Gender, Geography and Empire

Victorian Women Travellers in Africa

Cheryl McEwan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138725645
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351753142
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published 2000: This text is intended to draw together two important developments in contemporary geography: firstly, the recognition of the need to write critical histories of geographical thought and, particularly, the relationship between modern geography and European imperialism; and secondly, the attempt by feminist geographers to countervail the absence of women in the histories. The author focuses on the narratives of British women travellers in West Africa between 1840 and 1915, exploring their contributions to British imperial culture, teh ways in which they wer empowered in the imperial context by virtue of both "race" and class, and their various representations of West African landscapes and peoples. The book argues for the inclusion of women and their experiences in histories of geographical thought and explores the possibilities and problems of combining feminist and post-colonial approaches to these histories.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history (Haggard, 1885, 9).

Opening up a space for excluded voices and counter-traditions – extending the realm of ‘legitimate’ geographical knowledge – is, of course, a necessary task for any critical history of geography (Driver, 1995, 411).

Situated within the current academic theater of cultural imperialism, with a certain carte d’entrée into the elite theoretical ateliers …, I bring news of power lines within the palace (Spivak, 1985, 360).

Rethinking histories of geography

The comment above by Alan Quartermain about the exploration of the African continent in Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines could, until recently, have referred to the invisibility of women in histories of both geographical thought and British imperialism. However, in recent years there has been a proliferation of studies on the role of women in the British empire, mainly within anthropology, feminist history and feminist literary theory, but increasingly within geography. The role of women in histories of geography and geographical thought, however, remains a relatively neglected sphere of analysis within the discipline of geography. In this context, the aim of this book is to attempt to write a ‘feminized’ history of British geographical thought and imperial culture, using the specific example of women travellers in west Africa¹ during the nineteenth century.

Histories of geography are continually being recast and retheorized, with authors suggesting new ways of constituting, or challenging the very notion of, the tradition(s) of geographical thought.² As the quote from Driver suggests, much of the debate surrounds the definition of the boundaries of tradition. Thus, scholars are exploring the ‘spatialization’ of tradition (Rose, 1995, 415), and the implications for inclusion in/exclusion from these discursive territories. Of particular concern to feminist geographers, and a major focus of discussion in this book, is the explication of the gendered construction of ‘the geographical tradition’, the erasure of women and women’s voices from histories of geography, and the potential for the recovery of the agency of women in these histories (Domosh, 1991a and b; Rose, 1993 and 1995).

Critical feminist approaches to histories of geography are, by now, well rehearsed.³ However, Rose (1995, 413) suggests that the current rethinking of geographical traditions, and the questioning of what constitutes geographical knowledge in particular historical settings, has still yet to provide spaces in which women’s contributions can be accommodated. Indeed, she writes, ‘it seems that, even if we can no longer be certain exactly what geography was in the past, in virtually all histories of geographical knowledges one apparently incontrovertible fact remains: geography, whatever it was, was almost always done by men’. Rose argues that there is a critical dilemma for feminists trying to incorporate women into histories of geography. Women can be integrated into the discursive spaces of geographical traditions, only to become the same; the importance of gender difference is erased. Alternatively, women can be located outside the territory of tradition and their difference celebrated. The latter tends to reiterate essentialist definitions of masculinity and femininity. It is also one which, in its tendency to claim women travellers as proto-feminists, struggles to locate them in a critical, rather than celebratory, historiography. The erasure of the historical agency of the colonized subject in the production of imperial geographical knowledges further compounds these problems.

