UNIVERSAL SISTERHOOD
Philanthropic or missionary work, whether at home or overseas, had the potential to transcend the differences between women of different classes and races, allowing women to identify with one another.
Just as middle-class women drew on their identity as wives and mothers to reach out to workingclass women at home, likewise the domestic maternal image was used by anti-slavery campaigners and missionaries concerned at the plight of Asian and African women in the European colonies. But, these women did little to dismantle class and race hierarchies. Indeed, it was not until the interwar years that white women, at home and overseas, began to examine their own complicity in the capitalist and colonial agendas which determined the fate of oppressed working-class and native women. Instead, white middle-class women used the image of the degraded, downtrodden and oppressed woman — whether she was the victim of a drunken husband, a ‘backward’ culture or a superstitious belief system — in order to stake a claim to their own emancipation. Their cause was dependent on the predicament of their working-class and black sisters.White women who sought citizenship of the imperial nation-state used the image of the native woman as victim in order to bolster their claims. Antoinette Burton has argued, in the context of the British Empire in India, that feminists represented ‘Indian women as a colonial clientele dependent on the goodwill and uplift of their British sisters, whose support of India’s women in turn... guaranteed the future stability of the British empire itself.’53 Similarly, claims to municipal and parliamentary representation on the part of female philanthropists on the domestic scene, especially those engaged in temperance work, were fashioned on the backs of working-class women and children — the victims of the demon drink — thereby contributing to the uplift of the working class and the maintenance of the imperial nationstate by means of a healthier labour force and a more stable working-class domesticity.
In the colonies and in the urban slums, domesticity ‘rooted in European gender and class roles was transformed into domesticity as controlling a colonised people.’54 Domesticity had provided white middle-class women with the strength and the justification to traverse the ideological divide between the private and public spheres. Having done so they now used their new-found position to argue for their own civil and political rights.Feminist historians have come to see the development of modern western feminism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as shaped by imperial culture. The links between feminism and imperialism were probably strongest in Britain, but it is also clear that in France and in Germany elements of the women's movement drew upon imperial discourses, both in their campaigns to improve the condition of women in the colonies but also to bolster arguments for women’s rights at home. The beginnings of imperial feminism, as the phenomenon has been described, anticipated the main period of European colonial expansion in the second half of the century. Its antecedents can be traced to early writers on the woman question who had a tendency to characterise non-western societies as backward compared with the civilized culture of Europe. Catherine Macaulay (1731—91), Mary Wollstonecraft, Marion Kirkland Reid and Harriet Taylor Mill (1807—56) set up an opposition between Oriental or ‘barbaric’ societies on the one hand, in which women were little better than slaves, and on the other hand, the West, which was further along the road from savagery to civilisation. Female subordination was regarded as an anachronism in a civilised society; female emancipation was the culmination of western progress.55 It was this mode of thinking that informed the anti-slavery and anti-sati campaigns in Britain, but these had another consequence: they engaged women in public, political activity analogous to women’s involvement in temperance work and campaigns around sexuality later in the century.
The writing of pamphlets and the petitioning and campaigning activities undertaken in the name of the suffering slaves and widows, not only provided women with organisational experience and networking skills, although this was important in itself, but also established a recognised and legitimate sphere of public activity for middle-class women — ‘an appropriate area of female concern’.56 Furthermore, it put women’s opinions firmly in the political sphere at a time when women did not have the vote. And finally, these campaigns put women in touch with, like-minded women, encouraging a collective identity as they assembled a distinctively female approach to the method of campaigning and to the issues at hand. According to Clare Midgley:anti-slavery propelled women into independently organising together for political ends, into developing an approach to campaigning which was rooted in concern for other women, into emphasising their own responsibility for the perpetuation of slavery and thus viewing themselves as responsible adults, and into challenging men on policy matters and thus acknowledging that their views were not always adequately represented by their male colleagues.57
One could make similar remarks about women’s involvement in the temperance campaigns in western Europe. Women concerned about the corrosive effects of alcohol on the working-class family and, driven by a sense of Christian moral mission, knocked on doors, canvassed support for the cause, wrote pamphlets and organised petitions — a decidedly female style of activism which translated, for some, into a political (feminist) consciousness. The links between anti-slavery and the campaign for female suffrage are not direct but they are present. For liberal feminists active on the domestic and the colonial fronts, the campaign for female suffrage was predicated upon a belief in the superiority of white, middle-class culture. Political representation would allow women to bring their superior morality to bear on the political stage.
