French colonial policy left African women’s customs largely untouched

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. But there appears to have been nothing comparable in West Africa, for example, to the “female circumcision” debates which convulsed colonial Kenya in the 192o’s. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1085

Categorization

• XREF: Paragraph 39’s native-policy framework: the French framed women’s civil customs as part of protected customary law.