Imperialism and Gender Research Paper

From the late nineteenth century until the end of World War II, all of the most powerful nations on Earth (along with others that aspired to great power) pursued the strategy of imperialism in an attempt to achieve national political and economic goals. Although imperialism was not new (Great Britain and Spain are notable examples of a countries whose pursuit of empire began centuries earlier), this period is historically unique because so many nations became involved in imperial ventures and because the territories they claimed were so extensive. Between 1885 and 1914 alone European countries added 2.8 billion hectares to their imperial territories, the United States and Japan joined European countries in the pursuit of empire, nearly all of Africa came under colonial domination, and the British Empire grew to include one-quarter of the world’s population.

Societies and systems established by imperial nations varied greatly across time and space. Some became settler colonies, where colonizers would establish large, permanent communities. Others were created because of the resources that could be extracted or because of their strategic location and were ruled by small numbers of administrators backed by military force, or even by indigenous groups overseen by colonial administrators. Whatever form imperial societies took, they all profoundly affected both rulers and ruled economically, socially, culturally, and politically. Moreover, during the last two decades scholars have begun to understand that imperial systems around the world were maintained and legitimized, at least in part, through the use of language and policies based on gender ideals. These ideals included beliefs about the appropriate behaviors and sexualities of both men and women and were frequently used to mark distinctions between colonizing and indigenous cultures. They were also frequently inseparable from beliefs and attitudes about racial difference and were often used to shore up notions about the inherent inequality of colonized peoples. In addition, colonial encounters between rulers and ruled—varied though they were—changed local gender relationships and ideals in ways that deeply affected culture in the colonies as well as in imperial metropolises. These changes were not uniform in all colonies, or even within the various “national” empires. Rather, they depended on existing indigenous cultures, the presence or absence of natural resources, the presence or absence of colonial settlers, the degree of incorporation into the global economy, access to land, and many other factors. When examined from a global perspective, then, the relationship between imperialism and gender emerges as a complex phenomenon. At the same time, we can also detect several broad similarities that elucidate global connections and patterns.

Gender as a Means of Marking Hierarchy

Beliefs about gender, sexuality, and gender roles were central to imperial endeavors around the world because such beliefs provided legitimation for preserving distinctions between rulers and the ruled and because they helped colonizers categorize—and hence divide—indigenous peoples into distinct and knowable groups. Although the precise form that such beliefs took varied across time and space, the need to clearly mark the boundaries between colonizer and colonized through language and practices associated with gender and gender difference was widely shared across many imperial systems.

Nearly every imperial system sought to justify the unequal distribution of power between rulers and ruled—and even the existence of colonies themselves—by concerning itself with the sexual behaviors, appetites, and attitudes of colonized men and women. One recurring theme in French Indochina, British India, the Dutch East Indies, and British South Africa—to name only a few— was the idea that white women were in constant danger from the voracious and perverse sexual appetites of colonized men. The fear of rape, and the need to protect white women from it, hence came to justify the strict separation between colonizers and colonized as well as the careful control of both colonized men and white women. As a result, white women often found their lives in colonies paradoxically quite comfortable (because of servants, privilege, and leisure time) as well as quite restricted. Colonized men, for their part, were routinely excluded from positions in which they might have even a remote chance of exercising power over white women. They also found themselves at risk of severe punishment if they transgressed the boundary between themselves and colonizing women. Perhaps not surprisingly, rhetoric about the need to control colonized men and to protect white women grew more intense during times of high colonial tension.

One example of the ways in which gender could be employed to maintain distinctions between rulers and ruled was the 1883–1884 Ilbert Bill controversy in British India. The bill had been designed to concede a small amount of power to Indian civil servants by allowing Indian judges jurisdiction over some European cases. However, Britons in India vehemently opposed even the slightest suggestion that Indians might be able to pronounce judgment over Europeans and openly attacked the bill on the grounds that it threatened the safety of white women. Although the bill itself said nothing about women, opponents argued that it opened the door for Indian civil servants—whose ultimate fantasy, they asserted, was the possession of a white woman—to use their new power to take sexual advantage of British women. Moreover, opponents claimed that Indian men could not be expected to treat British women with decency because they were said to treat their own women so poorly. In the end opposition to the bill among the British community in India was so strong that it had to be dropped. Indian men had been kept firmly in a subordinate role through rhetorical claims about the gendered consequences of conceding power to colonized men.

