Written by Abi Fitzpatrick
12/10/2026
Following a growing interest in ‘history from below’, gender has become an increasingly prominent category of analysis within historical scholarship. Where traditional history tended to emphasise the role of men, and women’s history created a separate narrative altogether, gender as a category of analysis has the potential to neutralise this divide and incorporate both sides of the established binary into one history. Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” introduced important questions around the nature of gender as an analytical category and has since incited discussion from other scholars, such as Kathleen Wilson and Mrinalini Sinha, around its stability and relevance to imperial scholarship. This essay will examine the successes and inconsistencies of gender in historical analysis and explore the ways in which it is relevant to portrayals of both the coloniser and colonised under empire. Ultimately, it will argue that gender functions usefully in understanding the power dynamics of empire, but only when it is both approached from outside Eurocentric binaries and committed to intersectionality.
Fundamentally, gender as a term is contested. Its supposed neutrality has incited criticism, from Scott and others, as it has frequently been used by feminists as a ‘synonym’ for women, in an attempt to detach their scholarship from any political associations. These studies often unintentionally reinforce the binaries which they claim to reject, and ‘naturalise’ the existence of an opposition between manhood and womanhood through assuming simplistic gender divisions perform uniformly everywhere. Through presenting gender as a fixed entity, these approaches have failed to recognise that if gender is accepted as a social construct, it would implicitly be subject to changes as society adapted and would also manifest differently within each culture. When gender is acknowledged as a fluid concept, Sinha pertains that there becomes a ‘constant need’ for re-examination of the demographics under study and consideration of how their statuses have shifted, or whether they can be studied as a collective at all. Gender is thus a challenging lens of historical analysis, though not a useless one, as the category lacks a ‘stable subject’ to inform its judgements and can risk the projection of binary assumptions onto the past, under the guise of neutrality.
Gender studies of Empire have demonstrated how representations of colonial populations were rooted in gender ideology and stereotypes. Philippa Levine contends that the Empire was portrayed as a ‘naturally male’ environment, embodying the strength, bravery and intelligence that were central to Western ideas of respectable society. Indigenous communities however, particularly the men, were feminised and suggested to have demonstrated a failure in masculinity, which was blamed for the broader state weaknesses that made them vulnerable to colonisation. Sinha writes about the ‘colonial clichés’ which fuelled perceptions of native communities as alien through creating a distinct Other, here seen in the ‘effeminate Bengali’ and the normative middle-class Englishman. For example, in the council at Chota, gender did not function as the ‘primary signifier of power’ and though men commanded politics, they maintained their power through obedience to the general population, not through domination like the Western model. The persistence of a male-centred political arena does suggest, however, that the image of the Western versus Oriental visions of masculinity are perhaps less ‘mutually exclusive’ than anticipated and that a gendered hierarchy existed to some extent in these societies too; it just functioned differently.
Whilst colonised men faced feminising representations, women were subject to differing portrayals, with white women seen as the pinnacle of civilisation, and indigenous women as animalistic victims. Differing representations of Western and colonised women were hence used to justify the civilising mission of the Empire and argue that the process was one rooted in benevolence. Wilson argues that indigenous women were likened to ‘other colonial products’, which explains their inhumane degradation, and alludes to the conscious manufacturing of their image, to suit the broader imperial aims of colonial authorities. For example, black women were presented as masculine and lacking traditional feminine values, an image which was used to rationalise their relegation to labourers in plantations. However, when this image inhibited reproduction and incited ‘reproductive refusal’, the approach altered and began to feminise the representation of these women to encourage them to continue having children. This illustrates how the ideologies and images surrounding gender identities can be malleable and intentionally adapted to fulfil the desires of those in power.
On the other hand, from colonial narratives, white women were presented as saviours and ‘symbolic angels’ whose role was to work within the domestic sphere to implement British household values. Their focus on ‘making a new home’, in a place established as barbaric in the British consciousness, relied on transferring feminine ideals onto the women of the colonies. Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that they conducted a ‘(re)construction of the domestic realm’, which aimed to solidify the wider political regime through erasing cultural differences within the home. Whilst European women were therefore involved in a microcosm of the colonial process, since their role existed under the guise of compassion, they were predominantly absolved of blame for the brutality of Empire. Jane Haggis argues that, ultimately, their gender was the most dominant force of social ordering, and they were above-all defined by their inferior status to the men controlling this new regime. Study of gender is thus integral to historians of empire as it demonstrates how gendered hierarchies were pervasive not just within the political sphere, but also in the home.
All women were subject to degradation and subjugation perpetuated by the imperial regime, though in different ways. Whilst white colonial women were simply relegated to homemaking roles and excluded from political and legal decisions, indigenous women faced a more brutal subordination. Sexual duties were considered part and parcel of an enslaved woman’s work and they frequently faced sexual violence and rape. The degradation of indigenous women also undermines the suggestion that colonialism aimed to save women from their barbaric male counterparts as the European settlers perpetuated abuse in both new and old ways. Haggis argued that coloniser and colonised women alike were ‘ultimately defined and primarily located in all-encompassing relations of subordination with white men’. However, I would argue that deploying this lens can be destructive to historical analysis as it disregards any sentiment of female autonomy and ignores white women’s own dedication to proliferating European values abroad. Whilst they may have lived under the same patriarchy, white women benefitted from other opportunities and narratives of imperialism, and intersectional studies of gender and empire can illuminate this.
Ultimately, these complexities lead to the conclusion that gender as a category of analysis only functions effectively when utilised intersectionally. Joan Scott argued that ‘paradoxically, the history of women has kept “women” outside history’ through reinforcing the idea of separate spheres and portraying women as a distinct narrative, irrelevant to the established tale centring on men’s history and politics. Rather than creating a separate new narrative or merely adding women’s stories as ‘afterthoughts and appendices’, gender can be used to adjust what is considered essential to the narrative and delve deeper into the significance of the domestic world, and its relation to broader political decisions. When writing about the origins and evolution of the word ‘babu’ and its negative connotations in the British mind, Sinha interrogates how both gendered and racial prejudices informed the stereotypes created about Bengali men. For gender to function effectively, it must acknowledge the other categories – such as age, race, or class – which produce variation in experience for those within the same gender classification.
In conclusion, gender transforms our understanding of Empire as it reconfigures the domains of society positioned as important. Though often misconstrued and approached from within the boundaries of Western gender binaries, it succeeds as a category of analysis through its aim to study history with an inclusive and intersectional lens. When approached as a fluid entity with varying interactions with other demographic categories, it can be a powerful tool in understanding how the events and political regimes under Empire impacted ordinary life.
Bibliography
Boydston, Jeanne. “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis”, Gender & History 20, no. 3 (2008). 558-83.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal”, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. A. L. Stoler and F. Cooper(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 373-405.
Haggis, Jane. “Gendering Colonialism or Colonising Gender?: Recent Women’s Studies Approaches to White Women and the History of British Colonialism.” Women’s studies international forum 13.1 (1990). 105-115.
Levine, Philippa. “Introduction: Why Gender and Empire?”, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 1-12.
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. “Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Historical Analysis?”, Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 1 (2006). 11-21.
Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 28-51.
Scott, Joan W. “Gender: Still a Useful Category of Analysis?”, Diogenes 57/1 (2010). 7-14.
Sinha, Mrinalini. “Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century”, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 1-25.
Wilson, Kathleen. “Empire, Gender and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century” in Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 13-46.
Featured Image Credits
https://media.posterlounge.com/img/products/360000/357884/357884_poster.jpg
