Gendering Migration

Masculinity, Femininity and Ethnicity in Post-War Britain

Wendy Webster, Louise Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754671787
• eBook ISBN: 9781351934336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Gendering Migration demonstrates the significance of studying migration through the lens of gender and ethnicity and the contribution this perspective makes to migration histories. Through a consideration of the impact of migration on men and masculine identities as well as women and feminine identities, it extends our understanding of questions of gender and migration, focusing on the history of migration to Britain after the Second World War. The volume draws on oral narratives as well as documentary and archival research to demonstrate the important role played by gender and ethnicity, both in ideas and images of migrants and in migrants' own experiences. The contributors consider a range of migrant and refugee groups who came to Britain in the twentieth century: Caribbean, East-African Asian, German, Greek, Irish, Kurdish, Pakistani, Polish and Spanish. The fresh interpretations offered here make this an important new book for scholars and students of migration, ethnicity, gender and modern British history.

1
‘The Black Peril’: Race, Masculinity and Migration During the First World War

Richard Smith

The First World War gave rise to an increasingly visible black presence in Britain. Employment prospects for black seafarers improved and African and Caribbean men arrived to seek work in war industries or to volunteer for military service. The experiences of the black British population during this period provide important insights and context to the inter-war moral panics centred on relationships between black men and white women identified by Bland (2005; 2006), Joannou (2004), Kohn (1992), Schwarz (1996) and Tabili (1996). Such a study also illustrates the impact of international conflict on community relations.

Far smaller than the black population established during and after the Second World War, the black presence through the First World War¹ was, nevertheless, of fundamental symbolic significance, underlining the instability and contingency of apparently fixed categories, such as ‘race’ and masculinity, and disturbing the normative place of whiteness. Wartime circumstances produced contradictory depictions of the black male subject in Britain and the wider empire. As white masculine ideals were undermined by the martial performance of white men, some portrayals of black men offered hope of renewed masculine vigour. However, although faced with rising casualties, declining voluntary enlistment and concern about the physical and mental condition of recruits, the military were reluctant to consider the enlistment of black men. Instead, misrepresentations of inferior black character were re-articulated to exclude black volunteers from the front line in an attempt to restore diminishing white hegemony.

Charting how these contrasting depictions of black men impacted on the home front, this chapter offers complementary readings to economic explanations for an increase in anti-black feeling (Jenkinson 1996) and greater understanding of wartime racialized, sexual anxiety identified by Rowe (2000). The study focuses on dock communities in East London, home to a significant black population between the wars,² and the north-western city of Manchester, which attracted black migrants seeking employment in the munitions factories. Drawing extensively on local newspaper coverage, comparisons are invited with the experience of Irish migrants, who arrived in considerable numbers in the 1930s. As Louise Ryan (2001) demonstrates, local newspapers were pivotal in mediating racial identities and citizenship during this era of burgeoning mass culture.

The black masculine presence came to be viewed as both threatening and alluring. Welcomed at first, as government and media endeavoured to portray an empire united in struggle, black volunteers and war-workers faced growing antipathy and were increasingly regarded as a ‘black invasion’ or ‘black peril’. In some circumstances, the black man on British streets embodied a dandy-like figure, whose presence served to threaten and destabilize imperial categories of race and gender. Anxieties around the black presence found expression through an increasing preoccupation with miscegenation, a contemporary pseudo-scientific term for the mixing of ‘racial’ and ethnic groups. The popular press routinely suggested such mingling had a dissipating effect on the British nation, contributing to violent attacks on black communities.

War, Empire and White Masculinity

Captain J.C. Dunn, a medical officer with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, recounted the consequences of poverty on the physiques of many British soldiers, noting the ‘astonishing number of men whose narrow and misshapen chests, and other deformities or defects, unfitted them to stay the more exacting requirements of service in the field’ (1938, 245). Such concerns about the physical fitness of recruits echoed misgivings about the state of British manhood expressed during the South African War (1899-1902) (see Davin 1978) but also evident in earlier imperial crises. Writing six years after the Jamaican Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, Charles Kingsley described the black West Indian peasantry as more robust than the ‘short and stunted figures’ of Britain's cities (cited in Lorimer 1978, 155). Later, the eugenicist Francis Galton would express concern that white Britons were ‘less shapely than many of the dark-coloured peoples whom I have seen’ (Galton 1903, 168).

