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Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women’s College pp 33–49Cite as

Racism, Medievalism, and Anglo-Saxon

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Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

Abstract

This chapter analyzes three case studies (of Bryn Mawr College, the Industrial Institute and College, and Spelman College) to demonstrate the ways that the study of Anglo-Saxon affirmed a student’s connection with the racial superiority assumed by an overwhelming proportion of the white population throughout the United States at the turn to the twentieth century. Rather than simply a triumphant and progressive history of women’s access to an academic specialty, the narrative of the study of Anglo-Saxon in the women’s colleges interrogates the shifting, intersectional power structures of race, class, and gender that those white, largely upper-middle-class women inhabited.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    E.G. Stanley, “Old English = ‘Anglo-Saxon’” Notes and Queries 42.2 (1995) 168–173, at 168. Expanded Academic ASAP, 2 February 2014.

  2. 2.

    Henry Sweet, ed., King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, EETS OS 45, 50 (London: Trubner, 1871), accessed 2 February 2014. archive.org.

  3. 3.

    ANSAX-L electronic discussion group, “‘Old English’ vs. ‘Anglo-Saxon,’” Listserv/email messages 16 December 2013–18 December 2013.

  4. 4.

    Today, the word “whiteness” does much of the cultural work of the nineteenth-century phrase “Anglo-Saxon,” although the twenty-first-century word “whiteness” is most productively used as a term of interrogation and challenge (as opposed to the usually celebratory use of “Anglo-Saxon” in the nineteenth century). For an example within the vast literature of critical race theory produced in the early part of the twenty-first century, see bell hooks, Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2013).

  5. 5.

    Eric Kaufmann , “American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Anglo-Saxon Ethnogenesis in the ‘Universal’ Nation, 1776–1850” Journal of American Studies 33.3 (1999): 437–457. Kaufmann provides an interesting terminological contrast in his discussion of the roots of “Anglo-American” and “Anglo-American Protestant” nativism; he uses these terms interchangeably with “Anglo-Saxon.”

  6. 6.

    Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Harvard University Press, 1981), 26.

  7. 7.

    Horsman, Race, 209.

  8. 8.

    Horsman, Race, 4.

  9. 9.

    Horsman, Race, 1.

  10. 10.

    “medievalism, n.,” OED Online, September 2015 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/115639.

  11. 11.

    Kaufmann , “American Exceptionalism,” 13 (PDF of Kaufmann’s essay available open-access via the University of London http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/4211/).

  12. 12.

    Stanley R. Hauer, “Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language” PMLA 98.5 (1981): 879–898, at 880.

  13. 13.

    Letter from Jefferson quoted in Hauer, “Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language,” 880. The full text of Jefferson’s “Essay Towards Facilitating Instruction in the Anglo-Saxon and Modern Dialects of the English Language” is available via babel.hathitrust.org (accessed 3 September 2017 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3488066;view=1up;seq=947).

  14. 14.

    Horsman, Race, 18.

  15. 15.

    Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston: Osgood and Co., 1883), chapter 46. www.gutenberg.org accessed 15 July 2015. Also available in a number of modern print editions.

  16. 16.

    Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 43 and throughout.

  17. 17.

    Ritchie Devon Watson, Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 48 and elsewhere.

  18. 18.

    Watson , Normans and Saxons, 236–241.

  19. 19.

    George R. Stewart, American Given Names: Their Origin and History in the Context of the English Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 116.

  20. 20.

    The Gale Biography in Context database includes information about two other American Ethelberts in the nineteenth century: composer Ethelbert Woodbridge Nevin and Episcopalian bishop Ethelbert Talbot (accessed 24 July 2015).

  21. 21.

    “Barksdale, Ethelbert,” Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress, bioguide.congress.gov, accessed 15 July 2015; Jack F. Cox, The 1850 Census of Georgia Slave Owners (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1999).

  22. 22.

    Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism, 89.

  23. 23.

    Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism, 89.

  24. 24.

    Much later in the nineteenth century, the Rhodes family built a similarly “medievalist” mansion in Atlanta; see Richard Utz’s analysis of this house in chapter four of Medievalism: A Manifesto (Kalamazoo, MI: Arc Humanities Press, 2017).

