Bridging cross-cultural feminisms: annie besant and women's rights in England and India, 1874-1933

Abstract

Annie Besant was a Victorian radical whose outspoken views included advocacy of women's rights and opposition to British imperial policies. In her mid-forties she went to live in India. Contesting British attempts to Westernize Indian society, Besant found herself in the seemingly anomalous position of defending traditional Indian patriarchy and resisting efforts to reform the status of Indian women. Such conservatism brought on Besant criticism not only from Western liberals and Christian missionaries, but also from many Indian social reformers. When she gradually shifted her views and voiced her support for Indian women's rights, Indian nationalists condemned her as a British imperialist. The conflict between loyalty to national heritage and opposition to traditional patriarchy is one that colonized women have commonly experienced. By examining how an anti-imperialist British feminist responded to the question of women's reform in India, this paper offers another perspective on the complexities of this dilemma.     

Forgotten Feminists: the Federation of British Professional and Business Women, 1933–1969

Using archive documents of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (BFBPW) this article explores the role of this early business organisation in campaigning for feminist issues in the post‐war period. It argues that the BFBPW is indicative of the complexities of the women’s movement in the post‐suffrage era when it fragmented into interconnecting campaigning organisations around a multitude of women’s issues. The article suggests that businesswomen in this period acted in ways that anticipated modern ‘femocratic’ practice in the way they sought to use business networks to gain access to parliamentary policy networks.     

A survey of rural migration and land reclamation in India, 1885

In 1885 W. W. Hunter, Director‐General of Statistics in India, sent out a circular to all district officers enquiring about rural migration, land reclamation, and the ways in which government or private capitalists could aid reclamation schemes. The present article is based upon the replies which Hunter received. These contain much valuable information: on deserted villages, seasonal migration, the role of forest tribes as the vanguard of land reclamation, scarcity of labour as an obstacle to land reclamation in some areas in contrast with large‐scale coolie emigration from other areas, the limited ability of government to provide aid and guidance to land reclamation schemes, and some instances of successful capitalist ventures in this field. It is suggested that this information may be seen in the light of the methodological discussion on the definition of peasantry on the one hand and Boserup's theory relating demographic features and systems of agricultural production on the other (the latter being of particular importance since it leads to an appreciation of the regional setting of the peasantry process). The relationship between the state and the peasantry is also touched upon.     

Medical careers and health care for Indian women: patterns of control

Abstract

In the 1880s reform-minded men and women in Great Britain had joined the missionaries and a number of Indian reformers in demanding that Western medical care be extended to Indian women. The subjects of their concern were high-status Indian women who observed the norms of seclusion. British women, at this time entering the medical profession, supported this initiative because it legitimized their professional goals and promised employment. This paper explores the introduction of medical care for Indian women with reference to the life of Dr Haimavati Sen (c. 1867-1932), ‘lady doctor’ in charge of an exclusively women's hospital in Hughli district of Bengal. The paper explores two issues: the ways in which imperialism, feminism, and racism worked to marginalize Indian women in professional medical roles and the impact of this process upon women as patients and clients.     

Negotiating Female Morality: place,ideology and agency in the Red River Colony

By 1850 British women had settled in the Red River colony, a British outpost in what became the province of Manitoba, Canada, and where the Hudson’s Bay Company established fur trading posts. Through an analysis of documents concerning two unconnected lawsuits involving Countryborn women, it is possible to glean some understanding of how British women became agents of colonialism. Company authorities envisaged that White women would establish households predicated on Victorian patriarchal ideology that defined separate spheres for men and women. This article maps how White women stereotyped non‐White women as ‘Other,’ manipulated their symbolic role as mothers of the English nation, and used rumour to maintain a segregated settlement. It also explores the agency of these White women as they sought to establish a place for themselves through their struggles with one another, with First Nations and Countryborn women, as well as with the White men who ruled the colony.

