended on noncapitalist markets
to realize the ever-expanding value it produced. On the other hand, as capitalism
penetrated noncapitalist markets, it destroyed native handicraft and artisan forms
of production that could not compete with the mass-produced, commodities of
large-scale, industrial, capitalist enterprises. Thus as capitalism spread globally
it not only created a world in its own image, but also dug its own grave by
annihilating the noncapitalist forms it was dependent on for further expansion.
She writes:

Non-capitalist organizations provide a fertile soil for capitalism; more strictly: capital feeds
on the ruins of such organizations, and although this non-capitalist milieu is indispensable for
accumulation, the latter proceeds at the cost of this medium nevertheless, by eating it up.
(Luxemburg [1913] 1951:416)

Few Marxists of her era ever matched her depth of concern over the Western
imperialist destruction of noncapitalist social relations (Hudis and Anderson
2004). Instead of highlighting the backwardness of such formations, she focused
on their extraordinary tenacity, elasticity, and adaptability. In particular, she
emphasized how European imperialism destroyed the world’s remaining indigenous
communal formations—formations that had “afforded the most productive
labor process and the best assurance of its continuity and development for many
epochs” (Luxemburg quoted in Hudis and Anderson 2004:16). She writes:

The intrusion of European civilization was a disaster in every sense for primitive social
relations. The European conquerors are the first who are not merely after subjugation and
economic exploitation, but the means of production itself, by ripping the land from underneath

FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 475

the feet of the native population . . . What emerges is something that is worse than all oppres-
sion and exploitation, total anarchy and a specifically European phenomenon, the uncertainty
of existence. (Luxemburg [1908] 2004:110)

This theme of the ruination of natural economies pervades Luxemburg’s
devastating critiques of the impact of French imperialism in Algeria, of British
imperialism in India and China, of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and Latin
America, and of various European colonial ventures in Southern Africa (Luxemburg
[1913] 1951).

For Luxemburg, the imperialist destruction of natural economies exempli-
fied the process of “primitive accumulation” that Marx had discussed in

Capital

to explain the origins of capitalism in Western Europe (Marx [1867] 1967:667–
70). For Marx, “primitive accumulation” referred to the use of brute force and
violence to turn peasants into proletariat and to plunder riches from the New
World which the merchants and conquistadors of the mercantile era brought
back to Europe to stimulate burgeoning capitalist enterprises. Unlike Marx,
Luxemburg theorized that “primitive accumulation” was not just relevant to the
origins of capitalism, but rather was a recurring process in the imperial drives
of capitalism into foreign lands (Luxemburg [1913] 1951:369–71). “The
accumulation of capital employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its
genesis, but rather right on down to the present day. . . . In fact, it is invariably
accompanied by a growing militarism” (Luxemburg [1913] 1951:371). In this
way, she highlighted the role of militarism and force as integral to the logic of
modern imperialism.

As a number of critics have pointed out, Luxemburg’s underconsumptionist
argument is flawed for a number of reasons. First, if one looks past the production
of consumer goods to the production of means of production, we can see how
capitalist accumulation and realization can take other forms when it is realized
through investments in machinery and other means of production. Second,
capitalism does not just produce commodities to meet human needs. Rather it
constantly creates new needs and, hence, new markets within any given national
market. Third, as one critic rather scathingly put it, Luxemburg’s analysis
“implies the absurdity that backward nations have a surplus in monetary form
large enough to accommodate the surplus-value of the capitalistically advanced
societies” (Mattick 1978:4). Fourth, studies of international markets during
Luxemburg’s era suggest that major market activities took place between the
developed imperial powers rather than between developed and less developed
countries (Hobson [1905] 1971).

Although Luxemburg’s theory is flawed, she made a number of important
contributions to future analyses of imperialism. First, her writings are notable
for highlighting the role Western imperialism played in the destruction of
noncapitalist, global social relations. Second, by stressing how capitalism

476 SUSAN A. MANN

depends on state violence to expand globally, her work contains the seeds of a
theory of a permanent arms economy that was developed by later neo-Marxists
(Magdoff 1969). Third, she predicted the growth of militarism and conflict
between capitalist countries that repudiated any notion of the peaceful development
of capitalism and foreshadowed the world wars of the twentieth century (Cox
2003). Fourth, her theory has had a significant influence on contemporary
global feminist analyses.

