Feminism and Empire

Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865

Clare Midgley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415250146
• eBook ISBN: 9781134577460
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Feminism and Empire establishes the foundational impact that Britain's position as leading imperial power had on the origins of modern western feminism. Based on extensive new research, this study exposes the intimate links between debates on the 'woman question' and the constitution of 'colonial discourse' in order to highlight the centrality of empire to white middle-class women's activism in Britain.

The book begins by exploring the relationship between the construction of new knowledge about colonised others and the framing of debates on the 'woman question' among advocates of women's rights and their evangelical opponents. Moving on to examine white middle-class women's activism on imperial issues in Britain, topics include the anti-slavery boycott of Caribbean sugar, the campaign against widow-burning in colonial India, and women's role in the foreign missionary movement prior to direct employment by the major missionary societies. Finally, Clare Midgley highlights how the organised feminist movement which emerged in the late 1850s linked promotion of female emigration to Britain's white settler colonies to a new ideal of independent English womanhood.

This original work throws fascinating new light on the roots of later 'imperial feminism' and contemporary debates concerning women's rights in an era of globalisation and neo-imperialism.

1 The ‘woman question’ in imperial Britain

Despite the lack of an organised feminist movement in Britain between the 1790s and the mid 1850s, there was a rich debate throughout the period concerning the position of women in British society. Were British women oppressed or privileged? Did women’s biological differences from men imply differences in their mental capacities or emotional qualities? What were the appropriate social roles for women, and what type of education would best fit them for these roles? Should women be treated as men’s equals or as their social subordinates? Should they be encouraged to focus on their domestic duties or urged to assert their civic rights? Positions were often very polarised, particularly in the late 1790s, when conservative evangelicals were at pains to distance themselves publicly from radical advocates of the ‘rights of woman’. However, across the political spectrum, writers on the ‘woman question’ shared a reformist zeal, a conviction of the important role of women in the nation, and a belief that women exerted a strong influence on society, for good or for ill.¹

While the debate on the woman question in Britain between the 1790s and the 1850s has attracted considerable attention from historians, the implications of this debate taking place within an imperial nation have not been fully examined. This chapter seeks to clarify the ways in which analyses of the condition of British women over the period were influenced by Britain’s position as an expansionist imperial nation and leading world power. It will examine how these texts encouraged British women to consider their own social position in relation to the position of women in non-Western societies and to colonised peoples, particularly enslaved Africans.

Writing on the ‘woman question’ was shaped by understandings of the world developed in the contexts of British overseas exploration and imperial expansion, in particular by eighteenth-century Enlightenment stadial theory, which used the position of women as a key marker of the level of civilization in particular societies. In addition, campaigns to improve the position of women in Britain were influenced by new popular movements that arose in the late eighteenth century: the campaigns against the slave trade and colonial slavery, and the foreign missionary movement, with its global aspirations and complex relationship to British imperialism. Writers on British women drew on abolitionist and missionary discourses in comparing or contrasting the position of British women with that of colonial slaves, women in the ‘oriental’ harem, women in African, Pacific Islander or North American ‘savage’ societies, and Hindu women who committed sati, burning on the funeral pyres of their husbands.

The chapter begins by discussing a set of key feminist tracts that highlighted the oppression of women in Britain through making analogies between women and slaves, and which advocated the ‘rights of woman’ through developing a discourse of women’s progress from savage to civilised societies. It then moves on to discuss tracts from the opposing evangelical tradition, which contrasted the position of women in Protestant Britain with that of women in ‘heathen’ lands, drawing on Enlightenment stadial theory but stressing Christian religion rather than socio-economic development as the source of women’s privileges. The later sections of the chapter examine texts by two authors who approached the ‘woman question’ from rather different angles: Elizabeth Hamilton, who used the fictional correspondence of a ‘Hindu rajah’ to provide an outsider perspective on women’s position in Britain, and Henry Lawrence, who imagined a matrilineal Utopia located in India.

Civilisation, slavery and women’s rights

In analysing British women’s oppression and calling for women’s rights, feminist tracts drew critically on eighteenth-century European Enlightenment stadial theory. In the 1770s, French and Scottish theorists created conjectural histories of the world that linked stages of economic development, from an original state of nature through hunter–gatherer, pastoral, agricultural and then commercial stages, to levels of social and cultural development from savagery to civilisation, and levels of political development from despotism to liberty. The treatment of women by men was taken as an index of the stage of progress. Indeed, women formed the central focus of Scottish writer William Alexander’s 1779 history which was, the advertisement claimed, written specifically for a female readership. Central to Enlightenment stadial theory was a belief that women had been reduced to a state of slaves and drudges to men in savage societies, that political despotism was associated with men’s despotic rule over women, and that in contemporary European commercial society women that become the companions of men rather than their slaves. Indeed, Barbara Taylor has described the view that women’s positions had gradually improved with the advance of civilisation and political liberty as ‘a veritable idée fixe among educated Britons’ of the late eighteenth century.²

