Femmes et genre en contexte colonial, XIXe-XXe siecle (Women and gender in colonial context, 19th-20th centuries) (review)

This international conference was organized by three French historians with over fifteen years research experience: Pascale Barthelemy, Lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, who works on education and training of women in French West Africa; Anne Hugon, Lecturer at the University of Paris 1, who is researching the history of childbirth and child-rearing in the colonial period in Ghana; and Christelle Taraud, Professor at New York University in France, whose research concerns sexuality in the colonial Maghreb. After two years preparation, they organized a conference of exceptional scope. Over three days at two different venues, the symposium welcomed sixty-five scholars from five continents and several generations. Special emphasis was placed on young researchers (doctoral students and new PhDs), who made up a third of the speakers. The fact that women were in the majority at this event reveals nevertheless a segmentation difficult to escape in this field - at least in France. And this was precisely one of the main challenges raised by this conference. If the primary objective was to provide 'a long-term overview' of research on women and gender in various colonial contexts (Africa, Asia, Oceania), challenges specific to the inclusion of these studies in French research were not forgotten. To address this, the organizers initiated several spin-offs from the conference: publications in academic and public history journals, lectures, and radio broadcasts.¹ It is indeed no longer possible to consider this area a new current of historiography. For nearly thirty years now, researchers throughout the world have been writing the history of women and of relations between the sexes under colonialism. Yet while departments of colonial and postcolonial history in Anglophone countries very often integrate gender issues, this perspective remains tentative in France.

Nevertheless, the vast diversity of subjects covered during the twelve workshops attests to the value of taking a gendered approach to colonial history. At the risk of over-simplifying the richness of the contributions, I identify three major themes that ran through the conference. Of course, these themes were not rigidly separated, and the questions raised have much in common.

Through the lens of the history of women and gender, a number of papers revisited long-standing themes in the historiography of colonialism that were developed by Marxist analysts within labour history in the 1960s and 1970s, but later largely abandoned by historians. Studies on women and gender made it possible to return to such questions. These papers showed that women's labour in the colonies - whether European or colonized - was far from marginal. Farmers, planters, servants, traders, teachers, nurses, midwives or radio presenters, the plurality of forms of women's labour demonstrates the importance of their social and economic role. Some of them knew how to use the opportunities offered by European networks to establish themselves as true business-women, like the eighteenth-century Signares of Saint-Louis in Senegal, or Mauritanian women in the 1930s. However, colonialism also contributed to deterioration in the economic situation of women. Large European trading companies proved tough competition for women traders. The new production system introduced with industrial capitalism and cash crops led to marginalization of women farmers. At the Office du Niger, for example, land for growing rice and cotton was allocated to family heads. Women were relegated to the margins of the cash economy and found themselves forced to diversify their economic activities - food crops, wood collection, small businesses - to meet the needs of their family. Thus they suffered a double domination: both masculine and colonial. All these examples show the impact of colonialism on women's labour. The situations varied depending on the contexts, both imperial and local, but also with the agency available to the women of the colonies - according to their class, race, age and marital status. Women's capacity for initiative and adaptation is even more striking when one reads...