The White Woman’s Burden

Soon after its publishing in 1899, Rudyard Kipling’s poem titled ‘The White Man’s Burden’ become a symbol for imperialism – it represented the alleged ‘duty’ of the white man to manage the affairs of the ‘less developed’ non-white man. Even today, we see Western states acting on this ‘burden’, a very recent example being the US intervention of Afghanistan, a reason for which was the need to liberate Afghan women. In recent times, what has become perhaps even more common, is The White Woman’s Burden – the Western feminist’s obligation to impose her own ideals of freedom and liberty on the female populations of the Third World.

Chandra Mohanty, in her article on feminist scholarship and colonial discourses, highlights the limitations in Western feminism’s view of the women of the Third World as “a homogenous ‘powerless’ group”, “archetypal victims”, and “objects who defend themselves”. In characterizing the entire female populations of these countries as passive victims to marginalization by males, First World feminists seem to completely disregard the possibility of native women actively opposing and reforming oppressive conditions and negate the efforts made by women’s right activists in the Third World.

I would like to suggest that the feminist writings I analyze here discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the Third World, thereby producing/representing a composite, singular “Third World woman” -an image that appears arbitrarily constructed but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse.

As highlighted by Mohanty above, another mistake that Western feminism also sometimes makes is to use the term “Third World Women” to characterize any and all women that do not live in a developed Westernized country. In dividing the women of the world into two such groups (Us and Them), the Western feminism starts to think of one group as having all the freedoms and liberties that they deem desirable, and the other as lacking them. It then feels the need to impose these freedoms and liberties on all those that they think do not possess them. For example, Western feminism generally criticizes the Muslim veil as a form of oppression for the women wearing it. While there is no doubt in the fact that in certain instances, women are forced to cover themselves up, however, to make the generalization that this is the case all of the time would be inaccurate.

As her ‘burden’ continues to weigh down on her back, what the white woman must realize is that women of the Third World never really asked her to take that burden in the first place and that they want to develop their own ideals of freedom and liberty on their own terms.