Why am I passionate about this?
As a historian of feminism, I have been trying for decades to understand how gender, race, class, and nationality are knotted together in ways that are not always obvious or trackable in our personal experience. The books I recommend here have served as brilliant lanterns for meānot simply pointing out the flawed history of western feminism but instead explaining the complicated effects of whiteness and imperialism in the development of todayās feminist identities, ideologies, and consciousness. For me, these histories offer intersectional keys decoding the map of the world weāve been dropped into and offering a path leading to a more justly feminist futureā¦.I hope they do for you too!
Tracey's book list on the history of feminism and imperialism
Why did Tracey love this book?
A collection of very short but incredibly interesting and illuminating essays, this book inaugurated the field of study we might call āfeminism and empire.ā Strobel and Chaudhuri gathered up the most important histories written to that date that explained how nineteenth and twentieth-century feminism emerged from colonialist contexts all over the world. Asking the question āwhat difference does gender make?ā each author teases out the importance of gender for colonial travel and politics in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Reading this book made me want to contribute to that kind of historical understanding of gender, modeling for me what an āintersectional feministā method of historical investigation might look like.
1 author picked Western Women and Imperialism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
"[Western Women and Imperialism] provides fascinating insights into interactions and attitudes between western and non-western women, mainly in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is an important contribution to the field of women's studies and (primarily British) imperial history, in that many of the essays explore problems of cross-cultural interaction that have been heretofore ignored." -Nancy Fix Anderson
"A challenging anthology in which a multiplicity of authors sheds new light on the waves of missionaries, 'memsahibs,' nurses-and feminists." -Ms.
". . . a long-overdue engagement with colonial discourse and feminism. . . . excellent essays . . ." -Theā¦
- Coming soon!