‘Immorality’, Nationalism and the Colonial State in British Malaya: Indian ‘coolie’ women's intimate lives as ideological battleground

ABSTRACT

Cases settled by colonial courts in British Malaya often revolved around issues of gender, class, race and colonial law. This article uses official and non-official archival records to explore the realities hidden behind the gender stereotypes conveyed in accounts given by colonial authorities and Indian nationalists of immorality and domestic violence. It makes a detailed investigation of alleged offences committed by husbands or partners of ‘deviant’ women, and illustrates factors influencing the attitudes of colonial courts, newspapers, members of the coolie community and Indian nationalists towards such incidents. Coolie women lived under oppressive conditions arising from colonial rule, capitalist exploitation and patriarchal control. In seeking to escape unsuitable marriages or oppressive relationships, women exhibited fleeting signs of agency, but neither colonial administrators nor nationalist leaders acknowledged the agency of women. The image of coolie women as passive victims allowed colonial administrators to present themselves as protectors of social order, and nationalist leaders to accuse colonial administrations of failing to preserve the social and moral welfare of their subjects. Illustrating the importance of gender in the political struggle between colonialism and nationalism, this article suggests the need for a sensitive understanding of how subjugated individuals, especially coolie women, reacted to such socio-political situations. In so doing, the article provides a nuanced and complex interpretation of social control as well as agency of subjugated individuals in colonial plantation contexts.     

Rethinking the livret d’ouvriers: time,space and ‘free’ labor in nineteenth century France

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses the control of labor mobility through the livret d’ouvriers (1803–1890): a sort of internal passport aiming to subordinate workers’ circulation to the abidance of contract terms. The effective enforcement of livrets had a limited scope for various reasons. Nevertheless, those same difficulties offer a privileged perspective from which to analyze the shifting meanings of freedom and coercion in relation to labor poverty. The politics of identification show that it has been necessary to politically act on the spatial organization of productive processes in order to control labor through time, reacting to workers’ mobility as a specific form of collective bargaining. Through the lens of labor defection we see the emergence of a form of integration deriving from the cash nexus, the vehicle of market concurrence. Such integration calls for a form of control which cannot be subsumed within common law and that is rather axed on the modulation of market pressure – which we analyze through the 1850 debate over advance pay. From this perspective, the issues of breach of contract, police identification and debt insolvency allow to rethink the notion of coercion beyond its penal criminalization and, consequently, to frame the continuities between the police des manufactures, and the modern welfare State.     

Gender,Culture and the Law: Approaches to ‘Honour Crimes’ in the UK

This article examines the debate on whether to analyse ‘honour crimes’ as gender-based violence, or as cultural tradition, and the effects of either stance on protection from and prevention of these crimes. In particular, the article argues that the categorisation of honour-related violence as primarily cultural ignores its position within the wider spectrum of gender violence, and may result in a number of unfortunate side-effects, including lesser protection of the rights of women within minority communities, and the stigmatisation of those communities. At the same time it is problematic to completely dismiss any cultural aspects of violence against women, and a nuanced approach is required which carefully balances the benefits and detriments of taking cultural factors into account. The article examines the issues within the context of the legal response to cases involving honour-related violence, arguing that although the judiciary has in a number of cases inclined towards viewing ‘honour’ as primarily cultural rather than patriarchal, in some cases they have begun to take a more gender-based or ‘mature multiculturalism’ approach.

Silenced narratives of women’s participation in labour and political struggle in Spain, 1960–1975

ABSTRACT

This article studies women’s participation in the struggle against the dictatorship in Spain (from 1960 to 1975). Drawing on life stories of women activists from el Marco de Jerez, it examines their repertoires of actions, their frames, and the lack of recognition from both academic and political spheres. A Gramscian approach and the perspective of hegemonic masculinity contribute to explain how women organized, how represented their collective action, and why their memories have been silenced. The theoretical approach has helped to identify relations of hegemony within feminist studies and political movement.     

