Counters universalist narratives of mainstream feminism by examining the power exerted by four white women writer-activists to shape American society from the 1860s to 1930s.
White Woman's Burden focuses on four American writer-activists who were significant if secondary actors in the historical push for two rights that disproportionately served elite women: suffrage and equal higher education. Reflecting regional ideas about whiteness and womanhood from Massachusetts to New Mexico, Elizabeth Agassiz, Annie Fields, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Nina Otero-Warren embodied and helped nationalize the domestically defined versions of their era's mainstream feminism. Through their participation in advances in science, literary culture, higher education, state government, and language rights, these four women advocated for the interrelated objectives of (white) women's rights, US imperialism, and white nationalism. In challenging the assumption that white women's political involvement supported and supports universal goals that serve other marginalized groups, White Woman's Burden revisits mainstream feminist responses to the nineteenth-century "theory of influence," arguing that elite women's practices of social power developed during that period continue to shape our ideas about womanhood and activism into the present—from the contemporary belief in (white) women's innate civic-mindedness to white women's voting patterns in recent US presidential elections.
"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