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Rituals of the Matrice: Maternal and Infant Protection in French Colonial Cambodia

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Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire

Part of the book series: New Directions in Welfare History ((NDWH))

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Abstract

The bodies of Khmer women were fertile, French officials in Cambodia said. But as this chapter shows, the problem was keeping mothers and infants living and thriving. Upon the turn of the twentieth century in the French protectorate of Cambodia, colonial discourse christened the protection of mothers and infants as “la plus belle oeuvre” of the kingdom. The official work of maternal and infant protection began in 1906 with the establishment of the Société Protection Maternelle et Infantile, a private charitable organization whose members and activities were called the “oeuvre.” The Society, led by French women, alongside philanthropists, medical practitioners, colonial administrators, and the Cambodian royal government, created infrastructures to battle a perceived epidemic of Khmer infant mortality, and relatedly, Cambodia’s depopulation crisis and the degeneration of the Khmer race. The organization corded its humanitarian intervention to a discursive and anatomical domain: the matrice of Khmer mothers, the female uterus from which and where all came. This study uses the matrice as a device to think historically about the Society as a reproductive organ, from which and where French and Cambodian population politics took place. The chapter traces the rituals of the matrice from gestation to labor, beginning with the Society’s establishment in the 1900s and continuing into the organization’s expansion during the 1930s. Of course, such interventions rarely evaded the ambivalence or rejection of indigenous people. Khmer women were no exception. Historical and ethnographic sources gesture that Cambodian responses to French charity and medicine were practical and shrewd calculations that Khmer women and their kin and communities made about which rituals they would partake in when mothers delivered children out of the matrix.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this chapter, I use “Khmer” only in reference to the Khmer ethnic group, which French colonial sources often identified as a race. At moments, I describe people as “Khmer” only to emphasize their ethnic identity in that particular statement. I refrain from equating “Khmer” to “Cambodian” in order to recognize historical constructions of racial, ethnic, and cultural difference.

  2. 2.

    NAC RSC 36450 Dr. Darbès, “Accroissement apparent et réel de la population de Phnom Penh de 1931 à 1936,” Congrès international de la population, Paris, 1937, Extrait (Paris: Hermann et Cle Éditeurs, 1937), 88–9.

  3. 3.

    For feminist critiques, Luce Irigaray, Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère (Montréal: Éditions de la pleine lune, 1981), Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Thinking the Difference, trans. Karin Montin (New York: Routledge, 1994); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983) and “Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elle: Derrida’s ‘La carte postale,’” Diacritics 14, no. 1 (1984): 19–36; Rosalyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment, and Sexual Difference (London: Routledge, 1994), “Women’s Bodies Between National Hospitality and Domestic Biopolitics,” Paragraph 32, no. 1 (2009): 69–86, “Women’s Bodies Giving Time for Hospitality,” Hypatia 24, no. 2 (Spring, 2009): 142–63; Tracy McNulty, The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 125–34; Irina Aristarkhova, Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture (New York: Columbia University, 2012) and “Hospitality and the Maternal,” Hypatia 27, no. 1 (Winter, 2012): 163–81. And for postcolonial critiques, see especially the literature on colonialism and Black studies, notably Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2004); Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

  4. 4.

    In a sense, the French replicated their own concerns about the decline of the metropole. On the depopulation crisis in France and maternal health interventions, Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review 89, no 3 (June 1984): 648–76; William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) and ““A Sudden and Terrible Revelation”: Motherhood and Infant Mortality in France, 1858–1874,” Journal of Family History 21, no. 4 (October 1996): 419–45.

  5. 5.

    On how natalist politics and culture positioned mothers as the most critical agent in the care of children, families, and empire, from French and British perspectives, Elinor A. Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, Mary Lynn Stewart, Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5 (Spring 1978): 9–65.

  6. 6.

    Long Tung Phan, “Les mystères de Phnom Penh: L’Origine de Phnom Penh,” Le Populaire d’Indochine, June 25, 1935.

  7. 7.

    In the French context since the early modern period, bienfaisance was perceived as a “more pure, selfless form of altruism, one stripped of religious values.” Adam J. Davis and Bertrand Taithe, “From the Purse and the Heart: Exploring Charity, Humanitarianism, and Human Rights in France,” French Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (Summer 2011), 425. Also see Colin Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpelier Region, 1740-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

  8. 8.

    Barbara Watson Andaya, “Localizing the Universal: Women, Motherhood, and the Appeal of Early Theravāda Buddhism,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (February 2002): 1–30; Judy Ledgerwood, “Changing Khmer Conceptions of Gender” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1990), 36.

  9. 9.

    On the migration of French women to the colonies, Marie-Paul Ha, ““La Femme française aux colonies”: Promoting Colonial Female Emigration at the Turn of the Century,” French Colonial History 6 (2005): 205–24.

