2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Historians have recently become more concerned with the ways in which humanitarianism and development fit into the histories of European empires and postcolonial nation-states, emphasizing how humanitarianism supported and challenged imperial narratives and structures. Although themes of citizenship, identity, nationhood, and development are being incorporated into existing scholarship on decolonization and the end of empire, this work often fails to acknowledge the role of gender in these processes. Equally, the role of the state has often been downplayed in favour of research focusing on NGOs, private philanthropists, and activist groups. This panel focuses on how women's relationships to the state affected development, citizenship, and foreign aid. The three case studies – foreign relations in apartheid South Africa, development programmes in Kenya, and British (post) colonial humanitarianism – all contribute to the ongoing historiography of decolonization, by focusing on the ways in which women formed relationships to colonial and post-colonial states to resist and create new political and socio-economic structures. Shaped by their participation in the National History Center’s Decolonization seminars, all three presenters ask how historians can write gender into histories of the ends of empire and the beginnings of new states, as well as how attending to gender shifts our understandings of this transitional period. Focusing on local and transnational cases from across Africa, these papers center on the experiences of women and girls to explore tensions surrounding citizenship, development, and foreign aid that were so critical to the continent’s history in the 1960s and beyond.