Abstract
While political power in the British Empire was gained by military force, or its potential threat, and consolidated by the imposition of government bureaucracies with their associated legal frameworks, its moral authority was founded on much wider cultural resources. Numerous studies have explored how the pervading ideology of the ‘civilising mission’ with its promise of western education and medical advancement became accepted, or partially accepted, by at least a portion of the colonised populations. During the past decade, scholars have documented how imperial administrators innovated impressive ceremonies and ritual procedures to incorporate colonised groups into the mystical embrace of Empire.4 In this essay I explore how cultural production from diverse sources during the late-Victorian period interacted with political strategies to create a specific domain of discursive and material practices (adapted to local situations and changing contestations) which served to legitimate this global imperial regime. I focus on how scientists, politicans, writers, imperial administrators, missionaries and feminist reformers — those who generated the dominant discourses — constructed definitions of gender, sexuality and race, using the other terms as markers and metaphors.
If child-bearing women must be intellectually handicapped, then the penalty to be paid for race predominance is the subjection of women.
Karl Pearson, 18872
The combination of the two factors of sex and race serves to make miscegenation the ultimate taboo.
Abena Busia, 19863
It is appropriate here to record my warm gratitude to A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, who directed my work on the British ruling group in Nigeria. I lis extensive knowledge of the setting and its documentation proved invaluable. This paper was first presented in the seminar series of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women, Queen Elizabeth House; I am grateful for helpful comments and the long-term support of colleagues there. Terence Ranger made useful suggestions for improving the structure and content of this chapter. I also thank Dorothy O. Helly for her continuing discussion and insights.
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Notes
Karl Pearson, ‘The Woman’s Question’, The Ethic of Freethought (London, Adam and Charles Black, 1901, 2nd edn, revised; 1st edn 1887), p. 373.
Abena P. A. Busia, ‘Miscegenation as Metonymy: Sexuality and Power in the Colonial Novel’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 9, no. 3 (July 1986), p. 366.
Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’ and Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’ in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); also Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa’, Chapter 2 in this volume.
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817’, in Francis Barker et al. (eds), Europe and Its Others, Vol. 1 (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), p. 94.
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987) provides detailed analysis of the articulation of class and gender in the middle-class ideologies, institutions and practices which interdependently developed in relation to rapid economic and political change.
Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot. Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981).
On this point, see the analysis of the writings of Gramsci, Said, and Williams in Joan Cocks, The Oppositional Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 63–81. Her insights throughout this excellent book have been a stimulus for this paper.
The headline of a review by Mariana Valverde, The Women’s Review of Books, Vol. V, no. 4 (January 1988) of Sheila Jeffreys (ed.), The Sexuality Debates (New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).
The classic study on this topic remains Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, No. 5 (Spring 1978).
Elain Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (New York, Viking Penguin, 1990), pp. 76–99.
Lewis D. Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983). Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (London: St Antony’s/Macmillan; Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 229–32.
Joanna de Groot, ‘“Sex” and “Race”: The construction of Language and Image in the Nineteenth Century’ in Susan Mendes and Jane Rendall (eds), Sexuality and Subordination (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).
Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 49–71.
See Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865–1945’, and Antoinette M. Burton, ‘The White Women’s Burden: British Feminists and “The Indian Woman,” 1865–1915’ in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, in press).
Henry Louis Gates, Jr (ed.), ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 4–6
Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians (Leicester: Leicester University Press; New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978)
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science (London: St. Antony’s/Macmillan, 1982)
Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Quoted in Michael Howard, ‘Empire, Race and War in pre-1914 Britain’ in H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden (eds), History and Imagination. Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London: Duckworth, 1981), p. 344.
Frederick, Lord Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1922), pp. 618–19.
See Sandra Morgen (ed.), Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching (Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, 1989).
Alison Jaggar, ‘Human Biology in Feminist Theory: Sexual Equality Reconsidered’, in Carol C. Gould (ed.), Beyond Domination: New Perspective on Women and Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allenheld, 1984). See also essays in Shirley Ardener (ed.), Defining Females (London: Croom Helm, 1978) and in Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (eds), Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Pat Caplan, ‘Introduction’, The Cultural Construction of Sexuality (London: Tavistock, 1987). See also Martha Vicinus,’ sexuality and Power: A Review of Current Work in the History of Sexuality’, Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1982), pp. 133–156.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 103.
Elizabeth Fee, ‘The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology’, in Mary Hartman and Lois W. Banner (eds), Clio’s Consciousness Raised (New York: Harper & Row), p. 101.
De Groot discusses the double meanings of the term ‘penetrate’ as domination over alien territory and as an aggressive male sexual metaphor, op. cit., pp. 110–11. Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980) examines British policies of sexual control in nineteenth-century India to show the contradictions that resulted from the assumption that social distance was essential to the maintenance of power and authority. Ann L. Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 16, no. 4 (November 1989) develops her analyses in the broader context of the Netherlands Indies and French Indochina, as well as the British Empire. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990) provides prodigious documentation of this topic, but lacks analysis of unequal power relations.
G. P. Gooch, ‘Imperialism’, in C. F. G. Masterman (ed.), The Heart of Empire (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), p. 327–8.
Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan Schmidt, Imperialism: The Status and Sign of a Political Word, 1840–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 164.