Luxemburg’s Legacy to Contemporary Global Feminist Analyses

Given that Luxemburg’s collected works were first available in the German
Democratic Republic, it is not surprising that German feminists were the first to
use Luxemburg’s theory to discuss contemporary global feminist issues. One of
the most creative uses of her work can be found in

Women: The Last Colony

by
Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, and Claudia Von Werlhof (1988).
These authors argue that embedded in Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism is an
analysis of women’s work that was not even visible to Luxemburg herself. As
Von Werlhof, writes: “Paradoxically, Rosa Luxemburg was unaware that she
had written about the women’s question in

The Accumulation of Capital

. . .”
(Von Werlhof quoted in Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, and Von Werlhof 1988:14).
Below I examine two major ways these German feminists extended Luxemburg’s
work to highlight the relationship between feminism and imperialism.

Their first extension of her theory simply reconceptualized Luxemburg’s
analysis of capitalism’s dependence on expansion into natural economies as just
another way of saying that capitalism depends on nonwage labor for its existence.
They then discuss how women’s work both in developed and underdeveloped
societies is primarily nonwage labor. They argue that across the globe women
are primarily responsible for unpaid (nonwage) housework and childcare
whether or not these women work outside of the home. Moreover, in Third
World countries, the vast majority of workers (male and female) are engaged in
nonwage forms of production like subsistence agriculture or petty commodity
production that is based on family labor rather than wage labor. They conclude
that, if nonwage labor is so important to understanding imperialism, the
“woman question” is integral to an analysis of imperialism:

But who are these “non-capitalist” producers . . . ? They are the majority; housewives
throughout the world, peasants of both sexes, mainly in the Third World producing for their
own subsistence, and the army of males and females so-called “marginalized” people, most of
whom also live in the Third World . . .

The situation of Third World rural and urban subsistence producers, the “marginal mass,”
most closely resembles that of women. It is not women who have a colonial status, but the
colonies that have a woman’s status. (Von Werlhof quoted in Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, and
Von Werlhof 1988:14 –15, 25)

FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 477

The last chapter of their book ends by describing Third World men and women
as the “world housewives” whereby “the relation between husband and wife is
repeated in the relation between the First and the Third World” (Mies, Bennholdt-
Thomsen, and Von Werlhof 1988:177).

In their second major revision of Luxemburg’s work they extend her claim
that Western imperialism is a “disaster in every sense” for nonwage social
relations to argue that women in the Third World are more negatively impacted
by this process than are men. For example, Maria Mies documents the devastating
impact that capitalist development had on women in India:

. . .

capitalist penetration leads to the pauperization and marginalization of large masses of
subsistence producers; and women are more affected by these processes than men

. . . . There
is a growing inequality and polarization between the sexes. The capitalist penetration [of
noncapitalist forms abroad], far from bringing about more equality between men and
women . . . has, in fact introduced new elements of patriarchalism and sexism. . . . (Mies,
Bennholdt-Thomsen, and Von Werlhof 1988:40, 41, her emphasis)

Mies describes how this process leads to the feminization of poverty in the
Third World and an increase in violence against women as their position deteriorates
relative to men. She also discusses the dissolution or break up of families as
pauperized men migrate to the cities for wage labor while wives and daughters
stay in the local villages doing subsistence farming or turning to prostitution to
make ends meet (Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, and Von Werlhof 1988). Their
point that Third World women are more negatively affected than are their male
counterparts by modernization and development has been well documented by
other contemporary feminists. In contrast, their claim that women’s nonwage
labor is the archetype for examining labor in the Third World has been less
influential. Indeed, it may be more logical to argue the reverse that certain
nonwage forms of production are the archetype for women’s nonwage labor
(Mann 1990).

