DOMESTICATING THE EMPIRE

In the nineteenth-century imagination, the empire was an extension of home rather than a foreign place. By 1900, when the major west European powers had consolidated their imperial holdings, the human and commercial inter­course between home and the colonies was of such significance that the two formed a continuum.

British Dominions of Canada, South Africa and Australia — and the domestic market could benefit from the commercial advantages to be accrued from overseas possessions. From the perspective of European women, the empire was to become part of the domestic interior whilst, at the same time, those women who went to live and work in the colonies were exporting a set of gender roles and ideologies designed to remake colonial culture into the image of home, what McLintock describes as ‘imperial commodity racism'.²⁰

West Europeans, at least those living in the metropolitan and provincial cities, were familiar with empire. They collected money for foreign missions, they had relatives who had gone there, they campaigned on behalf of imper­ial subjects and they consumed its products. The presence of empire in the domestic imagination was ubiquitous by 1900. Imports of cotton provided work for thousands of working-class women who then aspired to purchase imperial consumer goods such as tea, coffee, sugar, rice and spices. The luxury goods found in so many European homes — soap, toothpaste, bis­cuits, tobacco — and more prosaic commodities such as bootlaces, toffees and bleach, were packaged and advertised emblazoned with imperial imagery bringing the empire right into people's front rooms.

Outside the European home one did not have to go far to be confronted with further reminders of empire. There were endless colonial exhibitions to visit: the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, the 1908 Franco- British Exhibition, and numerous other smaller-scale ‘entertainments' serv­ing as reminders of the educational and commercial value of the colonial encounter. Across Europe, what would now be described as freak shows were dressed up as scientific exhibits, appealing to the middle classes' hunger for pseudo-intellectual satisfaction and to popular desire for amusement. European cities were regularly visited by circuses, menageries and travelling exhibits featuring representations of ‘exotic' races and ‘savages' and, by the end of the century, museums featured native peoples plucked from their homelands and served up as anthropological exhibits which applauded the imperial adventure and reinforced racial and sexual stereotypes. The exhibi­tion of the black South African woman, Sara Bartman, in England early in the century served both to bring the colonies to England and, at the same time, to reaffirm the distance and difference between the races. Sara, most probably a slave, was not exhibited as a freak but as an exemplar of her race, featuring what were regarded as abnormally large buttocks, and as such she came to represent the ‘sexualised savage'.²² The men and women who went to see Sara Bartman not only came to view the Empire and all it stood for but, as Yvette Abrams argues, reinforced the sexualised and racial stereo­types applied to black and to white women.

European women were familiar with the idea of empire from encounter­ing its images, even unconsciously, in their everyday lives. This familiarity helped to inform women's responses when the empire impinged upon their personal lives. The wives of colonial administrators regarded indi­genous women as other, whilst single women eagerly responded to appeals for female missionaries, and professional women regarded work in the imperial possessions as an opportunity to pursue a career barred to them at home. Crucially, the empire was not regarded as an alien land of discovery, but as something already understood and an opportunity for altruism or self-advancement.

Female emigration to the colonies was encouraged by officially sponsored organisations such as the Society for the Emigration of Women to the Col­onies established in France in 1897, the Women's Division of the Colonial Society in Germany and the Church Missionary Societies in Britain, as well as the British Women's Emigration Society. This was the start of a significant influx of mainly single women into the colonies and dominions to work as domestic servants, teachers, nurses, nannies and governesses. These societies sponsored around 20,000 British women between 1884 and 1914, most of whom went to South Africa and Canada. In a domestic atmosphere extolling the virtues of marriage and motherhood, the position of the single woman was problematic. By sending these so-called surplus women overseas they could become part of the national regeneration and reform project. ‘Without marriages, without families, there will be no future colonies', remarked one French supporter of the programme.²³ ‘Although French women may have been invested with a modernizing mission abroad,' comments Janet Horne, ‘this mission remained rooted in the general cult of domesticity and mother­hood long established as a nineteenth century archetype.'²⁴ In Germany, the patriotic and nationalist Colonial Society assisted the emigration of young women to South-West Africa to become domestic servants there in order to help prevent racial mixing between German settlers and Africans and to help ensure the maintenance of German values and customs.²⁵ It was accepted by one English emigration association that women who initially went to work as servants or lady's helps in rural areas of South Africa almost inevitably made their way to Johannesburg because that was where all the men were.

Women who decided to become missionaries were given a rather different objective. British missionaries were sent to India with the express purpose of gaining access to ‘secluded' Asian women whose degraded and oppressed condition was attributed to their confinement in the zenana. These women were then taught how to become good wives and mothers, thereby establish­ing ‘the critical bulwark against heathenism'.²⁷ Thus, the characteristics ascribed to the ‘good woman' at home — moral, spiritual, self-sacrificing and modernising (in the sense that she imbibed the lessons of education, social hygiene and infant welfare) — were transported to the colonies and held up as a model to native women who needed to be instructed in good practices. Women's position in the household was the key to the reform of society at large.²⁸ Ironically, these female missionaries were preaching a nineteenth­century model of marriage and domesticity that they themselves had forgone for independent employment. As Jane Haggis remarks, ‘the lady missionary negotiates her way out of the garden along a path of convention rather than a path of rebellion'.²⁹

These apparently unconventional missionary women — at least in the case of Britain — were not rejecting nineteenth-century female stereotypes, but rather carrying out their duty to God. This combination of unconventional­ity and commitment to the Christian cause overseas can be found in the figure of Mary Slessor (1848—1915), Scotland's most famous female mission­ary. Slessor grew up in a working-class, Presbyterian weaving family in Dun­dee where she regularly attended mission visits in the slums of the city.