NO PLACE FOR A WHITE WOMAN
Until recently, empire has been portrayed as a male adventure populated by explorers, diplomats and civil servants. Women, in this narrative, were regarded as out of place in a tough, man's world.
They have walk-on parts as dependent wives or as nurses and missionaries, and they are invariably portrayed as obsessed with class and race status, and with maintaining rituals more appropriate to upper-class European society. But, women in the Empire were implicitly charged with preserving ‘civilisation', and in order to fulfil this role they reverted to what they knew best.34 Dressing for dinner, organising lavish cocktail parties, refusing to wear the more practical local clothing, all helped these women to preserve a veneer of ‘civilised behaviour' in a society in which they felt uncomfortable. Moreover, all European families in the colonies had servants, something not all would have been able to afford at home, which not only meant that European women lived leisured lives but also reduced the necessity to engage with indigenous society.Shopping in the bazaars and markets — often regarded as risky places for a white woman — could be avoided, as could any real understanding of native people's actual circumstances. As a result, these European women who isolated themselves within their white compounds and social circles only intensified the racial divide. Of course, unlike the missionaries, most colonial wives and daughters had not chosen to live overseas, but had dutifully followed their menfolk. In the absence of a mission to rescue and reform, these women were more concerned to protect themselves in an inhospitable country which presented all kinds of hazards. Creating a European-style home life overseas was, for many women, the only way they knew to cope with cultural disorientation and fear of the unknown.
It is for these reasons, or so it was said, that the arrival of white women caused a deterioration in race relations.
Colonial white women were regarded as an unsettling, disturbing presence, unwilling to accept the fragile consensus between colonisers and colonised which could include a tacit acceptance of sexual relations between white men and native women. White men felt obliged to protect their womenfolk from ‘predatory' native men. Women were not always welcomed by men in the bush,' commented Monica Cardew in A.C.G. Hastings' novel Gone Native, set in Nigeria. ‘Women meant afternoon calls, ties and collars, a sense of social duties often out of keeping with the life of work and play which men lead in the wilds.'35 In E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), the character of Miss Quested fills the role of the destabilising female force who arrives in India to marry a white man, only to involve herself in Indian life to the disapproval and unease of the British community. Her accusation of assault against an Indian doctor who had accompanied her on a visit to the Mirabar Caves, and her subsequent withdrawal of the accusation at the trial, is a story indicative of the way in which white women were seen as potentially destabilising if they did not adhere to the unspoken rules of colonial society which promulgated the avoidance of racial mixing in a social context.But we should be wary of accepting these assertions that white women's presence led to a worsening of race relations. In colonial Nigeria, women themselves appear not to have expressed a sexual fear of African men, and indeed were happy to go about their business freely and in safety. Rather, the notion that white women needed to be protected was a symbolic device used by colonial men, both to maintain control over the subordinate racial group and over white women themselves. The white woman who developed anything more than mistress-servant relations with a native male was supposedly endangering the safety of all white women who were now the prey of licentious native men. She threatened the hierarchies of race, class and gender established by male colonisers.
Women who transgressed these boundaries found themselves in an impossible position. The case of Alice Hume, the wife of the British government prosecutor in India, is a prime example of how precarious a white woman's place was in the Raj. By 1883 Alice had endured ten years of stifling boredom, and had an affair with Giridhari Mehter, a young Indian servant. The response of her husband James was first to beat his wife and then to act on the advice of British lawyers which was to prosecute the servant with a series of offences, including attempted rape, in order to deflect the scandal that would inevitably ensue if the truth was known. In court, Alice betrayed her young lover, backing her husband and the white colonial community in the knowledge that her reputation and that of her husband was at stake. Mehter was found guilty and transported, and the fragile equilibrium resting upon racial, gender and class inequalities, was maintained.36From around the 1890s, though, the role of European women in the colonies was beginning to be regarded differently. Darwinism and eugenic ideas of race science were accelerating the separation of races in colonial administration. British colonial officers were under new pressure to refrain from sexual relations with native women, on the grounds that such behaviour could result in a destabilisation of authority relations between administrators and native peoples. Racial mixing, or miscegenation, came to be feared by colonial governments. This focused attention on white women. Instead of being viewed as destabilising to good imperial government, women emerged from the 1880s onwards, as agents of the policing of racial and sexual boundaries. Women at home in Europe were being exalted as mothers, and as the solution to the deteriorating condition of army recruits (notably in Britain during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899—1902). It was women's duty to produce good quality babies for European powers to sustain political, economic and imperial power.
It was at this moment that single women arrived in European colonies in ever greater numbers — as teachers, nurses and missionaries. It was these single women, rather than colonial wives, who were expected to patrol the ‘boundary' between white and black races. As single women they were most definitely required in imperial culture to be sexually unavailable to native men. The symbolic role of the single white woman was to signal racial difference and ultimately contribute to the strengthening of the white race by marrying white men.Other colonial powers were as concerned as Britain about racial degeneration by the turn of the century, as more and more women became resident in the colonies. In the German colonies of South-West Africa, East Africa and Samoa, mixed marriage was banned in the context of German fears of a threat to colonial rule, a situation that was, incidentally, supported by some German colonialist women who argued that only they could carry out the female cultural tasks in the colonies, thus staking their own claim for inclusion in the colonial project.37 In the Dutch East Indies the popularity of eugenic ideas and fears about the decline of the white population there resulted in miscegenation being discouraged, in complete contrast with the earlier decades of colonial rule when interracial unions were condoned as facilitators of good colonial relations.38 Similarly, in French Cambodia, where male administrators had traditionally kept Cambodian concubines, warnings about interracial liaisons between French officials and native women were issued from the 1890s against background fears about declining births amongst the French middle classes. In French West Africa too, fears about racial degeneration and about the potential for rebellion amongst the metis — the mixed-blood offspring of interracial unions — served to justify a stricter set of rules regarding morals and hygiene.39 The colonies were henceforth regarded as alternative sites for the regeneration of France itself.
Increasing numbers of single women were encouraged to emigrate, thus providing a potential pool of French wives for colonial officials and a means of transplanting European domesticity on foreign soil.40 The export of women to the colonies thus served to drive a wedge between the European and indigenous communities; it was woman's duty to ‘create France' overseas both by establishing a European domesticity and by reproducing.41 Thus white women's bodies in the colonies, even more so than at home, carried the symbolism of racial and cultural identity. In Cambodia, for example, the role of the white Frenchwoman was strictly circumscribed. White women were there to keep the boundaries, by wearing European clothing and protecting themselves from the sun, by upholding French traditions and cuisine and by not straying from the European compounds into ‘native spaces' such as the market.42 In Dutch Indonesia, household servants in effect protected European women from the contamination of the indigenous culture so that the European household could be maintained as an oasis of cleanliness and hygiene.43 At the same time, the bodies of indigenous women bore a negative value; their sexuality was increasingly defined as dangerous and polluting, thus helping to sustain the image of the asexual white woman.44By 1900, European women increasingly came to be accepted as a desirable addition to colonial society. Wives, missionaries and single professional women were encouraged to go as a means of relieving the surplus of women at home and contributing to the regeneration of the white race abroad. Indeed, from being regarded in 1850 as ‘no place for a white woman', the colonies came to be seen by 1900 as spaces where white woman could contribute to the maintenance of a stable society based on unequal racial and class hierarchies.45 Initially seen as a destructive force, European women were eventually crucial to the continuity of empire.