Gender and Empire

Question 1

Why is it important to study a gendered perspective of empire?

Philippa Levine, ‘Introduction: Why Gender and Empire’ in Levine (ed.) Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2007)

Diana Jeater, ‘The British Empire and African Women in the Twentieth Century’ in Morgan and Hawkins (eds) Black Experience and the Empire, pp. 228-56

Answer 1

• acknowledging the actions and presence of women: The authors of the official ideology of the British Empire were never particularly concerned with the ordinary lives of women (Diana Jeater, ‘The British Empire and African Women in the Twentieth Century’ in Morgan and Hawkins (eds) Black Experience and the Empire, pp. 228-56)
• the British Empire was run by men and in ways that they claimed were universal, but which materially differentiated on grounds of sex as well as other kinds of social divisions.
• the very idea as well as the building of empires themselves cannot be understood without employing a gendered perspective.
• Encourages rejection of “totalizing” interpretations and thus does away with periods like ‘Victorian age’, the ‘post-war years’, ‘high imperialism’

Question 2

Risks of a gendered perspective

Philippa Levine, ‘Introduction: Why Gender and Empire’ in Levine (ed.) Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2007)

Answer 2

• Universalising group identities: Just as men didn’t have a common experience of empire, neither did females
• Danger of over-emphasis, and ignoring other important divisions such as race or class

Question 3

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Answer 3

it was not uncommon for colonized peoples to be seen by imperialists as weak and unmasculine because they were colonized,

In yet other imagery, the colonized man was imagined as a sexual predator unable to control his physical desires and dangerous to women.

Question 4

In what ways, and to what extent, was the figure of the coloniser made masculine?

Philippa Levine, ‘Introduction: Why Gender and Empire’ in Levine (ed.) Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2007)

Answer 4

• The focus on a group of pioneer men taming wild terrain into productivity and profitability put the spotlight on physically courageous and industrious men, posing an ideal white male figure
• . These were qualities denied to women and to the colonized

Question 5

Paternalistic views of indigenous people

Philippa Levine, ‘Introduction: Why Gender and Empire’ in Levine (ed.) Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2007)

Answer 5

• Society judged by its care for women, that in itself is a masculine vision
• The behaviour, the demeanour, and the position of women thus became a fulcrum by which the British measured and judged those they colonized. Women became an index and a measure less of themselves than of men and of societies.

Question 6

How did ideas of femininity in the metropole affect the status and expectations of women in Empire?

Philippa Levine, ‘Introduction: Why Gender and Empire’ in Levine (ed.) Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2007)

Diana Jeater, ‘The British Empire and African Women in the Twentieth Century’ in Morgan and Hawkins (eds) Black Experience and the Empire, pp. 228-56

Answer 6

• “rough and ready frontier practice…” gave way for a desire for Empire “to look more like Britain”
• Women inferior in empire because they were at home
  Diana Jeater, ‘The British Empire and African Women in the Twentieth Century’ in Morgan and Hawkins (eds) Black Experience and the Empire, pp. 228-56

“Metropolitan ideas about marriage, prostitution, domesticity, the gendered nature of politics and public space, and the economic role of women vis-à-vis men and children produced policies that had direct effects on women”

Question 7

Men in the public sphere and their impact on the view of Empire

Black Experience and the Empire
Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins
Diana Jeater

Answer 7

• In Africa in the High-Victorian age, ideas about public and private spheres were shipped over to Africa and held to be true there, too ( Black Experience and the Empire
  Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins)

Clitoridectomy and the Kikuyu

• Clitoridectomy was a coming of age ritual. Banned byNjuri Ncheke following orders from above.
• -> This caused “covert self- excision” movement.
• interpreted as evidence of resistance to colonial rule rather than as an assertion of women’s authority vis-à-vis men’s.
• Still thinking of women’s issues in terms of agriculture and domesticity, the colonial authorities assumed that the self-excision movement was led by young men….

Question 8

What role did women play in colonial societies?

