Introduction

To commemorate the centenary of Josephine Butler's death in December 1906, a three-year project on this social reformer's international networks was mounted by The Women's Library.¹ Two international colloquia were held, the first focusing on the influence of Butler's campaign against state regulation of prostitution in nineteenth-century Europe, the second on her inter-war legacy in colonized and mandated territories.² This second topic opens up many of the issues currently debated in historical accounts of the relationship between feminism and colonialism in this period. Much of the debate stems from Antoinette Burton's analysis of the 'white woman's burden', which posits not only that most British feminists were imbued with an imperialist consciousness of racial hierarchy, but that the very existence of their feminist movement depended on the racialized construct of the colonized Other.³ Josephine Butler's organization, which turned its attention to India (as well as Continental Europe) after the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in Britain, is taken to exemplify both propositions.

The discussions in our colloquia, particularly the second, examined some of the practical dilemmas and political constraints faced by activists of the period, and allowed for the consideration of an actual incompatibility between feminist and anti-colonial struggles at a given historical moment. Was it reasonable to assume that women who had dedicated their lives to the campaign against state regulation of prostitution in mainland Britain would wash their hands of the application of Contagious Diseases Acts in other territories under British jurisdiction? Was it axiomatic that feminists struggling to redress gender inequalities in their own country would privilege the overturning of imperial authority over using that authority to redress perceived abuses against women? (A western reader signing a petition relating to abuses in the developing world today may have experienced a frisson of this dilemma; not even the most scrupulous development charity can be free of it.)

We publish here two papers from the second colloquium. These may contribute towards moving forward a discussion which has perhaps become stuck on a rather repetitive loop. Susan Pedersen addresses the issue of how help can be offered between unequally placed parties. She traces the careers of the two women who were, successively, the sole female members of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, and shows the continuing influence of the international 'maternalism' of which Butler and that generation of her disciples who became activists in the 1890s have been accused.⁴ Pedersen contrasts their approach with that adopted by a member of a younger cohort of feminists, the journalist and novelist Winifred Holtby. It was precisely her experience of masculine condescension which led Holtby to identify with the colonized or 'protected' subject. Despite her wholehearted commitment to the League (given a bit part in her 1933 novel Mandoa, Mandoa!), Holtby utterly rejected the racism which underpinned the administration of the Mandates as much as it did that of formal colonial systems. She took active steps to oppose white supremacy within the British empire, particularly in South Africa, to whose black trade unionists she offered unstinting support. Pedersen's account of Holtby's life and fiction points us to an awareness of the possibilities and complexities inherent in any international humanitarian ethos.

Janaki Nair illuminates another aspect of the debate over feminism and colonialism. Many anti-colonial movements are led by men who feel belittled and emasculated by the imperial authority; and nationalism often involves a restructuring of gender relations to women's disadvantage. Focusing on Mysore, Nair addresses the topic of regulation of prostitution in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here the spotlight is not on British feminists, but on male Indian nationalists for whom the issue formed part of a modernizing project. Nair analyses the concurrent initiatives in this area of the imperial British and the provincial Indian administrations. Both dealt with supposedly similar public health concerns, but with very different goals in view. The colonial administration wished to prevent the spread of venereal disease within the British army, and also to shore up the existing racial hierarchy by prohibiting or at...