Thus a shift in thinking took place in the decades between the 1820s and the 1860s. By the time of the emergence of what we now call first-wave feminism, the empire was so much a constitutive element of west European identity that what had been framed as the duty of the privileged European woman (that is supporting enslaved and oppressed women in the colonies against their imperial masters) had become a claim to white woman's emancipation within the imperial nation. This was especially the case in Britain where men had already achieved a shift in identity from colonisers to imperial citizens by means of the 1867 Reform Act which enfranchised all ratepaying adult male occupiers.58 Middle-class male identity had been constructed around men's ‘assertion of their superiority over the decadent aristocracy, over dependent females, over children, servants and employees, over the peoples of the Empire, whether in Ireland, India or Jamaica, over all others who were not English, male and middle class.'59 White, middle-class women were to travel a similar road somewhat later, staking a claim for their citizenship upon their superiority over colonised women. Alongside European women's acceptance of imperialism was their inherent racism so that colonised women became the ‘white woman's burden', conveniently ignoring the fact that in some cultures women possessed greater freedoms and rights than the European women who promised to liberate them.60Interestingly, few late nineteenth century feminists had first-hand experience of the empire. One of those who did was the French radical feminist Hubertine Auclert (1848—1914). Having been an outspoken advocate of women's suffrage since the 1870s, Auclert left France in 1888 to live in Algeria for four years, until the death of her husband precipitated her return home. On observing the degraded position of the Arab woman in Algeria and in particular condemning practices such as child marriage — or what Auclert called child rape — polygyny and the absence of female education, she became an audacious campaigner for improvements in the rights of Algerian women.
In her Les femmes arabes en Algerie published in 1900, Auclert showed that whilst she shared the assumption of moral superiority of her European sisters, at the same time she was sensitive to the fact that French rule had degraded rather than improved the position of Arab women. French male colonisers, she argued, had colluded with Arab males in the subjection of Arab women under Islamic laws. A combination of race and gender prejudice on the part of European colonisers had left women ‘little victims of Muslim debauchery.'61 Her solution was borrowed from her experiences at home in France: the position of Arab women would be improved only if they were granted French citizenship rights. At the same time though, Auclert held to the belief that the enfranchisement of French women would lead to concrete changes in French colonial policy. ‘If women in France were accorded their share of power, they would not permit in a French territory the existence of a law allowing the rape of children.'62 Thus, although Auclert, like her British sisters, had great faith in women's civilising influence, holding little respect for indigenous customs and culture, she was not blind to the degenerative impact of the colonising power and in this respect her stance resembles that of the early British anti-slavery activists rather than her contemporary ‘imperial feminists'. The writer and feminist Olive Schreiner, who was born in South Africa to missionary parents and lived there until the age of 26, was more critical of British policy in Africa. A supporter of the enfranchisement of all Africans, she resigned from the British Women's Enfranchisement League when it limited its campaign to white women.63 However, it was not until the interwar years that feminists and reformers in France and Britain began to formulate a new vision of colonial womanhood, one which ascribed the agency for change to the colonised women themselves.64Clearly, universal sisterhood as it was advocated by European feminists before the First World War was not built upon foundations of racial equality. White women adopted moral superiority in their dealings with women in the colonies and assumed that the trajectory of progress experienced at home, encompassing a steady acquisition of legal and political rights, was also relevant to non-white women from quite different religious cultures and social traditions. Women's mission to women in the imperial context was carried out in a spirit of empathy and good intentions but it was to be challenged by the ‘beneficiaries' who went on to develop their own routes to emancipation.