Answer 8

soldiers, sailors, and officers’ wives,

• nurses,
• sutlers,
• merchants,
• prostitutes,
• the partners or daughters of religious pilgrims,
• slavers, planters, and officials,
• and as slave-traders and explorers themselves

Question 9

Overview of women in colonial Africa

Black Experience and the Empire
Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins
Diana Jeater

Answer 9

• Most notably in the period up to the Second World War, Colonial Officers across sub-Saharan British Africa consistently attempted to alter marriage practices, transform sexual relationships, and limit African women’s economic and geographical freedom.
• Women already of inferior and different status in this society: Different ways of acquiring and exercising power

High-Victorian intervention brought metropolitan ideas of the time:

• Women to aid husbands but not “themselves to be publicly or economically active”
• Domestic/child-rearing role
• Women were important for local agriculture. Could work in a garden, but imperialists less comfortable with them selling the food
• Wish to make African women have more proper sexualities
• Women had religious status that they didn’t want to sacrifice ie Zulu women, for example, defended their position as diviners, which had become an important female role in the nineteenth century.1

Question 10

Sexuality of women in colonial Africa before 1900

Black Experience and the Empire
Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins
Diana Jeater

Answer 10

Late 19th Century

BRITISH IDEAS
- British ideas of restraint, means of control

AFRICAN IDEAS

• In Africa, control of fertility was more important than that of sexuality

IMPERIAL APPROACH

• Repressing African sexuality, to make them behave more like an English women, was a means of social control
• Fear of sexuality, namely of Veneral disease

EVIDENCE

• The great curse of the Native men is licentiousness
• The Attorney General in Southern Rhodesia asserted, ‘Disease is certainly spread by promiscuous intercourse, but the agent is the woman not the man.’
• The markers of ordered family life recognized by white missionaries—sober clothing, monogamy, domesticity, and silence regarding female sexuality—were absent, and so moral disorder was assumed.

20th Century

BRITISHNESS

• Women had a bigger presence in the public sphere
• New ideas about female autonomy and womens’ rights
• There was a much greater readiness to grant divorces to African women in Africa than there was to grant divorces to British women in Britain during the same period.

IMPERIAL APPROACH

• The acknowledgement of female sexuality in Africa provided an outlet for its recognition within Europe, at a safely exoticized distance
• Yet, policies on the continent and in Europe were moving in different directions
• Here, the emphasis was on women’s freedom, and specifically the need to free them from unhappy and exploitative relationships with African men. Rather than the cause of licentiousness, women were presented as its victims.

NEW FOCUS ON PROTECTION

• Missionaries attacked polygamy and arranged marriage
• Cape-ruled Basotholand, Women given custody of children and
• it was made easier for women to escape husbands. Removed measures that would have protected them
• Society judged by its care for women, that in itself is a masculine vision (Philippa Levine, ‘Introduction: Why Gender and Empire’ in Levine (ed.) Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2007)

Question 11

How was colonialism disruptive from a gendered POV?

Black Experience and the Empire
Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins
Diana Jeater

Answer 11

• New gendered roles
• New definitons of masculinity: The criminalization of adultery did not work as it was founded on a metropolitan, rather than a local, understanding of what ‘adultery’ was. African elders had wanted men to be criminally charged to ensure payment of compensation. The state, however, criminalized men and women for their moral transgressions.

Question 12

Women in colonial Africa after 1900

Black Experience and the Empire
Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkin
Diana Jeater

Answer 12

OVERVIEW

• Indirect rule, indigenous male authority
• “In many cases, this strategy was reduced to colonial officials conspiring with older African men to exert control over women and junior men.”
• –> Rather than westernising social relations, Indirect Rule entrenched the conservative patriarchy of many African institutions at the same time as it created neo-traditions of female subordination.
• But after decades of stress on female independence, they now needed to be reigned in again. Blame on African woman, not policy

EVIDENCE

• In 1921, food shortages in Buganda were blamed on female sexual freedom.25
• Between 1929 and 1932 in rural Asante, chiefs periodically ordered the arrest of all spinsters and held them prisoner until they found someone to agree to marry them
• S. Africa, restrictions on women’s access to markets and housing were tried.
• Opposition to female economic autonomy was in African rather than colonial hands. Egba men in south-western Nigeria asserted new control over urban women in the 1920s by greatly restricting their ability to divorce their (p.245) husbands. Women now had to pay 8 shillings to file for divorce. Their ‘seducers’ were liable for court costs.

