Women, resistance and the creation of new gendered frontiers in the making of modern Libya, 1890-1980 / Katrina Elizabeth Anderson Yeaw ; advisor Judith E. Tucker

Ph.D. : Histoiry : Georgetown University : 2018

Women, Resistance and the Creation of New Gendered Frontiers in the Making of Modern Libya, 1890-1980 examines the gendered transformation in the territory that became Libya from the late Ottoman period until after independence. Questioning the official version of Libyan nationalism that understood colonialism as a masculine, and at times violent, interaction between male Italian colonists, soldiers, and administrators and colonized men, I demonstrate the multi-faceted ways in which Libyan women interacted with the modernizing Ottoman, Italian and later British states, whether through the introduction of new forms of education, the policing of community boundaries, or through the military suppression of armed resistance. I found that European colonial governance dismantled existing local institutions including the Ottoman education system. Consequently, Italian policies undermined previous Ottoman attempts at modernizing reforms while distorting many of the existing social structures. My dissertation utilizes a variety of Arabic and Italian sources from archives in Italy, the US, and the UK. In addition, it incorporates oral history interviews collected by the Libyan Studies Center in Tripoli. Chapter One investigates attitudes about sexual relationships between European men and Libyan women through an analysis of cases that came before Italian military tribunals in Tripoli and Benghazi. Chapter Two on Italian state education for girls analyzes the way the Italians dismantled the existing Ottoman education system for women while excluding women from Italian schools. Chapter Three focuses on missionary education for girls and its support of racial segregation in the colony. Chapter Four combines studies of institutional colonial violence with gender theory to analyze the ways in which women opposed Italian practices. Finally, Chapter Five evaluates the way in which the colonial period was remembered by Libyan women through a reading of postcolonial Libyan female writers.