  10. 10.

    On how notions of maternal devotion, religiously tinted, created a space for women as colonizing agents overseas, Antoinette M. Burton, “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and the Indian Woman, 1865–1915,” Women’s Studies International Forum 13, no. 4 (1990): 295–308; Rebecca Rogers, “Teaching Morality and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Algeria: Gender and the Civilising Mission,” History of Education 40, no. 6 (1 November 2011): 741–59; Abigail Green, “Humanitarianism in Nineteenth-Century Context: Religious, Gendered, National,” The Historical Journal 57, no. 4 (December 2014): 1157–75.

  11. 11.

    “Statuts” in NAC RSC 2447 Société de protection de la natalité indigène au Cambodge.

  12. 12.

    Women-led private charitable efforts on behalf of poor mothers and children have a history in France. For a case study on one prominent organization founded in the late eighteenth century that partnered with the state, see Christine Adams, “Maternal Societies in France: Private Charity before the Welfare State,” Journal of Women’s History 17 (2005): 87–111.

  13. 13.

    “Statuts de la Société franco-cambodgiens de protection de la natalité indigène” in NAC RSC 26711 Société de protection de la natalité indigène au Cambodge, Recommandations hygiènique à l’usage des indigènes.

  14. 14.

    Sisowath was particularly interested in agricultural and trade development, which required a human labor force. “Rapport de l’Oknha Prasor Sorisak, Secretaire Général, adressé à Sa Majesté le Roi au sujet de la création de la maternité” (19 December 1906) and “Lettre de Sa Majesté le Roi transmissive d’un rapport de l’Oknha Prasor Sorisak, Secretaire Général au sujet de la création d’une Maternité destinée aux femmes pauvres” (20 December 1906) in NAC RSC 26711.

  15. 15.

    Letter from Mayor of Phnom Penh Collard to Resident Superior of Cambodia Luce (6 May 1907) in Ibid.

  16. 16.

    Letter from Resident Superior of Cambodia Luce to Mayor of Phnom Penh Collard (n.d.) in Ibid.

  17. 17.

    Sokhieng Au conjectures that the Society rebranded to also distinguish itself from another well-known organization in Phnom Penh, the Société de Protection de l’Enfance au Cambodge [Society for the Protection of Infancy], which was concerned with the mixed-race children of French fathers and indigenous mothers and was connected to similar organizations in Vietnam. Sokhieng Au, Mixed Medicines: Health and Culture in French Colonial Cambodia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 128–29. On organizations concerned about the métis, see Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); Christina Firpo, The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016).

  18. 18.

    NAC RSC 11840 Texte “Fondation au Cambodge d’une société de protection maternelle infantile” (note pour la presse) (n.d.).

  19. 19.

    NAC RSC 1555 Francois Félix Albert Hervier.

  20. 20.

    Letter from Local Health Director to Resident Superior of Cambodia (18 August 1928) in NAC RSC 1100 Consultations gratuites à la Maternité de Roume Phnom Penh (1927–1930).

  21. 21.

    Hervier, “Rapport” in NAC RSC 76.

  22. 22.

    Anne Hansen, “Crossing the River: The Secularization of the Khmer Religious Worldview,” (MDiv thesis, Harvard Divinity School, 1988), 30–2.

  23. 23.

    A molar pregnancy is when a non-viable fertilized egg implants as a mass in the uterus.

  24. 24.

    One newspaper account from 1937 told the story of a Vietnamese woman who was in labor for several days at home and could not deliver. While on her way to the maternity in Phnom Penh, she ended up giving birth on the road to a stillborn. She was immediately transported to Roume for medical care. “On accouche dans la rue de Verdun,” La Presse Indochinoise, February 16, 1937.

  25. 25.

    On 914, Vũ Trọng Phụng, Lục Xì: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi, trans. Shaun Kingsley Malarney (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), 19, 35, 82–3.

  26. 26.

    “Rapport médico-légal” (27 February 1911) in NAC RSC 25763 Résidence de Stung Treng, autopsie du cadavre d'un nouveau-né, abandonné sur la berge du fleuve (1911); NAC RSC 1651 Plantation de Stung Trang—Cie de caoutchoucs du Mekong, visite du 3 mai 1928.

  27. 27.

    “Une visite au Centre Hospitalier de Phnom Penh,” La Depêche, March 20, 1935.

  28. 28.

    “Cambodge: Puériculture,” L’Union, March 31, 1936.

  29. 29.

    “La belle oeuvre: De Protection maternelle et infantile au Cambodge,” La Vérité, June 18, 1937.

  30. 30.

    “Pour venir en aide à l’enfance malheureuse … Une soirée théâtrale au profit de la Société de Protection Maternelle et Infantile du Cambodge,” La Vérité, June 8, 1936.