Anxieties about racial mixing—miscegenation— also echoed widely across imperial systems during the last half of the nineteenth century, and here again beliefs about gender and sexuality played critical roles in maintaining the separation between rulers and ruled. Most imperial systems were predicated on the belief that colonizing men needed sex in order to be satisfied. The problem, however, was a shortage of colonizing women in many colonial societies—even those that encouraged settler families. As a result, colonizing men frequently established sexual relations with indigenous women through prostitution, concubinage, or, less commonly, marriage. Such relationships were rarely based on true partnership: even when colonized women entered into them of their own choice (abundant evidence suggests that the use of force and manipulation was quite common), they enjoyed few rights or privileges and could be discarded at will. Moreover, these sexual relationships produced a whole set of new problems. Chief among these was how to maintain distinctions between colonizers and colonized given the existence of such intimate relationships. Even more problematic was how to classify and treat the mixed-race children who resulted from these relationships.

In the East Indies Dutch efforts to confront these issues illustrate both the centrality of sex management to imperial projects as well as the ways state policies about the regulation of sex could change over time. Prior to the twentieth century the Dutch East Indies Company sharply restricted the immigration of Dutch women to the East Indies. The company reasoned that Dutch men would be more likely to remain in the East Indies if they established long-term relationships with indigenous women. Moreover, indigenous women were less expensive to maintain than European women and could be expected to perform domestic labor in addition to their sexual functions. For these reasons the company advocated that Dutch men keep concubines—women who shared all of the duties of wives without the legal protections and entitlements of marriage. By the 1880s concubinage was the most common domestic arrangement for European men in the Indies, a situation that produced tens of thousands of mixed-race children. Yet, by the turn of the twentieth century, the existence of this large mixed-race population had begun to worry the Dutch East Indies Company and the Dutch government because it threatened to blur the divide between the colonizers and the colonized. To which group did these children belong? Were they Dutch or Indonesian? Would they support Dutch rule, or would they try to subvert it? As part of these worries, Dutch officials increasingly began to argue that Indonesian concubines had neither the skills nor the morals to raise their mixed-race children to be adults worthy of Dutch citizenship. As a result, during the early twentieth century the Dutch government reversed earlier policy by seeking to ban the practice of concubinage and to encourage instead the immigration of Dutch women to the Indies. These women, the government now believed, would provide a civilizing influence on Dutch men and would have the cultural skills to raise their children to be proper Dutch citizens. For European men who could not afford Dutch wives, the government now encouraged prostitution as a means of side-stepping long-term, family-style liaisons with indigenous women. In both the pre- and post-twentieth-century East Indies, government concerns with the sexuality and sexual behaviors of both men and women, colonizers and colonized, highlight the central importance of sex management—and the gender relationships such management depended upon—to the imperial state.

Beliefs about gender also contributed to imperial policies of divide and rule—that is, policies that emphasized differences between subgroups of colonized peoples as a way of minimizing unified opposition to imperial rule. In places as far-flung as India, Indonesia, South Africa, and French West Africa, to mention only a few, such policies encouraged preferential treatment of certain groups, which tended to pit these groups against less-preferred groups. Moreover, colonizing powers often bestowed favor on groups who seemed to embody colonizers’ own notions of ideal masculinity. In French Algeria, for example, French colonial administrators articulated stark divisions between the two major ethnic groups in the region: Kabyles and Arabs. Kabyles, the administrators argued, were superior to Arabs in nearly every way. Kabyles were sedentary rather than nomadic; they lived in mountains rather than the plains; they spoke an Aryan language rather than a Semitic one; and they were secular rather than religious. Gender ideals were also central to Kabyle superiority. The French, for instance, perceived Kabyle men as tall and athletic and likened their bodies to French ideals of the male physique. Kabyles were also said to be brave and fierce warriors who had proven themselves worthy foes of the French. Finally, despite their ferocity, Kabyles were said to treat their women with respect, which again resonated with French notions about themselves. Arabs, on the other hand, were perceived as physically small, lazy, slovenly, and cowardly people who brutally oppressed their women.

