| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Tracey Jean Boisseau. White Queen: May French-Sheldon and the Imperial Origins of American Feminist Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 258. Cloth $50.00, paper $21.95.

This book is a sophisticated and engaging study of the curious career of May French-Sheldon, a white, middle-class Midwesterner, who claimed to be "the first woman explorer of Africa." Tracey Jean Boisseau's "microhistory" uses French-Sheldon's creation of a public persona that effectively capitalized on a historical moment when the imperialist ambitions of the West coincided with the ascendancy of the "new woman" to reveal the racist and imperialist underpinnings of Progressive-era politics and feminism from the 1890s to the 1920s: "Thus her career provides a lens through which we can perceive the discursive politics of empire at an early moment in the inauguration of a new set of mass cultural ideals for American women" (p. 3). Through an imaginative use of sources, including a trenchant analysis of French-Sheldon's book, Sultan to Sultan: Adventures among the Masai and Other Tribes of East Africa (1892), Boisseau shows how French-Sheldon fashioned a career from an unremarkable expedition to Africa in 1891 by using her gender, race, and class to maximum effect. French-Sheldon marketed her trek to Africa as a politically and scientifically noteworthy event by employing both the ideologies of female exceptionalism embodied in the Victorian "cult of true womanhood" and the images of plucky independence of the turn of the twentieth century "new woman" to her advantage, and she drew popular attention to her exploits by promoting the "hyper-racialized fantasy of white womanhood" (p. 5). The public acclaim French-Sheldon received from bringing her feminine point of view to a study of East Africans, particularly women and children, led to her induction as a fellow in the London Royal Geographical Society in 1892. In Sultan to Sultan and in public appearances, French-Sheldon proffered strategies for Western imperialism predicated on a philanthropic vision informed by Progressive-era reform movements in the United States and ideas about women's natural civilizing influence as an antidote to the brutality and short-sightedness of male colonizers.

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