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  • “Cherchez la femme”:Women and Gender in French Scholarship on the Empire
  • Rebecca Rogers (bio)

Indigenous women of the French empire have long fascinated writers, painters, and photographers, as a wealth of literary and visual sources attest. Yet this interest is far from a dominant thread in contemporary French historical research. In what follows, I seek to understand the place that scholarship on women and gender in the empire holds today in France, from the perspective of an American who lives and works in France. I begin by sketching out the emergence of scholarship on the topic, beginning in the early 2000s, centering my analysis on the modern period. Secondly, I consider the extent to which women and gender have moved from being the object of dissertations and academic conferences to being subjects that are taught in classrooms. And finally, I offer a few explanations for why the gendering of the French empire has failed to acquire pride of place in academic conversations, despite the existence of a great deal of scholarship on the topic, now reaching back several decades.

Bringing Women and Gender to Light in French Colonial History: Views from France

A cursory examination of scholarship on women and gender in French colonial history suggests this is a very recent area of research, despite the groundbreaking work of the historians Régine Goutalier and Yvonne Knibiehler thirty years ago.1 A few scholars naturally pursued the questions raised in their wide-ranging exploration of women’s presence in the French empire, but in France, one had to wait for the twenty-first century to see evidence of significant new empirical work on the subject. Christelle Taraud, Anne Hugon, Odile Goerg, and Pascale Barthélémy, in particular, published books that drew attention to the wealth of material available within the imperial archive for those interested in women or questions of gender.2 All four of these historians were trained by specialists in area studies—as opposed to colonial historians—and, with the exception of Christelle Taraud, these scholars define themselves more as Africanists than as specialists on empire.3

In recent years, the subject of women, gender, and colonization has begun to attract more widespread attention in francophone circles, resulting in a number of special issues in academic journals. In Belgium, Amandine Lauro edited an issue of the women’s history journal Sextant that included [End Page 124] articles on women in the French empire, as did Pascale Barthélémy in the volume she coordinated for the French journal Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés.4 In 2013, a group of gender historians went a step further in the effort to promote these perspectives when they launched a new bilingual journal entitled Gender and Colonization/Genre et colonization. The first issue, coordinated by Ryme Seferdjeli and Christelle Taraud, focused on Algeria.5

This scholarship reveals the presence of quite a few active scholars in France, as well as in francophone Belgium, whose work is focused on gender dynamics within French colonies, notably in northern and sub-Saharan Africa. For the moment, these perspectives are far less developed with respect to Indochina and the old regime colonies in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean. The emergence of special issues in journals testifies, nonetheless, to a historiographic moment in which women and gender are part of the story of the French empire. This is the product of important conferences and a series of thematic seminars that helped to bring these issues more directly to the forefront.

The first major conference to highlight the importance of a dialogue between historians of gender and historians of empire took place in 2002 at the Third International Congress on Francophone Feminist Research in Toulouse. At the time, Françoise Thébaud and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, the founding editors of Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés, turned to the Africanist Anne Hugon and suggested she organize a series of sessions that examined colonization, decolonization, and postcolonial processes through the lens of gender, given the scarcity of such scholarship in France. Hugon published some of these talks in 2004 in a volume that included four state-of-the-art articles.6

Ten years after...

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