How Colonial Practices/Policies Led to the Regulation of Gender Relations Essay by Top Papers

The following paper will look at how colonial policies were aimed at regulating and controlling women - and, especially, native women. Specifically, the next few pages will look at how the Dutch East India Company encouraged concubinage (with native women acting as the concubines) so that young employees could remain productive and even establish roots in the local area. Similarly, prohibitions on marriage were put in place to keep European women out while ensuring that employees could devote their full energies to the tasks at hand. Additionally, when European women finally did arrive, they were subjected to "protective laws" that really were meant to keep in place racial and gender reifications. Not to be forgotten, popular notions of eugenics inevitably emerged that cast native women in a subordinate, lowly light. Finally, the cult of domesticity was often ruthlessly imposed upon native peoples as a means of transporting European domestic sensibilities to the tropics.