CIVILISING INITIATIVES
The European imperial project was regarded as a civilising as well as a commercial process. The role of European women in the attempt to bring civilisation to colonial subjects was paramount, especially since the position and status of indigenous women was so often used as the yardstick for a more general assessment of social, economic and cultural progress in any particular colony.
‘It seems to me that in all the countries of the world the condition of woman allows us to evaluate the social state of a people, their mores and level of civilisation', wrote a French military officer in Algeria in the 1840s.46 It almost goes without saying that the model against which the indigenous woman's degraded status was judged was the white, European middle-class, Christian woman. And against the background of imperial discourse which privileged western ideals of family and domesticity over other cultural traditions, western women almost unquestioningly saw their role as one of rescue and reform of the female victim of native superstitions and practices. As Midgley explains in respect of the British campaign against sati in India: ‘English women's campaigning on behalf of Indian women was made possible by the context of British imperial rule in India, and shaped by missionary beliefs about non-Western peoples: their innate capacity, regardless of biologically-defined “race”, to become civilized; and their present cultural inferiority.'47 Western women's ‘equality' was set against the perceived oppression of women in societies where patriarchy was seen to be underpinned by (non-Christian) religious belief and custom.Throughout the European empire and at home, female evangelicals, missionaries, philanthropists and feminists addressed a whole range of practices and belief systems they regarded as signifying the ‘uncivilised' character of indigenous society.
Sati, genital mutilation, child marriage, polygamy, female seclusion and the veil, were just some of the cultural practices in Hindu and Islamic societies deemed to necessitate urgent intervention by white women in the name of ‘women's mission to women' and in the name of the civilising process. It was only later in the nineteenth century, when organised feminism was beginning to make inroads in European society, that western women began to seize on the condition of women in the colonies as a political cause under the umbrella of ‘universal sisterhood'. However, at the heart of all reform efforts was the belief that women would only enjoy an improved status through education. This was the key to greater autonomy for women and, as western women saw it, the means of their escape from superstition, seclusion and oppression by their own menfolk.The anti-slavery and anti-sati campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s did act as an impetus in Britain for women to travel to the colonies to make a difference on the ground rather than from afar. They initially went as missionaries and teachers and then as doctors and nurses, making careers for themselves, but in their encounters with native women they helped to shape and perpetuate an image of them as victims of ‘bad (Indian/Asian/African) patriarchy' whilst European women were spreading the values of ‘good (white) patriarchy'.48 Although the image of the single female missionary suggests a degree of resistance to the dominant values of domesticity and separate spheres which so constricted middle-class women's horizons in the late nineteenth century, in fact the educational work carried out by these women in the colonies all too frequently sought to reproduce precisely the model of the good Christian wife and mother left behind, if not entirely rejected, by the missionaries themselves. Female missionaries were expressly preferred to male in some spheres since only they could penetrate the seclusion of the Asian woman. Missionary women portrayed themselves as answering a calling to help their sisters who were portrayed as helpless victims of an abusive system.
Once they gained access to the female world, though, women missionaries refrained from offering to Asian women the opportunities and freedoms they themselves had grasped, preferring to transform them into good Christian wives and mothers. As Jane Haggis argues in her study of British missionaries to India, missionary work was emancipatory but not necessarily for Indian women; it was the missionaries themselves who experienced freedom from domesticity whilst consigning their Indian sisters to just such a model.49 Even women doctors, who perhaps most personified the image of the newly emancipated, educated single woman, often regarded healing the souls just as important as healing the bodies of the women they treated.50Cultural imperialism was not restricted to the British. Albeit well- intentioned, white female missionaries carried with them western prejudices about indigenous cultures and the place of women. In practice this meant that colonial encounters between Europeans and native women were characterised by misunderstandings, and an arrogance on the part of the former in assuming that improvements for women, or ‘emancipation’, could only come about through an acceptance of western social models of social progress. In Dutch Sumatra (what is now Indonesia), for instance, there was a clear mismatch between missionaries’ aims and native peoples’ own understandings of the position of women. Missionary work centring on education, health and infant welfare, and sewing was shaped by the belief that women’s work was incompatible with marriage and motherhood whilst, amongst the Karo peoples, women traditionally carried out much of the work in the fields, prompting missionaries to regard the women as virtual slaves to their menfolk. With the practice of polygyny (the practice of men taking more than one wife) and bride payments, it is easy to see why the Dutch Christian missionaries saw female education as the key to women’s ‘emancipation’ in Sumatra.
However, the outcome was not what the missionaries expected or wanted. Karo women certainly took advantage of the educational and training opportunities but not in order to emulate the European missionary wife, but rather for their own needs.51The status of women was used as a measure of civilisation, with western Europe used as the model of civilised society. The ‘Asiatic’ or ‘Oriental’ woman was invariably represented as oppressed by a religion and culture described as heathen or despotic. The widow on the funeral pyre, the veiled and secluded Muslim, the child bride and even the working woman, were all legitimate targets for rescue and reform in order that colonial society might progress towards an image of the paternal/maternal colonial power. In these colonial encounters on foreign soil, women’s mission to women was doubleedged. European women did draw attention to some of the worst discriminatory practices experienced by women and they did bring about some improvements. ‘Fewer women were burned or had their genitals cut’, in Strobel’s words.52 Also, more women received an education and more mothers and babies survived. On the other hand it is hard to escape the conclusion that white women gained more for themselves than they achieved in the name of their Asian or African sisters. Their commitment to Christian conversion and to the western model of middle-class domesticity informed their limited concept of emancipation and amounted to an extension and even a legitimation of colonial authority. Thus, far from criticising the imperial project, female missionaries, reformers and even teachers and health workers contributed to its continuation.