Orientalism's Other, Other Orientalisms: Women in the Scheme of Empire

Orientalism's Other, Other Orientalisms: Women in the Scheme of Empire BiUie Melman. Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 17181918 : Sexuality, Religion and Work. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. xix + 417 pp. ISBN 0-472-10332-6 (cl). Bouthaina Shaaban. Both Right and Left Handed: Arab Women Talk about Their Lives. London: Women's, 1988; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.242 pp. ISBN 0-253-35189-8; 0-253-20688-X (pb). Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds. Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. London: Virago, 1990; Bloomington and IndianapoUs : Indiana University Press, 1990. xxxvi + 412 pp. ISBN 0-253-31121-7 (cl); 0-253-20577-8 (pb). Ruth Roded. Women in Islamic Biographical Collections: From Ibn Saçd to Who's Who. Boulder, Colo., and London: Lynne Rienner, 1994. χ +157 pp. ISBN 1-55587-442-8 (cl). Sarah Graham-Brown. Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1860-1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. xi + 274 pp; Ul. ISBN 0-231-06826-3 (cl); 0-231-06827-1 (pb). Michael Adas, ed. Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order. Phüadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1993. xüi + 379 pp. ISBN 1-56639-067-2; 1-56639-068-0 (pb). Valentine M. Moghadam, ed. Gender and National Identity: Women and Politics in Muslim Societies. London and New Jersey: Zed Books; Karachi: Oxford University Press, xii +180 pp. ISBN 1-85649-245-1 (cl); 1-85649-246-X (pb); in Pakistan ISBN 0-19-577549-X. Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood, and Shirley Ardener, eds. Women and Missions Past and Present: Anthropological and Historical Perceptions. Providence, RL, and Oxford: Berg, 1993. xxii + 279 pp.; iU. ISBN 0-85496-738-9 (cl); 0-85496-872-5 (pb). Margaret Strobel. European Women and the Second British Empire. Bloomington and IndianapoUs: Indiana University Press, 1991. xni +108 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-253-35551-6 (cl); 0-253-20631-6 (pb). Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds. Western Women and Imperialism : Complicity and Resistance. Bloomington and IndianapoUs: Indiana University Press, 1992. vii + 276 pp. ISBN 0-253-31341-4 (cl); 0-253-20705-3 (pb). Thomas J. Prasch © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 4 (Winter) 1995 Book Review Thomas Prasch 175 In the traditional Uterary representation and historiography of European imperialism, the old adage about the battle of Waterloo largely appUed to the wars of empire as weU: they were won on the playing fields of Eton. Empire buüding was a man's game (and largely a middle-class man's game at that), spearheaded by the pioneering explorers and missionaries , expanded by the merchants, and completed by the miUtary men and bureaucrats. Resistance to imperialism, too, was conceived as the work of men, from the tribal warriors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the Western-trained nationaUst poUtidans and gueriUas of the twentieth century. There was almost no place in this scheme of empire for European women, save in a transposed domestic sphere that dupUcated abroad their roles as wives and mothers at home. These stereotyped roles included the helpmeet to the missionary in Africa and the memsahib who preserved an island of domestic EngUshness for the EngUshman serving the Raj. For the indigenous women of colonial empires, an even more subservient set of roles was developed. They appeared as sexual opportunity or temptation (depending on the terms of the account) for white men, a motif through all imperial territories that takes perhaps its most pronounced form in the Western imagination's vision of the Orient's veüed women, harems, and baths; as the pretext for imperial intervention to save women from "barbarian" practices ranging from sari in India to polygamy in Africa and the Middle East; as the unresisting subjects of tradition-bound patriarchal cultures; and as metaphorical embodiments for a passive and penetrable, thus feminized, realm. Margaret Strobel, summarizing this traditional historiography in her essay "Gender, Sex, and Empire" (in Islamic and European Expansion), concludes that "we know Utile of what indigenous women were doing, let alone thinking." "If indigenous women have been largely absent...