The establishment at which we encamped last night, may be considered the boundary between the Civilized and Savage Worlds, as beyond this point, the country is uninhabited by Whites, except where a Trading Post of the Honourable Hudson’s Bay Company occasionally presents itself. ¹ [1] Hudson’s’ Bay Company Archives (HBCA) D6/4, Frances Simpson’s Journal, 5 May 1830. In 1830, Frances Ramsey Simpson was the eighteen‐year‐old English wife and first cousin of Sir George Simpson, the Governor of Rupert’s Land. View all notes     

Gertrude Tuckwell and the British Labour Movement, 1891–1921: a study in motives and influences

This article adopts a biographical approach to examine the politicization of a woman activist, Gertrude Tuckwell (1861–1951), in the British labour movement at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the influence of Tuckwell's radical background and argues that her loyalty and sense of duty towards her family shaped and directed the nature of her social and political work. With emphasis on the years between 1891, when she began to work for the Women's Trade Union League, and 1921, when this organization was transferred to the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, it is argued that these characteristics have contributed to her neglect within British labour history, which has tended to foreground those women whose leadership roles have been easier to define.     

Writing the Story of the Last Nawab of Bengal’s English Family

On 15 May 1870, the Nawab of Bengal married Sarah Vennell, a seventeen-year-old English chambermaid, in a Shia Muslim wedding ceremony, making her his fourth permanent or Nikah wife. They lived in England for ten years, and had six children. The Nawab’s liaison with what British officials called ‘a woman of mean extraction’ was a contributing factor when he was persuaded by the British government to abdicate in1880, give up many of his claims and allow the permanent abolition of his title. In that same year the Nawab formed a liaison with another maid and later returned to India with this maid and his and Sarah’s four surviving children, leaving Sarah in England. Their youngest son, my grandfather, changed his name and emigrated to Australia in 1925. This essay describes my gradual discovery in Australia of my Indian ancestors and the issues I confronted when trying to write their story. It includes an extract in which I describe my grandfather’s childhood in India.     

A picturesque travelogue: Mary Wollstonecraft's “letters written during a short residence in Sweden,Norway, and Denmark”, 1796

The article presents a reading of Mary Wollstonecraft's “Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark”, dated 1796, in which the concept of the Picturesque is used as an analytical framework. The Picturesque is a contemporary British aesthetics concerned with how we look at landscape, and with the aestheticism of viewing. It is suggested that the Picturesque offers a new way of understanding Mary Wollstonecraft's position in‐between Enlightenment and Romanticism, Revolution and Restoration, authorship and journalism.     

The roots of rural agitation in India, 1914–1947: A reply to Hardiman

This constitutes a reply to David Hardiman's recent criticism of my article on the middle peasant thesis and its applicability to late colonial India. It challenges Hardiman's notion of the middle peasantry as too narrow and not the indisputable Leninist definition. Further, it emphasizes the emergence of a more flexible agrarian economy and society which, whilst not necessarily ‘capitalist’, renders redundant the concept of a traditional middle peasantry. Finally, Hardiman's interpretation of the Bardoli campaign of 1928 and its implications for understanding rural agitations in British India are critically examined.     

‘The Trojan Horse’: Communist Entrism in the British Labour Party, 1933–43

Abstract

Entrism – the infiltration of political organisations by competitors – is typically associated with Trotskyism. Large-scale Communist entrism in the British Labour Party has been neglected by historians and reference in the literature is slight and impressionistic. Archival material permits reconstruction of a sustained attempt by the Comintern and British Communists to subvert Labour Party policy between 1933 and 1943. Documenting the development and dimensions of Communist entrism, this article establishes that, by 1937, 10% of Communist Party (CPGB) members were operating secretly inside British Labour, campaigning to change its policy on affiliation and engineer a Popular Front. Biographies of 55 such Communists provide new data and permit a typology of entrist activity. The episode sheds new light on Popular Front initiatives and the extent of genuine support for them within Labour. It illuminates the conspiratorial side of Stalinist activity at a time when the CPGB presented itself as a conventional British party.     

