‘Brave, Armed and Watchful’: Domestic Militarization and Contested Femininities During the Kenyan Emergency

ABSTRACT This article examines the militarization of white settler women during the Kenya Emergency (1952–1960), analyzing how their armed participation disrupted and reconfigured colonial gender norms. Drawing on visual and textual archival and newspaper sources, this article explores representations of settler women as maternal guardians of the colonial home and militarized agents of counterinsurgency. While their violence was framed as defensive and exceptional, it offers insights into white settler women's complicity with counterinsurgency violence in Kenya. These depictions foreground motherhood while exposing the tensions of contested femininities, revealing anxieties around gender, race and imperial authority in a moment of colonial crisis.