ABSTRACT
Charting some of the ways in which feminist ideologies have intersected with those of nation, empire, race, class, and other categories, this essay emphasizes the richness and complexity of multiple feminisms in different periods around the world, especially in Asia and Europe, and their global connections. Organized by geographic region and empire, the essay covers cases of pre-colonial feminism, imperial feminism, and anti-colonial feminism. Emerging in a period of hegemonic imperialist culture, “Western” imperial feminism repeatedly identified colonized women as inferior, oppressed women, producing distorted narratives and agendas supporting imperial projects. In reality, many groups of women around the world have enjoyed comparatively high status and significant rights and under colonial rule exercised agency to bring about forms of modernity they wanted, in spite of the hesitancy, indifference, and obstruction of the colonial state, whose claims of “civilizing mission” were not borne out by the often profoundly unmodern and extractive colonial economic systems.
