Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance

""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. This volume explores what Western women did, thought, and felt in and about the colonies in Africa and India, areas that have been presented, both at the time and in subsequent scholarship, as 'no place for a white woman'. The authors analyze Western women's complicity in, as well as their resistance to, the cultural values dominant during an imperialist era. They juxtapose feminists and social reformers of varying stripes with pro-imperialist women of different levels, thereby offering insights into the workings of race and class ideologies within imperialism. The essays reveal the diversity of voices, assumptions, and understandings of empire represented by activist women who used the implied and sometimes explicit-power of race and class to negotiate their own agenda within the colonial scene.