NEW IDEAS ABOUT SEXUALITY
- By the 1930s a package of ideas entailing monogamy, sobriety, and marital fidelity, which Teresa Barnes labels ‘righteousness’, was the difference between ‘good’ women and ‘prostitutes’ across most of British Africa.

CONFLICTING IDEAS ON LABOUR (Separate card)

NEW IDEAS ABOUT MOTHERHOOD

• New focus on making sure African women were good mothers
• Responsible for raising new generation of children with western morality

NEW STRESS ON PROPER MARRIAGE

• Domestication and dependence
• . In 1927 in Nigeria the British West African Educated Women’s Club supported the establishment of the Queen’s College, which explicitly offered girls an education as wives and mothers,

Question 13

Labouring women in colonial Africa
Black Experience and the Empire
Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins
Diana Jeater

Answer 13

• Cash crop markets –> Working women and children = benefitted men (esp. because men could have polygamous relationships)
• In Britain, a woman was a farmer’s wife, not a farmer herself
• Early on, less importance attached to women’s efforts
• However, womens’ labour was exploited in the war years
• In West Africa, cash crop production of exports such as cocoa, groundnuts and palm oil, (p.248) rose significantly, and rural women had to work even harder to increase agricultural outputs in order to sustain the imperial economy.

EVIDENCE

Contrast of rural policy and urban
- Zambian Copperbelt, modernization policies encouraged the development of social welfare initiatives and support for training programmes that would bring wives into more Western styles of household management based on the nuclear family.
VS
- In rural areas such as the Central Province in Kenya, extended households under entrepreneurial patriarchs contributed to the state’s agricultural betterment programmes by ‘traditional’ exploitation of female labour.

• Women wanted to retain economic independence, but were being replaced by new conception of “African Breadwinner” rather than a “tribal”, “unskilled” workforce
• -> In the Nigerian general strike of 1945, women’s interests in economic reform were subsumed in a campaign that presented women only as ‘supporters’ of men seeking a family wage

Question 14

What was the most damaging aspect of colonial rule for African women, according to Diana Jeater?
Black Experience and the Empire
Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins
Diana Jeater

Answer 14

The most negative effects of Empire on women were because of the colonial inability to understand that African women and men did not have the same types of relationships as British women and men had back in the métropole.

Question 15

18th Paternalistic concept of gender in empire

Philippa Levine, ‘Introduction: Why Gender and Empire’ in Levine (ed.) Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2007)

Answer 15

William Robertson asserted; ‘To despise and to degrade the female sex, is the characteristic of the savage state in every part of the globe.

Question 16

The civilising influence of women in 18th century empire

Answer 16

• Embracing the idea that English women represented the highest level of civilization, they felt entitled to dominate other women of the Empire, to serve as ‘teachers of (p.22) nations’ and manners to the less well-positioned.
• Those who failed to exhibit these qualities—which, by the 1780s and 1790s were denigrated as savage or depraved, redeemable only by acquiescing in the division of labour and standards of domesticity set for them by their betters.23

Question 17

Imbalance in men/women, consequences

Answer 17

Where the men greatly outnumbered them, as in the Caribbean (p.28) or New South Wales, British women from fairly petty backgrounds could aspire to good marriages; widows, as women of property, were highly desirable.

Men outnumbered women two to one in slave importations until the 1760s, although the rates of reproduction in the mainland colonies produced a rough parity between the sexes by the middle (p.29) decades of the century.

Question 18

Female slaves

Answer 18

Slavery was thus first and foremost a system of gender and racial power: black women were made responsible, materially and symbolically, for the reproduction of plantation slavery.4

Question 19

The female body

Answer 19

• African women were ‘masculine’, .
• The men and women’s depraved and lascivious sexual appetites were shown by their ‘preference’ for polygyny as well as by the size and shape of genitalia and even the means of copulation
• This was the European strategy of using gender and sexuality ‘to convey an emergent notion of racialized difference’
• -> and so define themselves as ‘religiously, culturally, and phenotypically superior’ to the peoples they (p.30) confronted or imported to the frontiers of Empire.50

Body ‘owned’ by colonisers
- Slave-owners across the European, African, and Mogul empires used enslaved women for sex and companionship. In British America white masters and overseers alike forced themselves on slave women at will;

Sometimes used to their advantage
- Mulatto women, in particular, used their colour and attractiveness to ensure a favourable place within the hierarchies of plantation life

Question 20

Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century

Catherine Hall

Answer 20

ON INDIA
- James Mill in his History of British India, first published in 1818, ‘Nothing can exceed’, he suggested, ‘the habitual contempt which the Hindus entertain for their women…They are (p.51) held, accordingly, in extreme degradation.’