Much recent work on critical histories of geography has been inspired by the Foucauldian notion of the relationship between power and knowledge. In particular, as Barnett (1995, 418) argues, there has been ‘an overwhelming, although not exclusive’ fascination with the relationship between modern European geography and European imperialism. Arguments about constructing feminist histories have also drawn on examples from this period (Domosh 1991a and b). This work has been important in challenging the masculinist construction of histories of geography and suggesting the agency of white women in the creation of imperial geographies. It is clear that the masculinist nature of the discipline of geography has serious consequences for what is regarded as legitimate geographical knowledge and who can produce this knowledge. In order to create discursive spaces for the inclusion of women in histories of geography, it is therefore imperative to reconceptualize these histories. Stoddart (1991, 485) suggests that ‘the contribution of women to the emergence and development of geography as a formal academic discipline’ would be more relevant to a feminist historiography. There is certainly scope for this and increasingly work has been undertaken in this field (Bell and McEwan, 1996; Mander, 1995; Ploszajska, 1995). However, Stoddart’s delimitation of the discursive boundaries of geography produces a definition that is both epistemologically narrow and contestable. As Blunt points out, institutions outside the academy were important in shaping views of women and their travels and produced a wider constituency for geographical knowledge. Rose’s suggestion that a strategy is required to unsettle the traditional boundaries of geography and to create new spaces is both radical and holds out the potential of producing more inclusive histories of the discipline. The real problem, it seems, in (re)writing histories of geography lies with the apparent need to position women (and other ‘subaltern’ and marginalized groups) and their ‘knowledges’ at various historical junctures within or beyond the ‘tradition’, or within an alternative ‘tradition’. The fact remains that women travellers, for example, were not geographers, nor did they define themselves as such. It seems illogical, therefore, to have to define alternative geographies to allow their voices to be heard. More important is the fact that they were writing and being read and, even more importantly, they were writing differently and often in highly original ways. Gregory’s (1995) approach of exploring the constellation of power, knowledge and spatiality and, in the case of the nineteenth century, ideas about empire, race and femininity in various narratives suggests a more productive approach rather than the constant and laborious struggle to position these texts as ‘geography’. The narratives themselves, their popularity and their consumption are of importance, not their position vis-à-vis the ‘tradition’ of geography, however the latter might be defined. A critical approach would eradicate essentialist approaches to ‘women travel writers’ and gendered genres of writing by exploring the gendered and racialized context of specific imperial encounters. In what follows I suggest strategies for how one might write a critical feminist account of geography and imperialism. These strategies not only attempt to deal with some of the problems and contradictions inherent in feminist analyses of empire, travel writing and geography, but also attempt to reveal the eurocentrism which is rarely problematized in these accounts. I wish not only to problematize the authority of colonial discourse, but also to detail some of the ways in which imperialism has constructed narratives of geography and gender. This account, therefore, is an attempt to combine feminist and postcolonial approaches in constructing a more critical version of geography and imperialism in the nineteenth century.

(Re)writing histories of geography: critical interventions

Moving beyond geography: women travellers as writers

Writers such as Driver (1990), Hudson (1977), Livingstone (1992) and Said (1990) have pointed out that the history of British geography during the late nineteenth century is intimately related to the history of British imperialism. During the nineteenth century the empire was perceived as a masculine preserve and the literature of empire was a male-dominated, heroic literature. Consequently, analyses of the history of the empire have often failed to account for the role of women as agents of British imperialism. As Melman (1992, 1) argues:

Historians and students of culture alike relegate women to the periphery of imperialist culture and the tradition of ‘empire’, the assumption being that the female experience of the Western expansion and domination outside Europe had been subsumed in hegemonic and homogeneously patriarchal tradition.

According to Callaway (1987, 3), the history of empire was very often the ‘history of the greats’; its male figures were imbued with courage, fortitude and heroism. Empire was the preserve of the great explorers, the big game hunters and the adventurers who pitted their manhood against the hazards of unexplored lands (Oliver 1982, 189). As Russell (1988, 213) argues, there existed a powerful parallel between geographical conquest and sexual conquest; landscapes were feminized, penetrated, assaulted, conquered and subdued. The empire was also a sexual playground for European men, free of the stifling morality of Victorian Britain, a public, masculine domain exclusive of white women.⁴ These imperial views on gender were informed by the belief system of a patriarchal Victorian Britain. Social Darwinism, evolutionary anthropology, medical tracts and treatises on psychology, the myth of chivalry, ‘muscular’ Christianity, boys adventure stories and the literary tradition of empire all contributed to the assumption of the superiority of the English gentleman (Callaway, 1987, 3). Attitudes in Britain towards race, social class and gender were intrinsic in this assumption; women, non-Europeans, the working classes, the deviant and the mentally ill all belonged to the realm of the ‘other’, metaphorically and physically excluded from the world of the Victorian gentleman. In the case of women, not only did Victorian notions of femininity and financial restrictions prohibit them from travelling abroad alone, the colonial governments and private businesses also prevented their access to the empire by refusing employment to married men. According to Ann Laura Stoler (1991, 61), marriage restrictions in Africa, India and South East Asia lasted well into the twentieth century.

Despite these restrictions, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards an increasing number of women took to travelling abroad, writing books about their experiences and presenting lectures at meetings of philanthropic, church and missionary groups, and very occasionally at some of the less formalized learned societies. Many Victorians viewed lone women travellers as oddities, eccentric ‘globetrotteresses’ with little to contribute to scientific and geographical knowledge. Even publishers and editors of the travel narratives were dismissive of the achievements of these women. For example, William Carey’s introduction to Annie Taylor’s diary of her journey to Tibet, which he edited and published, presents her trek as ‘quaintly pathetic in its simplicity and … richly amusing in its unpreparedness’. Taylor is reduced to ‘a plucky and resourceful woman … an unsophisticated pilgrim’.⁵ As Callaway (ibid.) argues, where women were mentioned in contemporaneous accounts of British imperialism, particularly in the anti-colonialist literature, emphasis was placed on the wives of colonial administrators and officials as representations of the worst aspects of colonialism: its racism, snobbery and eurocentrism. Only those women travellers who were seen to remain within the boundaries of acceptable feminine behaviour, such as nurses and the wives of missionaries, were given any credence, Florence Nightingale being the prime example (Middleton, 1973, 66).⁶