  31. 31.

    “Le concours de Bébé Indochinoise,” Echo du Cambodge, June 2, 1937.

  32. 32.

    There are avenues of research here to compare the colonial humanitarian politics of population and the interest of plantation slaveholders who were interested in women slave’s reproductive health as a matter of growing a labor force for economic reasons. On slaveholder interests in maternal and infant health, see Morgan, Laboring Women; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Turner, Contested Bodies.

  33. 33.

    “Protection Maternelle,” L’Opinion, November 29, 1935; “La Matinée de bienfaisance au profit de la Société de Protection Maternelle et Infantile,” Echo du Cambodge, December 3, 1935; “Une belle oeuvre à encourager,” Le Khmer, December 7, 1935; “Thé concert de bienfaisance du 15 Décembre 1935,” Echo du Cambodge, December 10, 1935; “Thé concert de bienfaissance du 15 Décembre 1935,” La Presse Indochinoise, December 12, 1935; “À la Société de Protection Maternelle et Infantile,” Le Khmer, December 14, 1935.

  34. 34.

    May Mayko Ebihara, “Svay: A Khmer Village in Cambodia,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1968), 446; Hansen, “Crossing the River,” 32–34; Jan Oveson and Ing-Britt Trankell, Cambodians and Their Doctors: A Medical Anthropology of Colonial and Post-Colonial Cambodia (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2010), 186.

  35. 35.

    Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women (New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1984), 132.

  36. 36.

    Hervier, “Rapport” in NAC RSC 76.

  37. 37.

    Au, Mixed Medicines, 134.

  38. 38.

    Ang Chouléan, Les êtres surnaturels dan la religion Populaire khmère (Paris: Cedoreck, 1986); Hansen, “Crossing the River,” 32; Ledgerwood, “Changing Khmer Conceptions of Gender,” 50–6; Patrice Michele White, “Crossing the River: Khmer Women's Perceptions of Pregnancy and Postpartum,” Journal of Midwifery and Women's Health 47, no. 4 (July-August 2002), 243–44; Oveson and Trankell, Cambodians and Their Doctors, 57, 183.

  39. 39.

    Oveson and Trankell, Cambodians and Their Doctors, 187–88.

  40. 40.

    In his study of Khmer medicine, Adhémard Leclère dismissed it as “not science,” only “superstitions.” Adhémard Leclère, “Ethnographie: la médecine chez les cambodgiens,” Revue Scientifique 21e Année, 4e Série, tome 2 (1894), 715, as cited in Oveson and Trankell, Cambodians and Their Doctors, 4. On the French colonial dismissal of the chhmop because of “superstition,” Ibid., 199.

  41. 41.

    NAC RSC 5125 Organisation des services sanitaires; Letter from Resident Superior of Cambodia (20 July 1903) in NAC RSC 741 Maternité indigène (1903).

  42. 42.

    Letter from Mayor of Phnom Penh Hahn to Resident Superior of Cambodia Morel (25 February 1905) in NAC RSC 744 Construction d’un hôpital à Cholon (1905).

  43. 43.

    Letter from King Sisowath transmitted by Secretary General Oknha Prasor Sorisak to Resident Superior of Cambodia Luce (20 December 1906) in NAC RSC 26711.

  44. 44.

    “Avis” in Ibid.

  45. 45.

    Ibid.

  46. 46.

    Au, Mixed Medicines, 134.

  47. 47.

    “Avis” in NAC RSC 26711.

  48. 48.

    “Un enfant royal est né,” La Presse Indochinoise, February 3, 1936.

  49. 49.

    By 1937, administrators called for an end to cash aid. They cited how the policy “duplicates the gratuity” of charity, since the Society already gave food and clothing. They also tired of “endless disorder” over payments that erupted between supervisors and parturients. Administrators felt that “charity, as is often the case, turns against those who do it, and ends up taking on an immoral character.” Letter from Local Health Director in Cambodia to Mayor of Phnom Penh (15 January 1937) in NAC RSC 31819 Dossier concernant les renseignements demandés par le Comité National de l’Enfance relatifs aux oeuvres administratifs, confessionalles et de la Croix Rouge (1935).

  50. 50.

    “L’Assistance Médicale au Cambodge (Suite): La Maternité Roume,” La Depêche, March 20, 1936.

  51. 51.

    Ernest Roume was the governor general of Senegal from 1902 to 1908, when he led major public health projects, see Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 38–72. A classic republican imperialist, Roume believed in France’s civilizing mission, the “moral and material improvement of the native” was achievable not by decree, but by the “patient and converging efforts” of colonial projects, including that of “medical assistance.” Quoted in Alice Conklin, “Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914,” American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (April 1998), 423–24.

