MISSIONS AND SLAVES
The first ‘colonial encounter' between European white women and black women of the colonies was in the context of two parallel endeavours. The first was the foreign missionary movement, the second was the anti-slavery campaign.
Britain had an especially large arena in which to advocate and practise missionary and reforming principles. The British West Indies and Imperial India surpassed in scale the interests of the other west European powers. France did have extensive overseas interests in the Caribbean, but the French Revolution declared the emancipation of slavery in the French colonies, and thereafter French anti-slavery activism was never such a popular cause as it was to become in Britain. In the 1790s the British churches established foreign missionary societies, whose aim was to spread Christianity and to improve the welfare of indigenous peoples. By the middle of the nineteenth century, foreign missions became the most important vehicle by which the British middle classes experienced colonised peoples, mostly indirectly through subscriptions, meetings addressed by foreign missionaries and missionary publications. From the 1810s ‘Female Societies' were established as auxiliaries to the main evangelical missionary societies. At first, women were engaged as little more than back-room helpers. However, it was soon recognised that women's special qualities might have particular value where men had failed on account of their special difficulties in gaining access to women and children. As one male missionary said in 1890, only female missionaries could ‘find their way into the zenanas [women's domestic apartments] and rescue the unhappy section of humanity they found there'.5 Women's natural piety also was regarded as a positive advantage. Christianity, it was argued, had elevated women to their rightful respected place. It was thus Christian women's duty to liberate women in the colonies from the ‘hard bondage of heathenism'.6The anti-slavery movement was a product of a similar agenda and sensibility. The early female anti-slavery campaign is important since Britain's later colonial expansion was often justified on the grounds that slavery had been abolished in their Caribbean colonies, giving rise to the view of Britain as a civilising imperial power. Moreover, the female anti-slavery campaign of the first half of the century provides a rough template for later attempts to reform the status and position of women in the colonies. By the 1860s, what has been called imperial feminism maintained a concern for women's oppression overseas, though using a language which prioritised racial inequality.7 These reforming endeavours had three things in common. Firstly, there was a belief in the superiority of western civilisation; secondly, there was an understanding that a civilised society did not tolerate ‘barbaric’ practices such as slavery which were antipathetic to the ‘natural equality of man’; and thirdly there was a belief that female emancipation was the endpoint of western progress. According to the Scottish writer Marion Kirkland Reid in 1843:
It is well known that, among savage nations, she is the menial slave of her lord; in barbarous states, she is alternately his slave and his plaything; while in lands like our own, which have made considerable progress in civilisation, though she has won herself many privileges, she is still very far from being allowed legal and social equality.8
In this context, black slavery in Britain’s Caribbean colonies was an anachronism since it did not sit well with Britain’s claim to be a civilised power. More profoundly, the advance of ‘civilisation’, the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women became linked in the bourgeois liberal thought of much of Europe.
The first stage in the anti-slavery movement was the abolition of the British slave trade, which was achieved in 1806 with the notable participation of women.
But slavery itself remained legal in the British Empire. So, a movement to free the slaves of the Empire developed strongly in the 1810s, 1820s and early 1830s, engaging mainly middle-class women in ladies’ auxiliaries and pressure groups. Ladies were staking a claim to the spiritual and moral high ground in the rescue of women and children. They applied separate spheres ideology from women’s issues at home to women’s issues within slavery. So, there was a distinctively female anti-slavery agenda, comprising compassion for the female slave, for the indignities and suffering she was forced to endure, and a sympathy for black women who were prohibited from enjoying freely what any white woman regarded as her right — family life and motherhood. Women abolitionists adapted the language of the male anti-slavery movement to their own agenda. For example, they took one key image of kneeling male slaves, with the caption ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’, and redrew it as a kneeling woman with the caption ‘Am I not a woman and a sister?’9 Slavery was being attacked not just because it was evil in a general way, but because of its distinctive humiliation and cruelty to women. The anti-slavery movement brought into being the notion that any woman would identify with any other woman in a position of vulnerability. To be torn from a child, forced into manual labour, or flogged in public was unacceptable to any woman, be she slave or free, black or white. So strong was this thrust of the women’s anti-slavery movement that it created tension with those who upheld the institution of slavery — not some ‘half-wild, benighted native Race', but middle-class women's own white Christian fathers and brothers. Women were prioritising their own enlightened Christianity as a moral evangelism superior to any that men might construct. 10 The women's movement was putting forward in the early nineteenth century what was the first widely accepted argument in white society against racism: that it denied the right of every woman to be free to experience womanhood and thus God.The anti-slavery argument put forward by women sat firmly within the bounds of appropriate gender roles. Slavery destroyed the family and the proper gender roles of men and women within that unit. Slavery separated wives from husbands and mothers from children. The proper place for a woman was in the home and not working on a sugar or cotton plantation. The strategy of female campaigners ‘brought home' the slavery issue. Less able to campaign in the political public domain, they made slavery into a domestic issue and targeted the housewife and her consumption of slave-produced products. The campaign to persuade British housewives to abstain from slave-grown sugar was part of a broader attempt to pressure the government to equalise the import duties on slave-grown and free-grown sugar in order that slave-sugar no longer enjoyed an unfair price advantage. Parliamentary campaigning was taken on by male anti-slavery activists but it was women who took the abstention campaign into the home — using pamphlets and door-to-door canvassing — public activity which merged into political campaigning as the abolitionist women progressed to petitioning and public meetings.11 The anti-slavery campaign was a crucial first step in the creation of a female collective consciousness in Britain, albeit limited to the middle classes. It provided these women with practice in public speaking and political skills which their husbands had gained by means of the 1832 Reform Act which enfranchised property-owning males. It also raised questions about the comparative position of enslaved and free women in society, prompting anti-slavery activists to challenge the power of men in the colonies and at home. Slavery and patriarchy were challenged simultaneously with the same argument from the same women.
