Today, Western feminists owe it to the rest of the world to take a hard look at the echoes between the antiquated program of sending the “enslaved” Englishwoman overseas, which built indirectly on Wollstonecraft to promote well-educated women as ideal colonists, and the Islamophobic “femonationalisms” and feminist “enlightened fundamentalisms” of our era, which romanticize “empowered” saviorists and aid volunteers, or trumpet women’s suffering under Islamist regimes, only to ban women from wearing the hijab on European beaches.
