Sentimental Education: Les Sages Femmes and Colonial Cambodia

Abstract

Sentimental Education: Les Sages Femmes and Colonial Cambodia Kate Frieson1 This paper is an investigation into the matrix of French colonial education, cultural hybridity and gendered identities at the apex of the imperial project in Indochina. My purpose is threefold: first, to examine the intersection between French secular education and a new literate and culturally hybrid social class of female intellectuals; second, to explore how these women related to a nascent native identity that developed in tandem with French colonial concepts of the Khmer nation; and third, to show how the gendered dimensions of a masculinized nationalism were debated, contested, and reframed within a Khmer Buddhist context by an influential group of women writers in the 1940s and 1950s. This subject is largely uncharted historical territory. 2 However, the archival documents forming the main database of this paper leave little doubt that women were active protagonists in Cambodia’s political and intellectual development during the late colonial period. The colonial archives provide evidence of a progressive women’s movement that molded and responded to changing notions of sex roles and gender relations during the colonial period. At times, these wise women lacked coherency, consistency, and leadership. At other times they were either consumed by a masculinized nationalist elite who prohibited a public role for women outside of maternalized gender ideals; smothered by Buddhist notions of karmic fatalism, which devalued social struggle; or submerged by the centuries-old notion of feminine servitude to male political elites. Although the emancipatory yearnings of this small group of women were not entirely fulfilled, their intellectual debates were important in reframing their gendered identities in the production of domesticity and the nation at the end of the colonial era. Colonial Education and the Mission Civilisatrace French colonial authorities viewed themselves as the saviours of the Khmer kingdom, which, having fallen from its “antique splendor” in the 12th century, was dangerously close to being subsumed into rival Siamese and Vietnamese kingdoms in the mid-1800s. As a colonial newspaper observed of the Protectorate of Cambodia, “One could not admire too greatly the providential role that has been reserved for France in relation to the debris of this population, so unfortunate and so worthy of concern, which will henceforth exist in peace under its protection.” 3 The Khmer monarchy and Buddhist sangha did not always view the French as executing a providential role, but these institutions of political and cultural authority endured nevertheless under a protectorate status between 1863-1954. Education was viewed as an essential element of the civilizing mission in Indochina, and French authorities devoted particular attention to Vietnam at the expense of Cambodia and Laos until the early 1900s. 4 Previous scholarship has cited French disinterest in education as one of the causes for its slow evolution in Cambodia’s post-colonial period. 5 A standard interpretation among historians is that “the French purposefully withheld education from Cambodians in order to restrict the development of an intellectual elite which might lead the country into rebellion.” 6 Newly recovered French government documents from the Cambodian national archives dating from the early 1900’s and recent scholarly research bring new interpretations of French colonial objectives and indigenous responses. 7 The archival materials demonstrate that the colonial government spent considerable energy devising education policies for indigenous Khmers, soliciting support for them among local administrations at provincial and district levels, and offering financial support to students from impoverished backgrounds. During a 1910 policy review in which colonial educators lamented the dismal quality and quantity of teachers and students in the protectorate, the governor general decided that schooling for girls and women should be a priority concern of the Indochinese administration in Indochina. Similar to the Dutch mission of “uplifting” girls and women in Java through educational institutions which served to “prepare them for their housewifely duties and maternal destiny,” 8 the objective of French schools was to “produce nicely dressed and nicely spoken native women who, conversant in French etiquette, would take France’s mission civilisatrace into the home, and make perfect wives for native civil servants”. 9 Judging from poor enrollments, lack of public acceptance, and dismal graduation statistics, the schools were a failure. According to Thomas...