Gender dynamics and opportunities

Colonial relations can be measured in terms of distance and proximity, as is attested by the endless historiographical debates over where empire begins and ends (the concept of the empire back home, of imperial London, Brussels or Lisbon, of an imperial-nation state, the question of where colonial studies finish and so-called area studies start, to name only a few).

So many women return to France, leaving their husbands to finish their tasks. No more united family: we are over here, they are over there. A telegram announces deaths; we cannot attend the funeral. One has to break all the bridges, break from one’s past. Children are born, and grow up. Some are fragile, others need to pursue degrees. Should they be in France?¹

This passage sheds light on both gender and social considerations at the heart of colonial rule. Desperate for reminders of home, some colonisers cloned their metropoles overseas. Others benefited from frequent furloughs and leaves to return to the motherland. Yet modern colonialism cannot be reduced to an exercise in cloning. For one thing, the colonial experience offered untold opportunities for Europeans overseas: it enabled social ascension to many, for women most notably.

Gender dynamics in the colonies sometimes departed quite dramatically from those in the metropoles. Patricia Lorcin has studied enterprising colonial women who seem to have revelled in colonial experiences, and for whom the colonies were tantamount to a form of liberation from more traditional roles. Indeed, two of the women in question, Isabelle Eberhardt and Karen Blixen ‘identified almost at once with the masculine element’ inherent to the colonial project at the time.² Rebecca Rogers has examined the case of Veronique Eugenie Allix (or Mme Luce) whose teaching of sewing and embroidery to Algerian women in the mid-nineteenth century soon made her a heroine not just in France, but across the Channel as well.³ In another colonial context, Lora Wildenthal has examined German women’s organisations that interwove nationalism and feminism to promote female opportunities in the colonies before 1914.

However, other European women certainly felt trapped in the colonies. Some had not gone there by choice, having either followed their husbands, or in some instances, been deported there as prisoners. Many complained of rigid gender imbalances, boredom, even colonial false advertising. Marguerite Duras famously implied that her mother had fallen victim to the latter. She writes in her semi-fictional novel The Sea Wall (Un barrage contre le Pacifique): ‘Occasionally, on Sunday, she stopped to gaze at the colonial propaganda posters in front of the town hall... The picture usually showed a colonial couple, dressed in white, sitting in rocking-chairs under banana trees while smiling natives busied themselves around them.’⁶ Her mother’s subsequent life trajectory in the French colony of Indochina would involve depression, poverty and misfortune. Such tales—although likely exaggerated in the case of Duras’ mother—were not new. Nor were women alone in bemoaning the colonial context, and blaming it for their conduct and comportments. Baron Albert d’Anthouard de Wasservas, for instance, recalled of the plight that befell his compatriots in 1880s Indochina:

Strange life for this colonial society of a few thousand Europeans camping in the midst of the rice fields. Every day boats bring a flux of arrivals and departures. Time is measured in furloughs and leaves. One is either coming from Europe or returning there. Women are rare, barely one for ten men, since they are parti­cularly vulnerable to the climate. This life amongst men is inevitably brutal and sad... Almost every single European man has a Vietnamese ‘Con-gai’—unions which are the product of colonial nomadism and leave in their wave entire allu­vial deposits of metis children.⁷