Western Women And Imperialism Analysis

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Recommended: The impact of Napoleon Bonaparte 1 on Europe

Madeline Ling
HIST 2760: British Empire
Professor Travers
10 May 2017
Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance
Western Women and Imperialism is a collection of essays collected and edited by historians Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel. The essays center around Western women’s experiences and influence within the British Empire during the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Taken altogether, the essays describe how Western, and primarily British, women were both complicit and resistant (and everywhere in between) to the domineering cultural values of an imperialist era. Chaudhuri and Strobel introduce this topic as one of current academic interest by outlining the evolution of “colonial …show more content…

Julia Clancy Smith profiled Isabelle Eberhardt, a German woman who became intertwined with north African colonial politics through her marriage to an Arab Muslim and her close intimate friendship with General Lyautey. General Lyautey, who at the time was trying to increase French colonial territory in Morocco, used Isabelle Eberhardt to infiltrate a Moroccan Sidi (71). While the mission was deemed a failure, Eberhardt’s use of gender subversion permitted her to engage in cultural transmission as well. Helen Callaway and Dorothy O. Helly profiled another influential Western woman, Flora Shaw. Flora Shaw, the Lady Lugard, was a prolific writer and great admirer of renowned imperialist Cecil Rhodes and an advocate for social Darwinism (80). While married to Sir Lugard, a governor of Nigeria, Shaw wrote passionately about imperialism for The Times, going so far as to even coin the name Nigeria for the west African British colony …show more content…

Leslie A. Flemming stressed the similarity between the Christian missionary mindset and British imperial liberalism, that it was characterized by “direct evangelism and the civilizing activities necessary for making evangelism more effective” (191). However, because the primary goals of missionaries revolved around the cult of domesticity, native women were rarely exposed to radically new social roles. Nevertheless, most Western women did hold the belief that they were producing a higher valuation of women within their own societies. One ironic aspect of many Western missionaries was their strongly egalitarian ideal in spite of the rigid racial segregation back home in their own countries, providing further evidence for Western feminism’s need to create an antithetical complement to their own progressive

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