Rosa Luxemburg’s work also has inspired contemporary global feminist
theorists to critically interrogate the Western notion of “development.” For
example, Vandana Shiva’s ([1989] 1993)

Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and
Development

uses Luxemburg’s analysis of the ruination of natural economies
to introduce her concept of “maldevelopment,” a key concept in global feminism
today (Shiva [1989] 1993:1; Kirk and Okazawa-Rey 2004:377). Shiva writes:

Yet, as Rosa Luxemburg has pointed out . . . colonization is a constant, necessary condition
for capitalist growth: without colonies, capitalist accumulation would grind to a halt. . . .

Development thus became a continuation of the colonization process

; it became an extension
of the project of wealth creation in modern, Western patriarchy’s economic vision. (Shiva
[1989] 1993:1, my emphasis)

This critical interrogation of what is meant by “development” marks a
paradigmatic shift in global analysis. Previous analyses of development, whether

478 SUSAN A. MANN

left, right, or center, primarily used economic growth as the major indicator of
development. These theories held that to increase production and alleviate
Third World poverty, wage labor and industrialization should replace earlier,
less efficient, precapitalist and nonwage forms of production. In this sense, they
viewed Western patterns of industrialization as the model for Third World countries.
This was as true of classical sociologists’ theories of social change (Durkheim
[1893] 1964; Marx [1867] 1967; Weber [1927] 1981) as it was of many post-
World War II theories, whether they were conservative modernization theories
(Parsons 1966; Rostow 1960) or Neo-Marxist Dependency and World-Systems
theories (Amin 1977; Frank 1976; Wallerstein 1979). Indeed, they all treated
“development” more as an inevitable unfolding of human destiny rather than
as particular

historical choices

that were very Western/Eurocentric in their
orientation (McMichael 1996:18, his emphasis). By contrast, many feminist
theorists today are critical of these models because of their Western vantage
point, their failure to deliver on their economic promises and the environmental
degradation that has accompanied global industrialization.

Therefore, it is important to highlight how Luxemburg’s work inspired
these feminist scholars who pioneered this paradigmatic change in global
analyses. As Shiva writes:

The old assumption that with the development process the availability of goods and services
will automatically be increased and poverty will be removed is now under serious challenge
from women’s ecology movements in the Third World, even while it continues to guide
development thinking in the centers of patriarchal power. (Shiva [1989] 1993:13)

Shiva argues that, prior to colonization and imperialism, Third World people
were not in need of “development.” She highlights how they lived in systems
based on subsistence agriculture that were organically connected to nature and
where women lived in an interdependent and complementary division of labor
with men. She focuses on how the violation of these organic and interdependent
systems signals both the “death of nature” and the “death of the feminine
principle.” By the “death of nature,” she means the beginnings of Third World
environmental despoilment and pollution. By the “death of the feminine principle,”
she is referring to a holistic world view where belief in the life force of mother
earth or “Prakriti” (as it is called in India) is interwoven with women’s socio-
economic roles as food providers and as mothers. Shiva documents these two
forms of destruction by showing how the replacement of subsistence agriculture
with modern cash crops in India resulted in a scarcity of water, food, fodder,
and fuel that disproportionately affected women’s work.

If global feminist theorists, like Shiva, reject both capitalist and socialist
visions of the future, what do they support? Shiva’s vision for the future is most
clearly articulated in

Ecofeminism

(Mies and Shiva 1993). The terms “subsistence

FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 479

perspective” and “survival perspective” are used interchangeably to refer to
their alternative vision. Its main features include changing the aim of economic
activity from producing an ever-expanding “mountain of commodities” to
satisfying fundamental human needs and sustainable development. Principles of
reciprocity, mutuality, sharing, and social bonds of community replace money,
the market, and financial institutions. In turn, natural resources are neither
privatized nor commercialized but treated as community responsibilities (Mies
and Shiva 1993). They support small, decentralized, democratic social organizations
and slogans such as “simple living” resonate strongly with them. They have a
particular affinity for grassroots movements and local populist causes that
challenge large corporations and centralized national governments. This
alternative vision is popular in global ecofeminist circles today and is shared by
feminists of various political persuasions, including anarchist social ecologists,
radical and cultural ecofeminists, and many “third wave” feminists (Merchant
1995; Reger 2005).