• the Bengali man as effeminate and incapable of caring for his own dependants, the freed African man in the Caribbean as industrious and independent.
• India, the practice of suttee, (widow-burning) became an issue. By the early nineteenth century, it had become a cause for concern in Britain too and was seen as symbolizing the degradation not only of Indian womanhood, but of Indian society more generally.
• Muslim men were defined as violent, despotic, and masculine, Hindu men as passive, indolent, and effeminate, easily conquered whether by Mughal Emperors or the British. The effeminacy of Hindu men, especially Bengalis, brought with it the degradation of Hindu women.
• Missionaries active in India used suttee to demonstrate the appalling condition of Indian women and the necessity, therefore, of evangelical work

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMPIRE AND THE METROPOLE
- Issues of child marriage, the treatment of widows, the segregation of women, and polygamy, all provided opportunities to compare the victimized status of Indian women with the freedom of British women

DANGEROUS FEMALE SEXUALITY

• Most missionary societies liked their appointees to be married.26 This reduced the risk of sexual encounters with ‘native females’, women who were imagined as desirable and depraved. Young single men could not be expected to withstand the alluring temptations of ‘licentious savages’ in hot climates.

Question 21

Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century

Barbara Bush

Answer 21

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE
- By 1910 women constituted 20 per cent of university students,
- 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act opened hitherto male professions to women.
- After the passing of the 1928 Equal Franchise Act, women constituted 52.7 per cent of the electorate
Elite women began to claim greater responsibility for the welfare of colonized women and to make an impact on official policy.

EMPIRE TO COMMONWEALTH
- Mounting challenges to Empire in metropolis and colonies transformed imperial discourse, epitomized in the reconceptualization of Empire to Commonwealth, a ‘move from (masculine) power to (feminine) service’.9

• Ellen Wilkinson, visited India with an India League delegation in 1932 and contributed to a report sympathetic to nationalist grievances and critical of government repression, including maltreatment of women resisters
• Eleanor Rathbone, an active feminist and humanitarian, took up the maternalist cause of oppressed Indian women in Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur (1934)

CONTINUITY?
- Domesticity, marriage, and appropriate gender roles remained central to imperial stability. Eugenicists believed that single men and women who delayed marriage were failing in their racial duty to reproduce the white race.

Question 22

Sexuality, Gender, and Empire

Philippa Levine

Answer 22

NATURE OF SEXUALITY

• Sex was something that needed regulating and managing. Unrestrained sexuality was an unending threat to Empire
• Scientists saw racial difference vividly illustrated in sexual characteristics. Larger genitals were equated with smaller brain size. Sexual excess became the mark of inferiority.

ROLE OF SEXUALITY
Women’s nature was to desire children rather than se

Critics in South Africa lambasted the new birth-control clinics of the 1930s for encouraging white women to sidestep maternity, thus endangering future white supremacy

FEAR OF SEXUALITY
- The East India Company prohibited senior employees from marrying Indian women by 1835

CROSS- RACE RELATIONS 
- . In Australia, for example, white working-class men frequently entered into relationships with Aboriginal women, and in Canada with Native Americans, arrangements often favoured because they could be more easily abandoned than those with white women.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE
And in the years before the institution of slavery was abolished in the British Empire, abolitionists found the rhetoric around coerced sex a valuable weapon. Much of their stark imagery was based on fact, for slave women were indeed vulnerable to sexual abuse

Question 23

Gender and Migration

A. James Hammerton

Answer 23

ROLE OF WOMEN
imperial impulse towards ‘social engineering’, for example to control sex ratios and to ensure male settler access to the services—domestic, sexual, and reproductive—of women.

