European Women In The 19th Century
Over the span of the 19th century, the European Empire expanded physically with the colonization of Africa, and mentally through advances in technology and education. Despite the fact that the world was changing, European women had the enormous pressure set upon them to stay exactly as they had always been. Through this paper, readers will better understand the limits and restrictions that 19th-century women bodies and sexuality had placed upon them, and how colonization, plus the emergence of the infamous “New Women,” tested these restrictions and generated anxiety over the positions of women. For the 19th century upper and middle-class women, the way social guidelines were adhered to could make or break women. As seen in Ladies of the
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In the French and Poska article Gender and Imperialism, readers are shown how the obsession with women’s bodies carried over strongly into European colonies as an issue of possession. The ability to be a man partially depended on “The ability to protect the chastity of the women in his care” (French 381). It is also to be noted that colony women were expected to “produce white Europeanized children” despite the apparent terror and danger surrounding them due to the wild land and wild men (French 387). European strength and perceived virility all depend on these women making European children as much and as quickly as they could. To complicate these matters even more, upholding family values fell largely on the heads of these women. As was a common in the 19th century, women were in charge making “their homes a haven for the men to come home to” (Smith 54). In some cases this meant quite literally making a home in the jungle, to preserve the European standard. The men must be able to be contained, as they often found themselves consumed by lust for the “exotic native women.” European women had to dress modestly and be as European as possible as an antithesis to this figure. She had to somehow keep her husbands attention away from the native women while sticking to a European notion that she knew nothing about sex or reproducing. In these colonial situations, so much of how the men were perceived was due to how he could control the body of his
In the French and Poska article Gender and Imperialism, readers are shown how the obsession with women’s bodies carried over strongly into European colonies as an issue of possession. The ability to be a man partially depended on “The ability to protect the chastity of the women in his care” (French 381). It is also to be noted that colony women were expected to “produce white Europeanized children” despite the apparent terror and danger surrounding them due to the wild land and wild men (French 387). European strength and perceived virility all depend on these women making European children as much and as quickly as they could. To complicate these matters even more, upholding family values fell largely on the heads of these women. As was a common in the 19th century, women were in charge making “their homes a haven for the men to come home to” (Smith 54). In some cases this meant quite literally making a home in the jungle, to preserve the European standard. The men must be able to be contained, as they often found themselves consumed by lust for the “exotic native women.” European women had to dress modestly and be as European as possible as an antithesis to this figure. She had to somehow keep her husbands attention away from the native women while sticking to a European notion that she knew nothing about sex or reproducing. In these colonial situations, so much of how the men were perceived was due to how he could control the body of his