Borderlines

Genders and Identities in War and Peace 1870-1930

Billie Melman, Billie Melman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136043901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Borderlines weaves together the study of gender with that of the evolution of nationalism and colonialism. Its broad, comparative perspective will rechart the war experiences and identities of women and men during this period of transformation from peace to war, and again to peace. Drawing on a wide range of materials, from government policy and propaganda to subversive trench journalism and performance, from fiction, drama and film to the record of activists in various movements and in various countries, Borderlines weaves together the study of gender with that of the evolution of nationalism and colonialism. Its broad, comparative perspective will rechart the war experiences and identities of women and men during this period of transformation from peace to war, and again to peace.

PART-I
GENDERING THE NATION

DEFINITIONS AND BOUNDARIES

THE BRITISH IMPERIAL STATE AND THE
CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL IDENTITIES

PAT THANE

INTRODUCTION

World War I wrought fundamental shifts in the British state and society. Although Britain emerged from the war weaker in international terms, both politically and economically, in domestic affairs the state had become bigger and more active as a result of the needs of the war. It is notable that the Liberal-controlled British state was able to be effectively interventionist during the war, despite its previous preference for a minimal central bureaucracy and reluctant intervention.¹ The flexible capacity of the British state to adjust to the exigencies of the severe test of this war was in marked contrast to the lumbering failure of the supposedly stronger and certainly much larger German bureaucracy.²

From the later nineteenth century, the role of the state—and citizens' expectations of it—had been growing steadily. Thus, the war in fact pushed Britain further and faster along a path it was already following. At the heart of political discourse and political thought from at least the 1870s to the 1940s was the assumption that the role of the state was expanding. From this perception flowed a range of views about the desirable boundaries of this expansion and the role, in relation to it, of the expanding body of citizens, as first all adult men and then all adult women acquired the vote between 1867 and 1928.³ It is worth noting that in 1914 Britain was still among a handful of European countries that did not have full manhood suffrage. The 40 percent of excluded adult males were enfranchised only in 1918, along with the majority of women aged over thirty.

This was an Imperial state, and an essential theme in the discourse about the relationship between the state and its “subjects” concerned that between the metropolitan state and the colonies. The term “subject” was preferred in British official discourse, which applied the term “citizen” to republics such as France or the United States. The contours of this theme also were changed by World War I. The British Empire was expanded to its largest size ever by the postwar settlement as it took over from the defeated powers responsibility for such territories as Palestine and German West Africa. But the demands of colonies for independence were also growing as never before, most insistently by the end of the war from Ireland (which achieved partial independence in 1921) and India (which had to wait until after World War II).

Such issues became prominent in the later nineteenth century for reasons that were international as well as internal to Britain and the Empire. Within Britain, previously excluded groups were demanding participation in decision making that affected their lives, and a larger share of the visibly increasing national wealth that they helped to create; just as groups of people in certain colonies (e.g., Ireland, Australia, Canada, and South Africa) wanted greater control over decisions concerning their territories and their inhabitants. The final third of the nineteenth century was a period of mounting international competition, above all for markets and for territory. Competition among nations sharpened or created ideas of national difference: of national identity, and racist ideas as to who did not belong within the nation. It enhanced the concern not only with defining the membership and characteristics of the “stock” of each nation (in the farmyard term favored by the English), but also with whether the numbers and physical and mental capacities of that “stock” were adequate to stand up to military and economic competition from other nations. Hence the alarm in Britain and elsewhere from around the 1870s about the declining birthrate and the assumed “physical deterioration” of the population.⁴

For Britain, these fears were peculiarly focused by the experience of the second Anglo-Boer war of 1899–1902, which was the greatest threat to the integrity of the Empire since the American breakaway of 1776. Inhabitants of the colonies of South Africa, who were not of British origin but Afrikaners of Dutch extraction, sought independence in the Cape and Transvaal. That it took thirty months and much expenditure to foil this attempt exposed the weaknesses of the British imperial army. The physical unfitness of many volunteers for the army (Britain had no system of conscription) seemed to confirm fears about “physical deterioration,” though it is unlikely that volunteers were physically inferior to those at any time in at least the previous half-century. Some who feared Britain's decline grasped the opportunity for propaganda for their cause, and the numbers of unfit rejects from the services were widely publicized.

