Touring “Our USA”: Seeing US Empire in the Maps of Ruth Taylor White, 1920–1940

This article adds to histories of US empire, gender, race, and visual culture by more fully addressing white women’s role in sustaining colonial power through their production of an imperial visual culture between 1920 and 1940. It investigates the maps of a woman cartographer, Ruth Taylor White, across different geographical sites of US empire in the Pacific, Caribbean, and North American continent during a key moment in the history of US empire. White worked at the end of a period in which Americans simultaneously debated, contested, and supported US imperial conquest, and when white women could no longer work as reformers or in assimilationist programs as effectively. It explores how white women’s production of the visual materials of empire – consumed by Americans across the country – helped reconstruct white womanhood and teach white Americans how to understand US empire. Looking at the example of White, this article shows how white women were creators of both an imperial visual culture and white imperial femininity. White’s maps, produced during a boom in visual culture and the tourism industry, promised fellow white women that they could achieve independence and liberation by experiencing the commodified, tourist-ready version of the places she mapped. By making empire legible to Americans as ready for consumption through tourism, white women like Ruth Taylor White participated in the important work of ordering the world according to the capitalist, racialized, and gendered hierarchies central to US empire.