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"The Veil and the Vote: Race, Sexuality, and Feminist Imperialism in Late 19th Century France"
| In 1899, Hubertine Auclert wrote that “Pour les Français, les vrais nègres ne sont pas les noirs, ce sont les femmes.” Directly addressing the fact that black men possessed the right to vote in French colonies such as Senegal, while white French women remained disenfranchised, Auclert employed strong racial language and imagery to underscore her point: that “civilized” white women lacked the rights and privileges that France gave to “savage” black men. This assertion reflects Auclert’s substantial efforts toward gaining women’s suffrage in France, a project that dovetailed with her deep engagement in matters of gender and empire. For Auclert, women’s rights and status in France and her colonies was tightly interwoven with questions of race and sexuality. Her understanding of race reflected a complex combination of her acceptance of the language of “civilization” and the concomitant belief in cultural evolution, enmeshed with her rejection of the fixity of racial hierarchies. In other words, she considered white Europeans to be more advanced than other races, but saw the potential for relative progress among non-Europeans. Simultaneously, Auclert viewed sexuality and gender through a racialized lens. These ideas formed the basis of her “imperial feminism.” Auclert believed that French feminism, or more specifically her left-wing version of French republican feminism, could emancipate women in both the metropole and the colonies. However, her conceptualization of “emancipation” differed significantly for these two broad groups. Addressing issues including suffrage, polygamy, marriage, fidelity, and prostitution, Auclert developed a dualistic imperial feminism, an activist politics through which she sought French women’s political equality and the ultimate assimilation of "colonized" women into the equitable French republic of the near future.
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