White collars and labour history: the contractual regime in Italy from the Liberal to the Fascist era, 1919–1945

This article aims to re-examine the history of non-manual labour, beginning with an analysis of the evolution of general norms governing the contracts of private sector workers in Italy, from the post-First World War period up until the creation of the fascist corporate system in the 1930s. The starting point is the 1919 law that defined the specific characteristics of white-collar workers, expressed as a bond of trust and delegation on the part of employers, from whom legally established and binding guarantees were issued. These guarantees included the offer of permanent employment and the right to compensation should said employment be terminated. This law was reformed during the fascist era, but continued to influence the collective labour agreements stipulated by unions under the regime, contributing to the sustained social status of white-collar workers, particularly in comparison to manual labourers. This article will highlight the difficulties in applying these standards, and the legal and union disputes they generated, exploring an area rarely discussed by historians, while also, as a case study, scrutinizing the more advanced situation of employees in the banking sector – a sector which, from a regulatory and contractual point of view, represented the white-collar élite, as it would continue to do for a long time after the Second World War.     

Young women’s negotiations of gender,the body and the labour market in a post-feminist context

This article explores the ways the body and femininity is understood and negotiated in relation to employment. This article draws on interview data from an Australian study which aimed to explore what it meant to be a ‘young woman’ in neoliberal late modernity, and in relation to the paradoxes of post-feminism. Though there has been an unprecedented rise in youth post-secondary school participation in Australia and elsewhere, girls’ and young women’s increased investment and participation in education has not provided the same gains as for their male counterparts. All interview participants described being aware of gender inequalities and gender discrimination in the workplace, including the glass ceiling, the gender pay gap, and demands and pressures on women to balance career and motherhood, however many did not associate these issues with ‘feminism’. We explore the dynamics of notions of equality, difference and the body in participants’ discussions of work and their anticipation of motherhood and the logics by which gender inequalities are sustained.     

‘Daughters of injur’d Africk’: 1 African women and the transatlantic slave trade

There is now a substantial literature on slavery yet few studies directly address the gendered nature of the slave trade. In this article, the author demonstrates how women’s experiences of the trade were contingent on conflicting European stereotypes of African women, their fertility and sexual vulnerability but, also, their gendered roles in African cultures. These gender differences influenced women’s resistance and survival strategies. The middle passage represented irreversible changes in slave women’s lives but important threads of continuity also existed across the Atlantic world. On the slave ship the ‘Daughters of injur’d Africk’ forged new bonds with fellow slaves and their cultural knowledge travelled with them. Women were seminal in reworking African culture on the slave plantation and actively resisted enslavement from the moment of capture to their harsh new lives in the Americas.     

The ‘Civilizing Mission’: The Regulation and Control of Mourning in Colonial India

The control of women's public form of mourning in India was undertaken in the colonial era by male social reformers. The article argues that this was both a part of the process which enabled the consolidation of colonial rule – since laments were repositories for the social memory of the dead which could lead to vendettas – and that this fed into the construction of a specific domestic ideology. The latter was predicated on the privatization and interiorization of grief, whereby women were enjoined to bear themselves with rectitude. The taming of the transgressive form of mourning, whereby women who had earlier exhibited their grievances in a spectacular form through lament, took to more quietist (devotional) forms, has reconfigured the relationship to death and mourning. However, this has been a partial phenomenon, limited to the upper-caste, middle-class milieu. Where women continue to hold a dependent position within community, nation-state and international economy, the article suggests that, in contexts of modern conflicts and warfare, where death runs ‘wild’, the exhibitionist and ‘wild’ forms of showing grief and anger continue to be demonstrated by women as an appropriate public response.     

We demand work! ‘Dispossession’, patronage and village labour in Bibiyana,Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

This paper critically appraises the usefulness of idioms and theories of ‘dispossession’ to describe changes taking place in rural Bangladesh, where rapid industrialization and ‘development’ have led to profound shifts in the agrarian economy. On the basis of long-term fieldwork in north-eastern Bangladesh, where the multinational company Chevron operate a large gas field, I argue that rather than political and economic struggles in the area involving access to land, it is access to work which is now all important for livelihoods and, as such, has become the basis for local patronage and political power. Theories of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, still widely cited in the anthropology of neo-liberal development in South Asia, are thus of limited help in explaining the changes and continuities which animate local political and economic struggles.     

