Feminism's Empire

Carolyn J. Eichner

• Verlag: Cornell University Press
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501763830
• Thema: Geschichte
• Thema: Französische Geschichte

Feminism's Empire investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing "pro-imperialist" and "anti-imperialist" as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposed—yet employed—approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation.

Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of "nature" that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Feminists faced similar barriers to full incorporation due to the gendered contradictions inherent in universalism. The system presumed citizenship to be male and thus positioned women as outsiders. Feminism's Empire connects this critical struggle to hierarchical power shifts in racial and national status that created uneasy linkages between French feminists and imperial authorities.

CHAPTER 1 Ideologies and Intimacies of Imperialism

In 1890, Hubertine Auclert declared: “Arab women raised the banner of emancipation well before European and American women. Five hundred years ago the women of Miliana, Algeria, rose up against masculinism.”¹ Proclaiming “Bravo to our ancestors!” Auclert contended that their revolt demonstrated how “thirteenth-century feminists” who lived under male oppression had carried on the legacy of their less-subjugated ancient progenitors. Enacting “their foremothers’ love of independence,” the thirteenth-century Arab women recalled the centuries earlier “epoch of idolatry, before Mohammad proclaimed man’s superiority to his companion, [when] the woman of the Arab race enjoyed the same rights as her spouse.… The Arab woman has not always been treated like an animal.”²

To Auclert, contemporary Algerian society existed as the degenerate remnant of a once-great culture. Lauding Arab women of the distant past in her book Les femmes arabes, Auclert simultaneously disparaged the status of their descendants in her contemporary Algeria. She pointed to the pre-Islamic period (pre–seventh century) as one of gender equity and acclaimed the “thirteenth-century feminists” who harkened back to that era in their uprising against male domination. Auclert lamented what she considered the interlinked decline of both Arab culture and Arab women’s status. Alleging Algerian women’s subhuman social standing—each woman was “treated like an animal”—Auclert asserted that the once glorious Arab culture had devolved to the point that it had displaced women from civilization into the realm of beasts. Auclert thus appropriated a popular racist trope and updated it into feminist critique.

Auclert wrote Les femmes arabes while living in Algeria, France’s premier colony, considered part of “Greater France.” Yet her interest in empire had developed nearly a decade earlier. Along with Olympe Audouard, Louise Michel, Léonie Rouzade, and Paule Mink, Auclert was among the first of the era’s French feminists to travel into empire, either literally or literarily. These women came from a broad span of feminisms, left the metropole for varied reasons, visited or dwelled in distant places, were personally and intellectually influenced by their experiences, and brought their newly shaped politics back to the metropole. Investigating colonial milieux from feminist perspectives, they often adopted imperial concepts—including racialization, sexualization, ethnographic categorization, and civilization. In this way, they became agents of imperial ideologies. These same women, however, opposed nearly all existing empires or colonial projects as inequitable. Embracing a range of complicated politics in the 1860s and 1870s, they were among the era’s first French critics to condemn empire as an oppressive force.

Observing and evaluating imperial worlds, the five feminists compared gender orders and women’s lives with those in France. They frequently found the French context inferior, especially in terms of legal equity.³ In contrast, as this chapter shows, they often judged women’s social value in France to be superior to that of women in other milieux. They held varied ideological positions and contested French institutions, structures, and traditions in differing ways. Witnessing particular social and sexual orders and customs—practices they often found illegible—these women turned to racialized and sexualized imperial tropes for explanations. Their observations resulted in both embraces and contestations of empire, complex and contradictory responses that grew from intimate encounters. Forged in the crucible of radical midcentury Paris, their divergent class- and gender-based politics and embodied experiences shaped their emerging critiques of empire.

As Ann Stoler has shown, the regulation of racialized and sexualized intimacies underpinned the practices and imaginaries of empire.⁴ Intimacy encompasses not merely the sexual but also a broad range of other affective interpersonal engagements, including regimes of control, physical violence, and bodily threats, as well as quotidian domestic, commercial, and social interactions.⁵ Traveling and dwelling internationally in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century world, these five feminists lived the embodied intimacies of empire. From Audouard’s attendance at a Coptic Christian wedding in Egypt, to Auclert’s interviews with women in an Algerian harem, to Michel’s interactions with both prison guards and local Kanak in the New Caledonian penal colony, these close interpersonal encounters both informed and fashioned the French women’s understandings and experiences of gender in empire.

Hierarchies

Feminisms and imperialisms surged in the later nineteenth century, both political projects rooted in contestations for power. Motivated by apparently oppositional goals—while feminisms strove to dismantle hierarchies, imperialisms expanded and reinforced them—their intersections altered both movements. Feminists fought from the periphery, disenfranchised and othered, pressing to dislodge extant powers, but also to claim authority of their own. In imperialism, they confronted a force to be both employed and opposed. As Jennifer Pitts notes regarding the apparent contradictions of liberals supporting empire, feminist adoption of aspects of imperialism also involved uneasy “theoretical justifications.”⁶ Questions of race, religion, and class, as well as gender and sexuality mediated different feminist responses, while being in empire shaped the activists’ politics and understandings of power.

