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Home > Women's and Gender History in Imperial Perspective
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Women's and Gender History in Imperial Perspective
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by Bonnie Smith
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
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Imperialism and its aftermath are central topics to the European history survey, but our understanding of imperialism has become more complex in the past decade. In part, this has occurred because of the new scholarship that places gender and women's history as central to the unfolding of imperialism and decolonization.
Women's Participation in Exploration, Imperialism, and Colonialism
Women counted among explorers, scientists, and travelers, searching out new plants and animals and increasing Western knowledge. Margaret Fontaine, the lepidopterist, not only compiled an incredible collection of specimens, she also left behind, after her death in 1940, fascinating memoirs of her global travels and encounters. The botanical paintings of another nineteenth-century world traveler, Marianne North, constitute the basis of the display at Kew Gardens. German women early in the twentieth century went to Africa carrying new technology such as cameras, with which they photographed local women, sometimes meeting resistance and at other times succeeding in capturing the local products and habits such as skin adornment.
German, French, Dutch, and English women were among those who served as missionaries and teachers. Their aim was to Christianize and instruct colonized women in particular. Because men dominated the migration to regions like Australia, governments saw the importance of increasing the number of women who migrated. Thus societies existed for the promotion of women's migration to colonies to serve as mates and to help breed white stock to prevent the dilution of the imperial race.
The arrival of women in the colonies in the nineteenth century was once seen as among the primary reasons why imperialism turned nasty by the late nineteenth century. Women, it was said, were more racist than men, but scholarship has recently assigned a more equal responsibility for imperial racism. In all events, the extensive travel and imperial migration of European women is another testimony to the depth of globalization, partly the result of women's travels, as the nineteenth century drew to a close and the twentieth century opened.
Gender History and Imperialism
Gender history also changes the historical account of imperialism, examining, for instance, the centrality of imperialism to notions of white masculinity. Big game hunting, exploration, and other feats in distant colonies promoted the creation of masculine identity as rugged and militaristic by the late nineteenth century. Elite men picked up non-Western sports such as polo and made them into a sign of both sophistication and prowess. The other side of the coin was casting non-Westerners as effete, crafty, and unreliable -- lazy even -- in contrast to the active manhood of whites.
White women's roles complemented those of their men, as they inculcated so-called "white" values such as honesty, hard work, and ruggedness into their sons. Theirs was the responsibility for molding an imperial race and upholding its decency and virtue, especially in their own sexual conduct. Women's reproductive behavior was additionally important in breeding healthy racial stock, and this task caused wealthy women at home to monitor more closely the behavior of the working classes, even leading them to sponsor medical, school lunch, and educational programs to make working women and their children more fit to be imperial citizens. Men and women alike participated in constructing European pride in such characteristics as public hygiene and personal cleanliness -- the whiteness of clothes often paralleling the whiteness of skin as a special value.
Missionaries and teachers implanted European domestic values to such good effect that when the artist Paul Gauguin attempted to find authentic subjects for his paintings in the South Seas, the local women mostly wore European garments that the missionaries there had made popular if not altogether mandatory. Women missionaries also tried to inculcate domestic skills and to promote the domestic ideal that women would be housekeepers. These habits went against African women's income-generating activities as farmers and traders, for instance, and they met with resistance. However, European male administrators had similar ideas of gender order, and they too overlooked or hindered women's relationship to production. Their policies worked to accord control of taxation, farming, and land to local men, who in fact were not engaged in productive work. The gender ideals of Western imperialism continue to influence present day policy, as large transnational organizations prefer not to fund the economic activities of non-European women no matter what their legacy as generators of income.
Imperialism thus worked a terrain shaped by European gender hierarchies and beliefs. Bessie Head's Maru provides a stirring account of the inculcation of Western values and skills in a local Botswanan young woman living in the mid-twentieth century. It portrays the work of an English missionary and the complex identity her protégée Margaret comes to experience when she strikes out on her own as a teacher. In this work, gender and ethnic issues among Africans are central themes, along with influence of European women in the construction of modern identities both under imperialism and in its wake.
Imperialism's Impact on Western Life
Not only women far from the metropole but those back in Europe were enmeshed in the complexities of imperialism. All the while participating in a code of Western superiority, European women enjoyed a wide range of products from around the world. They copied hairstyles, imitated the dress, and adopted a range of non-European cuisines. They filled their homes with bamboo furniture, "oriental" rugs, dishware, and the knickknacks that global trade provided -- and had provided since the sixteenth century.
More than that, their own political movements took on a global cast. Since the eighteenth century, women activists examined the situation of non-Western women, finding in social arrangements the fact, for instance, that women in the Middle East had a far greater access to property than their Western counterparts. This helped motivate activism in nineteenth century Europe and the United States for women's property rights.
Simultaneously, activists found much to pity in the situation of women beyond the West, and they used this pitiable state to their sphere as global activists, even making feminist claims on the basis of their own racial superiority. Finally, feminist movements from the nineteenth century on developed global contacts with other groups around the world. We see these contacts in the anthology produced by Theodore Stanton, the son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for instance, or in the autobiography of Huda Sha'arawi, an Egyptian nationalist-feminist of the first half of the twentieth century. Western feminist movements were enmeshed in global networks as well as ideologies.
Women and Decolonization
A final piece of the women and imperialism puzzle relates to decolonization and global migration after World War II. European society became more multiracial during these decades as guest workers, their families, and individual refugees headed for areas of safety and opportunity. Immigrants to Britain from the Caribbean were among the first to arrive in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Women in this cohort, no matter how highly trained, served to staff the lower levels of the expanding welfare state as nurse's aides and janitors. Women also entered Europe as part of extended families, their husbands, sons, and fathers helping to revitalize the labor force needed to rebuild war-torn areas.
Often women of this first generation of migrants did not work, acting instead as caretakers of non-Western customs and language. Others aimed to participate fully as professionals and citizens in their new countries. Buchi Emecheta's Second Class Citizen affords a moving view of an immigrant from Nigeria and her attempts to become a successful career woman and mother. Harassed because of race and gender, Emecheta ultimately became a successful writer.
Still other women -- Afro-Germans, for example -- continue their efforts to understand where they fit in contemporary European society. The situation of these "new Europeans" is a topic of robust debate, influencing politics and reshaping European culture and values today.
Bonnie G. Smith is Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University and has chaired the Development Committee for the AP European History Examination. She is the author of books and articles on European, women's, and world history, and co-author of The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures.
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