The scramble of European nations in the nineteenth century to create empires around the world, had a major impact upon women's experiences, their social movements, and upon women's identity.
Historians of gender and imperialism have demonstrated that the colonial experience is a site where we can observe the interactions between cultures centring on gender, race and class.
From the perspective of women's history, the imperial possessions of the dominant European powers present us with spaces where women found opportunities as members of a race considered to be superior, but where they also experienced constraints as members of a supposed inferior sex. The experiences of the British in the Caribbean, India and Africa, the French in North and West Africa and South Asia, the Dutch in the East Indies and the Germans in South-West Africa, provide a rich canvas for an examination of the ways in which ideas about gender and race at home were played out in a foreign setting. Women, as McLintock makes plain, were not ‘the hapless onlookers of empire', marginal characters in a landscape populated by real men; rather they were ‘ambiguously complicit both as colonisers and colonised, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting.'1 Whether as wives of colonial administrators, independent missionaries, campaigners for indigenous women's rights or as consumers of imperial products, white European women rarely questioned the imperial project and thus were complicit in it.Overseas, white women grasped the new opportunities open to them as missionaries, wives of colonial administrators, and as teachers and nurses. Just as they had stepped out of the home and into the urban slums of European cities as philanthropists, the overseas colonies offered mainly middle-class women to step beyond the realms formerly deemed appropriate to their sex to engage with the race tensions thrown up by the imperial contest. The two domains were intimately linked by the middle-class ‘cult of domesticity' and the ‘invention of race'. At home, the so-called dangerous classes of the new urban slums were being defined as a different and even degenerate, heathen race.
In the colonies, the cult of domesticity was used to demarcate racial boundaries and to impose order on the colonised peoples. Women were active in both of these domains. ‘The Victorian middle-class home became a space for the display of imperial spectacle and the reinvention of race,' argues Ann McLintock, ‘while the colonies... became a theatre for exhibiting the Victorian cult of domesticity and the reinvention of gender.'2Middle-class philanthropic activity, at home and in the colonies, was informed by gendered notions of appropriate roles for men and women, and by ideas about racial hierarchy. Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) introduced evolutionary theory and the idea of racial struggle. The writings of the French diplomat Arthur de Gobineau focused on race and civilisation. And the sociologist Herbert Spencer wrote on social Darwinism. Each provided intellectual and scientific justification for an engagement with the ‘other', whether the poor of the urban slums or the native peoples of the colonies, and they shaped responses to what was discovered. Critiques of the intemperate, ‘degenerate' working-class family at home rested upon the idealised bourgeois domestic model incorporating a breadwinner husband and a nonworking wife. But they were also informed by racial ideas which placed the working classes at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder. At the same time, women's excursions into streets inhabited by ‘degenerate' types — the working classes, immigrants, prostitutes and so on — helped them to formulate a model of society ordered by race. In 1839, one British report commented upon ‘the outcast thousands of the people whom we have culpably suffered to grow up in the heart of our country, [who are] more profligate and more perverted than the Hindoos.'3 Imperial adventure imported the language and the conceptions of race to domestic European society. Conversely, conceptions of the civilised and the uncivilised which had been formulated in the cities were exported to the imperial project. The disciplining of the ‘dangerous' classes at home, whilst at the same time building imperial strength by means of encouraging reproduction amongst the desirable classes, provided a language and a system for regulating gender, race and class boundaries in the colonies.4 The resulting effects for women in the colonies — both the colonisers and indigenous women — were ambiguous and often unsettling.