Women, Gender History, and Imperial Ethiopia

Abstract

Ethiopia has long been a source of interest to Westerners. Christianized during the Roman Empire but cut off from the Mediterranean in the seventh century of the common era by the rise and expansion of Islam, Ethiopia remained at least partially Christian throughout its long separation from European contact. This, along with the country’s rugged terrain, political organization, and ability to defend themselves from outside intrusion, kept the peoples of Ethiopia from being colonized by Europeans, even during the late nineteenth-century “Scramble for Africa.” However, an abortive effort by Italy to establish a colony at that time was followed by a more determined effort under Mussolini in the 1930s, which temporarily deposed the Ethiopian emperor. Nevertheless, Ethiopia cannot be said to have been a colonial country, which raises a significant question: to what extent can a country that has never been fully or successfully colonized be the subject of the “colonial gaze”? As K.E. Fleming suggests elsewhere in the present volume, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europeans travelers treated Greek history as a “colonial” possession, molding it to fit their notions of what ancient Greece was and what contemporary Greece “should” have been. The present chapter will use historiographical analysis to argue that a similar “colonization” has occurred in Ethiopian women’s history, as mid-twentieth-century African scholars attempted to fit Ethiopian history into existing anthropological, sociological, or theoretical models that minimized or misread women’s roles. It will further point the way for new, less patriarchal approaches to Ethiopian women’s history in the wake of more recent studies of African, colonial and women’s history.