French feminisms, global imperialisms—some historiographical reflections on writing Feminism’s Empire

ABSTRACT

French feminisms and anti-imperialisms co-constituted each other in many ways in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Yet there exist few histories of the intersections of the period’s feminisms and empire, in either French or English. The absence of scholarship investigating the links between two major nineteenth-century ideological, social, and political forces raises myriad questions that emerge at the junctures of institutions, interests, power, epistemologies, politics, and history. Why the silences concerning the relationships between feminisms and imperialisms? How would analyzing their complex relationships alter our understandings of not only these two major conceptual frameworks, but also of gender, race, whiteness, religion, and class—and their intersections—during this period. My book, Feminism’s Empire, emerged from these questions; its central arguments engage, critique, and explain their intricacies.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• feminist
• imperialism
• imperialist
• empire
• colonialism
• gender
• women
• France
• New Caledonia
• nineteenth-century
• antisemitism
• anarchism
• socialism
• race
• whiteness
• travel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Feminism’s Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).

2 Olympe Audouard, Voyage à travers mes souvenirs: Ceux que j’ai connus, ce que j’ai vu (Paris: E. Dentu, 1884), 73.

3 Paule Mink, ‘La femme en Algérie’, Le coup de feu (January 1886).

4 Elisa Camiscioli, ‘Women, Gender, Intimacy, and Empire’, Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 139.

5 Jennifer Sessions, ‘Women and French Empire’, Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 186–99.

6 On exception is Steven Hause’s biography of Hubertine Auclert which includes a chapter on her experience of living in Algeria, and the ways in which it influenced her feminism. Steven C. Hause, Hubertine Auclert: The French Sufragette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 132–48.

7 The problem persists in the French context, as Rebecca Rogers explains, ‘the gendering of imperial history encounters resistance from scholars working in area studies as well as the historical mainstream because both gender and race remain problematic and contested categories of analysis.’ Rebecca Rogers, ‘`Cherchez la femme’: Women and Gender in French Scholarship on the Empire’, Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 130.

8 Christelle Taraud, La Prostitution colonial: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc, 1830–1962 (Paris: Payot, 2003).

9 Clare Midgley, ed., Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Antoinette Burton, ed., Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities (London: Routledge, 1999); Ruth Roach Pierson, Nupur Chaudhuri, and Beth McAuley, eds., Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Cutlure, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

10 Billie Melman, ‘Orientations historiographiques: Voyage, genre et colonization’, Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire 28 (2008), 166–70.

11 Camiscioli, ‘Women, Gender, Intimacy, and Empire’, 138–48; Rogers, ‘Cherchez la femme’, 130.

12 Julia Clancy-Smith, ‘Twentieth-Century Historians and Historiography of the Middle East: Women, Gender, and Empire’, in Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century, eds. Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer, and Y. Hakan Erdem (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 83.

13 Anne Hugon, Histoire des femmes en situation colonial: Afrique et Asie, XXe siècle (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2004), 8.

14 Hugon, Histoire des femmes, 8; Camiscioli, ‘Women, Gender, Intimacy, and Empire’, 139–40; Claudine Robert-Guiard, Des Européennes en situation coloniale, Algérie 1830–1939 (Aix: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2009), 5–7; Rogers, ‘Cherchez la femme’, 130.

15 Studies of feminism and imperialism in the early-20th-century French empire have flourished in recent years. See, for example, Jennifer Anne Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Félix Germaine and Silyane Larcher, eds, Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848–2016 (University of Nebraska Press, 2018); and Sara Rahnama, The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2023).

16 Sarah Zimmerman, Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2020); Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation and Citizenship in the French Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Marie-Paule Ha, French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Christina Firpo, The Uprooted: Race, Childhood, and Imperialism in Indochina, 1890–1980 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016);

17 Félix Germain and Silyane Larcher, eds. Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848–2016 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018); Odile Krakovitch, Les femmes bagnardes (Paris: O. Orban, 1990), and Alice Bullard’s superb, Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

18 See, among many others, the Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire special issue, Voyageuses 28 (2008), and more recently Marie-Paule Ha, French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochina (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Rebecca Rogers, A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Clotilde Chauvin, Louise Michel en Algérie: la tournée de conferences de Louise Michel et Ernest Girault en Algérie, octobr-décembre 1904 (Saint-Georges-d’Oléron: Editions Libertaires, 2007); Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Isabelle Ernot, ‘Voyageuses occidentales et impérialisme : l’Orient à la croisée des représentations (XIXe siècle)’, Genre & Histoire 8 (Spring 2011); and, Robert-Guiard, Des Européennes en situation coloniale, Algérie. 1830–1939 (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l'Université de Provence, 2009); Félix Germaine and Silyane Larcher, Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848–2016 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

19 See especially Christelle Taraud, La Prostitution colonial. Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc, 1830–1962 (Paris: Payot, 2003), and Taraud’s many subsequent publications; Elisa Camiscioli, Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024); Ellen Amster, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877–1956 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); Caroline Sequin,

Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024; Judith Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019); and Victoria Thompson, ‘’I Went Pale with Pleasure’: The Body, Sexuality, and National Identity among French Travelers to Algeris in the Nineteenth Century’, in Algeria and France 1800–2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia, ed. Patricia M. E. Lorcin (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006); and Robin Mitchell, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2020).