The legacy of these attitudes is still to be seen in some relatively recent accounts of Victorian women travellers. For example, in her account of women adventurers, Maria Aitken (1987, 9) argues that although women did not travel frivolously, ‘their vagaries are amusing now’. Accounts of such Vagaries’ add spice to already colourful biographies, but at the same time underestimate the contribution of women to British imperial culture and overlook the part they played in the production of imperial knowledges. The women remain amusing oddities on the peripheries of imperial experience, and it is their extraordinary lives that provide the context for analysis rather than their contribution to British imperial culture.⁷ In addition, as Birkett (1992) argues throughout her biography of Mary Kingsley, women who travelled alone outside Britain are perceived by their biographers as victims of nineteenth-century attitudes towards women, as daring explorers, or as feminist heroines. The major achievement of women travellers in such accounts seems to be their apparent defiance of contemporary conventions regarding the supposed role of women; they are hailed as proto-feminists. Mills argues that although increasing attention has been paid to the texts of women travel writers, much of this has focused upon the women themselves as individual rebels against the constraints of Victorian society. There has thus been little exploration of the relations between the women and the territories through which they travelled, and their part in the production of imperial knowledges.

The restrictions on women’s access to the empire were paralleled in Britain by restrictions upon their entry to learned societies. Many senior figures in the Royal Geographical Society were resolutely opposed to women Fellows. The Society flirted with the issue of women’s admittance in 1892 and 1893, when a total of twenty-two women were elected, but the doors were closed again immediately; it was only in 1913 that the R.G.S. finally admitted women fellows on the same grounds as men.⁸ George Lord Curzon in a letter to The Times succinctly expressed its attitude towards women fellows at the end of the nineteenth century:

We contest in toto the general capability of women to contribute to scientific geographical knowledge. Their sex and training render them equally unfitted for exploration, and the genus of professional female globetrotteresses … is one of the horrors of the latter end of the nineteenth century.⁹

It is not simply, as Domosh argues, that the legacy of such attitudes has meant that women have tended to be written out of, or peripheralized in, the histories of both geography and the British empire. The reason for this may also lie with the women themselves. As Stoddart (1991) has argued, it is difficult to incorporate women travel writers into histories of geography precisely because these women did not consider themselves geographers, nor were they remotely interested in anything that may be regarded as geography in the narrow sense. Furthermore, a particular problematic in writing feminist histories of geography has been the apparent need to claim women travellers in a disciplinary sense in order that they be located in the ‘geographical tradition(s)’. A critical feminist approach need not concern itself with such myopic considerations. It is widely acknowledged that women, for the greater part, did not contribute to the ‘heroic’ history of economic and political imperialism. They did not discover, explore and conquer new lands, nor did they play a significant role in the establishment of academic geography towards the end of the nineteenth century. Despite recognition of their exclusion from the traditions and practice of scientific geography, however, the experiences of nineteenth-century women are nonetheless of relevance to the histories of geography and imperialism. On the one hand, British women were actively involved in the British empire as sponsors of expeditions or as critics in Britain, or as travellers, missionaries and the wives of administrators operating within the empire. In a few cases women were able to influence imperial policy.¹⁰ On the other hand, women (and women travellers, in particular) made notable contributions to imperial discourse during the nineteenth century. Their status as writers, rather than their place in ‘heroic’ histories of geography, lends significance to the works of women travellers.

Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest, particularly in literary theory, in travel writing; as Kowalewski (1992, 6) argues, ‘the signs of an invigorated contemporary interest in travel are everywhere to be seen’. Of particular relevance here is the fact that this interest has, to some extent, captured the attention of geographers, and several have made the case for seeing travel writing, both contemporary and historical, as a form of geography (for example, Barnes and Duncan, 1992; Bishop, 1989; Crush, 1995; Gregory, 1995). The inspiration for the recognition of both the enduring appeal of travel writing as a mode of representation,¹¹ and of the overlaps between geography as a discipline and travel-writing as a poetic, imaginative and occasionally ‘scientific’ genre of literature was Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Said constructs a critical reading of what he refers to as ‘imaginative geographies’, the complex production of images of lands and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of maps and tables
• List of plates
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Travel, text and empowerment
• 3 Paradise or pandemonium?
• 4 White women and ‘race’
• 5 Slavery, witchcraft and cannibalism
• 6 Colonized counterparts
• 7 Retrieving subaltern histories?
• 8 Conclusions
• Archival sources
• Bibliography
• Index