In German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 Lora Wildenthal explores the nineteenth-century assumption that the advancement of a society could be measured by its treatment of women. Demonstrating this theory's resonance for German colonists, Wildenthal shows how race was an additional - and more concealed - factor embedded in the history, politics, and culture of both German feminism and German colonialism from the late nineteenth century through to the Third Reich.
Although German women hoped that its African colonies would provide renewed and vital opportunities for them, their expectations collided with those of many colonial men, who envisioned an even more restricted role for women in the colonies than in Germany. Some even hoped that the colonies would constitute a place free of "demanding" and "critical" European women. Wildenthal analyses recently accessible Colonial Office and mission society archives, periodicals, women's memoirs, and fiction to show how colonial women nonetheless created a niche for themselves in the colonies by emphasising their unique contributions toward white racial "purity" and the inculcation of German culture at the level of the family. At the same time that they pressed for career opportunities for themselves, they campaigned against interracial marriage and circulated an image of African and Pacific women as obedient, sexually promiscuous, and inferior.
German Women for Empire offers insight into the uses of the German colonial imaginary even after German colonialism was no longer a reality. Colonial women created one of a number of movements that helped turn racialist thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries toward the hierarchical evaluation of German citizens that culminated in the Third Reich.