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Lecture | CMGI Brown Bag Seminar

“Carriers of our culture”. The Colonial School for Girls and Women in The Hague, 1921-1949

Date
Wednesday 6 December 2023
Time
Serie
CMGI Brown Bag Seminars 2023-2024
Address
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden
Room
Conference room (2.60)

In interwar The Hague, the Colonial School for Girls and Women offered the Dutch women who were migrating to colonial Indonesia in ever greater numbers a course that was supposed to prepare them for a life in the colony. A colonial huishoudschool, or ‘housekeeping school’, the institute was aimed at what was seen as the typically female domain of the household and the family an as such included cooking, sewing, and childcare among its subjects. However, within this traditional gender role, white Dutch women were considered to be an important civilising influence on both Dutch colonists and the colonised Indonesians, giving them a claim in the imperial project. The school therefore also taught its students the mindset of the colonial ‘European’ and included the Indonesian language and dealing with Indonesian servants in its curriculum. In 2021-2022 I studied the school at the Rijksmuseum, which holds the school’s registry containing personal data and portraits of the over 1,200 women who attended it. In this talk I approach the political mission of the school as a form of cultural citizenship and hope to discuss the intersections of gender and race, but also class and religion in the context of the Colonial School.

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