Women in France d’Outre-Mer: Pedagogy and Avenues of Research

Twelve years ago, I wrote an essay for a French Historical Studies forum on the problems and strategies of teaching the history of women and gender in France d’Outre-Mer (the overseas territories of France).¹ The main problem then was the paucity of scholarship in English on women or gender in the French empire. Even the number of works in French was limited. The challenge was to find ways of presenting the subject to undergraduates by circumventing this lack. The two methodological questions the article then focused on were whether one should prioritize discourse or experience and, second, whether one should focus on colonized or colonizing women, or both. Although these questions can still be useful, recent historiographical developments have reconfigured the way in which we can think about, teach, and understand women in the colonies. First, and most obviously, France’s colonial past, once a peripheral concern, is now a requisite part of French history and indispensible to understanding France’s modern “identity” (to use a term that is considered problematic by some scholars). Moreover, that past has impinged on present-day French politics to an extent that was not fully anticipated when I wrote the essay for the French Historical Studies forum. Secondly, as presentations at the 2015 French Colonial History Society (FCHS) Conference demonstrated, interest in women and gender in the colonies has expanded, allowing for greater possibilities of territorial and chronological focus. As interest and the ensuing scholarship has increased, it has become apparent that distinctions between discourse and experience, or those between the colonizing and the colonizer, are more blurred than scholars originally conceived. Historians thus need to reconsider the binaries of power, agency, and cultural appropriation. Additionally, scholars have now turned their attention to France in a transnational context while others have started to investigate issues of memory, nostalgia, and, what Paul Gilroy has called, postcolonial melancholia.² These changes have further complicated the history of empire and provided a richer palette to work with, even if women and gender are still overshadowed.

The 2015 spring issue of French Politics, Culture, and Society, for example, focused on the politics of empire in postrevolutionary France and showcased some of the new scholarship on the subject, but it did not contain a single article whose specific focus was on women or gender.³ Is this mere coincidence? Are women really so marginal? Or is their absence merely a reflection of the gendered nature of historiography itself? In unraveling the complicated history of France d’Outre-Mer, are we confronted with historiographical topics that take priority over women and gender? To be sure, issues of gender present a difficult conundrum in a space where there may be multiple forms of gender structure, colonized and colonizing, which not only intersect or conflict with each other but also change over time.

Although the choice of monographs on French colonial women and issues of gender is still not as large as one would like, coming nowhere near that of the British Empire, new monographs have appeared, and there has been an increase in the number of articles on the subject, suggesting that more monographs might be on the way. The focus of the 2015 FCHS Conference and its many panels on the subject were certainly encouraging. In many of the published works about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Algeria has been a prime focus due, no doubt, to the fact it had the largest settler population whose exodus from France has had profound political repercussions. But scholars have branched out, and there are now English-language works on such colonies neglected in the past as Pondicherry, New Caledonia, Gabon or Madagascar even if women and gender are still largely absent.⁴ Absences can nonetheless be useful as springboards to examine historiographical issues as well as reflect on the historical significance of women’s roles over time.

So where does that leave us today if we were to teach a course on women, gender, and empire, whether the focus is on the metropole or the colonies? If we were to...