Women in the Colonial Archives

Abstract

Writing about the history of women in the 19th century, the French historian Alain Corbin remarks: “Women’s history is like an echo, perceived with the help of a whole range of male data, despite the efforts of historians (both male and female) to seek out women’s words more directly, Almost all the documents in the public archives were written by men in positions of responsibilities.”1 Such is certainly the case of French colonial history, which until recently has been dominated by an almost exclusively male cast. In this paper, I discuss some of the challenges I encounter in my own research on the lives of French women in Indochina in the early decades of the 20th century. One major issue has to do with the politics of selecting and cataloguing sources in the archives, which is heavily gender and class inflected. The second challenge lies in the reading and interpretation of the archival sources on and by women.