What is the most important evidence to support it?
From Fernald’s point of view, women who ceased to devote themselves to men and instead competed with them, who preferred “manly” self-assertion to “womanly” self-sacrifice, threatened the health of the race. But just as worrisome was women’s threat to traditional male prerogatives. Warn- ing that softness in men and assertiveness in women indicated degener- acy, Fernald offered imperial policies as a solution. He looked to overseas policies to solve domestic problems because he believed that the rigors of combat and challenges of establishing colonial control would test American men more thoroughly than domestic pursuits. Beyond that, they seemed certain to separate American men from effeminizing domestic influences. . . .
As the nation celebrated its victory, some observers concluded that American men had done more than prove their manhood in war—they had improved it. Manhood, they opined, was the greatest legacy of the war. The newspaper editor Henry Watterson conveyed this idea in his History of the Spanish-American War. “Above all, it [the war] elevated, broadened, and vi- talized the manhood of the rising generation of Americans,” he wrote. Simi- larly, an article in Century Magazine held that “exhibitions of the finer and rarer qualities of manhood, added to the record of bravery made by white and black, regular and volunteer, all these are national possessions that can never be taken away from us, that can never work us injury; they are of more real value than any territorial possessions that the war has brought or may bring to these United States. For it remains forever true that it is the manhood, the nobility, the character of its people, and not the extent of its territory, that makes a country great.” Such statements implied that the war had been, above all, a wonderful and ultimately successful opportu- nity for American men to “vitalize” their manhood and then flaunt it before everyone who had doubted it. This included American men themselves. In the Republican convention of 1900, Sen. Chauncey M. Depew (R, N.Y.) ap- plauded the war’s effects on American men’s psyches. Thinking of charges such as those made by Theodore Roosevelt on the eve of the war that “shilly- shallying and half-measures at this time merely render us contemptible in the eyes of the world; and what is infinitely more important in our own eyes too,” Depew declared, “There is not a man here who does not feel four hun- dred percent bigger in 1900 than he did in 1896. Bigger intellectually, bigger hopefully, bigger patriotically, bigger in t