Feminism and empire is a deeply informed analysis of the impact of empire on the prehistory of British feminism. It is an important contribution to the new imperial history of the early nineteenth century, not to be confused with the new imperial era on which imperial historians, at least until recently, have largely focused. Feminism and empire ends at the beginning of the period bookended by the global scramble for colonies and the Great War that resulted. It was in this latter period, the closing decades of the nineteenth century, that advocates of women’s rights first began to describe themselves as feminists. And it is this later generation that articulated what historians have labelled ‘imperial feminism’.
Clare Midgley provides a careful and systematic assessment of the ways in which the predecessors of those first feminists anticipated the widely acknowledged imperial affinities of late Victorian feminists. Midgley is not the first historian to seek the origins of modern feminism in the revolutionary transformations of British political culture during the first half of the nineteenth century. Her first book was among the earliest, however, to acknowledge the scale on which feminism’s forerunners were mobilized by the hugely popular campaign against slavery.Footnote 2Feminism and empire extends the argument of Women against slavery from the detailed social and local history of British women’s activism to a precisely delineated genealogy of the colonial referents and concerns that informed early Victorian debates about the ‘woman question’.
Midgley freely acknowledges the national parameters of her inquiry. Her subjects – largely, though not exclusively, female authors and activists – lived, wrote, and organized, at least for the most part, in Great Britain, as did the audience addressed in their texts. At the cultural level, however, she provides persuasive evidence that British women negotiated their place in the national community in discursive relation to the colonies. In other words, their nation was itself a transnational project, if not a product of empire.
Midgley moves beyond the now obvious point that empire mattered on its home front to tackle finer questions of how, why, and with what consequences the colonies figured in early nineteenth-century conceptions of British women’s rights and roles. The first chapter underscores the often contradictory invocations of empire in debates about the ‘woman question’ between the 1780s and 1850s. Midgley notes a rather dramatic contrast between those texts produced largely though not exclusively during the age of revolution and those produced at mid century. This is not to say that the revolutionary generation was innocent of imperious cultural pretensions. Radical critics of metropolitan gender conventions frequently couched their concerns about British women’s status in terms of cross-cultural and/or colonial comparisons. In this period, however, such comparisons worked to the detriment of British patriarchy. The latter was criticized for similarities between its treatment of British women and the treatment of women in colonized or non-European societies, the injustice or immorality of which was clearly assumed to be obvious to all interlocutors.
Colonized women figured as a backdrop in these narratives; the central concern is the contested status of British women. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, contrasts displace comparisons. In addition, the focus shifts away from the condition of British women to the plight of their colonized counterparts. British women are increasingly portrayed as privileged beneficiaries of Western civilization. Their blessings constitute a duty to protect their benighted colonial sisters, whose suffering can only be assuaged by unleashing British women’s agency.
The remaining chapters look at British women’s role in political campaigns (anti-slavery and anti-sati), social movements (colonial emigration), and foreign missions. Midgley develops her ground-breaking work on British women’s mobilization in support of the anti-slavery movement in ways that identify a highly gendered weapon of the disenfranchised weak, namely the sugar boycott. In refusing to purchase slave-grown sugar, British women rendered the private sphere of domestic consumption public and political. Precluded from contributing to petitions, women engaged in the direct action of boycotts. Midgley notes the irony involved in their use of separate spheres, contrasting the supplicating stance of male petitioners with the economic pressure wielded by their female counterparts, who were determined to force the hand of a parliament from which they would be excluded for another century.
British women were also actively involved in metropolitan campaigns against sati in India, in mobilizing home support for foreign missions around the world – as well as for female education and the employment of women missionaries – and in the shorter-lived campaign for middle-class women’s emigration to settler colonies that peaked at mid century. Just as disparate as their colonial involvements were the political affinities of Midgley’s subjects, who range from the conservative Hannah More, who invoked evangelical justifications for women’s confinement to the home, to the radical Grimke sisters, who linked the emancipation of slaves in both the United States and the British empire to the emancipation of women, in that they were chained to the same patriarchy (Midgley draws our attention to many such transatlantic connections).
The empirical breadth and bibliographic depth of vision on display in this volume reveal a senior scholar at the top of her game. Each of the case studies makes persuasive and original interventions in the overlapping fields of British women’s and imperial history. In combination, they constitute the type of sweeping synthesis that reflects and reinforces the maturation of the field. This is also the kind of study that can do service in a variety of academic settings thanks to the clear-eyed clarity of Midgley’s prose. Students should find any one or all of its chapters accessible, while scholars at every level will find its conceptualization, argument, and bibliography an invaluable ‘must read’.
