“Gender is, in effect, a delivery system for race and class distinctions, and the arousal of gender consciousness has to be taken as a sign of other activations as well as those, or along with those, of sex.” (Laura Wexler, Tender Violence, 42)

Advertisement for Pear’s Soap, 1899

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother (1936 -- Florence Owens Thompson)

“By assimilating class and racial conflict to supposedly natural hierarchies of sexual difference, gender masks the continuing, ongoing, willful violence of those decisions” (50) Miss Hartwell & the Bible women, Foochow, China, 1902

“The women’s culture of 1820-1870 that (Ann Douglass) derides was dangerous not because it was feminine but because it was racist, just like the culture of the men” (124) Quotes Nancy Armstrong: “sentimental writing conceals the very power it has granted to this female domain. It is no doubt because each of us lives out such a paradox that we seem powerless to explain in so many words how our political practices came to depend on the socializing practices of the household and the schoolroom.” (125)

Woxie Harie, Cheyenne Indian training school (Estelle Reel 1901)