Gender and Modernity in Post‐War British Cinema; a case study of Young Wives’ Tale (1951)

This article explores the interrelationship between gender and modernity within the context of post‐war Britain, focusing upon the representation of women in the popular film genre of the ‘marriage comedy’. It uses a case study of the 1951 film Young Wives’ Tale to explore post‐war ideas about the ‘companionate marriage’ and the emergence of a ‘modern’ British society. Critical examination of female performance style and the gendered negotiation of domestic space within the film suggests the ways in which anxieties about the ‘new’ and the ‘modern’ are displaced onto the female protagonists. The article explores the ways in which ‘tradition’ is usurped in the film and concludes that it was a box office failure because it was out of step with the cultural consciousness of post‐war cinema audiences. The film’s lack of success demonstrates the extent and manner to which gender relations could be challenged in the early 1950s.     

Women's studies and the women's movement in Britain: origins and evolution, 1970–2000

The article is based on research carried out in 1998-99 which involved interviewing United Kingdom based women who had been responsible for introducing degree courses in women's studies into British universities and polytechnics. The interviews are records of the memories of those women as they look back on a political moment when they were engaged in collective attempts to transform the academic curriculum. Personal memories are placed alongside accounts and debates which appeared in printed sources, such as books and newsletters from the British Women's liberation movement from 1970 onwards. The article also reflects on the process in which past events and personal memoirs move from stories to histories, enter the archive, and begin to acquire the status of history.     

An echo in France of the British women’s suffrage campaign

ABSTRACT

The reputation of the suffragettes and the Pankhurst family in France was often considered to be too militant for the French journal La Française. This feminist journal praised the suffragettes whilst keeping a distance from such ‘trouble-makers’. This was a complex acceptance. In particular, from 1912, when some suffragettes engaged in violent tactics, the journal began calling for non-violent actions. After the Representation of the People Act was passed in 1918, La Francaise waited ten months to rejoice in this news. Now it began to suggest that British women were showing French women how to win their own enfranchisement, which was not granted until 1944. A few weeks before the 1928 Equal Franchise Act, the journal praised more and more Emmeline Pankhurst's radical spirit. This article suggests that the British suffragette movement had an influence on the women’s suffrage campaign in France although often in complex and contradictory ways.     

M. L. Darling and the Punjab peasant in prosperity and debt: A fresh look

More than half a century ago M. L. Darling contended that the volume and burden of debt in the Punjab province of British India were higher for the more prosperous farmers or areas. This thesis has enjoyed considerable intellectual respect over the years. The present article attempts a closer inspection of Darling's data and argues that though the prosperous farmers had a larger volume of debt its incidence was lower. The findings of the All‐India Rural Credit Survey (1951–52) corroborate this contention.     

The New Economy,Class Condescension and Caring Labour: Changing Formations of Class and Gender

An argument about the declining significance of class and gender as structural constraints in British society has become common in mainstream sociological theory. Mobility, reflexivity, and detraditionalization are seen as key characteristics of a post‐Fordist, post‐structural society. In feminist theory, however, debates about the reconstitution of class and gender, as well as the symbolic meaning of class, challenge assumptions about detraditionalization. I assess these arguments through an exploration of the consequences of women's changing labour market position and the contradictions between employment and caring responsibilities. I argue that emerging class differences and widening inequalities between women, as well as new class relationships in the home, should be explored further.     

