Penser le genre en Nouvelle Néerlande au XVIIe siècle : enjeux historiographiques

Abstract

While the goal of this panel was to highlight the positive consequences of embracing a hemispheric approach to study a local situation, this article aims to show the methodological dangers of its opposites, exceptionalism and parochialism. Scholarship on New Netherland has indeed been marked by a pervasive exceptionalist framework up until very recently, so much so that it has been extremely difficult to study gender relations in this colony without questioning the supposed uniqueness of women’s role and prerogatives in the colonial society. This analysis on gendered roles has long been an important part of the exceptionalist mythology surrounding Dutch New York since the nineteenth century and has failed to take into account the progress made in the field of gender and colonial studies over the past decades. Adopting a hemispheric perspective appears as a good way to avoid this methodological trap. First, the macro-regional perspective helps un-compartmentalize all analysis of gendered relations in this area, and rid it from its Dutch essentialism. Second, and more importantly, the adoption of a hemispheric framework paves the way for using methodological tools that could help analyzing New Netherland as a colonial society rather than a transferred Dutch society, and therefore renew our understanding of it.

Keywords

• colonial period
• historiography
• Gender
• New Netherland