Joy Schulz is a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, focusing on US foreign policy and comparative politics in the Pacific region. Schulz has written two books: When Women Ruled the Pacific: Female Political Power in Nineteenth-century Hawai’i and Tahiti and Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific, which won the 2018 award for best book on the history of the Pacific West from the Western History Association, a US-based nonprofit.
You have extensively researched female political power in the Pacific, particularly in Hawai’i and Tahiti in the 19th century. What inspired your interest in this topic, and why do you feel it’s important to highlight the roles of women in Pacific political history?
[There are] two ways to answer your question. The first is—when I was researching my first book on children who grew up under the Hawaiian Kingdom, whose parents were Americans but [who] were born in the islands—I came across Queen Liliʻuokalani as a fascinating person. She was a Christian based upon the American missionary movement in Hawai’i, but she also was an Indigenous Hawaiian [who] was attempting to merge both cultures. I wanted to follow up with more in-detail research of her life after that first book.
The second way to answer your question would be in Indigenous Studies. There [are often] references to the fact that Indigenous communities have allowed women a greater political role, but I’ve never really seen it fleshed out in the literature. I’ve never seen any sort of manuscript or detailed explanation of what that actually looked like in a comparative setting in a very industrial space and time. Researching Liliʻuokalani and some of the women who came before in Hawai’i, I also came across some of the queens in Tahiti. I thought this would be a fantastic book [in which] to talk about women in this particular part of the world because they were so unique and different from women exercising rights in other parts of the world.
How did you select the four women you’ve focused on in your work, [Purea, ‘Aimata, Ka’ahumanu, Lili’uokalani], and what aspects of their leadership stood out?
The fact that British, French, Spanish, and American men met these women at particular points in history [is crucial]. That the very first American and European men “discovering” these islands were coming into contact with women rulers—and then that those same nation-states decided to control or take over the independence of those islands at the exact same time that women were in political power—was just too good of a story not to tell. Just the fact that gender played such a huge role in the geopolitics of the Pacific.
How did these dynamics develop over the period of colonization? For example, we have this force of patriarchal imperialism at the same time we have these matriarchies. How did these gender dynamics…
Read More: The Women Who Shaped Pacific Politics, An Interview with Historian Joy
