Women were also settlers: analysing the role of German women in settler violence in German Southwest Africa, 1884-1915

Within studies on colonialism, the category of settler violence is gaining increasing relevance. It highlights the messiness of colonial rule on the ground, describing it as a setting fraught with emotions driven by uncertainty and fear, blurred boundaries, competing interests between state and settlers, and a deeply entrenched racialised patriotism. This trend is important, for it opens up the view presented to us by imperial imaginations of a monolithic, centralised, and controlled colonial space to a more complicated reality on the ground. Thus far, however, European women are almost completely missing from studies on settlers, although they were assigned a central part in colonial imaginations of the nation abroad. Studies on European women in the colonies show that they were crucial to any settler society because of their symbolic role as carriers of European civilisation and corporeal boundary markers for racial hierarchies. They therefore embodied the potential for Europeans to settle in imperial lands, as their mere presence functioned to protect from racialised fears like "degeneration," "going native," or "miscegenation." But what did these European women's lived realities look like in the colonies? How did they act to fulfil their roles as racialised boundary markers and protectors of European purity? How did they relate to the indigenous servants they spent most of their time with in their own households? What was their role in the much-discussed brutality and intimacy of settler violence? I will suggest fruitful starting points for answering these questions using archival research and memoirs published by German women who settled in German Southwest Africa from 1884-1915. Drawing on feminist International Relations, I point out that women are always central to violence and must be studied in order to fully grasp violent contexts. Additionally, I suggest that calls by scholars on violence to broaden the scope of our understanding of violence helps us to include women in the study of violence. As such, I will outline German women's role in three different forms of violence: firstly, discursive violence and its legitimating function for physical violence; secondly, violence within what Ann Laura Stoler calls the 'intimate sphere'; and, lastly, their interaction with state-sponsored violence.