UVM Theses and Dissertations
Format:
Print
Author:
Marshall, Judith
Dept./Program:
History
Year:
2013
Degree:
M.A.
Abstract:
Studies of British women living in the Empire generally focus on only one aspect of how they performed and experienced their gender. For example, historians will examine the phenomenon of Imperial Motherhood, or the icon of Modem Girlhood, or how Memsahibs in the empire were able to lay claim to an authority that would have been reserved for males in the metropole. While this allows for a subtle understanding of each of these ideologies of womanhood, they leave their readers with a somewhat fragmentary understanding, . These are in many ways contradictory ideas about what it meant to be a female imperialist. The image that forms by examining them separately, as they have been, is that these different femininities are somehow in competition with each other.
Which of these contradictory ideas most accurately describe the historical reality? The frustrating answer is: All of them. In this thesis, I take a step back to consider these three female tropes as separate threads that made up the larger tapestry of imperial womanhood. I argue that while each ideal had its own characteristics, ideological backing, associated images, and encouraged behaviors, individual women were, in truth, informed by multiple facets of femininity and would move between different roles throughout the day, through different interactions.
The context for my research in this thesis is interwar colonial Kenya. Temporally, the 1920s and 30s are an ideal moment in which to examine imperial femininity because following the first world war the position of women in modem society was an open question around the world, resulting in public debate over defining femininity. However, as the golden age of the Empire had already passed by the interwar period, much of the work that has focused on the redefining of womanhood in the 1920s and 30s has been unconcerned with empire. Meanwhile, many studies of imperial femininity has focused on the late nineteenth century and thus ignored the changing role of women in the final decades of the Empire.
The temporal setting of the vast majority of work on female imperialists is largely decided by its geographical setting. As historians of British India have written most of these studies, it makes an internal sense that the focus would be the high point of the Raj. However, by moving the geographical context to the settler community of Kenya, which has largely gone unexamined since the early 1980s and thus remains unexplored by scholars with backgrounds in gender and postcolonial studies, the temporal context must also shift. By choosing interwar Kenya as the setting, we can consider new questions that arose during the twentieth century concerning changing ideas about gender, modernity, race, and empire.
Which of these contradictory ideas most accurately describe the historical reality? The frustrating answer is: All of them. In this thesis, I take a step back to consider these three female tropes as separate threads that made up the larger tapestry of imperial womanhood. I argue that while each ideal had its own characteristics, ideological backing, associated images, and encouraged behaviors, individual women were, in truth, informed by multiple facets of femininity and would move between different roles throughout the day, through different interactions.
The context for my research in this thesis is interwar colonial Kenya. Temporally, the 1920s and 30s are an ideal moment in which to examine imperial femininity because following the first world war the position of women in modem society was an open question around the world, resulting in public debate over defining femininity. However, as the golden age of the Empire had already passed by the interwar period, much of the work that has focused on the redefining of womanhood in the 1920s and 30s has been unconcerned with empire. Meanwhile, many studies of imperial femininity has focused on the late nineteenth century and thus ignored the changing role of women in the final decades of the Empire.
The temporal setting of the vast majority of work on female imperialists is largely decided by its geographical setting. As historians of British India have written most of these studies, it makes an internal sense that the focus would be the high point of the Raj. However, by moving the geographical context to the settler community of Kenya, which has largely gone unexamined since the early 1980s and thus remains unexplored by scholars with backgrounds in gender and postcolonial studies, the temporal context must also shift. By choosing interwar Kenya as the setting, we can consider new questions that arose during the twentieth century concerning changing ideas about gender, modernity, race, and empire.