the puritans errand into the wilderness reconsidered

Investigating the gender line that was ignored by these influential scholars raises the question whether Du Bois was correct in his early assessment that the color line would be the defining problem of the twentieth century. Thus their works assist in substantiating the reality of a such a “gender line” while not actually recognizing the existence or relevance of it. Instead, the implicit and explicit chauvinism with which these scholars construct their vision of America completely disregards gender struggles and further enforces patriarchal ideas. Neither these traditional Americanists nor Du Bois’ alternative approach to American Studies, however, acknowledge the existence of yet another line dividing the American people: the relation between the male and female gender. What Du Bois viewed as one of America’s foundational structures, however, remained virtually unmentioned by many of the mid-century founding fathers of the field of American Studies, such as Perry Miller and Edmund Morgan, who were unbothered by racial issues on their quest to uncover an exceptional cultural foundation for “ America” (Miller vii).

the “relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (15). Du Bois defined what he considered the “problem of the twentieth century”: the color line, i.e. In his celebrated essay collection The Souls of Black Folk, African American scholar W. It focuses on the racial and sexual identity formation in the authors’ early years, the way they are caught between the color line and the gender line throughout their lives, and the potential reasons why the two women differ in their personal ranking of race versus gender.” Du Bois’ notions of the color line with the concept of a similarly dominant gender line in American society, this piece investigates works by two writers navigating both lines: Maya Angelou and Elaine Brown. The following work was created for AMS 400: Race, Gender, and History of American Studies.īrief description: “Between the Lines: Race Versus Gender in American Studies and Black Women’s Writing” explores the interplay of race and gender throughout the politically charged and historically chauvinistic field of American Studies. By: Pauline Bewermeier ’19, an American Studies major.

The puritans errand into the wilderness reconsidered