Domestic labour,masculinity and social change: insights from working-class young men’s transitions to adulthood

Abstract

Drawing on a seven-year longitudinal qualitative study in England, this paper presents evidence of how engagement with housework and childcare is regular and normalized for contemporary working-class young adult men. I explain this development with reference to inclusive masculinity theory, but supplement this by incorporating Mannheim’s concept of social generation, as recently adopted by scholars of youth sociology. The paper thus further augments other research that has documented considerable change in the construction and performance of contemporary masculinities – such as an opening up of gendered behaviours and a decrease (but not erasure) of homophobia – among young men across multiple contexts in English-speaking countries.     

‘Let's party’: State intervention,discursive traditionalism and the labour process of Highland rice cultivators in Central Sulawesi,Indonesia

The state has intruded in the labour process of the highland wet‐rice farmers of Central Sulawesi since the imposition of Dutch colonial rule in 1905. Capitalist development since that time has resulted in differentiation in the ownership of the means of production; however, class tensions have been countered by the New Order state's shrouding the work process in a ‘discursive traditionalism’ which transforms wage labour into a ‘work party’. The transformations in this work party over time and the resultant political ramafications are examined.     

Agricultural growth and the structure of ‘casual’ labour‐hiring in rural West Bengal

There are two main arguments in this article. First, if wages and employment are to be used as indicators of changing levels of rural poverty they need to be complemented by micro and meso level studies of how increases or declines in wages and employment are distributed among individuals and households. Secondly, if the nature of the relationship between employer and labourer is to be understood, aggregates such as ‘casual’ labour need to be unravelled. Evidence from a study of two small localities in rural West Bengal between 1991 and 1993 suggests that the poorest workers receive the lowest remuneration across a range of informal contracts, including daily time‐rate, piece rate, seasonal beck‐and‐call and migrant labour arrangements. Levels of remuneration are also determined by locally specific ideologies of gender and social rank and by party politics.     

Sugar and unfree labour: Reflections on labour control in the dominican republic, 1870–1935

This article takes issue with theories which suppose an essential contradiction between capitalist production and unfree labour relations. Using the history of sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic as a case study, it is argued that capitalist entrepreneurs tried very hard to restrict free wage labour relations. On the Dominican sugar plantations this goal was reached by a system of differential mechanisation which brought about a rigid separation between the mass of unskilled field workers and the restricted number of (semi‐) skilled workers. This labour division could be reproduced over a long period of time because the field workers were migrant labourers from Haiti liable to strong racial discrimination within Dominican society.     

‘Between Slavery and Freedom’: the expulsion and enslavement of free women of colour in the US South before the Civil War

For free black women in the pre-Civil War American South, the status offered by ‘freedom’ was uncertain and malleable. The conceptualization of bondage and freedom as two diametrically opposed conditions therefore fails to make sense of the complexities of life for these women. Instead, notions of enslavement and freedom are better framed as a spectrum. This article develops this idea by exploring two of the ways in which some black women negotiated their status before the law—namely though petitioning for residency or for enslavement. While these petitions are atypical numerically, and often offer tantalizingly scant evidence, when used in conjunction with evidence from the US census, it becomes clear that these women were highly pragmatic. Prioritizing their spousal and broader familial affective relationships above their legal status, they rejected the often theoretical distinction between slavery and liberation. As such, the petitions can be used to reach broader conclusions about the attitudes of women who have left little written testimony.     

Labour relations in the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors: Report of a case study in South Gujarat,India—Part I

The fate of peasants, agricultural labourers and others who leave the agrarian sector, either temporarily or permanently, to seek employment in towns and cities, must be of great interest to anyone concerned with the peasantry. Yet it is an area about which we are remarkably ignorant. Jan Breman's study of the ‘labour relations’ (or, one might say, the ‘poverty') of those who are, to a significant extent, first‐generation town‐dwellers, or who, indeed, although they seek employment in towns, have not yet severed their connections with the countryside, is extremely enlightening in this respect. Although it is not directly about peasants we publish it as an important contribution to our knowledge of this hitherto ‘dark’ area, in which rural origins or connections are of manifest significance. The author employs the ‘informal'/'formal’ sector dichotomy, with suitable scepticism, to examine in great detail the labour system outside agriculture in the Valsad district of South Gujarat.?     

