ABSTRACT
Gunnar realized that his formulation of “the Negro problem” as the result of white Americans’ failure to live up to their egalitarian ideals reflected his own predicament. “The book on the Negroes” will have “all the facts and data, with . . . inspiring methodological discussions,” but its “great pattern is my life’s problems. . . . Still standing is humanity’s elemental tragedy: that good people turn life into a pure hell when they live in social relations.” Inspired by Alva’s feminist analysis, Gunnar considered the parallels between race and gender in a society that remained deeply patriarchal. In a neglected chapter of An American Dilemma, he argued that women, like enslaved African Americans, had been subordinated to white men and that both these groups’ subjection had been justified by the idea that they were intellectually inferior to white men and incapable of self-government. Historically, the abolitionist and women’s rights movements had been closely connected, as Black men had advocated for all women. Now modernity was dissolving the last vestiges of relations of domination, and it was up to democratic reformers and social scientists to point the way to a better world.
