Gender and Imperialism (review)

Since the 1980s, a number of studies have begun to explore the complex and changing relations between gender and imperialism. Their immediate impetus derives from new historical work on imperialism, from women’s history and gender history, and from postcolonial theory. Together, these have effectively challenged the paradigm of classical imperial history, as established in the period of ‘high’ imperialism. Imperial history performed a largely supportive, legitimating role in relation to empire, and was preoccupied with male domains without any consideration of questions of gender construction or of women and empire. Its principles and purposes have also been challenged from those formerly subjected to imperial rule and goverance. Decolonisation has generated histories viewed through the experiences of the colonised, bringing into the frame female as well as male ‘emic’ perspectives on the past. These alternative ‘histories from below’ are complemented by deconstructions of colonialist Others, despite the uneasy tensions between them. Even greater tensions exist between revisionist historians of empire and colonial discourse analysts. The analysis of colonial discourse and the development of postcolonial theory has followed in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). This landmark text has proved enormously fruitful, and not less because, through various critical interventions, we are now more aware of its various limitations. Certain women historians such as Billie Melman and Reina Lewis have contributed to this awareness, and sought to overcome them in their own important historical work. Clare Midgley’s edited collection provides a welcome and enriching extension to such work, the main value of which is twofold in its attention to both coloniser and colonised as variably gendered, and to the intersections of gender with class and ‘race’, in and across the various sites of imperial encounters and interactions.

The book is divided into three parts. The first consists of two chapters which reexamine British imperial power through its gender implications. Himani Bannerji’s study of the age of consent issue in India shows how British colonialism sought to legitimise itself and lubricate the machinery of governmental administration by way of policy legislation that aimed to reorganise gender relations among the colonised. She focuses in particular on the Age of Consent Act of 1891, which raised the age of legally permissible sex for girls from ten years to twelve years. Jane Haggis is also concerned with India in discussing her attempts to write a ‘non-recuperative’ history of white women and colonialism. The objective of such history in relation to British women missionaries in India is to avoid reproducing the stark dualism that places them either as racists or victims of imperial patriarchy. In setting up her discussion there remains, I think, something of a tendency to dualise the different conceptual emphases on ‘women’ and ‘gender’, on experience/voice and meaning/discourse. Nonetheless, this is a fine contribution to current historiographical debate, dealing sensitively and sharply with both its case study material and broader theoretical problems.

The second part of the book extends the focus of the first on colonial contexts by examining reactions and resistances to British imperialism. Padma Anagol’s study looks at the Indian women who were the recruits for religious conversion by the kind of missionary women discussed by Haggis, while Margaret Ward explores the masculinist character of Irish nationalism. Marilyn Lake’s concern is with ‘frontier feminism’ in Australia from the 1880s to the 1940s. By contrast, Hilary Beckles moves back in time to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in looking at modes of resistance to slavery by black women in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. All of these are well-researched, closely argued pieces, and the second section of the book brings the question of women’s agency more fully into view than in the first section. This perhaps explains the more critical response of its authors to postcolonial theory and its tunnel emphasis on representations and sites of discourse. For all its sophistication, the irony remains that women are often rendered passive or seen as victims of circumstances by an approach in which the critique...