At the end of the 19th century Dutch feminists and women who saw themselves as part of the women's movement intensified their efforts to establish national visibility. By organizing a national exhibition that celebrated women's labor in all its aspects they succeeded in this endeavor to an unprecedented extent. This exhibition, held in The Hague in the summer of 1898, provides an interesting insight into the way in which the organizers and visitors of this national exhibition identified with the available discourses about state and nation in the Netherlands. A devising of new forms of public speech about women's interests and concerns intersected with the rise of a new image of Dutch colonial identity that took place in the same period. Did an exchange of ideas, metaphors and references between the language about 'women' and the rhetoric of empire take place? How was the speaking about 'women' in the Netherlands at the end of the nineteenth century related to speaking about 'the colonies'? Did the "racialized Other" become part of the idiom of the new Dutch women's movement? How and when were colonial women included in Dutch feminist treatises? Was - on the other hand - the language about the Dutch role in the West- and East-Indies gendered? Did Dutch feminists identify with Dutch colonial rule or with indigenous women living in the colonized countries? Could both forms of identification go together for a feminist in 1898?
This article tries to be a contribution to a genealogy of inclusion and exclusion at two levels. Firstly it addresses questions about the whiteness of Western feminism. If, as is maintained with good reason by many, feminist speaking about women, and in particular women's studies as an academic specialization, is modeled on speaking about white middle class women, what implications should this have for thinking about difference and for writing a history of feminism? Is it possible to write a history of this 'whiteness', a history that shows how the rhetoric of 'all women' implied the exclusion of 'other women'? Historical research into early forms of national feminist activism and its relation to thinking about 'race' may contribute to the understanding of difference as crucial in feminist project. Instead of speaking about 'new' categories and the 'multiplication' of differences one could speak with more reason about a legacy of difference common to all feminist thinking about women. Thinking about women has in the history of feminism always taken place at the intersection of gender with other differences. That legacy can be deplored and praised - the material discussed in this paper would support both views - but it should never be denied or forgotten. Myriam Diocratez once wrote: "... a word does not forget where it has been". 'Women' is a word that has traveled far, the following is part of it's travelogue.
In a second sense this project can be seen as dealing with a historiography of inclusion and exclusion. In combining history of the Dutch women's movement with history of Dutch colonialism, fields are brought together that differ widely. However they share an important feature: both have seemed marginal to Dutch history in general. Colonial history of the Netherlands has been dramatically absent in Dutch political history. The colonial past has been a separate field that often only entered Dutch historical awareness as irony, as if Dutch imperialism was never as 'real' as the colonial projects of European neighbors were. There has been research into what the Dutch 'did' in and 'to' the Indies. The reverse questions what colonialism did to the colonizer, what role imperial rule in Indonesia, Surinam and other parts of the world played in the construction of the Netherlands as a modern state and nation is hardly ever posed. The absence of 'gender' from the scholarship of colonialism is equally baffling, though for feminist researchers less surprising. In the following it will be argued that the two absences resemble each other.
In 1898, when Wilhelmina, daughter of William III, the last king of the Netherlands who had died in 1890, reached the age of 18, she was inaugurated as the queen of the Netherlands. A group of women who had been active in promoting the emancipation of women took the initiative for a "National Exhibition of Women's Labor." They reasoned that if a woman could be trusted to be head of state, it would be worthwhile to show how much and how important work was done and could be done by women in general. Women's work and labor presented at this exhibition ranged from the labor of the poorest servant-girl to the first female doctors of medicine, from agricultural labor to the first academic dissertations written by women. The archives of this massive undertaking, that involved hundreds of women organizers throughout the Netherlands, publications, eleven big conferences and more than 90.000 visitors, have been saved almost completely and are being kept in the IIAV in Amsterdam.
Such a 'national' event in the history of the women's movement raises a number of fascinating questions. In the context of this paper the focus will be on the issue whether the association of Dutch feminists with a 'national event' such as the inauguration of the queen, implied association with the colonial aspects of the Dutch nation-state. The attempt of women to become visible as a part of the Dutch nation meant that women had to address Dutch colonialism. This involved choices about the representation of roles and positions for women at the exhibition. In 1898 the Dutch women's movement had to locate itself in the history of a nation that defined itself as a mothercountry. Before turning to the ways 'the colonies' entered the discussions among the organizers of the 1898 exhibition, it is useful to address the marginal position gender and colonialism have occupied in the historiography of the Dutch nation.
