"In the decades around the turn of the century, {Bederman contends}, Americans were obsessed with the connection between manhood, race, and 'civilization.'Civilization was explicitly understood as a racial and gendered concept--a stage in human evolution reached only by the Anglo-Saxon races and characterized by sexual differences . . . similar to those celebrated by the Victorian doctrine of separate spheres. . . . In different hands, however, 'civilization' could legitimate other, even contradictory political positions; some white women could use it to oppose male supremacy, and some Blacks to oppose white racism. . . . {Bederman focuses} on four different individuals, each of them{in her opinion} throwing light on a different aspect of the question: Theodore Roosevelt and the psychologist G. Stanley Hall; . . . the antilynching Black activist Ida B. Wells and the white feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman." (J Am Hist) Index.