‘I'm going to get a job at the factory’: attitudes to women's employment in a mining community, 1945-65

This article examines how couples in mining households managed the increasing opportunities for women to work outside of the home in the period following the Second World War. Households in mining communities have regularly been characterised in research literature as operating strictly segregated gender roles and the lack of employment opportunities in mining areas appears to have accentuated the rigid division of labour. However, in some areas where the mining industry was in decline, new employment opportunities for married women increased, which inevitably placed a strain on the male provider model. This article explores these issues in relation to the ironstone mining district of East Cleveland and uses data generated from thirty-three semi-structured interviews. It will be argued that whilst the separation of the male provider and female homemaker role remained the ideal for many couples, others chose to avail themselves of the economic and psychological benefits of female employment. However, even amongst those couples where the women did undertake paid employment, the image of the male as provider was still preserved by the use of various strategies.     

‘This fair lady,in her laces’: Margaret Howie Strang Hall,the first woman in Scotland to try to become a lawyer

ABSTRACT

Margaret Howie Strang Hall was the first woman in Scotland, and the youngest woman in the UK, to try to become a lawyer through the same formal process open to her male contemporaries. This examination of Hall’s attempt aims to set it in context, using contemporary court documents and newspaper reports, while expanding on what is known of her life. Hall’s story is an important one in the struggle for equal professional opportunities and her experience in the Scottish legal system provides a counterpoint to the better-known English examples.     

‘De-pastoralisation’ in Uganda's Northeast: from livelihoods diversification to social differentiation

ABSTRACT

Over the past two generations, livestock loss and hunger, caused by violent conflict and drought, have driven many transhumant agro-pastoralists living in central Karamoja to resettle in unpopulated areas more suitable for agricultural production. These areas, mostly located in the southern and western parts of the region, were historically used by herders as dry season grazing rangelands, while they presently house permanent settlements populated by now sedentarised ‘marginal farmers’, town-based workers and patriarchal elites. In this article, I advance the concept of ‘de-pastoralisation’ to explain the process of dispossession of the major means of social reproduction, which causes an increase in livelihoods diversification and in social differentiation. Through the concept of de-pastoralisation, this article aims to investigate the historical dissolution of pastoralism and its socio-economic consequences, characterised by exploitative inter and intra household relations of production, leading to processes of general proletarianisation and male elite accumulation that reproduce inequality over time.     

‘She killed not from hate,but from love’: motherhood,melodrama and mercy killing in the case of May Brownhill

This article examines press portrayals of and public reactions to a ‘mercy killing’ in 1930s England. May Brownhill, sixty-two, killed her ‘invalid’ adult son by giving him an overdose of aspirin and poisoning him with coal gas. Through the conventions of melodrama, May was portrayed in the press as a respectable, devoted and self-sacrificial mother deserving of sympathy. The case also resonated with contemporary debates about euthanasia. It is an historical example of popular leniency, whereby although guilty of a crime, an individual is not seen as deserving of punishment. The case contributes to our understanding of how popular leniency was shaped by gender, class and age, and by contemporary views on ‘mercy killing’.     

Pushing Dualisms and Differences: From ‘Equality versus Difference’ to ‘Nonmimetic Sharing’ and ‘Staying with the Trouble’

Abstract

Critically revisiting the ‘equality versus difference’ dualism that is inscribed in the feminist canon of the last decades is an important task for feminist ethico-political discussions today. The theoretico-political tension between claims of equality and difference still troubles feminist discussions and thus needs to be addressed by contemporary research. Yet, moving beyond the persisting antagonism cannot be done by either moving outside the problematic relation or by choosing one term over the other. It is, as Joan W. Scott noted, impossible to choose between equality and difference, so that other ways of tackling the problem are needed. This article suggests a new line of flight for feminist politics in respect to this founding paradox from a feminist new materialist/posthuman(ist) perspective. Via an affirmative reading of Irigaray's cosmopolitical concern of Sharing the World (2008) and a critical investigation into the structuring ‘anthropological limit’ (Derrida) of her sexual difference thinking, the author pushes the dualistic framework of equality versus difference towards a thought of ‘nonmimetic sharing’ and ‘staying with the trouble’. In her argument, she turns to the differential worldings of Grosz's ‘differing’, Barad's ‘quantum’ and Haraway's ‘terran’ in order to open up ethico-political alternatives to engage difference(s) differently. The article ultimately argues that by affirming all multifaceted (im)material worlding entanglements, significant new insights can be gained for both theorizing differentiality as ethico-onto-epistemological ‘becoming-with’ and for practising this world of/as difference(s) in a more ‘response-able’ manner.