3. Excluded from Dutch History?
The history of feminism and the history of colonialism share a certain invisibility when put in the context of the development of the Dutch modern nation-state. The absence of Dutch colonial history in political histories of the Netherlands has been deplored by Ann Laura Stoler. She notes that even the most innovative and intelligent studies of Dutch bourgeois culture do not take into consideration the social and cultural importance of the Dutch colonial empire. Colonial history is a separate field of knowledge that appears to be of only marginal value to the scholarship of Dutch political culture. A recent study by Martin Bossenbroek of the images of the 'Netherlands East Indies' and the 'Boeren' in South Africa in Dutch Culture around 1900 is one of the rare exceptions. The study contains a wealth of information about the impact of imperialist ideologies and practices on Dutch culture. It describes how the Dutch applauded military subjection of Atjeh during a series of bloody actions around the turn of the century. At the same time politicians formulated the ideals of an 'ethical' policy aimed at 'civilizing' the Indies by way of ecducation, infrastructure and the rule of law. Although the author at the end of his books in an ironic twist suggests that all colonial thinking may have been a dream and nothing more, his main conclusion is that imperial ideology contributed to the formation of a modern Dutch national identity that had popular support.
The history of women in general and of feminists in particular in the Netherlands shares with the history of colonialism a certain historiographical exclusion and marginalization: women's history is often seen as a separate field without implications for the history of Dutch state, culture and economy. Feminist historians have rightly claimed that women have been marginalized as outsiders, that their influence and deeds have been neglected by male historians who did not want to face the importance of gender as a useful category of historical analysis. Reclaiming the importance of both histories for a better understanding of Dutch national identity in general raises the point of the connection between feminism and colonialism. In this respect histories of feminism will have to address the question how women and how the women's movement have participated in the Dutch colonial enterprise. The notion that history of feminism is about the good guys (innocent women) left out while historiography of colonialism is about the bad guys (aggressive imperialists) left out will not help to understand the ways in which both histories have crossed and intersected.
4. The Making of Bourgeois Power
The observation by Stoler that colonialism and imperialism are missing from histories that deal with the development of the Dutch modern bourgeois political culture is part of a broader argument. In Race and the Education of Desire she argues that the construction of the Western middle class and the new forms of self surveillance that fuel it can only be understood in its colonial and imperial conditions. Stoler asserts that Michel Foucault's well-known thesis about the construction of a sexuality discourse in the West-European nineteenth century requires (and in some ways already includes) the indispensable supplement of the construction of a racist colonial discourse. Only this combination can fully explain the rise of power by surveillance. Colonialism was, according to Stoler, central, not marginal, to the construction of the new forms of power that rested on control of the self. The 19th century bourgeois culture of liberalism was based on a new awareness of the self that stressed 'normalcy', 'health' and 'sense' as denotations of personal autonomy. These middle class sensibilities, were in Stoler's, words not exported to the colonies from a strong and stable bourgeois mothercountry; quite on the contrary: the colonial situation itself was one of the chief locations where the European bourgeois culture was constructed. There, in the nurseries, the household manuals and marriage counsels, the European bourgeoisie developed it's sense of being entitled to power by developing the image of a racialized other vis-à-vis an autonomous self. Stoler makes gender an important aspect of her analysis of imperialism. She points out that '(e)mpire provided the fertile terrain on which the bourgeois notions of manliness and virility could be honed and put to patriotic test', and that a colonial discourse of 'vigilant hygiene' was centered around the white European women. Although images of manliness and femininity are thus crucial in Stoler's analysis of Dutch colonialism, an active historical role of Dutch women and feminists in the construction of imperial ideologies is not taken into account. On the other hand, the work by Antoinette Burton and Vron Ware that showed the involvement of British feminists with the imperialism of their time does not address the meaning of imperialism for the construction of bourgeois power.
Stoler argues that the invisibility of colonialism in historiography of Dutch liberalism is the result of a concept of colonial rule as an activity that does not influence the mothercountry. This concept has reinforced the idea that Dutch bourgeois society and the ruling of the liberal middle class in Holland was created independently from imperial rule abroad. The image of middle class ssensibilities as being 'imported' to the colonies makes invisible the ways in which these sensibilities themselves were produced in an imperial and racialized context. Only the object of colonial rule seems to be influenced by colonialism. Its subject is untouched by what it does to others, it remains self-contained and secure in it's autonomous position.
