The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During the British Rule.

The recent turn toward empire among students of British history and literature raises a number of challenging questions about the parameters of "national" history and its subjects. One particularly persistent strand in the current challenge to traditional histories is the question of what role British women played in creating, sustaining, and maintaining Britain's empire and dominions. British men from Rudyard Kipling to Sir David Lean made their reputations by satirizing the memsahib, that sorry and ridiculous figure upon whose chastity the whole social fabric of British India, at any rate, is supposed to have rested. Historians of women and feminist scholars in a variety of disciplines over the past decade have worked to complicate that picture, examining the complexity of white women's social locations in different colonial sites and seeking to understand how empire itself interpellated a national/imperial loyalty that was sometimes, but not always, transcended by allegiances to …