Femmes et genre en contexte colonial, XIXe-XXe siecle (Women and gender in colonial context, 19th-20th centuries), Centre d'histoire de Science Po, Paris, 19-21 January 2012

This international conference was organized by three French historians with over fifteen years research experience: Pascale Barthelemy, Lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, who works on education and training of women in French West Africa; Anne Hugon, Lecturer at the University of Paris 1, who is researching the history of childbirth and child-rearing in the colonial period in Ghana; and Christelle Taraud, Professor at New York University in France, whose research concerns sexuality in the colonial Maghreb. After two years preparation, they organized a conference of exceptional scope. Over three days at two different venues, the symposium welcomed sixty-five scholars from five continents and several generations. Special emphasis was placed on young researchers (doctoral students and new PhDs), who made up a third of the speakers. The fact that women were in the majority at this event reveals nevertheless a segmentation difficult to escape in this field – at least in France. And this was precisely one of the main challenges raised by this conference. If the primary objective was to provide ‘a long-term overview’ of research on women and gender in various colonial contexts (Africa, Asia, Oceania), challenges specific to the inclusion of these studies in French research were not forgotten. To address this, the organizers initiated several spin-offs from the conference: publications in academic and public history journals, lectures, and radio broadcasts.1 It is indeed no longer possible to consider this area a new current of historiography. For nearly thirty years now, researchers throughout the world have been writing the history of women and of relations between the sexes under colonialism. Yet while departments of colonial and postcolonial history in Anglophone countries very often integrate gender issues, this perspective remains tentative in France

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