Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947 (review)

Until recently the place of women in the British empire was widely neglected, by imperial historians because women were thought to be marginal to it, and by women's historians because—Procida hints—they were nervous of what they might find there. Both considered imperialism to be a fundamentally masculinist construct, with women placed in it as victims to be protected, helpmeets for imperial husbands, softeners of empire's hard edges (through philanthropic work, for example), or—according to one ex-imperialist in the 1990s—its ruin. (His point was that it was the race prejudices of the memsahibs—European women in India—that provoked the natives to rebel.) Mary Procida takes issue with nearly all of this. Working from diaries, memoirs and other writings by scores of wives of colonial officials in India, she argues that these women's roles—in that particular part of the empire, at any rate—were more active than the received account would suggest. According to Procida, compared with their counterparts at home, the memsahibs were more important, actively imperialist, and less constrained by metropolitan gender patterns characterized, for example, by the "separation of spheres" in Britain between "public" (male) and "private" (female).

So: Anglo-Indian women ("Anglo-Indian" is used here in its nineteenth century sense of English people living in India) did not see themselves as weak creatures to be protected by virile men. They suffered as much as the men did for the empire, for example by sending their children "home" to be educated. They did not engage much in good works (the "white woman's burden"). They shot and hunted with the most masculinist of their menfolk; discussed Indian politics knowledgeably and vigorously; and indeed had opinions on these imperial matters which belied the supposed gentleness of their natures. The evidence Procida marshals to support these generalizations is impressive. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century novels written by Anglo-Indian women, for example, especially those set against the 1857 "Mutiny," deliberately set out to counter the "victim" trope with images of brave, resourceful and active heroines, defending their children and often even rescuing their weaker men. (This ties in, incidentally, with the new genre of girls' fiction at this time, spearheaded by Bessie Marchant, one of whose young heroines even engages with gorillas.) One of the great myths about European women in the empire is that they lived in perpetual fear of rape by natives, a reason why they needed the men to protect them; these women indignantly denied any such craven fears. They were much more at threat from drunken British soldiers, their "protectors." To fear Indian violence would have undermined their self-image as more "masculine," by virtue of their "race," than any Indian man. (Procida retails a story of one memsahib putting down a sick dog when her male Indian servant is too sentimental to do it.) Hence their fondness for hunting, too, especially with (phallic) guns. On the other side, philanthropy—the main approved public activity of middle-class women in more gender-divided Britain—was shunned by most of them, as was any sort of fellow feeling with Indian women. "For women," writes Procida, "the dictates of imperial rule often demanded the assumption . . . of the trappings of the masculinist imperialist . . . Pragmatism trumped gender ideology" (140-1). Women became more man-like. Indeed, contemporary native Indians whose own gender patterns were more conventional (or "traditional") sometimes found it hard to believe that they were not really men.

This was useful to Indian nationalists, who made a great deal of the superior femininity of their own womenfolk, by which they meant their willingness to perform their wifely duties. It was also distasteful to many metropolitan British at the time, conservatives who would have preferred their women to be gentler and more maternal, and feminists who expected more sisterliness...