‘The Defection of Women’: the New Zealand Contagious Diseases Act repeal campaign and transnational feminist dialogue in the late nineteenth century

Over the past decade, historians have situated feminist reformers’ efforts to dismantle the British imperial contagious diseases apparatus at the heart of the transnational turn in women's history. New Zealand was an early emulator of British prostitution regulations, which provoked an organised repeal campaign in the 1880s, yet the colony is seldom considered in these debates. Tracing the dialogue concerning the repeal of contagious diseases legislation between British and New Zealand feminists in the 1890s, this article reaffirms the salience of political developments in the settler colonies for metropolitan reformers. A close reading of these interactions, catalysed by the Auckland Women's Liberal League's endorsement of the Act in 1895, reveals recently enfranchised New Zealand women's desire to act as model citizens for the benefit of metropolitan suffragists. Furthermore, it highlights the asymmetries that remained characteristic of the relationship between British feminists and their enfranchised Antipodean counterparts.     

The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England

This article uses a case-study of the relationship between the British suffrage organization, the Women's Social and Political Union, and its equivalent on the Irish side, the Irish Women's Franchise League, in order to illuminate some consequences of the colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland. As political power was located within the British state, and the British feminist movement enjoyed superior resources, the Irish movement was at a disadvantage. This was compounded by serious internal divisions within the Irish movement - a product of the dispute over Ireland's constitutional future - which prevented the Franchise League, sympathetic to the nationalist demand for independence - from establishing a strong presence in the North. The consequences of the British movement organizing in Ireland, in particular their initiation of a militant campaign in the North, are explored in some detail, using evidence provided by letters from the participants.British intervention was clearly motivated from British-inspired concerns rather than from any solidarity with the situation of women in Ireland, proving to be disastrous for the Irish, accentuating their deep-rooted divisions.The overall argument is that feminism cannot be viewed in isolation from other political considerations. This case-study isolates the repercussions of Britain's imperial role for both British and Irish movements: ostensibly with a common objective but in reality divided by their differing response to the constitutional arrangement between the two countries. For this reason, historians of Irish feminist movements must give consideration to the importance of the ‘national question’ and display a more critical attitude towards the role played by Britain in Irish affairs.     

Accommodating ‘Mrs. Three‐in‐One’: homemaking,home entertaining and domestic advice literature in post‐war Britain

This article analyses the effects of the ‘servant problem’, meaning the contraction of the domestic service industry in the twentieth century, as represented in domestic advice literature (etiquette, homemaking and home decoration books). Before World War II, domestic advisors assumed that readers employed staff, while by the 1970s no such assumption could be made. Managing a home unassisted, especially when entertaining guests in the role American etiquette expert Emily Post termed ‘Mrs. Three‐in‐One’ (hostess, cook and waitress at once), formed an enduring topic for British and North American domestic advice writers between 1920 and 1970. Rather than reapportioning parts of the homemaker’s labour to other family members, the solutions offered by domestic advisors revolved around reshaping domestic space and its uses in order to facilitate the simultaneous performance of multiple tasks. Multipurpose objects were promoted to act as ‘bridges’ between distinct domestic regions, while multifunctional spaces and open‐plan interiors collapsed distinctions between such regions. Thus changes in the roles of women within society and the family are shown in this analysis of domestic advice literature to affect the design and layout of the home, and domestic advice books are seen to have promoted ultimately conservative solutions.     

activist-mothers maybe,sisters surely? Black British feminism,absence and transformation

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women’s theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence.     

Writing stri dharma: international feminism,nationalist politics,and women's press advocacy in late colonial India

This article contributes to recent historical debates regarding the shared connections between the colony and the metropole in British-ruled India through the examination of Stri Dharma, a widely known journal started in India in 1918 by British feminists. Neither completely British nor Indian in character, this women-run journal emerged during the 1920s and 1930s as an international feminist news medium targeted at Anglo-Indian, Indian, and British women readers. This broad-ranging audience participated in a complex political dialogue determined by both class and race tensions that created a sometimes uneven forum for the exchange of ideas. Through a close examination of this title and other primary source materials related to the context of women's suffrage and Indian nationalism, this article engages with contemporary feminist scholarship in order to trace the underlying cultural and political factors that motivated British and Indian women writers to create a periodical based on universalist principles of gender solidarity and international cooperation during the late colonial period.