A Half-Colonization: The Problem of the White Colonial Woman Writer

In the 1986 book, A Double Colonization: Colonial and Post-Colonial Women's Writing, the editors (Kirsten Hoist Petersen and Anna Rutherford) claim that all women in colonial and post-colonial countries are doubly-colonized: by patriarchal society as well as by the dominant imperial or metropolitan power. In my view, A Double Colonization makes insufficient distinction between the position of Australian, Canadian, South African, or Creole women of European descent and their Aboriginal, Native Indian, Black African, or West Indian counterparts - that is, between the daughters of the colonizers and the colonized.^ The white-settler woman and her descendants occupy a privileged position in comparison to their darker native or slave-descended sisters. While the native woman is truly doubly-oppressed or doubly-colonized, by male dominance as well as by white economic and social dominance, the white settler woman can best be described as half-colonized. Although she too is oppressed by white men and patriarchal structures, she shares in the power and guilt of the colonists.