These perceptions of gendered difference were neither trivial nor matters of simple representation. Rather, they encouraged preferential treatment for Kabyles, imposed a strict division between two indigenous groups, and deeply influenced French-Arab interactions in Algeria. Indeed, the language of gender difference in imperial situations served not only to maintain distinctions between rulers and ruled, but also to maintain distinctions between different groups of colonized people.

Gender and the Colonial Encounter

Colonial encounters between rulers and ruled had profound social, cultural, political, and economic effects all over the world. In terms of gender, such encounters frequently disrupted local ideologies, relations, and traditions and often led to changes in all three. In virtually every colonial encounter, the gender ideals of the colonizing powers helped to shape colonial practice, law, and culture. However, the way such ideals were translated into policy depended upon the response of colonized peoples, and thus the effect of such ideals was neither uniform nor predictable. Moreover, the disruptive effects of the colonial encounter on gender ideals were not a one-way street because they influenced gender ideals in imperial home countries as well.

Nineteenth-century Hawaii illustrates the ways colonial gender ideals could interact with indigenous gender ideals in unexpected ways. Prior to contact with westerners during the eighteenth century, Hawaiian culture had imposed sexual separation between men and women and had mandated that women follow certain eating taboos. In other respects, however, Hawaiian women played important social, economic, political, and spiritual roles and maintained a large degree of personal autonomy. As Western—especially U.S.—influence increased in Hawaii during the nineteenth century, Hawaiian women were criticized as being sexually immoral, were consistently written out of U.S.-dominated politics, and were increasingly defined as legally subordinate to Hawaiian and U.S. men. Thus, as a result of U.S. intervention into Hawaiian society, Hawaiian women’s legal and social positions deteriorated. Yet, these same interventions also led to an improvement in Hawaiian women’s position as landholders during the last half of the nineteenth century. This unexpected improvement was the result of the Great Mahele of 1848, when the Hawaiian government—under duress by U.S. interests—divided Hawaiian land into salable pieces. The overall result for Hawaiians in general was massive dispossession from the land. For Hawaiian women, however, the results were much more ambiguous because the number of women who inherited land in the post-Great Mahele period dramatically increased. In part this increase was a result of indigenous choices and beliefs about women as effective guardians of Hawaiian land. The net effect was the preservation of Hawaiian women’s economic and social importance even as their legal status diminished as a result of discriminatory U.S. policies.

Further cases illustrating the interaction of colonial and indigenous gender ideals abound in colonial Africa. In northern Ghana, for example, the implementation of the British judicial system caused indigenous women’s legal status to deteriorate. In particular, colonial rule sought to introduce and enforce the notion that wives were the property of their husbands—a notion that, although foreign to Ghanaian gender ideals, allowed men to claim increasing legal control of their wives. In colonial Tanganyika European authorities instituted policies—such as taxation and the conversion of cattle sales to cash— that increasingly defined Masai men as heads of households and allowed them privileged access to the political domain. Masai women, who had long played vital economic and social roles within their communities, were thus increasingly marginalized by colonial policies that clearly favored men as political and economic actors. At the same time African women were not merely passive victims of a patriarchal partnership between colonizers and indigenous males. Rather, African women in many colonial states manipulated colonial court systems for their own benefit, ventured into independent economic enterprises, and moved into new occupations—as teachers or midwives—opened up to them by the colonial encounter.

Colonial encounters could also shape gender relations in imperial home countries. In Britain imperialism informed the gender identities of both women and men and often provided the context within which claims about appropriate gender roles were made. A case in point was the British feminist movement, which developed and grew during the last half of the nineteenth century—and thus coincided with the massive expansion of the British Empire. British feminists advocated equal legal rights with British men, but they justified their claims to equality by arguing for the need to represent and civilize colonized—especially Indian—women. Indeed, feminists argued that the oppressed condition of Indian women necessitated their own political participation so they could utilize their superior moral authority to “uplift” their Indian “sisters.” In this context British feminists’ sense of themselves as women depended heavily on their perception of gender relations in the wider imperial world.

