Colonialism assigned distinct reproductive roles to white women by class
Evidence
Until well into the twentieth century white women were fashioned in racial terms as the media of national reproduction, in at least three ways. First, they were the bearers of future generations of citizens and citizen creators, providing care as nurses for military or administrative agents of the colonizing staté’ Middleand upper-middle-class women served also ideologically to reproduce the body politic in ethnoracial and national terms, via their principal positions as governesses and teachers. Working-class women by contrast serviced the economy largely by working up the raw materials from the colonies into commodities for both domestic consumption and global circulation, while expected also to reproduce new generations of workers. NonEuropean women in the colonies served as domestic labor for the colonizers as well as field hands, in many instances effectively nurturing young white children while all the time considered fair game for — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 50
Categorization
- XREF: Woman-as-nation-reproducer echoes the ‘media of national reproduction’ framing; resonates with Ian Buruma’s and Benedict Anderson’s work on gender in nationalism, and with the Lex Oppia discussion in the reader’s own article on immodesty as class/identity signaling.
- ADDENDUM: Directly extends the class/identity-signaling thread from ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — here class-stratified women’s roles are refashioned for racial reproduction of empire.