Contemplating Women's Imperial Service

Wetzel, Esther

doi:10.18422/74-1394

Contemplating Women's Imperial Service

dc.bibliographicCitation.article	11
dc.bibliographicCitation.volume	74
dc.contributor.author	Wetzel, Esther
dc.date.accessioned	2025-02-26T08:29:19Z
dc.date.available	2025-02-26T08:29:19Z
dc.date.issued	2023
dc.description.abstract	Despite a growing body of literature on women’s roles within the British Empire as settlers, teachers, nurses, missionaries, activists, and ‘adventuresses,’ their contribution to Victorian knowledge production remains underexamined. In particular, the labor of married women has often been subsumed under their husband’s work and, as a result, has largely gone unrecognized. Treating them as emblematic of a shadow archive of married women’s cultural production in the late 19th century, I interrogate Mabel Bent’s diaries, photographs, and ethnographic collecting strategies to show that she exercised epistemic power through the imperial practices of representation and appropriation. I locate her productive and reproductive work within a complex web of service relationships between herself, the British Empire, and her husband, and show that while Bent related ambiguously to her service, she exploited it to defy gender conventions without risking her reputation.
dc.identifier.doi	10.18422/74-1394
dc.identifier.uri	http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?fidaac-11858/3372
dc.language.iso	eng
dc.relation.issn	2750-7327
dc.relation.journal	New American Studies Journal
dc.relation.journalalt	A Forum
dc.rights	L::CC BY 4.0
dc.subject.ddc	ddc:305.3
dc.subject.ddc	ddc:810
dc.subject.ddc	ddc:740
dc.subject.field	americanstudies
dc.subject.field	genderstudies
dc.subject.field	literarystudies
dc.subject.field	arthistory
dc.title	Contemplating Women's Imperial Service
dc.title.alternative	Mabel Bent as Photographer, Travel Writer, and Collector
dc.type	article
dc.type.version	publishedVersion
dspace.entity.type	Publication