Gender and the Nationalist Response to Imperialism

Given the centrality of gender ideologies to imperial projects around the world, we should not be surprised that they were similarly central to a variety of nationalist responses to imperialism. Yet, gendered responses to imperialism did not follow set patterns across time or space and varied widely in relation to both the colonial power and local culture. One pattern that did emerge in places as diverse as post-1945 India and Indonesia, 1960s and 1970s Zimbabwe, and 1950s and 1960s Algeria was the formulation of an aggressive, hypermasculine nationalist rhetoric. Where this pattern emerged, colonized women sometimes became targets of nationalist violence. In other cases they were idealized and made to stand as symbols of purity and tradition. Both strategies tended to marginalize women’s roles in nationalist struggles and tended to complicate postimperial gender relations. A second, paradoxical, pattern was the active participation of women in most nationalist movements all over the world. Indeed, women from French Indochina to Jamaica to Angola served in critical roles as messengers, providers, and even as soldiers.

The case of Zimbabwe in Africa illustrates the complex ways gender could help constitute the language and practices of anti-imperial nationalist movements. Under colonial rule Zimbabwean men felt increasingly emasculated as they lost status to white Europeans, were treated as children, and were unable to protect Zimbabwean women from the sexual advances of colonizing men. Emasculation took more material forms as well because colonial rule had made it progressively more difficult for Zimbabwean men to achieve those goals that were thought to mark ideal masculinity—including especially taking a wife, buying land, and providing for a family. As a result, Zimbabwean nationalism during the 1960s and 1970s took on an aggressively masculine posture (the two main parties styled themselves after the cock and the bull) that emphasized the importance of being manly, virile, and heterosexual. Incidents of violence against women increased dramatically during this period, evidenced by a spike in the number of rapes and attempted rapes. At the same time, women’s actual participation in the Zimbabwean nationalist movement was crucial to its eventual success. They provided information to nationalist guerrillas, gave food and shelter to nationalist fighters, and, after 1975, were trained as guerrilla fighters themselves. Yet, in spite of such active women’s participation, Zimbabwean independence in 1980 did not lead to equality for Zimbabwean women. Instead, like many other states that emerged in the wake of successful anti-imperial movements, patriarchy was simply reconfigured in new ways—boosted and encouraged by the aggressively masculine ways that many colonized men responded to their colonial overlords.

The Indonesian nationalist movement during the immediate post–World War II period shared the hypermasculine tone of the Zimbabwean nationalist movement. As in Zimbabwe, Indonesian men had long endured denigration by Dutch colonizers, who consistently referred to Indonesian—and especially Javanese—men as weak and effeminate. Moreover, Dutch men had gained privileged access to Indonesian women. To combat this sense of emasculation, Indonesian nationalists in the anticolonial war of 1945–1949 consciously adopted an aggressively masculine ethos by celebrating toughness, virility, and militarism and broke with established (Javanese) cultural traditions of courtesy and gentleness. In this revolutionary movement, women and female sexuality were seen as dangerous and even traitorous. Women’s colonial roles as concubines (nyais) had made them suspect as potential spies, and weakness associated with women was viewed as a potential drain on, and distraction from, the cause of revolution. Indeed, because so many Indonesian nationalists felt it necessary to fight European imperialism with a new, hypermasculine gender identity, the movement turned against its female supporters in a bid to create a new sense of masculinity on the European model.

Implications

The relationship between global imperialism and gender was complex. It was not uniform across space and time, and its precise form varied widely according to local conditions, the colonial culture being imposed, and the specific issues involved. Moreover, the consequences of gender ideals in imperial situations often worked themselves out in unintended, ambiguous, and unexpected ways. What is clear, however, is that beliefs about gender were central to imperial projects around the world and that they had real, observable effects in the material world as well as in the realm of representation, discourse, and psychology. In addition, gendered responses to imperial control played a role in shaping gender relations in many newly independent nations, with effects that can still be felt in the present.

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