While Mies and Shiva have significant stature in global feminist and
ecofeminist circles today, their work is not without critics. One of the more
serious critiques of their work centers on the issue of “essentialism” or attributing
core or shared features to a group/collectivity—such as Third World women or
premodern peoples, without being sensitive to the differences by race, class,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, and geographic location within these groups/
collectivities (Fuss 1989; Mohanty 1984; Spelman 1988). Because critiques of
essentialism are

de rigueur

in feminism today, it is not surprising that contemporary
feminists have been critical of perspectives like those of Mies and Shiva, who
present premodern, indigenous women as the “quintessential ecofeminists” or
their communities as paradigms for egalitarianism (Jackson 1993; Sturgeon
1997). These critics argue that such views are essentialist because they ignore
differences between indigenous women, just as they often ignore the patriarchal
nature of many premodern, subsistence cultures (Li 1993).

Using the Past to Clarify the Present

No doubt Luxemburg would be pleased that her theory is still utilized
almost a century after she wrote

The Accumulation of Capital

(Luxemburg
[1913] 1951) and impressed with contemporary feminists’ more in-depth analyses
of nonwage labor. However, she would be critical of how Mies and Shiva
romanticize nonwage forms of production, as well as their views on “development”
and their “third road” to social change. While Luxemburg appreciated the
extraordinary tenacity of precapitalist, indigenous social formations, she never
romanticized these precapitalist forms nor did she hold them up as a paragon
for global social life. Rather, Luxemburg was an advocate of industrial socialism.
For example, in a section of

The Junius Pamphlet

titled “Socialism or Barbarism?,”

480 SUSAN A. MANN

she makes abundantly clear that she thinks socialism is the best road for both
First and Third World peoples (Luxemburg [1915] 2004).

Moreover, the subsistence-based alternative proposed by contemporary
writers like Shiva and Mies was not unheard of in Luxemburg’s era. In the late
nineteenth century, Populists and Marxists hotly debated the relative merits of
capitalist, socialist, or populist paths to social change. This debate, often referred
to as the “Agrarian Question,” was particularly heated in late nineteenth century
Russia where the dominant revolutionary party was the Populist (Narodnik)
Party (Mann 1990). Luxemburg never allied with the Populists, but joined
forces with such famous Russian revolutionary leaders as Plekhanov and Lenin
who favored the socialist road to development (Nettl 1969).

Contemporary writers also provide us with some insights into why many
Marxists today continue to agree with Luxemburg’s socialist solution. For
example, socialist critics argue that the vast majority of economic, social, and
ecological problems that plague the world today cannot be adequately addressed
at a small and local level. They argue that in a world that has witnessed economic,
cultural, and social globalization, such issues need to be addressed in more
macro-level contexts, be they regional, national, or international. For example,
James O’Connor, one of the foremost socialist ecologists writing today, has
written scathing critiques of those who imagine that local and small-scale social
organizations could cope with global industrial and environmental pollution,
such as acid rain, nuclear disasters, and global warming, that spills over local,
regional, and national boundaries (O’Connor 1991).

Unlike most feminists today, Luxemburg lacked ecological awareness.
While she had a strong interest in botany and zoology that is evident in her personal
letters, “she was not the deep-breathing romantic nature lover portrayed by
some of her biographers” (Nettl 1969:41). Like most Marxists of her era, the
domination of nature meant human freedom and progress to her. The only
school of Marxism critical of the irrational and environmentally unsound
features of the human domination of nature in the early twentieth century was
the Frankfurt School which arose in the 1920s after Luxemburg’s death (Agger
1998; Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 1972).