It seems useful to ask whether feminism's absence from general histories of Dutch bourgeois liberalism can be explained by referring to this same type of reasoning. Dutch women's emancipation is indeed often seen as having entered political bourgeois culture from the outside. The activities of the women's movement have often been described as those of an outside group that "claimed" citizenship. The fact that Dutch women obtained rights and privileges as citizens supposedly did not influence the Dutch conception of citizenship itself. The idea that citizenship could have been 'exported' to women while the Dutch bourgeois idea of autonomous self did not change thus suggests that women can simply be 'added' to the history of the Netherlands, without 'stirring' that history. Although research in the field of Dutch women's history has shown that women did make a difference when they became active in fields that had been dominated by men, e.g. universities, clerical work in offices, labor- and marriage-legislation or historical writing, this difference has till now hardly resulted in a fundamental rewriting of the histories of these fields. This deficiency is especially noticeable when one turns to the histories of modern nationalism. All of the issues addressed by the Dutch women's movement at the end of the century are considered by modern historians crucial for the construction of modern nationalism. Education, citizenship, productive labor, popular sense of belonging, political representation, and the responsibilities for public and private morals was what new national identity was about.
The Dutch women's movement at the end of the 19th century contributed explicitly to the discussions about these topics around which bourgeois self-awareness was established. If - as Stoler argues - 'empire' was a constitutive element in that process, the involvement of the women's movement in creation of an imperial discourse deserves closer scrutiny. This calls for a revision of the image as the women's movement as an 'innocent outsider' to the history of nationalism as well as imperialism. The struggle for women's rights may have been one of the sites where new forms of speaking about empire and colonialism took shape. The claim to female citizenship was articulated in an era when Western nation-states participated in a worldwide imperial project. It is therefore important to trace how new definitions of female citizenship related to divisions that were defined as national, racial and social.
By reconstructing these genealogies I intend to move beyond a binary opposition of 'complicity' and 'resistance' that dominates much writing about women involved in imperial projects in Britain and the Netherlands. Narratives about 'imperial' women are have often ambiguous story-lines. The histories of emancipation as women on the one hand and knowledge of their support for racism and oppression on the other hand seem to belong to different realms. The first is praised as independence and a break with traditional notions of womanhood, while their racism is blamed on the conventions of the time. This approach leaves the possible interdependencies between both aspects of women's unquestioned. White feelings of superiority were often defended by referring to the subjected position of women in 'native' societies. The 'emancipation' of European women served in some instances a legitimization of colonial rule.
The Dutch national exhibition of women's labor in 1898 offers a challenging opportunity to trace the genealogies of imperial involvement of Dutch feminism. The exhibition was an occasion where the Dutch women's movement explicitly identified with Dutch national and colonial history. It took place at a time when Dutch colonialism was thoroughly restructured, turning from limited settlements and extensive economic exploitation by the colonial state into full-fledged imperialist rule. At the same time new ideas about social legislation and responsibility of the government for social well-being were gaining influence. When the organizers of the exhibition addressed the 'women's issue' as a question about the contribution of women to the Dutch state, they participated in a debate where few parameters were undisputed. The controversies between supporters and opponents of social legislation, between defenders and critics of Dutch imperialism covered a wide political specter.
5. Back to 1898: Exhibiting Women and Empire
The 1898 exhibition became a landmark in the history of Dutch feminism. The organizers aimed at showing the importance of women's work in all it's aspects. As mentioned before the exhibition was accompanied by a number of conferences. These were dedicated to a range of issues relating to women's labor that did not lend themselves to visual display. A conference about public morality enabled women to discuss prostitution without showing anything that could be deemed immoral. Social work was another topic that could be discussed without showing aspects of poverty and living conditions that for middle class visitors to the exhibition might be abhorrent.
The published proceedings of these conferences reveal from what perspectives, from what locations, the women and men present looked at women's labor. Although working conditions of lower class women and for example prostitutes were by implication part of the conferences, the attention focussed on the role middle class women could play in ameliorating the fate of those women. Thus women's work was discussed mainly from the perspective of bourgeois women who might improve the lot of the other women. The participation of women from a working-class background was limited, though not totally absent. During the conference about 'Servants' one or two women spoke from their experience as domestic servants, the majority however spoke from its experience as employers.
The right to speak about social problems in general was claimed by women who tended to define social problems as problems of other women. The problems of young middle class women who were not challenged by training or education, and whose health suffered from boredom and who were stifled in the limits posed upon her were discussed by one of the few women with a medical degree. This doctor, Catharina van Tussenbroek, was herself an example that such limits could be overcome. In this perspective it is revealing that the exhibition of the working conditions of poor laboring women (seamstresses, cigar-makers, farm-hands) was seen as the responsibility of the committee on social work. This part of the exhibition was called the 'table of horrors' where products of long and underpaid hours of women's labor were exhibited and budgets of labor class families were added as further illustration. Clearly, these conditions belonged to the realm of social work, they formed the proper object of women wanting to ameliorate the plight of other women. The committee on industry exhibited the glorious results of modern industry, and the good working conditions that were created there by some modern industrialists, their wives and by the female welfare workers they employed.
