Alice Kessler-Harris
A provocative and important book that makes a major contribution to our understanding of how American feminism has been shaped by a legacy of racism. In a compelling and illuminating exploration of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist thought, Newman explores how racial thinking distorted liberal ideas of citizenship and democracy and limited the commitments of white women to equality for all. Everyone interested in the deep-rooted and paradoxical consequences of hidden racism should read this book.
— Rutgers University
Gail Bederman
White Women's Rights offers a persuasive and entirely new analysis of the race-based underpinnings of American feminist thought between the 1850s and the 1920s. While previous scholarship has highlighted the ethnocentrism of certain 19th-century American women or feminists, Newman demonstrates that feminism itself, as a set of ideas, had an intrisincally racial component. Her argument is original, complex, and subtle.
— University of Notre Dame
Matthew Frye Jacobson
'A bold reinterpretation of American feminism and the politics of race. Through a series of finely drawn and challenging intellectual portraits of figures such as Alice Fletcher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Roberts Coolidge, and Mary French-Sheldon, [this book] demonstrates the bedrock import of US imperialism and domestic racial hierarchy to the development of (white) feminist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...Broadly researched, tightly argued, and rendered with an incandescent clarity.
— Yale University
Hazel Carby
[This] is an important book. it is a fascinating and informative account of the numerous and complex ties which bound feminist thought to the practices and ideas which shaped and gave meaning to America as a racialized society. A compelling read, it moves very gracefully between the general history of the feminist movement and the particular histories of individual women.
— Yale University
