Women's Anti-Imperialism, “The White Man's Burden,” and the Philippine-American War

Abstract

During the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), the Anti-Imperialist League was the organizational vanguard of an anti-imperialist movement. Research on this period of U.S. imperialism has focused on empire building, ignoring the gendered activity of anti-imperialists in the metropole. The author outlines the constitutive relationship between gendered structures and experience that informed anti-imperialists' “contentious politics,” using archival sources of the Anti-Imperialist League and anti-imperialist debates in newspapers. The author shows how anti-imperialist leaders informally included women's monetary donations, labor, networks, and reputations while formally excluding their full membership. Finally, the author shows how masculinist ambivalence, or the pattern of the gendered inclusions/exclusions of anti-imperialists, explains the incremental transformations and reproductions of gendered structures in anti-imperialists' contentious politics. The author suggests masculinist ambivalence has theoretical utility for explaining gendered inclusions and exclusions in movements that are not explicitly about gender conflict or change.

In a Few Generations: Debating Race, Colonial Development, and Independence in the US Colonial Field

“…6 In 1902, with the help of the anti-imperialist sympathizing attorney Louis Brandeis (who would later become a Supreme Court Justice), she wrote a letter to President Roosevelt and submitted a written statement to the Senate Investigation on Affairs in the Philippines to appeal for her brothers to be released. She was the only Filipina/o critical of the occupation to submit a testimony before the committee (Murphy, 2009b). Lopez stayed with the family of anti-imperialist activist Fiske Warren during her stay in Boston, and later extended her stay in the USA to attend Smith College.…”