Colonial refusal to reform women’s status mirrored metropolitan refusal to grant women rights

Evidence

French refusal to intervene in civil customs affecting women generally seems to have persisted throughout the colonial period. It is presumably linked to a similar refusal in the metropole to grant women the same rights as men under the Third Republic. Although there was some interest in emancipating women from oppressive marriage customs and paternal authority-and this interest would increase in the 192o’s and 1930’s-the administration’s official attitude was that such social change should proceed at its own pace. This attitude eventually brought French administrators into conflict with French missionaries, particularly in the Western Sudan, who sought to free their own female converts from their subordination within the African household and have them marry according to the precepts of the Catholic Church. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1085

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the civilizing mission’s limits precisely at gender — connecting to the ADDENDUM on moral panics over women’s dress and to how ‘customary law’ stayed intact where women were concerned. — connects to: Cromer opposed women’s suffrage in Britain while invoking women’s rights to justify empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 157; Imperial feminism weaponizes women’s rights rhetoric to justify colonial rule without improving women’s conditions — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 157