Imperial Ambivalence Gender, Discourse and Empire in Early Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Narratives of the Philippines

Regarding the US occupation of the Philippines, postcolonial scholars investigating the feminization of the United States' colonial politics have exposed the imperialist agenda hidden behind the policy of benevolent assimilation. However, by focusing on white women's complicity in the colonization effort, scholarship often overlooks white women's ambivalent relationship with empire. This essay examines this ambivalence, exploring the ways women's travel narratives of the Philippines exploit the dominant discourses in order to increase white women's agency. Specifically, I show how Emily Bronson Conger in An Ohio Woman in the Philippines (1908) utilizes the discourse of domesticity to achieve empowerment through the expansion of the domestic sphere, and how Mary Helen Fee in A Woman's Impression of the Philippines (1910) manipulates the discourse of uplift to undermine the notion of separate spheres and assert herself as an independent subject. Though the occupation is a means of empowerment, it is ultimately founded on a white-supremacist logic that undermines the binaries of foreign-domestic and primitive-evolved, thus destabilizing the women's roles as domesticators and stewards of racial uplift. By identifying these and deconstructing these discourses, this essay moves towards a fuller, if more paradoxical, understanding of the relationship between race, gender and empire.