“Whose Standards of Life are they Fighting to Preserve?” The Historic Lack of Intersectionality in the Feminist Movement in Britain
By Daisy Nash, Postgraduate
In the 1980s, off the back of the British Women’s Liberation Movement, feminist scholarship began to challenge the supposition of an intersectional womanhood. What emerged was an unequivocal understanding of the western feminist cause; the articulation of an experience relative to the beleaguered white woman. Academics such as Chandra Mohanty problematised this ‘linear assumption’ of women that seemed indifferent to cultural, religious and social diversity. This was deemed most notable in discussions of the “Third World Woman”, whereby the powerlessness of non-western women was assumed inevitable; a ‘discursive colonisation’ that cemented the superiority of the western feminist.
Within this article, the historic use of this enabling dichotomy will be examined, demonstrating the pervasive exploitation of the non-white female body in a (supposedly global) feminist discourse. Beginning with the anti-Sati campaign in the early 1800s – condemning the custom of widow burning in India – the enduring links between colonialism, imperialism and feminism in Britain will be recognised, contextualised by the rising importance of the “civilising mission”. For 20th century feminists such as Eleanor Rathbone, the platform provided by colonial interactions was expanded by the domestic popularity of eugenic theory, adding an element of classism to the already racialised feminist cause.
In the early 19th century, missionary forces’ desire to extend their program to colonial India led them to appeal to the women of the British Empire. The phenomenon of Sati became the foundation of this gendered appeal, with radical missionaries, such as William Ward, capitalising on the intimate “sisterhood” between British and Indian women. His letters to potential bastions of this cause reveal the opportunity for power that interacted with the gendered mission, promising that British women “must be heard” in their political endeavours.
Through an anti-Sati stance, white women entered the political arena, enacting multiple petitions that, although couched in patriarchal rhetoric, represented a radical opportunity for the female voice. Famed missionaries such as Mary Cooke demonstrate the mobility that this colonial discourse enabled, as her contributions to Indian girls’ education reflect the new desirability of a “feminising” influence. To stabilise their influence however, colonial women pandered to the paternalistic mode of governance, helping justify the importance of westernising influence in the “savage” colonies.
In setting the tone for British feminism, the discourse on Sati not only provided British women with a political voice but also accompanied their rise as a cultural mouthpiece of British India. As women became increasingly accepted to the missionary front, their depiction of life in the colonies became key to the metropole’s understanding. Colonial women’s writings thus became “exercises of power”, building on the discourse of difference that informed English and Indian womanhood.
In Antoinette Burton’s seminal study, Burdens of History, the colonised woman forms the basis of Victorian feminist expression, mobilised to enact an argument of emancipation that, in reality, only served a Western context. In centring women as the key to a civilised nation, British feminists were able to expose their own paradoxical modernity, under a pretext of care for the Indian woman. Thus, Indian women’s bodies became a vehicle of political service for western feminism.
The binaries that British feminists enacted to cement their colonial superiority only increased as the century wore on. Born into economic fortune and Oxford-educated, Eleanor Rathbone represents the epitome of Burton’s “imperial feminist”. Her extensive involvement in the suffragette movement in England was translated to an Indian context in the 1920s, culminating in her infamous publication on child marriage.
Although Rathbone condemned the British government’s indifference to the “woman question”, the Indian woman remains universally objectified and oppressed in her writing. Not only is she depicted as the subject of lifelong “imprisonment” through Purdah, but, more importantly, the Indian female body becomes a “sacrifice” in the custom of child marriage. This text epitomises the hierarchy of power that was enacted by British feminists throughout the 19th and 20th century, rendering the eastern woman a pawn in the tyrannical workings of state and patriarchy.
Rathbone et al furthered their claims to an exclusive feminism by conflating their vision of motherhood with eugenic theory. Once again, their compromises to the patriarchal state allowed those of lower status to suffer the consequences. In the early 20th century, the rising status of eugenic theory had a significant audience in middle-class British women, evidenced by the Eugenics Education Society (EES) which was founded by Sybil Gotto and boasted an over 40% female membership.
The classist nature of their work was embodied by the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, a law tasked with institutionalising “feeble-minded” citizens – a definition that translated as the poor and vulnerable. Gotto was key to its implementation, and it received crucial advocation by EES women. While President of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), Rathbone was an active member of EES, and her colleague Eva Hubback went as far as endorsing “voluntary” sterilization at their 1931 convention. As a result, exclusionary politics once again became a defining pillar of feminist activity in Britain, highlighting the very singular definition of women that 20th century feminism came to endorse.
The impact of this privileged feminism is evidenced when we return to the academic shifts of the 1980s and onwards. Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar’s ground-breaking work ‘Challenging Imperial Feminism’ again alludes to the “monolithic” woman that western feminism has assumed. In championing the white woman, the priorities of those hindered not only by gender but by race and class are displaced, leading to the crucial question: “Whose standards of life are they fighting to preserve?”
In the 21st century, the whitening of feminism is still a topical issue. In looking back at the ingrained exclusivity of the feminist movement, we must use these examples to alter the landscape and demands of the modern fight for gender equality.
Eleanor Rathbone, Sir James Gunn, Oil on Canvas, The National Portrait Gallery, 1933
Bibliography
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Ward, William, Farewell Letters to a Few Friends in Britain and America, on Returning to Bengal in 1821 (Kentucky: Thomas T. Skillman, 1822) https://www.wmcarey.edu/carey/ward3/farewell.htm [accessed 9th January, 2022]
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