The colonial feminine mystique

Following the establishment of the SFEF, a flurry of promotional writings on colonial female emigration made their appearance in the metropole, whose goal was to initiate women to life in the empire, a realm that had hitherto been represented as a ‘no woman’s land’.

The principal roles French women were expected to assume in the empire were not merely those of mother and wife, but colonial mother and wife. Such is, for example, how Charles Lemire, a long-time administrator in Indochina, understood the role of the coloniale in his statement that ‘woman is the indispensable collaborator of colonisation in her capacity as wife and mother’.³⁴ When urging women to follow their spouses to the colony, many colonial observers were prompted not so much by conjugal considerations as by the assumed positive impacts their presence would make to their husbands’ existence in the colony. It is primarily with the latter concern in mind that Piolet made his impassioned call for women to move to the empire:

The French woman must also go to the colonies in order to help, console and support her husband, to watch over his well-being and his health, to care for him in a thousand indispensable ways... That is to say that, in fact, the life of a young man in the colonies is unpleasant amidst the natives, not one among whom can be a confidant or a companion.³⁵

Similar justification was put forward by the authors of Le confort aux colonies, a home management guidebook for colonial living, to define the wifely role of women in the colonies where

The European will have to face situations that are often difficult... It is at this moment that the task of his companion will be defined.

Much as wifehood, motherhood in the colony was likewise appreciated mainly in terms of its contributions to the imperial cause. Indeed, promotional literature strongly encour­aged French women to do their patriotic share by assuming colonial motherhood since it was believed that only the presence of children and families could entice men to settle permanently in the colonised lands. Besides helping to bring about stability and commit­ment in the white community, a second no less significant advantage of colonial maternity is that it could ensure the reproduction of a ‘pure’ French race and alleviate the vexing problem of metis children. Born and raised in the empire, these white children would grow up as ‘authentic’ colonials, who, in the view of the prominent promoter of female emigra­tion Clotilde Chivas-Baron, could even claim a certain degree of superiority vis-à-vis their metropolitan counterparts:

They will be colonials, that is to say great travellers; they will retain the prestige of those who had crossed the immense sea and oceans, those who had lived in the lands of pineapples and bananas... those who had heard the rhinoceros grunt and the tiger growl; and those who have seen with their own eyes ‘Negroes and Chinese’.

By begetting French Kims and Mowglis, colonial mothers would have achieved the all­important mission of reproducing future generations of colonial leaders, thereby perpetuating the imperial legacy.³⁷