Teaching Women’s Rights and the Imperialist Agenda

I am a graduate student studying English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and I recently concluded co-teaching a course called The Human Experience of War. UW-Eau Claire is a medium-size public university in the Midwest with an undergraduate enrollment just above ten thousand. As a graduate student, I had the opportunity to co-teach an undergraduate course with a collaborating professor. The course consisted of reading various works of British literature that spanned World Wars I and II. It was a 300-level literature course that was available to non-English majors and filled a GE (general education) requirement for upper-level humanities, which resulted in an eclectic mix of students with a wide array of interests, backgrounds, and majors. My official title for this class was Teaching Assistant, and my responsibilities included everything that comes with teaching a college literature course (i.e., teaching classes, responding to written work, lecturing, composing lesson plans, designing assignments/projects, etc.). The goal was to approach wartime literature from a varied perspective, reading and analyzing both canonical and popular culture texts in order to further our understanding of the experience of living IN wartime Britain. Supplementary readings from texts such as Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory were used in order to provide context and useful background information.

Through the experience of teaching this course, one recurring theme that struck me as significant was the ever-present need of people to have a cause to justify their actions. It seems that people have a limitless supply of explanations and reasons for systematically destroying one another. Unfortunately, I also found that the professed reasons for going to war or promoting imperialism often had little to do with the actual motivation for such actions. Over the last few decades, the growing concern with women’s rights—domestically and across the globe—has made it the newest target of exploitation to further American imperialism, much to the detriment of women’s rights movements around the world. It is important for anyone teaching about women’s rights, globalization, or war to recognize this mis-appropriation of feminist issues to further the imperial agenda.

Imperial Feminism

This act of assimilating feminist concerns into the imperialist agenda has been labeled by some as “imperial feminism.” In an article titled “What’s Left? After ‘Imperial Feminist’ Hijackings,” Huibin Amelia Chew describes how “the pretext of ‘liberating women’ has served as a justification for the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq” and that “This ‘imperial feminism’ creates quandaries for feminist politics in the U.S.A., by clouding our ability to see systemic patriarchy” (75). Chew is one of many feminists who have noted how the U.S. has attempted to justify the occupation of foreign nations, most recently Afghanistan and Iraq, by relying on the notion that through occupation the U.S. is liberating women whose rights are withheld from them under the current regime. Contrary to the claimed positive influence and good intentions of the U.S., Chew describes the negative economic and social impact that comes as a result of the U.S.’s occupation of these countries. Other sources on the topic of imperial feminism include:

Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt

This is an anthology of essays compiled from a conference at Syracuse in 2006 called Feminism and War. The essays address various topics of concern to feminists related to war and the experience of war. This would be a very useful place to start for resources related to this topic.

A Border Passage, by Leila Ahmed

In this autobiography Ahmed describes her experiences growing up in Cairo, provides vivid descriptions of her Egyptian childhood, and then discusses her struggle to assimilate as an immigrant feminist living in the U.S. The British imperialism she experienced as a child in combination with the rise of Arab nationalism under Nassar provides a useful point of historical comparison to the imperial feminism conducted by the U.S. at present.

Gendered Peace: Women...