German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Politics, History, and Culture) by Wildenthal Lora

Author:Wildenthal, Lora [Wildenthal, Lora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2001-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

Only a few hours were spent on “colonial geography and history, economics, and colonial readings.”179 The course of instruction promised to whisk women to a mythical time and place where they would have a central role in the economy that industrialized Germany had denied them. Both of the colonial schools for women offered the odd spectacle of middle-class women paying high tuition to perform the kind of manual labor that usually fell to their social inferiors. Working-class German, Boer, British, and African women in German Southwest Africa were doing much of the same work without certification.

By 1911 the Women’s League was planning to extend the settlement scheme to German East Africa, where, it was hoped, educated women would be more employable.180 German East Africa lacked schools for white children, and so colonists with children created a demand for governesses. Moreover, as one Women’s League member noted, white domestic servants were not “necessary” in German East Africa because colonists there typically employed African men as household servants.181 That meant, in turn, that the German Southwest African race purity efforts banishing African women from households would not apply. The First World War interrupted plans to send unmarried, educated women to German East Africa, but the Women’s League resumed its efforts after the war and sent German women to what was then the British mandate of Tanganyika.

The Women’s League institutionalized women’s participation in the colonialist movement in areas beyond nursing and missionary work. Colonial war, populist settlement, colonial “reform,” and German women’s continued efforts to participate in the colonialist movement pushed the men to imagine new gender arrangements within the German community. Together, colonialist women and their male allies questioned the political and social primacy of the colonial patriarch, with his prerogatives of property, prestige, and sexual freedom. Colonialist women had even developed a rhetoric of their own primacy in German cultural survival. As one woman journalist put it: “The man can conquer and subjugate territories in the world for the German idea; but only the persistence of woman can implant and preserve the German idea abroad over the long term!”182 Yet the limits of men’s acceptance of women in the colonialist movement remained visible in two phenomena of the years immediately before the First World War. First, under pressure to focus attention on distinctively “feminine” tasks, the Women’s League and the Women’s Association for Nursing converged, even collided, in the area of pronatalist work. Second, colonialist men continued to assume that only “feminine” tasks justified the existence of procolonial organizations led by women, and they therefore questioned why the two groups should continue to exist separately.

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