Stadial theory drew on knowledge of non-European peoples created in the process of European exploration and colonisation overseas from the late fifteenth century onwards. By the 1770s, the two nations within which conjectural histories were written, France and Britain, were the two leading European colonial powers, and a new phase of British exploration and exploitation in the Pacific was being initiated by the voyages of Captain James Cook between 1768 and 1779.³ Britain’s imperial expansion during the eighteenth century and her rivalry with France on the global stage had a profound impact both on the forging of an overarching sense of British Protestant national identity and on the emergence of a new sense of English ethnic selfhood.⁴ The commercial society that stadial theorists placed at the apex of civilisational progress was one heavily reliant both economically and socially on imperial commerce. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, a central component of this was the trade in African slaves and in slave-grown Caribbean sugar.⁵ With European colonial expansion, the creation of forms of knowledge about non-European peoples, as Edward Said so influentially pointed out in Orientalism, became a key part of the assertion of colonial power, ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority’ over those defined as ‘other’.⁶ However, Enlightenment thinking was diverse, and included a strand critical of European imperialism.⁷

While some Enlightenment thinkers adopted a culturally relativist approach that questioned the superiority of Western civilisation, stadial theorists, as G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter have discussed, constructed a history of world within which ‘the peoples and stages of civilisation of the European past were readily mapped onto the tribes contemporaries encountered in Africa or America’, with such contemporary societies seen as living relics of earlier, less civilised, eras.⁸ Savage man was taken to be the mirror image of the primitive ancestor of the civilised European. This, as Silvia Sebastiani has suggested, ‘broke open the universalistic discourse on progress’ present in stadial theory to a ‘hierarchical discourse contrasting the stasis of non-European peoples and the dynamism of Europe’. This hierarchical discourse was associated with a new ‘science of man’ that constructed racial difference through naturalising cultural characteristics ‘by rendering them innate and inscribing them on the body’, with women assigned an important role in the formation of these distinct races.⁹

Just as Enlightenment thinkers’ belief in natural equality was in tension with their construction of contemporary hierarchies of cultural and racial difference, so their stress on the social malleability of human nature and the shifting social position of women was in tension with their emphasis on natural differences between the sexes. Depictions of women as a civilising and progressive influence, and indeed women’s actual contributions to Enlightenment culture as writers and as hostesses of intellectual salons, sat uncomfortably alongside the association of women with nature, the idea of historical progress as the assertion of masculine reason over female irrationality, and fears of the corrupting influence of ignorant and frivolous women on contemporary commercial society. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the emphasis on women’s unique physiology was seen to necessitate the circumscribing of her social role to that of wife and mother within the patriarchal rural family, her ability to exert a good moral influence dependent on her seclusion.¹⁰

It was partly through engaging with the tensions and inconsistencies in Enlightenment thought, and through directly challenging those ‘men of reason’ who postulated women’s natural inferiority, that modern feminist discourse emerged. The relationship of this discourse to European colonialism was complex. On the one hand, feminists drew on stereotyped and often negative views of non-European peoples forged in the process of the expansion of European colonial power. On the other hand, like their fellow political radicals and religious dissenters, they drew inspiration from anti-colonial and anti-slavery movements. The immediate sparks for the emergence of modern feminism in the 1790s Britain were the dramatic political developments of the late eighteenth century, when Enlightenment ideas of natural rights were translated into a political agenda promoting the ‘rights of man’ by Americans in revolt against British colonial control, French revolutionaries and ‘Black Jacobins’ in France’s richest Caribbean sugar colony of San Domingue.¹¹

This complex set of influences is very evident in the work of Catherine Macaulay, whose writings span the period from the American Revolution to the French Revolution and who was one of the leading female intellectuals of the late eighteenth century. Macaulay gained fame as the author of an eight-volume History of England (1763–1783), an Enlightenment history of the progressive acquisition of liberty by the English written from a republican perspective. Her attitudes to British imperialism were complex: her support for the American Revolution, based on her belief that legitimate government must be based on a contract between the ruler and ruled, was combined with enthusiasm for Britain’s commercial development based on her sea empire, tempered by an opposition to colonial slavery.¹²

