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Date of Award
2020
Document Type
Restricted Thesis: Campus only access
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Dr. Monika Siebert
Abstract
Kiersten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford’s 1986 book titled A Double Colonization: Colonial and Post-Colonial Women's Writing examines the intersection of two imperial forces: colonial and patriarchal structures. Petersen and Rutherford’s coinage of “double colonization” references the experiences of women reflecting on the colonial period and its legacies in the post- imperial British world. A Double Colonization explores how “The colonial world was no place for a woman, let alone a lady; it was a man’s world [where] conquered lands and people were celebrated in a series of male-oriented myths: mateship, the mounties, explorers, freedom fighters, bushrangers, missionaries” (Petersen 9). The authors stress that the British colonial social fabric was largely an imagined patriarchal space that denied women agency. Third World women were particularly vulnerable to colonization in the British empire, and Rutherford and Petersen recognize how colonizing efforts dismantled existing societies to reconstruct order via structures that silenced women. Women who once enjoyed liberties within their Native communities were thrust into a new world that no longer valued them as matriarchal, matrilineal, and other societies had. Women were not only disturbed by patriarchal undercurrents of colonization when colonizers exported new social constructions to their lands, but also suffered a particular silencing under the colonizer’s rule.
Recommended Citation
Szalanczy, Valerie, "“The Narrative Is All That Matters”: Storytelling as Justice in Indigenous Women's Writing" (2020). Honors Theses. 1508.
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/honors-theses/1508