Gender and Empire

European women had a complex, varied, and often contradictory relationship to the African and Asian territories controlled by the European powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Women in colonial societies had slightly elevated positions that allowed them to attack the inequalities of race, politics, and economy. The new social class of a superior race and inferior sex within shows a relation to the rising middle class of the Industrial Revolution. They both had a respectable position in society, but were not superior and could never attain the highest status.