A Frenchoman's Imperial Story Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria [Hardcover]

Eug?nie Luce was a French schoolteacher who fled her husband and abandoned her family, migrating to Algeria in the early 1830s. By the mid-1840s she had become a major figure in debates around educational policies, insisting that women were a critical dimension of the French effort to effect a fusion of the races. To aid this fusion, she founded the first French school for Muslim girls in Algiers in 1845, which thrived until authorities cut off her funding in 1861. At this point, she switched from teaching spelling, grammar, and sewing, to embroideryan endeavor that attracted the attention of prominent British feminists and gave her school a celebrated reputation for generations.

The portrait of this remarkable woman reveals the role of women and girls in the imperial projects of the time and sheds light on why they have disappeared from the historical record since then.

Rebecca Rogers has written a first-rate biography about Eug?nie Allix Luce (18041882), a determined French schoolteacher in mid-nineteenth-century Algiers. She has also made a significant contribution to the historiography of primary education, ethnic relations, cultural patrimony, international feminism, and colonial administration, among other inherently gendered issues in the social history of French Algeria. Rogers contributes to a growing body of literature that calls into question the notion that imperialism was a largely masculine enterprise. In fact, Rogers builds on a number of studies that have included Mme. Luce and her school in their analyses of the history of women and empire. Yet, Rogers's book is the first to explore the life of this woman in greater detail, situating her initiatives in the larger histories of international feminism, material culture, and feminine education in both France and empire, and the politics of early colonial Algeria . . . Ultimately the biography of Mme. Luce does more than simply 'add color to the past.' By detailing how one woman and her gl³-