After the war, one response of the British state to this shock was to seek to increase the British-born population of South Africa. Men who had fought there were granted plots of land. But men alone could not raise good British “stock” in South Africa. A series of articles in The Nineteenth Century in 1902 on “The Needs of South Africa” argued that:

The emigration of women to South Africa has become a question of national importance. If that country is in the future to become one of the great self-governing colonies of the British Empire, warm in sympathy and attachment to the mother country it must be peopled with loyal British women as well as British men….

Without that home-life settlers will bring with them none of the peaceful influence which will be the surest means to bring about reconciliation with their Boer neighbours and fellow subjects.

For:

As a rule the Boer women of South Africa are devoid of many of the qualities which are essential to make a British man's home happy and comfortable. Cleanliness is a virtue too often foreign to the Boer character and it is not infrequently replaced by an ignorance of the laws of hygiene which produces habits of slovenliness both injurious to health and distasteful to British ideas….

It is women of high moral character possessed of common sense and a sound constitution who can help to build up our Empire.⁵

Women were given official encouragement to migrate to South Africa, thereby also helping to diminish the “surplus woman problem,” the excess of women over men in the British population, which was depriving women of the opportunity to marry and, it was thought, encouraging their demands for equal rights.⁶

Fears about race and Empire created a rhetoric that more explicitly than before identified women with the role of preserving, perpetuating, and enhancing the physical quality, and the numbers, of the race in their role as mothers and, more mystically, embodying the essence of each race as its physical conduit to the next generation. As Dr. Elizabeth Sloan Chesser declared in 1914, in a pioneering psychology text, “every girl has a duty to the race”:

For she is the vase of life; she has in her body the power of handing on and on the life-force which has come to her through millions of years. It is a very sacred and serious thought—is it not?—that your life is so vital a matter to others yet unborn, that by your conduct you can help to keep the life-stream pure, help to uplift the race; that, on the other hand, you can hinder the great forces of evolution.⁷

An important role of the growing British state was to define a British national and imperial identity, to define who possessed that identity, to integrate them into the Empire, and to enhance their physical condition.

THE STATE AND WELFARE

In the years following the Anglo-Boer war, the British state sought to support and encourage women in their role of improving the physical condition of the population, through a series of state welfare measures. Its expanding welfare role was a central feature of the increasing activity of the British state before 1914, which was especially evident under the Liberal governments in office between 1906 and 1914. These initiatives were cautious and not costly. It is fashionable to play down their importance, but this is to underestimate the shift in the role of the state that was in process.⁸ In a number of important ways, these welfare measures grew directly out of, or intersected with, the national and international issues with which influential actors in the state were concerned. Most obviously, they were intended to assist the enhancement of national and imperial physical, economic, and military efficiency; equally importantly they were designed to integrate significant groups of the excluded and actually or potentially politically restless into a sense of full participation in the state.⁹ They played an important role in defining who had the full rights of a British “subject.”

In providing new forms of social benefit, the state conferred new rights and had to decide who merited those rights. In the absence of a written constitution, who was British, and what rights British subjects possessed were shaped by statute and common law and by government practice. In important ways, through welfare and other measures, the British state helped shape the identities of inhabitants of Britain and the Empire.

For centuries, the main form of publicly funded provision for the needy had been the Poor Law. Receipt of poor relief had always brought exclusion from civil rights, above all from the right to vote, which by the nineteenth century poor people often possessed in local elections. The test of need for poor relief was simply destitution. New state initiatives of the later nineteenth century had relatively unambiguous qualifications: e.g., for state education there was an age limit. For many of the new welfare benefits of the early twentieth century the state was either unable or unwilling to set such unambiguous boundaries. In particular, it faced a problem of defining eligibility for cash payments. The only direct cash payments previously made to the needy from public funds were through the exclusionary Poor Law. The new measures were intended both to aid and to include the recipient as a full member of the British community. This raised new questions which were anxiously debated. Who was to be included in the new old-age pensions and health-insurance benefits? All of the aged poor and the working-class sick, or only some? If the latter, where were the boundaries to lie?¹⁰

The Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 provided the first state old-age pensions following a thirty-year campaign by social reformers and working people on behalf of a group demonstrably suffering severe poverty. Despite pleas for a universal pension for which the only qualification was age (55, 60, and 64 were all proposed) government economic stringency dictated that it should be targeted by means test upon the poorest above the high age of 70. But poverty alone was not deemed a sufficient qualification. This would not differentiate the pension from poor relief. The pension was intended not merely to relieve destitution but also to increase the sense of security and of inclusion within the state of the deserving “subject” after years of labor and acceptable behavior. The status of full subject was denied to those guilty of “habitual failur...