  52. 52.

    For example, see map from Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division G8014.P738 192.P6, A. Portail, “Plan de Pnom-Penh (192?). Exact date unknown.

  53. 53.

    Maspero, “Circulaire No. 54 Ouverture d’un pavillon special payant à la Maternité Roume” (14 June 1920) in Bulletin administratif du Cambodge, Année 1920 (Phnom Penh: Imprimerie du Protectorat, 1921), 441–42.

  54. 54.

    “L’évolution et l’oeuvre de l’Assistance Médicale au Cambodge,” La Depêche, May 19, 1937.

  55. 55.

    “Une visite au Centre Hospitalier de Phnom Penh,” Le Depêche, March 20, 1935.

  56. 56.

    Ibid.

  57. 57.

    Au, Mixed Medicines, 131.

  58. 58.

    Oveson and Trankell, Cambodians and Their Doctors, 176–77.

  59. 59.

    Maurice Leneveau, “Les scandales de la Maternité Roume,” Le Khmer, July 18, 1937. Leneveau concluded the same article with another scandal that occurred at Roume, in which a Vietnamese woman who had given birth there was accused of infanticide after her newborn went missing and was found dead.

  60. 60.

    Later that year, a coolie who worked at Roume attacked a woman with a knife. “Mme veuve Danic blessée par un coolie de la Maternité Roume,” La Presse Indochinoise, November 6, 1937.

  61. 61.

    “Les scandales de la Maternité Roume: Une protestation d’un groupe de sages-femmes et d’infirmières de Phnom Penh,” La Depêche, August 4, 1937.

  62. 62.

    Maurice Leneveau, “Les Scandales de la Maternité Roume: Simple réponse à Madame Tran Thi Huong,” Le Khmer, August 7, 1937.

  63. 63.

    “L’évolution et l’oeuvre de l’Assistance Médicale au Cambodge,” La Depêche, May 31, 1937. On the colonial development of Chruichangwar, Gregor Muller, Colonial Cambodia’s ‘Bad Frenchmen’: The Rise of French Rule and the Life of Thomas Caraman, 1840–1887 (London: Routledge, 2006), 94.

  64. 64.

    The editors acknowledged that they had “rectified” the letter but left its substance “intact.” “A propos de l’affaire des Chmops cambodgiennes,” La Presse Indochinoise, June 14, 1938.

  65. 65.

    It is interesting that the documented addresses of many privately practicing indigenous sage-femmes—not employed at Roume, but licensed by the colonial health service—were in the red light district. The neighborhood was not the exclusive domain of prostitutes, but the association is notable. NAC RSC 31896 Listes des médecins, dentistes, et sages-femmes libres; NAC RSC 606 Liste des médecins chirurgiens, dentistes, sages-femmes exerçant à titre privé au Cambodge (1938–1941).

  66. 66.

    For example, studies that emphasize the failings of French colonial maternal and infant health cite the low numbers of Khmer women who gave birth in hospitals, or the struggle to recruit and train Khmer women as medically trained midwives. Kate Frieson, “Sentimental Education: Les Sages Femmes and Colonial Cambodia,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 1, no. 1 (Fall 2000); Trude Jacobsen, Lost Goddesses: The Denial of Female Power in Cambodian History (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008), 160–62; Oveson and Trankell, Cambodians and Their Doctors, 169–86; Au, Mixed Medicines, 126–56. Au explains the nonsuccess as the result of French misreadings—they were blind to the “transformative aspects” of Western birthing practices. Ibid., 134.

  67. 67.

    For an extended discussion of the paradoxes of hospitality in a historical examination of humanitarianism as a derivative of hospitality, see Tara Tran, “Hospitality Engendered: Women’s Bodies and Humanitarianism in French Colonial Cambodia” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2021).

  68. 68.

    On the debate in the historiography of the intentions of the French civilizing mission, see the positions between Alice Conklin and Gary Wilder, notably in Conklin, A Mission to Civilize and “Colonialism and Human Rights” and Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

  69. 69.

    In Southeast Asia and gender studies, the poles of this debate are occupied by those on one side who argue that women in early modern and precolonial Southeast Asia possessed almost equal status with men, and those on the other side who posit the opposite. A sustained study of the former position is Jacobsen, Lost Goddesses. For a discussion from the latter, Au, Mixed Medicines, 121–23, 154–56.

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  1. Center for Khmer Studies, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

    Tara Tran

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  1. Department of History, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Margaret Cook Andersen

  2. Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX, USA

    Melissa K. Byrnes

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Tran, T. (2023). Rituals of the Matrice: Maternal and Infant Protection in French Colonial Cambodia. In: Andersen, M.C., Byrnes, M.K. (eds) Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire. New Directions in Welfare History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26024-7_6

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