Abstract
Between 13 February 1829 and 29 March 1830 a total of fourteen separate groups of women from around England sent petitions to Parliament calling on it to abolish sati, or rather what they described as ‘the practice in India of burning widows on the funeral piles of their husbands’.1 Amongst the earliest examples of female petitioning, and directly preceding women’s more extensive petitioning for the abolition of colonial slavery, this intervention in the political process was taken not by women who identified themselves as radicals or supporters of the ‘rights of women’ but rather by women associated with the evangelical missionary movement. The petitions formed the climax of a broader campaign against sati linked to women’s support for missionary activity in India and to the first coordinated attempt to provide Christian education for Indian girls and women.
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Notes
See, for example, text of the petition of the female inhabitants of Melbourne, Journal of the House of Commons, 84 (1829) entry for 2 April 1829, p. 192. The term ‘suttee’ rather than sati was used in British nineteenth-century texts. Definitions of sati vary in English and Indian languages: see John Stratton Hawley (ed.), Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 11–15. In this article the term sati is used to refer to the practice of widow-burning (rather than to the woman herself).
Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
For a description of the dominant middle-class ideology of ‘separate spheres’ and the vital part played by evangelicals in developing it, see Catherine Hall, ‘The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology’, in White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 74–92. There has been a lively debate over the extent to which ‘separate spheres’ actually characterised gender roles in the early nineteenth century.
Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992).
Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), Chapter 3.
For the close link between ‘home’ and ‘foreign’ missions see Susan Thorne, ‘“The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable”: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain’, in Frederick Cooper and Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 238–62.
Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: Apollos, 1990), Chapter 3.
F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 23–9.
Eugene Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society, 3 vols (London: Church Missionary Society, 1899), vol. i, p. 243, vol. iii, p. 321; Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, appendix 1, p. 231.
Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 98; Ernest Marshall Howse, Saints in Politics: The ‘Clapham Sect’ and the Growth of Freedom (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), p. 92.
Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals; and on the Means of Improving it — Written Chiefly in the Year 1792 (London: House of Commons, 1813), pp. 30, 56.
William Wilberforce, ‘Substance of the speech of William Wilberforce, Esq. on the clause of the East India Bill for promoting the religious instruction and moral improvement of the natives of the British dominions in India, on the 22nd of June, and the 1st and 12th of July, 1813’, The Pamphleteer (London), 3, no. 5 (March 1814), pp. 43–113: quote from p. 70.
The quotation is from the leading evangelical poet William Cowper’s ‘The Task’, as quoted in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 165.
John Pollock, Wilberforce (Tring: Lion Publishing, 1986), p. 236.
Letter from H. More to W. Wilberforce, Barley Wood, 12 April 1813, as quoted in Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce (eds), The Correspondence of William Wilberforce, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1840), vol. ii, pp. 240–1; Howse, Saints in Politics, p. 86. See Chapter 2 of this volume for further discussion of More’s political activities.
Ward’s text became a key source of information on Hindu religion and society in Britain at this period — see Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1998), Chapter 4.
For pioneering examinations of the links which women made between metropolitan and imperial philanthropic missions to women and children at this period, see Alison Twells, ‘“Let us Begin Well at Home”: Class, Ethnicity and Christian Motherhood in the Writing of Hannah Kilham, 1774–1832’, in Eileen Janes Yeo (ed.), Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 25–51; Alison Twells, ‘“Happy English Children”: Class, Ethnicity and the Making of Missionary Women, 1800–40’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 21, no. 3 (1998), pp. 235–46.
M. A. Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal, 1793–1837 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. xii; Kenneth Ingham, Reformers in India, 1793–1833: An Account of the Work of Christian Missionaries on Behalf of Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 55; Kanti Prasanna Sen Gupta, The Christian Missionaries in Bengal, 1793–1833 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1971), p. 97.
William Ward, A View of the History, Literature and Religion of the Hindoos, 3rd edn, 3 vols (London: Baptist Missionary Society, 1817), vol. i, preface; William Ward, ‘Letter to the Ladies of Liverpool, and of the United Kingdom’, The Times, 3 January 1821, p. 3; William Ward, Farewell Letters to a Few Friends in Britain and America, on Returning to Bengal in 1821 (London: Black, Kingsbury, Oarbury and Allen, 1821), letter to Miss Hope of Liverpool, pp. 62–85. For information on Ward’s visit to Britain see John Clark Marshman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward, 2 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1859), vol. ii, pp. 199, 242.
There is an extensive literature on Roy: a useful starting point is V. C. Joshi (ed.), Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India (Delhi: Vikas, 1975). For the English text of Roy’s tracts on sati see ‘Translation of a Conference between an Advocate for and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning Widows Alive, Calcutta, 1818’, and ‘A Second Conference between an Advocate for and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning Widows Alive, Calcutta, 1820’, in J. C. Ghose (ed.), The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, 2 vols (New Delhi: Cosmo, 1982), vol. ii.
The Parliamentary Debates (London: Hansard, 1822), new series, 5, entry for 20 June 1821, col. 1217.
Joseph Peggs, The Suttees’ Cry to Britain (London: Seeley, 1827).
David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 63.
For debate about female petitioning among anti-slavery campaigners in the 1790s and again in 1830, see Midgley, Women against Slavery, pp. 23–4, 62–4; for debate in 1829 over female signatures to petitions against Roman Catholic Emancipation, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 278–9.
Joseph Peggs, The Suttees’ Cry to Britain, 2nd edn (London: Seeley, 1828), p. 91, footnote.
Ibid., p. 97.
John Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist, 1774–1839 (Delhi: Thompson Press, 1974). Rosselli describes Bentinck as a supporter of anti-slavery, a friend of Charles Grant, an active member of the British and Foreign Bible Society and an associate of the Clapham Sect.
C. H. Philips (ed.), The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. xxvi–xxviii, 94, 191–5, 335–45, 360–2 (text of the regulation). For Bombay and Madras see Kenneth Ballhatchet, Social Policy and Social Change in Western India (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 304–5.
C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire: The New Cambridge History of India, 2, no. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Chapter 4.
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Midgley, C. (2000). From Supporting Missions to Petitioning Parliament: British Women and the Evangelical Campaign against Sati in India, 1813–30. In: Gleadle, K., Richardson, S. (eds) Women in British Politics, 1760–1860. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62989-3_5
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