  25. 25.

    Gregory A. VanHoosier-Carey , “Byrhtnoth in Dixie: the emergence of Anglo-Saxon studies in the postbellum South,” in Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997), 157–172, at 161 and throughout.

  26. 26.

    VanHoosier-Carey , “Byrhtnoth,” 169; Horsman, Race, 125–134. In her discussion of the transcendentalists and abolitionists who lived in Concord, MA, Susan Cheever says of Nathaniel Hawthorne that he “abhorred the Fugitive Slave Act, and he didn’t approve of slavery—although like most of his contemporaries he believed that African-Americans were inferior to white men, even as women were” in American Bloomsbury (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 150.

  27. 27.

    For a provocative analysis of the hierarchies among Caucasian groups, see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995, repr. 2008).

  28. 28.

    Clarke , Sex in Education, 139–140.

  29. 29.

    See, for example, Edward A. Ross’s essay “The Causes of Race Superiority,” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (1901): 67–89, especially 88–89.

  30. 30.

    Thomas is the subject of a full biography: Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas. Women in American History. Illini Books ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. For instance, J.R. Hall does not include Thomas in his list of US faculty who studied Anglo-Saxon abroad in “Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Nineteenth-Century: Denmark, England, America,” A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, eds. Elaine Treharne and Phillip Pulsiano (London: Blackwell, 2001), 434–54, and does not mention her or any other women faculty in his “Nineteenth-Century America and the Study of the Anglo-Saxon Language: An Introduction,” in The Preservation and Transmission of Anglo-Saxon Culture: Selected Papers from the 1991 Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, eds. Paul E. Szarmach and Joel T. Rosenthal (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 37–71.

  31. 31.

    Bryn Mawr College, Program (Philadelphia: Sherman and Co., 1885), 22–24. Accessed 1 Feb 2014, http://libguides.brynmawr.edu/bmcdigitalcollections.

  32. 32.

    Letter from M. Carey Thomas to Mary Garrett, 11 November 1887. M. Carey Thomas papers, Bryn Mawr College Archives, microfilm reel 14.

  33. 33.

    Horowitz , Power and Passion, 158.

  34. 34.

    See Linda Perkins, “The education of Black women in the nineteenth century,” in John Mack Faragher and Florence Howe, eds., Women and Higher Education in American History: Essays from the Mount Holyoke College Sesquicentennial Symposia (New York: Norton, 1988), 64–86, as well as Perkins’s “The African American Female Elite: The Early History of African American Woman in the Seven Sister Colleges, 1880–1960,” Harvard Educational Review 67.4 (1997): 718–56.

  35. 35.

    Perkins, “African American Female Elite,” 733.

  36. 36.

    Cornell University , “Registrar’s Card: Fauset, Jessie Redmona,” 1905, Cornell University Archives. Fauset’s academic program focused on Latin and Greek; she took four English classes but none of Cornell’s Anglo-Saxon classes.

  37. 37.

    For a biography of Fauset and critical overview of her work, see chapter two of Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995); for the influence of medievalism on Fauset: Cord J. Whitaker, “Double Medievalist Consciousness: The 19th century, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Medieval Future,” Medieval Academy of America meeting, 26 February 2016, Boston MA.

  38. 38.

    Thomas was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1877 when she graduated from Cornell. See the biography provided by the Bryn Mawr archives, accessed 7 March 2016: http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/speccoll/guides/thomas.shtml.

  39. 39.

    M. Carey Thomas, address to 1916 College Opening, reprinted in The College News, Bryn Mawr, October 11, 1916; quoted in Perkins, “African American Female Elite,” 734.

  40. 40.

    The racist side of the suffrage movement has been cataloged in a number of places, including Laura E. Free, Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2015); also notable is Geoffrey C. Ward, Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (New York: Knopf, 1999), 104–111.

  41. 41.

    M. Carey Thomas, A New Fashioned Argument for Woman Suffrage (New York: National College Equal Suffrage League, 1911), 16. This text is a printed version of a speech Thomas delivered in 1908; it is available via HathiTrust https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100182119 accessed 28 April 2017.

  42. 42.

