In his 1897 speech for the inauguration of the Societe Franqaise d’Emigration des Femmes (SFEF), a society set up under the auspices of the prominent pro-colonial organisation the Union Coloniale Francaise (UCF)

to promote the migration of French women to the empire, Joseph Chailley-Bert, the UCF secretary-general, informed his audience of a radical change in the nation’s colonial policy.

After the two-decade-long military expansion, France should henceforth move from conquest to the development of her overseas possessions: ‘for the greatest number and the wisest of the colonists, these words, “colonial policy”, must acquire, have acquired another meaning. They signify the political and administrative organisation, and the economic exploitation of our colonies’. To this end, it was not enough to send men and capital to the colonies, what was further needed, Chail- ley-Bert contended, was ‘the one element that constitutes the family and forms its very basis: women’.¹ The UCF’s recognition that women have an essential role to play in the colonial scheme of things indeed signals a sea change in the nineteenth-century colonialists’ thinking about the empire, which had been hitherto constructed as an exclusively male preserve where white women feared to tread. How could we account for such a total volte-face of what Ann Stoler describes as the ‘strident misogyny of imperial thinkers and colonial agents’,² the group notoriously known to blame women for the ruin of the empire as epitomised in the ‘myth of the destructive female’?³

This chapter proposes to explore the highly complex web of factors underlying the sweeping transformation in the representation of the colonies in the Third Republic (1870—1940) from being a ‘no woman’s land’ into a ‘women’s haven’. We will first discuss the arguments colonial lobbyists put forward to support the claim that colonial female emigration would provide solutions to several contemporary social and economic ills plaguing both the metropole and the empire. One main contention is that French women would not only help set up French families in the colonies, thereby ensuring the colons’ long-term settlement; their presence would also put an end to interracial concubinage and the related problem of mixed-blood children. As for the metropole, it was argued that sending women to the empire could solve the nation’s depopulation crisis and offer an ‘outlet’ to the large ‘stock’ of single females whose presence would greatly improve the severe gender imbalance in the white population of the colonies. The second half of the chapter examines the construction of French imperial womanhood as elaborated in the emigration promotional literature in which the colonial woman, referred to as the coloniale,⁴ was called upon to incarnate a feminine version of the civilising mission. The ultimate aim of the remaking of Frenchness in the empire via the domestic realm was to sharpen the racial divide between the French and the native communities as a means to enforce French hegemony.

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Source: Aldrich Robert, McKenzie Kirsten (eds.). The Routledge History of Western Empires. Routledge,2014. — 542 p.. 2014

In his 1897 speech for the inauguration of the Societe Franqaise d’Emigration des Femmes (SFEF), a society set up under the auspices of the prominent pro-colonial organisation the Union Coloniale Francaise (UCF)

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