Can we decolonize White Women?

When speaking about colonization, the role of white women as active participants cannot be overlooked. White women have been slave-owners and segregationists; they worked at residential schools. White women have historically bought untold violence to Indigenous, Black and brown communities and continue to do so today. White womanhood has always been a weapon. The iron fist in a velvet glove.

And yet dominant Western narratives, including many feminist ones, side-step this epic piece of the puzzle. They erase that the fight for the vote was for white women only, that the right to work demanded BiPoC people (mainly women) continued to toil in domestic labour, that the system they wanted to succeed in was one that was built to oppress.

51% of white women voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 US election. White women were the main beneficiaries of the DEI programs now scrubbed from company bios. And in April 2025 white women rallied the UK Supreme Court to have the term woman defined related only to biology.

And yet, the presumption of their innocence, their delicacy, their forced supplication, persists.

Colonialism is not only land theft, but the theft of history. It is rewritten, taught, repeated, even made into art. It is the disfigurement of story, creating something new in its place. And so the story of white womanhood was created, the ideology of it. The innocence of white womanhood now a central tenet of white patriarchal supremacy and its favourite pastime - colonialism. The story of white women (as opposed to their history) one of innocence, and the protection that lies in the proximity of power.

In 2026, neo-colonialism continues to be an internet trend. Skinny culture is back, trad-wife content continues to boom and women keep posting about not wanting to work/ wanting to live on a farm and do nothing (they’ve clearly never been on a farm before). This is the same narrative of white womanhood in a hand-dyed maxi-skirt. The only way to do no labour is if others are doing it for you. The only way to have a farm/homestead is to occupy stolen land. The only way to adhere to extremely specific white beauty standard is to be that, or die trying. The violence of white womanhood persists, takes aim and calls itself “divine feminine”.

In this narrative women are still inherently weaker, still the ‘fairer sex’.

In this narrative women are ultimately yoked to the success of the colonial project at hand.

In this narrative women can be protected only insofar as they remain under the patriarchal tree.

The safety of supplication.  

The rise of white supremacist fascism and the resurgence of these narratives is interlinked. These are internet trends for white women, new laws “protecting” white women, actions aimed at glorifying a specific, and demonizing all those that are other. This narrative re-colonizes, and it as dangerous as it is deliberate. Decolonization is an active process, as colonization is an active process. It is a constant unpicking of a narrative, and a divestment from it. White womanhood is an ideological construct, and a colonial project. It is structured, has rules, and has consequences for breaking them. But, as something that was built, it can also be destroyed. As an institution, it can be dismantled. And as we break it, we are one step closer to being free.