20 See Julie Kalman, Orientalizing the Jew: Religion, Culture, and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, eds., Colonialism and the Jews, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); and Clémence Boulouque and Nicole S. Serfaty, Juives d’Afrique du Nord. Cartes postales (1885-1930) (Paris: Bleu Autour, 2005).

21 See Yael Schlick, Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment (New Jersey: Bucknell University Press, 2012); Susan Foley, ‘In Search of ‘Liberty’: Politics of Women’s Rights in the Travel Narratives of Flora Tristan and Suzanne Voilquin’, Women’s History Review 13, no. 2 (2004), 211–31; Christian Veauvy, ‘Les Saint-Simoniennes en Egypte. Analyse critique d’un modèle d’émancipation’, Lectora 17 (2011), 221–39; Renée Champion, ‘Suzanne Voilquin en Egypte ou la pratique de la solidarité feminine’, in L’Orientalisme des saint-simoniens, eds. Michel Levallois and Sarga Moussa (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2006), 157–72; Renée Champion, ‘Représentations des femmes dans les récits de voyageuses d'expression française en Orient au XIXe siècle (1848-1911)’, unpublished dissertation, 2002; Judith DeGroat, ‘History, Testimony and Postmemory: The Algerias of Pauline Roland and Assia Djebar’, in Memory as Colonial Capital: Cross-Cultural Encounters in French and English, eds. Erica L. Johnson and Elo'ise Brezault (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 121–38.

22 Rebecca Rogers, A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 14.

23 Monicat’s book, Itinéraires de l’écriture au féminin: Voyageuses du 19e siècle (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), focuses more broadly on women travel writers. See also, Ernot, ‘Voyageuses occidentales et’ ; Julia Clancy-Smith, ‘Islam, Gender, and Identities in the Making of French Algeria, 1830-1962’, in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, eds. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 154–74; Rachel Nuñez, ‘Rethinking Universalism: Olympe Audouard, Hubertine Auclert, and the Gender Politics of the Civilizing Mission’, French Politics, Culture & Society 30, no. 1 (Spring 2012), 23–45; Edith Taïeb, ‘Coloniser and Colonised in Hubertine Auclert’s Writings on Algeria : An encounter doomed to failure’, in A ‘Belle Epoque’ ? Women in French Society and Culture 1890-1915, eds. D. Holmes and C. Tarr (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Chauvin, Louise Michel; and, Hause, Hubertine Auclert.

24 Mink, ‘La femme en Algérie’; Olympe Audouard, Les mystères du sérail et des harems turcs : Lois, mœurs, usages, anecdotes (Paris: E. Dentu, 1863) ; Hubertine Auclert, Les femmes arabes en Algérie (Paris: Sociétés des Editions Littéraires, 1900).

25 Olympe Audouard, À travers l’Amérique : Le Far-West (Paris : E. Dentu, 1869).

26 Léonie Rouzade, Le monde renversé (Paris: Lachaud, 1872).

27 Rouzade, Le monde renversé, 33.

28 Auclert, Les femmes arabes, 56–57.

29 Auclert, Les femmes arabes.

30 Marnia Lazreg, ‘Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring), 96–97.

31 Olympe Audouard, Les mystères de l’Egypte dévoilés (Paris : E. Dentu, 1866), 381–2.

32 Audouard, Les mystères, 381–2, 390.

33 Audouard, Les mystères, 393.

34 Rouzade, Le monde renversé.

35 Mink, ‘La femme en Algérie’.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Olympe Audouard, L’Orient et ses peuplades (Paris : E. Dentu, 1867), 240–2.

39 Monicat, Itinéraires de l’écriture, 237.

40 Audouard, L’Orient, 94–95.

41 Audouard, L’Orient, 95.

42 Hubertine Auclert, ‘Les droits de la femme’, La libre parole (May 17, 1894).

43 ‘How could anyone take pity on people with caves full of gold? On people who have a hatred of soap and water which can only be compared to their love of gold?’ Audouard, L’Orient, 95; She relates the tale of merciless Jewish money lender with a ‘long and hooked nose and a shifty look’. Hubertine Auclert, L’Intransigeant illustré, n.d.

44 Louise Michel, ‘Les mémoires de Louise Michel’, L’égalité (June 26, 1890).

45 Louise Michel, ‘La rêve’, in Louise Michel (1830–1905), ed. Gérald Dittmar (Paris: Editions Dittmar, 2004), 225–9.

46 Louise Michel, ‘Les filles de la Galoubette’, 1, Dossier Louise Michel, International Institute for Social History.

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Carolyn J. Eichner

Carolyn J. Eichner is Professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, specializing in modern France and empire, gender, race, political radicalism, and the politics of names. A 2022–2023 Fulbright Research Scholar (Paris), and a Spring 2023 Camargo Foundation Fellow, she has also held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her publications include Feminism’s Empire (Cornell University Press, 2022), a Russian translation forthcoming (Boston: American Studies Press, 2025), The Paris Commune: A Brief History (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune (Indiana University Press, 2004) and Franchir les barricades: Les femmes dans la Commune de Paris (Editions de la Sorbonne, 2020), finalist, Prix Augustin Thierry de la Ville Paris, 2020 (prize for best historical monograph between Antiquity and late nineteenth century).