German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (review)

This book is an important addition to histories of imperial feminism and gender histories of modern Western colonialism. Historians of imperial feminism argue that the cultural and political strategies of white feminists and women's rights activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employed, benefited from, and informed racist and nationalist ideologies of imperialism. Gender historians argue in a similar vein that the modern histories of race, class, nation, masculinity, and femininity are inexorably joined, structured and played out in the politics and cultures of imperialism. To date, these histories are primarily of British and American imperialisms. Wildenthal both supports these arguments and adds German colonialism as a comparative twist to the literature.

A great strength of the book is its attention to the political and cultural meanings in Germany and German colonies of a broad range of gendered colonial encounters that informed gender politics. Wildenthal argues the strong and immediate relationship between culture and politics in Germany and in the colonies. German authors, officials, and politicians, both female and male, imagined the colonies as cultural frontiers raising questions and generating evidence about German women and men's proper roles and relationships to nation and race.

Although Wildenthal spends much time on shifts in the agendas and political leadership of such women's colonialist groups as the Women's Association for Nursing and the Women's League in Germany, she locates political leadership and membership in terms of class and occupational makeup. She applies the labels feminist and radical feminist loosely in these discussions. An examination of the emergence and changing cultural meaning of these terms in Germany would be valuable.

Over time, elite women activists' late nineteenth-century visions of the colonies as sites for economic and personal independence give way to bourgeois visions of women as defenders of the German nation and race through pure and proper sexual and social reproduction. The wars of resistance in Southwest Africa (Namibia) from 1904 to 1907 were pivotal in erasing most German ambiguity toward mixed-race sexual relationships and cultural hybridity, and "Race, identified biolistically with women's essence, had become the universal goal" (170).

Wildenthal presents examples of cultural and social history that affected the gender politics of race, nation, immigration, and citizenship, drawing mostly from German Southwest Africa and Southeast Africa (Tanzania), with some comparisons from German Samoa. The text focuses primarily on Germany from the 1880s through the beginning of World War I, but the final chapter on interwar Germany is a brief and fascinating examination of colonial culture suddenly without colonies.

The author emphasizes specific cases and general issues important in the press, politics, and popular opinion. She pairs, to wonderful effect, the marriage of the Swahili-speaking aristocratic woman Salme bint Sa'id with the German businessman Heinrich Ruete in 1866, and the marriage in 1905 between Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari, an educated Swahili-speaking man, and Bertha Hilske, a working-class woman from Berlin. In another example, she argues the cultural importance of the published memoirs of colonial farmers' wives.

Although the author focuses on the politics of German women's roles in the colonies as nurses, teachers, and wives, unfortunately, she does little with German women's relationships to Africans. She looks more closely at German men's sexual relationships to colonized women because this issue became central to the German politics of race and nation. In the debate about miscegenation, some German colonialist men defended these relationships as a necessary component to colonial masculinity and as liberating.

This is a rich and nuanced presentation of gendered colonial culture and politics in Germany. The author juxtaposes, but does not always make explicit connections between, different types of evidence and levels of social and political activity. The approach allows for a very effective dialogue between historical sources.