Apart from the glories of modern industry, the glory of empire figured prominently at the exhibition. One of the conferences was dedicated to the role of women in the colonies and announced as a debate about social work in "our Indian properties" (my emphasis BW). Here the colonies were discussed as places of opportunity for women from the Netherlands. The discussion of colonial conditions focussed on the possible role Western women could and should play in the colonies. Attention focussed on issues of "morality" and health-care in the colonies. While colonial 'responsibilities', the 'white woman's burden' so to speak, were discussed at the conference, the empire itself was celebrated. The exhibition added 'taste' and the 'sound' and 'image' to the words at the conference. In several pavilions Indonesian and Surinamese food was for sale, handicrafts from the colonies were exhibited and gamelan music could listened to. Where the exhibition in general was strictly limited to showing the results of women's work, here the organizers digressed from that principle: both male and female crafts were shown. Presumably the organizers were more interested in the new opportunities for European women that colonial rule offered, then in de conditions of women's labor in the colonies.
This point of view was underscored by the architectural design of the exhibition. The grounds of the exhibition, in the dunes just outside the Hague, were divided in two parts. In a symmetrical building large and small rooms were dedicated to several types of women's work. The entrance at the front brought the visitors into a big 'Hall of Industry'. Here the benefaction and the achievement of modern industry was displayed. The central room at the end of the building was the conference hall, where all exhibition conferences were held. Apart from two small rooms dedicated to the Dutch East Indies and Suriname, where examples of handicraft from these parts of the world were shown, the main part of the colonial exhibition was situated in the gardens. Winding footpaths brought the visitors to different small pavilions. 'Exotic' music, 'exotic' architecture and 'exotic' food were offered to the women and men who visited the exhibition. The gardens offered relaxation after visiting the exhibition or one of the conferences. Here the classification was less strict and the sensation of wandering into another world provided visitors with the illusion of imperial travel in miniature. They could see Javanese women doing batik-work. They could also listen to a Javanese gamelan-orchestra that consisted of men. The Javanese and men and women belonged to a troupe who had been traveling through Europe to give demonstrations at several exhibitions. There is no evidence that much discussion took place about the fact that male musicians participated in the exhibition. While the concerts and recitals of the exhibition in general were limited to work by female composers, all-female choirs and woman-conductors, the colonial context apparently made the gender of the musicians less important.
Because the exhibition contained both the representation of women's labor in the Netherlands and of women's labor in the colonies, it is possible to compare the perspectives involved in both instances. It was not often that colonial and domestic conditions were exhibited at the same place. In this context the analogies drawn between slums and colonies made during the conference and exhibition deserve particular attention. Michelle Perrot has pointed out that for women at the end of the 19th century 'slums' could mean the same as 'jungle' meant for men: an opportunity to discover new territories, a chance to live dangerously and outside the limited conventions of their lives.
A social democratic leader was reported criticize the fact that bourgeois women paid so much attention to conditions in the colonies that needed improvement. According to him in the slums, close to their well-to-do homes, the same appalling conditions could be found. It is crucial to look closely at the implications of this analogy, there is more at stake than a metaphor for the enterprise of looking beyond the limits of one's own class. The analogy between empire and the poor or laboring classes points to the way the Dutch women's movement constructed women's claim to citizenship. The argument that women were entitled to full membership of society was based on the idea that their labor was valuable for others.
The value of women's work was defined as contributing to a social and 'civilized' Dutch nation and empire that took care of those in need. The construction of 'others', whether 'paupers' or indigenous men and women in the colonies, whether 'drunken husbands' or 'fallen women', was crucial for the construction of the Dutch women's movement. By making "social work" for these groups the center of their definition of women's claim to citizenship, the feminists took part in and contributed to a new definition of state and nation in the Netherlands. By claiming public attention for what were now called 'social problems' and the specific ameliorating power of women, these feminists strengthened a new definition of social responsibility of the state. There contribution was significant in the creation of a discourse that defined empire and nation as social entities. The Dutch women's movement of the nineties helped to put 'morality', social policies, and an ethical approach of colonial politics on the national agenda.