Despite these differences, common ground between Luxemburg, Mies, and
Shiva lies in their shared materialist approach to feminism. This approach
situates gender relations within the structures of global, political/economic
systems and focuses on the effects these structures have on women’s daily activities
in the routine maintenance of their material lives (Landry and MacLean 1993;
Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley in Ritzer 2008). This emphasis on political
economy distinguishes their work from contemporary global theorists who have
taken the postmodern turn. A major feature of the postmodern turn is that “it
takes feminist scholars way from the materiality of inequality, justice and

FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 481

oppression and toward a neo-idealist posture that sees the world as ‘discourse,’
‘representation’ and ‘text’ ” (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley in Ritzer
2008:485).

Implications for Imperialism Today

Unlike materialist global theories that focus on imperialism as a political/
economic phenomenon and point directly to the classes/social groups who
benefit from this global exploitation, postmodernists tend to use the term
“globalization” and focus on transnational processes that flow in many different
directions and that affect many diverse “scapes” of social life—social, cultural,
ideological, technological, political, and economic (Appadurai 1996). Such
scapes are partly or wholly independent of any given nation-state or social group
and, therefore, the beneficiaries and victims of globalization are more diffuse
and ambiguous.

Postmodernists tend to focus on cultural and discursive aspects of
globalization—particularly on the decline of the “Western narrative” or the
“Euro-American Master Narrative” (Appadurai 1996:300; Ritzer 2008:579–90;
Smart 1993). These terms refer to the modernist projects that began during the
Enlightenment and continue up until the present. These projects foster such
Western ideals as democracy, the separation of church and state, freedom of
speech, and individualism. In postmodernist accounts, resistance to the univer-
salization of this Western narrative is generally portrayed as ethnically or
culturally driven—that is a drive to maintain local, diverse ethno-histories from
the homogenization, secularization, and rationalization that economic and
cultural modernization entails (Smart 1993). For these theorists, major global
clashes today are often portrayed as clashes between homogenization and
diversity (Ritzer 2008).

This presents contemporary feminists with a major dilemma. On the one
hand, the postmodern turn in feminism today ushered in important critiques of
essentialism and universalistic master narratives, as well as an appealing call
for polyvocality and diversity. It also entailed an epistemological break with
earlier modernist approaches that led to a greater focus on marginalized cultures
and voices, subjugated knowledges, and perspectival knowledge claims. The
notion of “truth” became a troubled one in the postmodern world of polyvocality
and multiple realities as the key questions became whose truth? Whose reality?
Whose version of reason? (Bordo 1990:136 –7). On the other hand, Western
feminism arose out of a rational, secular ideology with roots in the Enlightenment
where the more universalistic ideas of freedom and equality are central. Con-
sequently, when local forms of diversity embrace patriarchal traditions, such as
religious fundamentalism at home or abroad, it is often disconcerting to
Western feminists who are well aware of the ways fundamentalist, patriarchal

482 SUSAN A. MANN

religions can subordinate women. So how do feminists deal with this dilemma
when it is framed as a clash between diversity and homogenization?

Global materialist feminists, like Mies and Shiva, explicitly reject the
homogenization of culture that accompanies economic rationalization and
modernization. However, because of their materialist approach, they focus on
how the commodification of culture is the root of this problem (Mies and Shiva
1993). Similarly, their materialism leads them to reject the cultural relativism
embraced by postmodernists in the name of polyvocality and difference. They
fear that such cultural relativism places local customs and traditions “as particular
and beyond criticism,” such that we must accept patriarchal and exploitative
institutions/customs simply as cultural expressions and creations of particular
people (Mies and Shiva 1993:11).

