Colonizers and citizens: Bourgeois women and the Woman Question in the German colonial movement, 1886-1914.

This dissertation examines German women' s participation in Germany's colonial movement in the context of the Woman Question of the day. It shows how conservative women close to the Patriotic Women's Leagues (Vaterlandische Frauenvereine) as well as moderate and radical bourgeois feminists developed interests in colonialism and how women' s colonial projects ought to be seen in the context of related efforts within Germany. Parts I and II focus on the two secular colonialist women's organizations of Imperial Germany: the German Women' s Association for Nursing Care in the Colonies (Deutscher Frauenverein fur Krankenoflege in den Kolonien, an affiliate of the German Red Cross), and the Women's League of the German Colonial Society (Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft), and trace how secular (non-missionary) German women entered the colonial movement, what programs they developed and what constraints they faced. Women's memoirs and colonial novels, particularly those of Frieda von Bulow, are also examined. German women' s entry into the colonial movement forced men and women of a range of political persuasions to confront aspects of the Woman Question (Frauenfrage) such as the "surplus" of unmarried women in Germany, middle-class women's employment, marriage-law reform and women's citizenship status. Some colonialist women encountered feminist issues through their experience in the Frauenverein and Frauenbund; others were already recognized feminists and social-work pioneers (e.g., Minna Cauer, Hedwig Heyl) when they approached the colonial movement as a practical forum for their own projects. The Woman Question in Germany together with the ideology and practice of colonialism created a "colonial woman question" (koloniale Frauenfrage) based on new forms of racialism such as mixed marriage bans, and on white pronatalism. Part III places colonialist women's engagement of feminist issues in its contemporary context of the "colonial mixed marriage debate" (koloniale Mischehendebatte), a controversy among men and women over citizenship, race and class that spanned the colonies and Germany.PhDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104409/1/9513507.pdfDescription of 9513507.pdf : Restricted to UM users only