White women in Fiji 1835-1930 : questions of gender and race
Date
1984
Authors
Knapman, Claudia Gresham
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Abstract
For most historians European women have been
irrelevant to significant themes in the history of Fiji
since European contact. The paucity of material about their
lives is seen to confirm their unimportance. Yet such
women, and European women in other multi-racial colonial
societies, have been regarded as the cause of deteriorating
race relations between white and black, and even as the
downfall of empires.
In this thesis it is suggested that the above
assertion is related to the characteristic images of white
women in mixed-race colonial societies; negative images
which are present in literary and academic writing and
popular imagination. The thesis endeavours to explore the
reality of white women's lives in Fiji and the
correspondence between this reality, the images and the
race-relations hypothesis.
A variety of sources, including interviews, are
utilised to establish the details of the lives of European
women in Fiji from 1835 - 1930. Information about their
paid and unpaid work, leisure activities and social
relationships is provided. Contemporary ideas about white
women and black men are examined, and their importance in
Fiji. Particular attention is directed to issues identified
by others as crucial to women's relationships with black
people, that is, to the arrival of European women at the
time of the settler rush in 1870 and 1871, and to the
mistress-servant relationship. The prevailing images of European women, and the
hypothesis that white women caused racial tension, are
assessed in the light of this evidence from Fiji and found
wanting. I put forward the idea that academic and other
writers have used European women as scapegoats, to explain
problems in the race relations area, by incorporating
nineteenth century ideologies of gender into twentieth
century historical and sociological explanations.
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