Mies and Shiva (1993:11) also warn against “discounting the economy
altogether” for a consideration of culture. Here they are responding to the
tendency of postmodernists to view global clashes today as transnational
“culture wars” rather than as political/economic clashes. This paradigmatic shift
to a focus on culture wars has become hegemonic in the mass media and in U.S.
politics today. Christiane Amanpour’s recent

CNN Special

, “God’s Warriors,”
which highlighted the culture wars waged by Christian, Jewish, and Moslem
fundamentalists against secular, modern culture is illustrative of this trend
(Amanpour 2007). Here the major reason for political confrontations at home
and abroad is depicted as a clash between fundamentalist, religious morals and
what fundamentalists perceive as a morally bankrupt, secular culture that fosters
sexual promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse, and consumerism. Ironically, our
current government’s administration has played both ends of this fundamentalist
versus secular continuum by fostering its own born-again, Christian-driven,
political agenda that restricts abortion rights and gay rights at home, while at the
same time lambasting Islamic fundamentalists for their patriarchal practices in
an effort to foster women’s support for U.S. ventures abroad. In this global
morality play, the West becomes associated with either its Judea-Christian
traditions or its modern, secular culture—both of which are portrayed as enemies
of transnational, radical Islam.

In contrast, a materialist analysis would focus more on how the global
“culture wars” and the widespread nature of anti-Western sentiments abroad
were fomented in large part by the earlier political/economic impacts of the
colonialist and neocolonialist policies of Western imperialism. Through these
policies the hegemonic Western powers created a world of their own making.
For example, in their heyday the British led the Western powers in literally
carving up the globe by erecting artificial national borders between the ancestral
territories of various ethnic and tribal groups (Goldsmith 1994). By doing so,
they created some of the world’s contemporary political hotspots. This was the

FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 483

case when they mishandled their Mandate of Palestine and when they created the
country of Iraq in the 1920s (Anti-Defamation League 1999; Simon and Tejirian
2005). Similarly, the United States was not averse to establishing modernization
by force as, for example, when our Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped foster
the coup that brought Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, to power in 1953.
His autocratic rule was eventually overthrown in 1979 by revolutionary forces who
established an Islamic Republic (Gasiorowski and Byrne 2004). The U.S. government
also gave military and financial support to the Taliban in the 1980s when it was
fighting against the Soviets. Less than two decades later, the United States was at
war with the Taliban and President George W. Bush’s campaign placards claimed
that “W is for women” to woo U.S. women’s support for our current war against the
Taliban in Afghanistan.

In short, the West is paying today for its lack of regard
for the indigenous inhabitants of these lands and the animosity engendered when
their material and cultural lives were appropriated, suppressed, or transformed.

While these are just a few examples of how a materialist feminism might
address certain global issues, it is noteworthy that a number of Postcolonial and
Transnational feminists are wedding materialist analyses with their poststructuralist
deconstructive methods. For example, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984), a
major figure in Postcolonial analyses today, initially focused on discursive
issues and “decolonizing” Western feminist thought in her path-breaking work
“Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” However,
more recently, in

Feminism without Borders

, Mohanty ([2003] 2006) discusses how
her major concerns have shifted. While she makes clear that her overall analytical
framework has not changed, she views “the politics and economics of capitalism
as a far more urgent locus of struggle” and describes her work today as more
akin to a deconstructive, “historical materialism” (Mohanty [2003] 2006:231).

Other Transnational and Postcolonial feminist theorists have highlighted
how an “undertheorization” of political economic issues too often leads to an
entrapment in cultural and discursive debates (Gupta 2006:25; Grewal and
Kaplan [1994] 2006:21; Mendoza 2002:303, 310; Spivak 1999:357–8). These
theorists are still attentive to discursive and cultural issues as well as to the
micro-politics of everyday life. Yet their recent works point more to how dis-
course, culture, and everyday life are embedded in macro-global economic and
political processes. Like Mohanty, they all recuperate the centrality of capitalism
in the New World Order. That these materialist-deconstructive approaches
appear to be the wave of the future for feminist global analyses bodes well for
the continued significance of Rosa Luxemburg’s work.

Conclusions

This study was designed to address two shortcomings in American
feminist sociology in regard to the issue of global imperialism. It first focused

484 SUSAN A. MANN

on the inadequate attention U.S. feminist sociologists have paid to how major
leaders of the U.S. women’s movement responded to imperialism when the
United States began its overseas expansion in the late nineteenth century.
Here we saw how race, class, and gender were interwoven in their debates over
imperialism. Those feminists who were more attuned to race and class oppression
were more likely to take an anti-imperialist stance. Suffragists who took a
pro-imperialist stance during this era often did so to foster their own domestic
race, class, and gender interests. In short, their own social locations and standpoints
were reflected in their discourses on imperialism.

