Living and Writing Empire. A Global Biography of Frieda Hauswirth

This thesis reconstructs the life and legacy of Frieda Hauswirth (1886–1974), a Swiss-born writer, painter, as well as feminist and anticolonial intellectual active in Switzerland, North America, Britain, and India during the first half of the 20th century. It offers the first comprehensive biography of this historical figure, who has so far largely escaped scholarly attention. At the same time, the dissertation moves beyond purely biographical concerns by positing Frieda Hauswirth’s ‘global biography’ as a microhistorical entry point for the study of underexplored convergences between histories of empire, feminism, anti-imperialism, and nationalism in the late colonial period. Over three thematic parts, the dissertation mobilises this global biography as a tool for discovering how one life condenses, refracts, and complicates broader historical processes. Part I, “Becoming Anticolonial”, examines Hauswirth’s connections to Indian anticolonial intellectuals in California and Switzerland, and seeks to answer the question of how her support of this movement first developed. Part II, “Becoming Feminist”, turns to Hauswirth’s visions of feminist solidarity across borders. It places Hauswirth’s concern with female education and the women question in India in the framework of a broader history of ‘Western’ and/or white women seeking to ‘help’ women in colonised regions of the world. Part III, “Becoming an Expert”, analyses the books that brought Hauswirth fame as an India writer and expert in the 1930s. This part provides both a valuation and a critical interrogation of Hauswirth’s political programme of idea-brokering as a form of anticolonial solidarity. Methodological and disciplinary siloes in the field of history have long kept mobile and unruly lives like Hauswirth’s—unclaimable by a single nation, spanning multiple allegiances and discursive universes—difficult to accommodate. Because of this, a study of Hauswirth’s biography helps destabilise dominant frames of historiography and illuminate the ways political solidarities were forged across borders of nations, empires, class, race, and gender. Her story allows us not only to expand our understanding of the spectrum of feminist and anticolonial engagement available to women in the late colonial world, but also to consider the methodological challenges of writing biography in a global, decolonial, and feminist key.