Jenny Sharpe, ‘The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency’, Genders 10 (Spring 1991), pp. 25–46.
In John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (London: Dent, 1970; 1st edn 1865).
See Susan M. Reverby and Dorothy O. Helly, ‘Introduction: Converging on History’ in Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
In John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Rossi (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970; 1st edn 1869). Kate Millett gave prominence to the opposed arguments on gender in her classic essay, ‘The Debate over Women: Ruskin vs. Mill’, in Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1973). Deborah Epstein Nord, ‘Mill and Ruskin and the Woman Question Revisited’, in James Engell and David Perkins (eds), Teaching Literature: What is Needed Now (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), provides new insights by placing this controversy in its Victorian context.
Flavia Alaya, ‘Victorian Science and the “Genius” of Women’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 38, pp. 162–80.
Henry Maudsley, ‘Sex in Mind and Education,’ Fortnightly Review, Vol. 15, 1874, p. 467.
John M. MacKenzie, ‘The imperial pioneer and hunter and the British masculine stereotype in late Victorian and Edwardian times’, in J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin (eds), Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 180.
Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) provides the most thorough documentation and analysis of the political movement to remove the Contagious Diseases Acts from the statutes.
See, for example, Dale Spender, ‘Sexual economics: Josephine Butler’ in her Women of Ideas (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 334–46
Jenny Uglow, ‘Josephine Butler: From Sympathy to Theory (1828–1906)’ in Dale Spender (ed.), Feminist Theorists (London: The Women’s Press, 1983), pp. 146–64.
Jenny Uglow, See the analysis of Victorian contradictions by Deborah Gorham, ‘The “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” Re-examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England’, Victorian Studies 21, no. 3 (Spring 1978), pp. 353–79.
On the topic of ‘half-castes’, see Dorothy O. Helly, Livingstone’s Legacy: Horace Waller and Victorian Mythmaking (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987), pp. 141–2.
D. J. M. Muffet, Empire Builder Extraordinary Sir George Goldie (Douglas, Isle of Man: Shearwater Press, 1978), pp. 17–23.
Ian Brook, The One-Eyed Man is King (London, Cassell, 1966), p. 127.
See, for example, Janice N. Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaysia: a Study of European Wives in a British Colony and Protectorate, 1900–1940’ and Beverly Gartrell, ‘Colonial Wives: Villains or Victims?’ in Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener (eds), The Incorporated Wife (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1984)
Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji 1835–1930: The Ruin of Empire? (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986)Callaway, op. cit.
Margaret Strobel, ‘Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century British Empire’ in Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz and Susan Stuard (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987); Stoler, op. cit.; Margaret Strobel, op. cit., 1991).
Nigel Nicolson, Mary Curzon (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), p. 138.
Mary E. Oake, No Place for a White Woman (London: Lovat Dickson, 1933), p. 11.
James Mill, History of British India (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1968, 1st edn 1818), p. 309, quoted in Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire, p. 49, with an excellent analysis of his misconception.
Constance Larymore, A Resident’s Wife in Nigeria (London: George Routledge, 1911; 1st edn 1908), p. 106.
Sylvia Leith-Ross, African Women. A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (London: Faber & Faber, 1965; 1st edn 1939), p. 19.
Veena Das, ‘Gender Studies, Cross-Cultural Comparison and the Colonization of Knowledge’, Berkshire Review, Vol. 21, p. 64 (1986).
Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India’, Cultural Critique, Vol. 7 (Fall 1987), pp. 119–56.
Partha Chatterjee, ‘Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women: The Contest in India’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 16, no. 4 (November 1989), p. 629.
See essays in Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock (eds), Women and Colonization. Anthropological Perspectives (New York: J. F. Bergin, 1980)
Ifa Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Press, 1987), pp. 134–43.
Fernandez Henriques, Children of Caliban. Miscegenation London: Secker & Warburg, 1974).
‘Race in Legislation and Political Economy’, The Anthropological Review Vol. IV, no. XII (April 1866), p. 125. The author in all probability was Dr James Hunt, who in 1863 broke away from the Ethnological Society of London to found the Anthropological Society as a forum for presenting extremist views on race. See Ronald Rainger, ‘Race, Politics, and Science: The Anthropological Society of London in the 1860s’, Victorian Studies, 22 (1978), pp. 51–70.
Amirah Inglis, The White Women’s Protection Ordinance: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Papua (London: Sussex University Press, 1975).
Sharpe, ‘The Unspeakable Limits of Rape’, p. 29. The uses of imperial imagery of sexually-violated white women to justify brutal repression of colonised subjects had its parallels in the American South where white social control was maintained after the freeing of slaves by alleging the rape of white women to instigate mob lynching of blacks. On this, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, ‘“The Mind That Burns in Each Body”: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence’ in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds), Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 328–49.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee, “’satan Let Loose upon Earth”: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857’, Past & Present, no. 128 (August 1990), pp. 92–116.
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© 1993 Terence Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan
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Callaway, H. (1993). Purity and Exotica in Legitimating the Empire: Cultural Constructions of Gender, Sexuality and Race. In: Ranger, T., Vaughan, O. (eds) Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12342-1_2
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