The second section discussed how the theoretical contributions of Rosa
Luxemburg are virtually ignored in U.S. portrayals of feminist sociology and
women founders of sociology. Particular emphasis was given to how Luxemburg’s
analysis of imperialism influenced the writings of a number of contemporary
global feminists. Various extensions and revisions of Luxemburg’s work by these
feminists were examined. Despite differences on the issues of environmentalism,
populism, and the role of modernization and development in social progress,
they share a materialist feminist approach. This materialist approach was then
contrasted to the postmodern turn taken by a number of global theorists
today. I concluded by discussing how materialist-deconstructive approaches are
increasingly being used in Transnational and Postcolonial feminist analyses
today.

Through this process, we retrieved and reclaimed part of our historical past
that has been overlooked in U.S. feminist sociology. Perhaps the most important
reason for unearthing our past is to learn from it, so as to better chart our future
and change the oppressive power relations encoded in the name of gender, race,
class, nation, and empire.

ENDNOTES

*The author thanks Rachel Luft, Emily Blumenfeld, Gordon Welty, James Dickinson,
Michael Grimes, and the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this
article.

The term “feminist” was first used in the 1920s (Cott 1987).

A notable exception here is Bert Adams and R. A. Sydie’s (2002)

Classical Sociological
Theory

The continued disenfranchisement of African American women after 1920 calls into question
this date as the proper end point for claiming the victory of U.S. women’s suffrage.

The implications of U.S. internal colonialism have been addressed in some depth, especially
by U.S. women of color theorists.

See also Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (1998), Leila Rupp (1997), Sylvia Jacobs (1995, 1981), and
Ellen Carol DuBois (1994).

FEMINISM AND IMPERIALISM, 1890–1920 485

This quote also would prove relevant to the “second wave” of U.S. feminists given that the
issue of women in combat was used by anti-feminists in the 1970s and early 1980s to thwart the
passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Jingoism is a British term coined in 1878 to refer to zealous pro-imperialists. It was derived
from the lyrics of a song sung in pubs and music halls at that time: “We don’t want to fight but by
jingo if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too . . .” (http://
www.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingoism).

These suffragists were incensed, but not surprised to learn about the Army’s regulation of
prostitution, as this issue had been raised much earlier by British feminists when the British
military engaged in similar practices to reduce venereal diseases among soldiers and sailors.

More than 20,000 Europeans attended a demonstration in Berlin in 2007 to honor the
anniversary of Luxemburg’s death (Grossman 2007).

The increasing recognition of the intersections of race, class, gender, and nation has meant
that using the term “feminist” for women engaged in anti-racist or anti-imperialist struggles is more
accepted today than it was in Luxemburg’s era and has been strongly supported in feminist Third
World theory (Jayawardena 1986).

Natasha Walter writes: “Bush has frequently used his policy in Afghanistan as evidence of
his commitment to women’s rights, and as an attempt to woo women voters. Recently, Laura Bush
spoke at an election rally at which women in the audience held placards saying ‘W stands for
women.’ ” However, according to Walter, this is not how many women in Afghanistan see it. Rather,
they argue that power is still parceled out to brutal regional commanders who make their situation
more dangerous than before the U.S. invasion. In short, W stands for warlord, not women as the title
of Walter’s article “The Winners Are Warlords, Not Women” suggests ( Walter 2004).

Yyotsna Gupta (2006) argues that Mohanty’s shift toward a greater focus on political
economy was inspired by Mies’ and Shiva’s work, thus indirectly pointing to the influence of
Luxemburg on Mohanty’s work.

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Q & A

Critical Thinking

Areas of Expertise

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Trusted Partner of 9650+ Students for Writing

Preferred Writer

Grammar Check Report

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Free Features $66FREE

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Delegate Your Challenging Writing Tasks to Experienced Professionals

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