Training colonial women
The Registry of the Colonial School, 1921-1949
This project studies the Colonial School for Girls and Women in The Hague, contributing to twentieth-century Dutch colonial history and working on the intersection of gender, race and culture.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The Rijksmuseum holds the stamboek, or registry, of the Colonial School for Girls and Women, which existed in interwar The Hague. Some 1,200 Dutch women took courses at the school to prepare them for a life in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). Their names, destinations, and photographs were entered in the registry. Although the women’s role in the Indies was mainly limited to the traditionally ‘female’ domains of household, healthcare and motherhood, the school also presupposed agency and emancipation in claiming that women had their part to play in colonial society. However, this part was built around paternalist ideas of the racial and cultural otherness of the Indonesian population and of a Dutch civilising mission.
AIM OF THE PROJECT
The goal of the project is to write a cultural history of the school in the Rijksmuseum’s Studies in History series, based on research into the registry, as an object and as a textual source, and into the school’s archive. The project seeks to understand how the school taught a female cultural citizenship that was defined by notions of gender, race and culture. In this way, the project will not only shed light on the little-known Colonial School but also show how colonial topics and connections were integrated into Dutch society in the modern era.
RESEARCHERS
Miel Groten
m.groten@rijksmuseum.nl
Johan Huizinga Fellow
Eveline Sint Nicolaas
e.sintnicolaas@rijksmuseum.nl
Senior Curator of History
Harm Stevens
h.stevens@rijksmuseum.nl
Curator of History