Presenter: Diana Moore (The Graduate Center, City University of New York)
Moderator: Konstantina Zanou (Columbia University)
This paper examines the work of three British women, Julia Salis Schwabe, Mary Chambers, and Jessie White Mario, who established schools in rural or southern Italy and wrote about the socioeconomic problems of the new state. Though some historians have argued that Schwabe and her supporters saw themselves as elite empire builders with a duty to impose their superior Protestant culture upon an uncivilized Italy, I argue that their sense of superiority was based as much on class as religion and that many middle-class Italian liberals and radicals shared these ideas about the economic and moral poverty of the general Italian populace. Therefore, we cannot conclude that they were acting specifically as colonizers in Italy. Instead, I argue that their actions reveal the relative importance of shared middle-class sympathies and liberal values in nineteenth-century nationalist movements and also highlight the potential overlaps between nineteenth-century European nationalist movements and imperialist endeavors. Their actions also reveal increased possibilities for female agency in this era of middle-class Liberal cooperation as the women were able to leverage their status, wealth, and connections into positions of leadership and authority in reforming projects both at home and abroad.
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Part of the Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium. This event is sponsored by The Department of Italian & The European Institute.