For eugenicists, the First World War brought great unease, claiming the fittest and compounding the effects of the declining birthrate among the middle, upper and respectable working classes. This was epitomised in an article by Reverend James Marchant of the National Council for Public Morals, attacking the growing use of birth control:

Some modern parents, modern advocates of little and good as applied to families, are deeply impressed by their own cheap and easy reason for shirking their responsibilities to the race … this limitation of children looks more like lack of physical stamina, of the weakening of the moral fibre, of an impoverished sense of social responsibility, of the death of the spirit of self-sacrifice, than deep-seated foresight for the quality of the children to be … Many noble men have been sacrificed and the race is now on to breed purer and stronger families. Quantity is the key — competition will improve the quality of the race.³

Not only the physical condition, but also the character of white masculinity was brought into question. Since the 1880s, there was growing concern that the fruits of empire and domestic comfort produced ineffectual, morally weak men damaging to the imperial effort. As the army reformer, Viscount Wolseley, argued: ‘Overcultivation is calculated to convert manliness to effeminacy; it is conducive of luxury and love of ease … indolent habits which kill all virile energy, and when that dies, not only the greatness of the nation but its independent existence are buried in the same grave’ (1888, 692). By the turn of the century, this theme had been taken up vociferously by the populist journalist Arnold White (1901).

As men returned broken and shattered from the war, the physical decline of white British masculinity was further underlined, despite efforts to present the mutilated veteran as ‘more of a man’ (Bourke 1996, 58). Psychological conditions displayed by thousands of soldiers, alongside a general sense of helplessness in the face of technological destruction and military discipline, also diluted the basis of white masculine superiority founded on rationality, stoicism and self-control (Showalter 1987).⁴ Around 200,000 soldiers were discharged from the army on psychiatric grounds (Stone 1985, 249). Many more were treated and sent back to the front line. Scholars such as Stryker (2003) and Meyer (2004) have begun to question the emphasis laid on the prevalence of psychiatric conditions, popularly known as shell shock, deployed to evoke the ‘crisis of masculinity’ identified by Showalter (1987, 171) in her influential study. They suggest masculinity, rather than being undermined, was re-articulated through a culture of suffering.

All these transformations in white British masculine character had the potential to call into question explanations of imperial authority and ascendancy. The figurative presence of the enfeebled British Tommy was evident in the development of Australian identity. National narratives suggested Australian rather than the British soldiers were responsible for decisive victories, due to the robust physique and independent character at the heart of settler mythology. Such representations were sufficiently persuasive for the dissemination of counter-propaganda to be considered by the imperial authorities (Andrews 1993). It is important to underline the specific and contingent quality of these fictive representations of white British masculinity. In her chapter on the Second World War, in this volume, Inge Weber-Newth shows that, in other circumstances, the British Tommy could embody altogether more potent and appealing qualities.

Imagining the Black Male Body

As heroic images of white masculinity were eroded, representations of the black male body were deployed to revitalise masculine identities. As Frantz Fanon would later comment, ‘When the whites feel they have become too mechanized, they turn to the men of color and ask them for a little human sustenance’ (1986, 29) a process evident in the post-war popularity of the African American actor and singer, Paul Robeson (Dyer 2004) and more generally among European responses to black culture during the 1920s and 1930s (Archer-Shaw 2000; Sweeney 2004). The place of Robeson in popular culture reflected, in part, white desire for spiritual and bodily vigour, unspoilt by the horror of modern war. But while apparently underlining white frailty, Robeson's mediated presence exemplified the contradictory, ambiguous and restorative qualities of black masculinity in the white imagination. On the Western Front, ‘le soldat noir aimable’ (friendly black soldier) served as ‘society entertainer’ (Horner 1919, 50) a repository for emotions otherwise denied to white soldiers expected to sustain stoicism, rationality and self-control.

Through this lens, the black subject was looked upon as a child of nature, innately spiritual and untroubled by the cares of the modern world — a source of solace and perhaps envy to white civilisations in the depth of crisis. Ironically these representations of black masculinity, predicated on physical prowess and proximity to nature, can be traced to the emergence of colonialism, plantation slavery and postemancipation economies in the Americas (Rich 1990); features, like the war itself, of modernity, rather than the primordial. Centred on such preoccupations, suggestions of hyper-sexuality, volatility and irrationality, were never far from the surface, cap...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Studies in Migration and Diaspora
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 ‘The Black Peril’: Race, Masculinity and Migration During the First World War
• 2 Britain and the Refugees of Europe 1939-50
• 3 Bilateral Relations: British Soldiers and German Women
• 4 Male and Female Polishness in Post-war Leicester: Gender and its Intersections in a Refugee Community
• 5 Gender, Race and the Ideal Labour Force
• 6 Notions of ‘Home’ and Belonging Among Greeks in the UK
• 7 Becoming Nurses: Irish Women, Migration and Identity Through the Life Course
• 8 Spaniards in the UK — A Successful Female Post-industrial Migration
• 9 Gender and Generation in Pakistani Migration: A Critical Study of Masculinity
• 10 ‘No Job for a Grown Man’: Transformations in Labour and Masculinity among Kurdish Migrants in London
• 11 Masculinity and Migration: Life Stories of East African Asian Men
• Index