Colonial manuals promoted white motherhood to replace concubinage and enforce racial separation.

Evidence

All guides took for granted that motherhood was the colonial woman’s first vocation, and they devoted as much attention to instructing women how to raise their children as on how to manage a household. In this emphasis on reproduction, the focus on separation from the colonized was even more apparent. On the most basic level, the exhortation for whites to reproduce among themselves condemned sexual relations between the races. Commentators repeatedly contrasted the richness of white French family life with the emptiness of concubinage; a native mistress “constantly betrayed … emotional poverty, intellectual insufficiency.” — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 597

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Pairs with the marriage/concubinage theme — the shift to French wives can be read as a form of imposed domestic morality echoing the moral-panics article.