As feminists, the five women began from positions of marginalization, excluded from dominant ideologies and power structures by both their politics and their gender. As elite white women entering colonial and Orientalized spaces, they had even greater distance from those around them.⁷ In differing ways, each of these feminists used her othered perspective to imagine and articulate a new kind of Frenchness, one that integrated dominant and peripheral ideas of gender and race in both metropole and colonies.⁸ These oppositions informed one another: the opposition of feminism to dominant French society affected their interpretations of empire, but so, too, did their encounters with empire and colony inform their feminisms. As Isabelle Ernot writes, female European imperial travelers “between two worlds … have incontestably lived a singular experience: a distancing and a liberation from their own gendered culture, while never really escaping it.”⁹ Physically removed from France, the feminists left behind the constraints of its gender roles and hierarchies. Yet the pervasiveness of such structures meant that these European women unavoidably internalized and reproduced elements of them. Despite feminists’ attention to inequities and oppressions (in terms of gender, but also class and race), they too, remained imbricated in these power relations.

Audouard, Auclert, Rouzade, Mink, and Michel thus simultaneously contested and reified the period’s dominant constructions of alterity. The term “alterity” refers not only to absolute otherness, but also to the processes that form the otherness. It denotes the historically and culturally specific creation of hierarchical realms of inclusion and exclusion. French scholars often use “alterity” in place of race—the latter a concept deeply contested, and frequently avoided, in French intellectual and political contexts. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the metaphorical walls dividing the included “us” versus the excluded “them” established the parameters of Frenchness. Race, specifically whiteness, formed its base. So, too, did religion, gender, and class. Frenchness was defined not merely by what it was—white, Catholic, male (for full citizenship), and elite (to be civilized and thus truly French)—but fundamentally also by what it was not: indigenous, non-Catholic, female, and working class (equated with savagery).¹⁰ The imperial state shaped and shifted these barriers in its colonizing efforts, assuring the reinforcement of the line between French and other.¹¹

The European model that marked marginalized groups as fundamentally different and inferior has roots in the late Middle Ages, with the racialization of Jews as a group inherently and irrevocably separate from Christians. By the sixteenth century, Europeans relegated Africans and Amerindians, with whom they had come into contact via “discovery” and imperialism, to this othered racial category. In the post-Revolutionary period, French republicanism promised inclusion in Frenchness to all on French soil. While enshrined in law, the universal republic failed in practice to eradicate the marginalization of racial and racialized religious peoples (Jews and Muslims) in either metropole or colonies.¹² In the mid-nineteenth century, Arthur de Gobineau’s profoundly influential, multivolume Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines established a “scientific” justification for European racial superiority rooted in whiteness, one that shaped dominant French conceptions of race well into the twentieth century.¹³ As Herrick Chapman and Laura Frader argue, French understandings of race have long operated at the intersection of the myth of the universal republic and “entrenched habits of bigotry.”¹⁴ Biological race undergirded late-nineteenth-century Frenchness, even as republican universalizing rhetoric claimed to overcome it. In France’s empire, these allegedly opposed conceptualizations interacted to justify political oppression, land theft, and deadly force.

The Imperial Presence

Each form of anti-imperialism arose from specificities within the practices of empire. Comprehending these entanglements involves analyses of the nineteenth-century political, ideological, and social contexts within which these multiple feminisms and imperialisms emerged and intersected.

European imperialism expanded dramatically in the latter third of the nineteenth century, temporally overlapping with and intersecting feminisms’ growth. Europe’s empires covered 35 percent of the globe in 1800, but by 1914 Europe ruled 84 percent of the Earth.¹⁵ During this dawn of “new imperialism,” France’s imperial holdings eclipsed those of all European nations except Britain’s. The serious expansion of what became France’s second colonial empire (the first extending from the seventeenth century through the fall of Napoleon) started with the collapse of the Second Empire and the establishment of the Third Republic. No longer an empire in name, the state increasingly intensified its position as one in fact. Beginning with Algeria and then expanding to West and equatorial Africa, Mexico (briefly), Southeast Asia, and Oceana, it grew by the early twentieth century to include even more territories in North Africa, East Africa, and the Middle East, as well as smaller claims on parts of China and Antarctica.

Several factors motivated European competition for colonies. Economically, France sought raw materials, labor, and markets. Politically, it pursued international power and prestige, as well as a way to counter domestic social unrest and socialist agitation (the empire created opportunities for jobs and land to placate workers in the wake of the Paris Commune). Imperial conquest was seen as a demonstration of the nation’s masculine virility following the humiliating loss of the Franco-Prussian War, the cataclysm of the Commune, and declining birth rates.¹⁶ Finally, the mission civilisatrice, the “civilizing mission,” motivated many imperial supporters who believed (or rationalized) that it was their moral duty to spread Western education, Christianity, and modern medicine.¹⁷

France’s imperial project emerged from its republican tradition and from the centuries-long belief in European superiority, a fiction reaching back to the ancient Greek myth of Zeus selecting and honoring Europe.¹⁸ In the 1870s the new, fragile, and tenuous Third Republic embraced the colonial idea in an effort to transcend deep political rifts, erase the shame of the Franco-Prussian War and the crisis of the Paris Commune, and solidify governmental authority and legitimacy. The mission civilisatrice represented the idealized potential of what France could become. It cast imperialism in a republican light: France would bring the civilized, highly evolved characteristics of its republic to its colonies as an act of benevolence.¹⁹

In metropolitan Britain, the empire and its related concerns garnered significant popular attention and were ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Ideologies and Intimacies of Imperialism
• 2. Sex, Love, and the Law
• 3. La Citoyenne
• 4. Imprisoned, Colonized
• 5. Universal Language, Universal Education, Universal Revolution
• 6. Familiar Stranger
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index