British women, it has been argued, ‘played an important part in harnessing evangelical ideas about feminine sensitivity to the fashionable cult of sentimentalism — a sentimentalism that romanticized Africans as pathetic creatures incapable of resisting slavery themselves and promoted English women as their helpmeets and saviours.'12 Another arena in which British women sought to draw on their belief in the special ability of women to empathise with their poor sisters in the colonies was in British India and especially in respect of sati or widow-burning.
Recalling the spectre of the enslaved woman subject to flogging at the hands of her white master, campaigners against sati used the horrific image of the widow burning on her husband's funeral pyre and the fate of her orphaned children to appeal to British women's sympathy and maternal concern to improve the position of Indian women.13 But unlike the position of female slaves which was due to the white institution of slavery, the fate of Hindu women was seen as part and parcel of an uncivilised, idolatrous culture, contrasted with Christian domesticity which privileged the role of women in the family. In the case of sati, female campaigners saw their role as one of moral reform. Indeed, the very existence of the empire bestowed upon these women the power to rescue female victims of ignorance and superstition. The solution was female education. According to the Reverend William Ward, an early Baptist missionary in India, the existence of sati was directly linked to the ignorance of Indian women, and British imperialism was the means by which the ‘long degraded state' of India might be reformed.14 Under the guidance of the Christian missionary teacher Mary Anne Cooke, who established a number of girls' schools around Calcutta in the 1820s, the objective of the reformers was brought closer: the transformation of ignorant and powerless women into good Christian wives and mothers.Widow-burning was outlawed in British India in 1830. Three years later slavery was abolished in the British West Indies with the passing of the 1833 Emancipation Act. It would be misleading to claim too much credit for women's campaigning on these issues since they were already in the public political domain. What is interesting here is the approach adopted by both anti-slavery campaigners and those who wished to see the end of sati, most of whom had never set foot in the British colonies, let alone spoken to an African or Indian woman. The moral maternalist position adopted by female campaigners drew upon an evangelical tradition which was starting to inform women's philanthropic activity at home amongst the urban poor.
Middleclass campaigners and later missionaries, based their ideas ‘both on notions of cultural superiority and on a sense of identification and empathy with nonWestern women on the grounds of women's common experiences as wives, as mothers, and as widows.'15 It was not deemed necessary to listen to the voices of these oppressed women; after all, shared experience and previous work in the domestic philanthropic arena were regarded as sufficient to inform their imperial reform agenda and, as Burton points out, black voices were inconvenient and unnecessary when there were white women prepared to speak on their behalf.16 When the former British West Indies slave Mary Prince (1788—1833), attempted to tell her story in her own words in 1831 in her autobiographical The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, she was not initially believed, even by anti-slavery campaigners who required proof of the floggings she endured before they would welcome her into their fold. Moreover, it undoubtedly helped that Prince was described by her sponsor as respectable, industrious and holding ‘sincere Christian beliefs', the archetypal victim so beloved of anti-slavery campaigners.17By portraying the native woman as a helpless victim, the white woman was able to justify her engagement with the plight of black females. One of the consequences of this unequal engagement was the perpetuation of the belief that imperialism was a moral necessity, giving the state's attempts to intervene in hitherto private aspects of the indigenous culture greater legitimacy. Women campaigners were making imperialism a moral issue as they saw it. In India the attempt by the British state in 1891 to raise the age of consent for girls from 10 years to 12 years aroused intense opposition from the male population of the Indian community, yet the state's allusion to the sympathy for its position from British women suggested the anti-sati campaign a few decades earlier had had some effect.18 Middle-class women's actions on behalf of female slaves and the ‘culturally oppressed' were no doubt well-intentioned. Many were truly shocked at the condition of enslaved women and children and indigenous women who appeared to have no rights. Yet, these early reform missions were informed by white women's conception of the Christian family and of separate spheres. They exported their idea of home and women's elevated place within it, thereby privileging their own conception of the gender order over that of other cultures. And in doing so, of course, these early reformers helped to legitimate the colonial project.