The exhibition of 1898 combined calls for the prohibition of prostitution, for social legislation and for a 'civilizing' colonial policy. It enabled women from the Dutch middle class to see themselves as part of the ruling classes of the Netherlands. By claiming that women could make the nation 'social', 'decent' and 'civilized', they constructed room for middle class white women. This approach facilitated new forms of authority. These were no longer based on wealth or economic independence, but on a gendered and racialized sense of decency and normalcy.
For the women who participated and organized the exhibition of 1898 this new basis of entitlement was exhilarating. It opened visions of a world where they no longer would be excluded from positions of authority on account of their sex. On the contrary: their sex provided them with special claim to authority. The debates surrounding the preparations for the exhibition reflect this thrill. At the same time, they show an uneasiness about speaking about 'women'. In the language of the organizers the word 'women' shifts from subject to object. At one moment "we women" will improve the world, a moment later "women" are the ones whose position will be improved by efforts such as the exhibition. Sometimes quite literally 'women' move in one argument from being subjects to being objects and back again. Whether they discuss women as objects of improvement or women as the agents who will bring about this betterment, speakers and writers have to deal with differences: when describing women's agency, they stress the different political and religious convictions that are united in the exhibition. When explaining in what sense the position of women should be improved, social and economic differences are mentioned: both the middle class woman who is not allowed to work and the woman who needs help from charity will profit from the women's movement. While class was important in these distinctions, the colonial context offered an other set of differences to bridge. It was not easy to find a language that included both Dutch women (in the mothercountry and in the colonies) and indigenous women in the colonies. When the Indies and Surinam were described as "our possession" , the word "our" included all Dutch women in the imperial project while Surinamese and Indonesian women were excluded. For the organizers it was not obvious that a colonial dimension belonged to a National Exhibition of Women's Labor in the Netherlands. They hesitated how speaking about 'women' should be related to speaking about the colonies.
In the minutes of the first preparatory meetings demonstrate this. One woman asked whether attention for the Indies ("east" and "west") was fitting for an event that aimed to improve the situation of Dutch women. The question gave rise to an extensive discussion in which several ways of including the colonial in a Dutch women's project were articulated. One of speakers asserted that a growing number of Dutch women went to the East Indies and that it was in their interest to know more about the colony. Another speaker argued that information about the Indies might help to raise interest in the colonies, where conditions were often "deeply horrible". She implied that Dutch women might improve these circumstances. The first speaker doubted whether "Indian women" (Indische vrouwen) would profit from the exhibition. If the Exhibition could not contribute directly to advance of women in the colonies, a colonial section would be unnecessary. The last woman to speak on the issue referred to the young queen and women's experience of exclusion. First she argued that women who had suffered removal from authority at the hands of men should themselves beware of excluding another group of women. She then continued by arguing that if the Exhibition was to ask the royal support of the queen, the organizers should take into account that the queen would never support an undertaking that excluded a number of her subjects. This statement was received with applause by those present. Thus the female monarch provided an image that included all women. The language of national and imperial unity provided the speaker with a language that seemed to make all women equal. However, this form of inclusion had its price, it was based on the uncritical acceptance and celebration of Dutch imperialism.
The question of how Dutch feminism in the 1890's related to Dutch colonialism is crucial for the effort to write women into Dutch history. If we want to take seriously the claim that women, gender and feminism have been important actors and factors in this history, than the implication of the women's movement in the Dutch colonial enterprise will have to be addressed. Stoler argues convincingly that new forms of power developed in the 19th century depended on the construction of a new bourgeois sense of the autonomous self. This self was constructed by differentiating itself from sexualized and racialized others. The women who organized the Exhibition of 1898 infused the public debate with arguments about women's responsibility in the areas of sexuality, social conditions and colonial rule. Dutch feminism contributed to the innovation of the meaning of citizenship. This citizenship had at its heart the right to 'educate' the laboring classes, to 'save' 'fallen women' and to 'civilize' colonial subjects. Crossing the lines between the different women that 'educated', 'saved' and 'civilized' was central to the construction of Dutch feminism: a new subject was created. Implied in this new subjectivity however was the construction of the 'objects' of women's work for the nation: the women who had to be saved, uplifted and civilized.
Embedded in Dutch colonial discourse, the language used to described these 'others' was often patronizing and condescending. Although Dutch feminists succeeded in bringing together different women from all parts of Dutch society at the Exhibition of 1898, they did not succeed in defining 'women' as a category that went beyond colonial relations. At certain moments, e.g. when they discussed on the role of Dutch women in de Dutch colonies, the women's movement of the late 19th century has contributed to the innovation of the language of empire. Feminist historians who are interested in the history of differences among women must take this legacy of difference seriously.