German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 »

Lora Wildenthal is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University.

When Germany annexed colonies in Africa and the Pacific beginning in the1880s, many German women were enthusiastic. At the same time, however, they found themselves excluded from what they saw as a great nationalistic endeavor. In German Women for Empire, 1884-1945, Lora Wildenthal untangles the varied strands of racism, feminism, and nationalism that threaded through German women's efforts to participate in this episode of overseas colonization.

In confrontation and sometimes cooperation with men over their place in the colonial project, German women launched nationalist and colonialist campaigns for increased settlement and new state policies. Wildenthal analyzes recently accessible Colonial Office archives as well as mission society records, periodicals, women's memoirs, and fiction to show how these women created niches for themselves in the colonies. They emphasized their unique importance for white racial purity and the inculcation of German culture in the family. While pressing for career opportunities for theme selves, these women also campaigned against interracial marriage and circulated an image of African and Pacific women as sexually promiscuous and inferior. As Wildenthal discusses, the German colonial imaginary persisted even after the German colonial empire was no longer a reality. The women's colonial movement continued into the Nazi era, combining with other movements to help turn the racialist thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into the hierarchical evaluation of German citizens as well as colonial subjects.

author of At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain - Antoinette Burton

Wildenthal tells an important set of stories about the implication of white women in the modern imperial enterprise. This book will become a must-read for German historians, students of feminism, modern women, and empire and reform movements; as well as a model for how to do colonial women's history.

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
1	Colonial Nursing as the First Realm of Colonialist Women's Activism, 1885-1907	13
2	The Feminine Radical Nationalism of Frieda von Bulow	54
3	A New Colonial Masculinity: The Men's Debate over "Race Mixing" in the Colonies	79
4	A New Colonial Femininity: Feminism, Race Purity, and Domesticity, 1898-1914	131
5	The Woman Citizen and the Lost Colonial Empire in Weimar and Nazi Germany	172
	Epilogue	201
App	Colonialist and Women's Organizations	203
	Notes	205
	Bibliography	287
	Index	325