In her Letters on Education (1790), Macaulay’s assertion of natural equality between the sexes is linked to a broader assertion of the ‘the natural equality of man’ that encompasses an attack on those who claim the natural superiority of Europeans over Asians or Africans. She acknowledges that there are some positive aspects to non-European societies and argues that while ‘most European states have at this day an apparent superiority in government, in arts, and in arms’, this is an accident of history, and European history itself shows periods of achievement followed by periods of decline.¹³ When it comes to the position of women, however, Macaulay sees nothing positive in non-Western societies. She states that ‘the situation of women in modern Europe …, when compared with that condition of abject slavery in which they have always been held in the east, may be considered as brilliant’, thus locating Europe as the site of progress towards female emancipation, while simultaneously acknowledging that ‘if we withhold comparison … we shall have no great reason of boast of our privileges’.¹⁴ Macaulay’s image of the unchangingly oppressive east, which reiterates a commonplace of European eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought, reappears in her call for equality in the education of boys and girls. She condemns the inferior state of female education in Europe as resulting from ‘a prejudice, which ought ever to have been confined to the regions of the east, because it accords with the state of slavery to which female nature in that part of the world has been ever subjected’.¹⁵

This presentation of female subjection as anomalous to Western society is reinforced by Macaulay’s critique of Rousseau’s views on female education, which she characterises as Eastern,¹⁶ and contrasts with her own programme of female education in these terms: ‘I intend to breed my pupils up to act a rational part in the world, and not to fill up a niche in the seraglio of a sultan’.¹⁷ Macaulay, while calling into question the assumption of an automatic link between the development of enlightened culture in Europe and the liberation of women, thus promotes female emancipation as Western progress away from a negatively imagined East, with the woman of reason replacing man’s sexual slave. This marks an early appearance of what Joyce Zonana has labelled ‘feminist orientalism’, which shares with other Orientalist discourse a dominant association of the East with the harem, an image that linked the sexual enslavement of women with political despotism.¹⁸

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the most famous foundational text of modern Western feminism, was influenced by Macaulay’s work but went beyond her in seeking to extend radical calls for the ‘rights of man’ to women. Like Macaulay, Wollstonecraft critiques Rousseau’s views on natural female inferiority and his associated views of female education. She is sympathetic with Rousseau’s disillusionment with the frivolity and corruption of current European society.¹⁹ She disagrees, however, with what she interpreted as Rousseau’s belief that ‘a state of nature is preferable to civilization, in all its possible perfection’.²⁰ She argues that he was mistaken in assuming that the existing ills of European societies were ‘the consequence of civilization’ rather than ‘the vestiges of barbarism’.²¹ The problem, as she stated at the opening of the Vindication, is that ‘the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial’.²² Here, Wollstonecraft distanced herself from what Barbara Taylor has described as the ‘bourgeois-triumphalist’ strand in British Enlightenment readings of history, which saw contemporary commercial society as the apex of civilisational achievement.²³ However, she argues that ‘the perfection of man’ should be sought ‘in the establishment of true civilization’ rather than a ‘ferocious flight back to the nights of sensual ignorance’.²⁴

Wollstonecraft, as Jane Rendall has noted with reference to her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), followed Enlightenment sta-dial thought in using the presence of slavery and the oppression of women as markers of how supposedly civilised societies fell short of full civilisation.²⁵ She was also clearly influenced by the emergence of the British campaign against the slave trade: in the Vindication she compares her countrywomen to colonial slaves in a passage which aligns her with the contemporary campaign for abstention from slave-grown sugar, in which British women played a key role, as will be discussed in the Chapter 2. Wollstonecraft questions: ‘Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species, like poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, when principles would be a surer guarantee only to sweeten the cup of man?’²⁶ Here, calling attention to the discriminatory and degrading treatment of both African slaves and European women that underlay the ‘polite and commercial society’ of eighteenth-century Britain, Wollstonecraft aligns the cause of women’s rights with the anti-slavery cause, assuming an abolitionist stance on the part of her readers.²⁷

Wollstonecraft’s use of the woman–slave analogy, however, also problematically obscures the differences between the experiences of (black) slaves and (middle-class white) women, and rests for its effectiveness on an erasure of the specific sufferings of black women under slavery. In addition, it is tied to a negative view of indigenous African societies. In contrast to the authors of sentimental anti-slavery poetry and tales of the period, Wollstonecraft is no idealiser of the ‘noble savage’.²⁸ Comparing fashionable European women’s vanity and fondness for dress to the ‘strong inclination for external ornaments’ which ‘ever appears in barbarous states’ where ‘the mind is not sufficiently opened to the pleasure in reflection’, she argues that the fact that ‘all the hardly earned savings of a slave are commonly expended on a little tawdry finery’ provides evi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The ‘Woman Question’ In Imperial Britain
• 2. Sweetness and Power: The Domestic Woman and Anti-Slavery Politics
• 3. White Women Saving Brown Women?: British Women and the Campaign Against Sati
• 4. Can Women Be Missionaries?: Imperial Philanthropy, Female Agency and Feminism
• 5. Feminism, Colonial Emigration and the New Model Englishwoman
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography