When Germany annexed colonies in Africa and the Pacific beginning in the 1880s, many German women were enthusiastic. At the same time, however, they found themselves excluded from what they saw as a great nationalistic endeavor. In German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 Lora Wildenthal untangles the varied strands of racism, feminism, and nationalism that thread through German women’s efforts to participate in this episode of overseas colonization.
In confrontation and sometimes cooperation with men over their place in the colonial project, German women launched nationalist and colonialist campaigns for increased settlement and new state policies. Wildenthal analyzes recently accessible Colonial Office archives as well as mission society records, periodicals, women’s memoirs, and fiction to show how these women created niches for themselves in the colonies. They emphasized their unique importance for white racial “purity” and the inculcation of German culture in the family. While pressing for career opportunities for themselves, these women also campaigned against interracial marriage and circulated an image of African and Pacific women as sexually promiscuous and inferior. As Wildenthal discusses, the German colonial imaginary persisted even after the German colonial empire was no longer a reality. The women’s colonial movement continued into the Nazi era, combining with other movements to help turn the racialist thought of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries into the hierarchical evaluation of German citizens as well as colonial subjects.
Students and scholars of women’s history, modern German history, colonial politics and culture, postcolonial theory, race/ethnicity, and gender will welcome this groundbreaking study.
Cloth - $84.95 | 0-8223-2807-0 |
| [ISBN13 978-0-8223-2807-0] | |
Paperback - $23.95 | 0-8223-2819-4 |
| [ISBN13 978-0-8223-2819-3] | |
“Wildenthal tells an important set of stories about the implication of white women in the modern imperial enterprise. This book will become a must-read for German historians, students of feminism, modern women, and empire and reform movements; as well as a model for how to do colonial women’s history.”—Antoinette Burton, author of At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain
“This stunningly original and important book will define scholarly standards and inspire other studies for a long time to come. Wildenthal probes the nexus of German women’s history and colonial politics more deeply, more extensively, and more systematically than any other piece of scholarship I know.”—Leslie A. Adelson, author of Making Bodies, Making History: Feminism and German Identity
Lora Wildenthal is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Colonial Nursing as the First Realm of Colonialist Women’s Activism, 1885–1907
2. The Feminine Radical Nationalism of Frieda von Bülow
3. A New Colonial Masculinity: The Men’s Debate over “Race Mixing” in the Colonies
4. A New Colonial Femininity: Feminism, Race Purity, and Domesticity, 1898–1914
5. The Woman Citizen and the Lost Colonial Empire in Weimar and Nazi Germany
Epilogue
Appendix: Colonialist and Women’s Organizations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Colonial Nursing as the First Realm of Colonialist Women’s Activism, 1885–1907
2. The Feminine Radical Nationalism of Frieda von Bülow
3. A New Colonial Masculinity: The Men’s Debate over “Race Mixing” in the Colonies
4. A New Colonial Femininity: Feminism, Race Purity, and Domesticity, 1898–1914
5. The Woman Citizen and the Lost Colonial Empire in Weimar and Nazi Germany
Epilogue
Appendix: Colonialist and Women’s Organizations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Related subjects:
History, European
Gender Studies/Feminist Theory