Orientalismo Femminista e Maternalismo Evangelico: il Percorso delle Donne Britanniche verso lo Spazio Pubblico, 1790-1865

Historians of early and modern women’s movements have often underlined that public space was an unsafe terrain for women. This work is aimed at reconstructing the path through which women –living in the time lapse between the 1790s and 1860s– had made their way into an entirely masculine field. Indeed, if men inhabited the public and the political, women were relegated to the emotional and reproductive domains. While men were citizens, women were dismissed as the apolitical Others par excellence and relegated to domesticity. The path leading middle-class British women to gain political respectability and to become legitimate public actresses was far from being uncontroversial. Indeed, as Imperial actresses, British women felt that the superiority of their race placed them a cut above the women of conquered civilization; as members of the national body-politics, they had to come to terms with a macist culture placing them at the bottom of the patriarchal hierarchy. This conflictive positionality gave rise to a female consciousness that was intrinsically ambiguous. Indeed, while entering the public scene, British women were simultaneously challenging the patriarchal system at home and reinforcing or “dislocating” it in the colonial “out there”. In the metropole, middle-class women’s writings diffused a victimised and degraded image of Eastern womanhood and deployed rescue narratives depicting themselves as the only Imperial actresses capable of redeeming their “heathen sisters” from their sufferings. In colonial India, as teachers, missionaries and doctors, they were entrusted by the colonial enterprise to imbue the Indian society with western notions of gender roles and to disclosed –to the male gaze and control– those female indigenous spaces once precluded and still uncolonised. Nonetheless, instructed middle-class British women transformed the Indian soil in the space where to pursue their own colonial projects and used a victimised image of Indian women as a pretext to advance their social status, while acquiring professional recognition.