    Thomas had an intense friendship in the late 1870s with Francis B. Gummere, the author of the 1892 Germanic Origins, a celebration of the supposed Germanic origins of English virtues. Gummere and Thomas, both poetry-loving Quakers from suburban Philadelphia, were rumored to be romantically involved but eventually became professional rivals, as Gummere was for years the English professor at Haverford, the Quaker men’s college near Thomas’s Bryn Mawr. It seems safe to say she would have approved of the racist assumptions in Gummere’s work. See Horowitz, Power and Passion, 78, 102, as well as John D. Niles, Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism with Selected Readings (Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 8–9.

  43. 43.

    Mississippi University for Women, The W: History of Excellence. n.d., accessed 18 Jan 2014, http://web3.muw.edu/about-muw/our-history.

  44. 44.

    Christie Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 3.

  45. 45.

    Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 1.

  46. 46.

    Industrial Institute and College, Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Students (Columbus, MS: Industrial Institute and College, 1888–1894). Quotation from 1894, 21. Accessed 1 Feb 2014 via archive.org.

  47. 47.

    Blanche Colton Williams, Gnomic Poetry in Anglo-Saxon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), accessed 26 October 2015 archive.org. Williams was the English department head at Hunter College (then a women’s college) until her retirement in 1939.

  48. 48.

    The phrase “white trash” dates to the early nineteenth century; see Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, “What is ‘white trash’? Stereotypes and economic conditions of poor whites in the United States,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press 1997), 168–184, at 170; see as well “white trash, n. and adj.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017 (accessed 1 September 2017).

  49. 49.

    Timothy J. Lockley, “Partners in Crime,” in White Trash: Race and Class in America, eds. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (New York: Routledge, 1997), 57–72, at 58. See also Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), especially chapter three, “Three Generations of Imbeciles are Enough,” 65–95.

  50. 50.

    Lockley , “Partners in Crime,” 59; Lockley references Avery Craven’s “Poor Whites and Negroes in the Antebellum South” Journal of Negro History 40 (1930), 16–17.

  51. 51.

    Florence Matilda Read, The Story of Spelman College (Princeton: Princeton University Press for Spelman College and the United Negro College Fund, 1961); Yolanda L. Watson and Sheila T. Gregory, Daring to Educate: The Legacy of the Early Spelman College Presidents (New York: Stylus Publishing, 2005).

  52. 52.

    Spelman Seminary, Historical Sketch and General Catalogue 1881–1921 (Atlanta, GA: Spelman Seminary, 1921); Spelman College, Catalog of Spelman College (Atlanta, GA: Spelman College, 1924–1932).

  53. 53.

    Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, http://www.sacscoc.org/details.asp?instid=68160, accessed 8 September 2015.

  54. 54.

    For information about Mary Mae Neptune’s career, see chapter two of Katie McCabe and Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Justice Older Than the Law: The Life of Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009).

  55. 55.

    Matthew Xavier Vernon, “Strangers in a Familiar Land: The Medieval and African-American Literary Tradition,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2011, 53.

  56. 56.

    Vernon , “Strangers in a Familiar Land,” 54.

  57. 57.

    An 1896 editorial in The Women’s Era (a publication for African American women) celebrated Tubman, noting: “the benign presence of this great leader, in days and actions that caused strong men to quail, this almost unknown, almost unsung ‘Black Joan of Arc,’” in “Eminent Women,” The Woman’s Era (Boston) 3, no. 1 (1896): 8; quoted in Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: Ballantine, 2004), 275, noted on 383, n. 17. Ida B. Wells-Barnett makes the connection herself in the preface to her autobiography with a perhaps apocryphal story about a question from an audience member during a lecture; the identification of Wells with Joan was strong enough that two biographers use Joan of Arc as a trope in their work on Wells’s life. See Well’s autobiography, edited and published by her daughter: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Alfreda Duster, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Joseph Nazel, Ida B. Wells (Los Angeles: Melrose Square Pub Co, 1995); Patricia Ann Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

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  1. Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Mary Dockray-Miller

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Dockray-Miller, M. (2017). Racism, Medievalism, and Anglo-Saxon. In: Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women’s College. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69706-2_3

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