Female Travel in the German Empire: Women’s Emancipation and Advocacy of Colonialism in Frieda von Bülow’s In the Land of Promise

In German historiography, women’s participation in colonial conquests has long been ignored. In fact, as early as the 1880s, the German female bourgeoisie began to take an interest in the colonies. It was common for bourgeois women to gather within a feminist circle and to accompany the men on colonial expeditions, thus putting the patriarchal origin of the German Empire into question. Our contribution focuses on Frieda von Bülow’s colonial novel In the Land of Promises. Her novel shows that women’s presence in the colonies, which at first might seem to be a form of emancipation coupled with exoticism, in fact led to the legitimization of colonization. As a result, the notions of sex, race, and colony are tightly bound together. Ultimately, the novel shows that women’s participation in the colonial process maintained the purity of the German identity by establishing a racial order in the colonies that allowed the Germans to avoid bicultural relations