Description
Book SynopsisFeminism''s Empire investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era''s first French feminists'' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposedyet employedapproaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation.
Among the era''s first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism''s gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of nature that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impos
Trade Review
Carolyn Eichner's extensively researched and detailed Feminism's Empire contributes to making visible how French feminists approached France's domination of colonial others. Feminism's Empire a deeply researched and insightful study that pays careful attention to all the nuances, ambiguities, and occasional hypocrisies of feminist encounters with imperialism, and makes an original contribution to the study of global history as well as to the histories of feminism, imperialism, and gender.
* H-France *
The book is in dialogue with present decolonial concerns. Intersectionality is at the very heart of it, and Eichner deserves praise for her unpicking of the intricate and often jarring interplays of gender, class, race, and religion.... Feminism's Empire is an eloquent statement of the importance of centering women's thinking and experiences as an integral part of Third Republic political and intellectual life.
-- Constance Bantman * Global Nineteenth Century Studies *
Feminism's Empire effectively highlights the complexity of the question of feminism(s) among French activists and the varied ways these individuals combat gender binaries and inequity in the nineteenth century.... I consider Feminism's Empire to be an excellent exploration of the intricacy of both Frenchness and whiteness (as a system of domination and a societal construct) in French contexts.
-- Jacqueline Couti * Global Nineteenth Century Studies *