The prominent role of women in the ‘refinement of America’, in urban and rural regions, was likely to appeal to upwardly mobile immigrant families.7

’ in his elaborate theory of ‘systematic colonization’, Wakefield placed gender issues and the role of women at the centre of discussion; his arresting aphorisms, and his increasing preoccupation with the role of female immigrants, (p.159) have been quoted extensively ever since.10 To make a colony attractive to men, it was enough to ‘take care to make it attractive to women’

EVIDENCE

From 1832 experiments in mass female emigration to Australia, with convict-like shiploads of up to 300 single women, were designed to remedy the gender imbalance

AIMS OF WOMEN

Not surprisingly, vast numbers of single women did marry, but their goals were much closer to those of men—focusing on employment and self-improvement—than colonial theorists and propagandists understood.15

David Fitzpatrick has proposed the ‘unimportance of gender in explaining post-Famine Irish emigration

Fitzpatrick notes that ‘men and women alike were portrayed as rational beings, seeking betterment overseas, without betraying the interests of the dispersed family’.41

Isabela Wyly An energetic businesswoman and a devout Wesleyan convert, she married her (p.167) employer, produced ten children, and fostered chain migration of extended family members
–> “shows how migration could open up opportunities for women which approximate to conventional notions of the meaning of migration for men. “

RISKS WOMEN FACED

moral risks of the long voyage for unprotected females and fears of corruption of the innocent.

Question 24

Labouring women in Empire, a general overview

Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Gender in the British Empire’, Oxford History of the British Empire IV, 1999

Answer 24

• Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Gender in the British Empire’, Oxford History of the British Empire IV, 1999
• They migrated within India, to the jute mills of Calcutta, to coalmines in Bihar, tea gardens in Assam, and textile mills in Bombay.
• For single men, migration to the jute mills of Calcutta represented a strategy for family survival within a continuing network of kinship ties.
• For single women, migration was often a final response to familial rejection, and it marked the termination of those ties.5
• Migrant men’s access to land also depended on women continuing to tend land in their absence.1
• Balancing old agricultural commitments and new domestic ideals from British: Despite the heavy agricultural burdens of African rural women, sewing and homecraft featured more prominently than farming skills in the teaching of mission girls’ schools.

Question 25

Women and the colonial economy

Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Gender in the British Empire’, Oxford History of the British Empire IV, 1999

Answer 25

came to dominate many local markets in coastal Nigeria and Ghana, selling cooked foods, textiles, and craft products.8

Question 26

Gender and colonial law,

Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Gender in the British Empire’, Oxford History of the British Empire IV, 1999

Answer 26

The Indian Age of Consent Act of 1891,

or the early-twentieth-century colonial campaigns against the‘forced’ marriage of African women.

Question 27

Women and Hinduism in India Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Gender in the British Empire’, Oxford History of the British Empire IV, 1999

Answer 27

Such constructs were inevitably contested. Hindu revivalism similarly projected powerful images of woman as mother, protector of the home and sacred embodiment of national virtue, her body a pure space which had escaped the transformative effects of colonialism

Question 28

Conflict with expectations of sexuality in colonial thought and Shona reality

Women and Hinduism in India Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Gender in the British Empire’, Oxford History of the British Empire IV, 1999

Answer 28

For the Shona, as for many African peoples, marriage and sexual activity were an aspect of lineage membership in general, and individual members were answerable to the family group for the use they made of their sexuality.

• Colonial policy concerned with the protection of individuals

Question 29

masculinity and imperialism

Women and Hinduism in India Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Gender in the British Empire’, Oxford History of the British Empire IV, 1999

Answer 29

OVERVIEW

• the ideologies of masculinity often deployed by colonial states,
• the emergence of new kinds of ‘Imperial’ masculinity in metropolitan culture from the later nineteenth century

QUALITIES
Men as hardened and practical, women as emotional and impractical:
- Many women, particularly British doctors and Indian women activists, argued that female consent should be defined in wider terms of physical and emotional maturity.

• Men, both colonial advocates and conservative opponents of legislation, agreed that the only issue was a girl’s reproductive capacity, as measured in the age of first menstruation

SEXUAL RESTRAINT
- Secretary of State Lord Crewe’s official prohibition of concubinage in 1909.

PATERNALISM
- In the Papuan case, for example, the White Women’s Protection Ordinance brought in by the Governor Sir Hubert Murray in 1926, imposed the death sentence for the rape or attempted rape of any European femal