Editing Colonialism (section)

== Race and gender ==
During the colonial era, the global process of colonisation served to spread and synthesize the social and political belief systems of the "mother-countries" which often included a belief in a certain natural racial superiority of the race of the mother-country. Colonialism also acted to reinforce these same racial belief systems within the "mother-countries" themselves. Usually also included within the colonial belief systems was a certain belief in the inherent superiority of male over female. This particular belief was often pre-existing amongst the pre-colonial societies, prior to their colonisation.<ref name="Stoler 1989">{{Cite journal |last=Stoler |first=Ann L. |date=Nov 1989 |title=Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonical Cultures |url=https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136501/1/ae.1989.16.4.02a00030.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190430113223/https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136501/1/ae.1989.16.4.02a00030.pdf |archive-date=30 April 2019 |url-status=live |journal=American Ethnologist |volume=16 |issue=4 |pages=634–60 |doi=10.1525/ae.1989.16.4.02a00030|hdl=2027.42/136501 |hdl-access=free }}</ref><ref name="Fee">{{Cite journal |pmid = 394780|year = 1979|last1 = Fee|first1 = E.|title = Nineteenth-century craniology: The study of the female skull|journal = Bulletin of the History of Medicine|volume = 53|issue = 3|pages = 415–33}}</ref><ref name="Fausto-Sterling 2001">{{Cite book |chapter=Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of "Hottentot" women in Europe, 1815–1817 |last=Fausto-Sterling |first=Anne |title=The Gender and Science Reader |publisher=Routledge |year=2001 |editor-last=Muriel Lederman and Ingrid Bartsch|chapter-url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234102374}}</ref>

Popular political practices of the time reinforced colonial rule by legitimising European (and/ or Japanese) male authority, and also legitimising female and non-mother-country race inferiority through studies of [[craniology]], [[comparative anatomy]], and [[phrenology]].<ref name="Fee" /><ref name="Fausto-Sterling 2001" /><ref>{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CmJWBaANlsEC |title=The "Racial" Economy of Science |last=Stepan |first=Nancy |publisher=Indiana University press |year=1993 |isbn=978-0-253-20810-1 |editor-last=Sandra Harding |edition=3 |pages=359–76}}</ref> Biologists, naturalists, anthropologists, and ethnologists of the 19th century were focused on the study of colonised indigenous women, as in the case of [[Georges Cuvier]]'s study of [[Saartjie Baartman|Sarah Baartman]].<ref name="Fausto-Sterling 2001" /> Such cases embraced a natural superiority and inferiority relationship between the races based on the observations of naturalists' from the mother-countries. European studies along these lines gave rise to the perception that African women's anatomy, and especially genitalia, resembled those of mandrills, baboons, and monkeys, thus differentiating colonised Africans from what were viewed as the features of the evolutionarily superior, and thus rightfully authoritarian, European woman.<ref name="Fausto-Sterling 2001" />

In addition to what would now be viewed as pseudo-scientific studies of race, which tended to reinforce a belief in an inherent mother-country racial superiority, a new supposedly "science-based" ideology concerning gender roles also then emerged as an adjunct to the general body of beliefs of inherent superiority of the colonial era.<ref name=Fee /> Female inferiority across all cultures was emerging as an idea supposedly supported by [[craniology]] that led scientists to argue that the typical brain size of the female human was, on the average, slightly smaller than that of the male, thus inferring that therefore female humans must be less developed and less evolutionarily advanced than males.<ref name=Fee /> This finding of relative cranial size difference was later attributed to the general typical size difference of the human male body versus that of the typical human female body.<ref>[https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/dec/04/male-female-brains-real-differences Male and female brains: the REAL differences] 10 February 2016, by Dean Burnett, The Guardian</ref>

Within the former European colonies, non-Europeans and women sometimes faced invasive studies by the colonial powers in the interest of the then prevailing pro-colonial scientific ideology of the day.<ref name="Fausto-Sterling 2001" />