Tim Allender, Australian historian of education, takes a long view, to understand both the constructions and the realities of gender for both Indian and European colonial women in India. Building on his extensive research on education in India, his central concern is not only concepts of gendered behavior and performance, or femininity, but also the networks of empire that shaped, and were in turn shaped by, state policies over time. Based on a wide array of primary materials from both British and Indian repositories, Allender uses individual case studies along with broad, state-rendered policies to capture the complexities of women's lives on both sides of the colonial divide.
Allender delves quickly into the racialized world of the East India Company, followed by the ways in which it was carried out through British-controlled India (raj) after the Revolt of 1857. He opens with an 1888 book of advice that colonial British women wrote for each other, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, which offers a cool assessment of how to choose Indian midwives and wet nurses. The example demonstrates that despite the cookbook authors’ involvement in educating Indian girls, racial comradery was assumed to end at the European household door.
Shying away from a robust postcolonial literature on Indian women during this long period, Allender constructs a narrow definition of femininity as understood by British colonials, identifying the book as “primarily concerned with Western perspectives about femininity (rather than feminism) in tracing the agency of Western women and Westernized women in colonial India” (p. 4). Referring only briefly to extant scholarship on Indian feminism and Indigenous education, Allender justifies the narrow focus of this study with a debatable concern that subaltern studies have become hegemonic, ignoring Europeans operating in India (pp. 7–8). He anticipates this book to be a corrective to that neglect. The reader may also wonder about Allender's use of the term female when referring to Indians, and women when referring to Eurasian and Europeans (i.e., throughout he refers to “colonial women and Indian females”), without explanation.
Indeed, Learning Femininity is limited to the colonial women educators working in British India, specifically in and around the intersection of state-sponsored education for women and girls over a 112-year period. The women represented in the book are small in number; as Allender describes, “By the end of the nineteenth century, official female education policy was highly sensitized by race considerations to protect the moral body of a small group of mostly Eurasian women, and an even smaller group of Indian women whose families were closely connected to Western commerce” (p. 6). At this time, the raj claimed that only 1–2% of school-age girls were in school, of which a scant 0.4% were in secondary school, and only half were Indian. In this way, Allender limits the study to a small but influential segment of women in India who were either the purveyors or recipients of colonial education.
Although Allender asserts, “It is the network and circuit conception of empire that is most compelling for the purposes of this book” (p. 13), in fact the central focus throughout is the colonial education of women and girls, including medical training, and the differences in opportunity that were based on racialized attitudes toward them. Access to education, he shows, depended on whether one was Indian or European—elite or not—and Eurasian women, a category that Allender highlights to great effect, who were privileged in their access to education.
Allender organizes the book around three central themes: the privileged position of Eurasian women, the introduction of British-based and racialized “accomplishments” curriculum, and the evolution of colonial governance in India with regard to the education of women and girls. In concert over time, these combined to produce a British-style, idealized version of an educated femininity.
For generations, sanctioned marriages and relationships between Indian women and European merchants and soldiers—largely British, Portuguese and French—produced baptized and Westernized mixed-race Eurasian children. From the early years of the nineteenth century, government schools were set up for the children of soldiers, including Eurasian children, and unavailable to Indian children. It is in these schools that the British created the “accomplishments” curriculum based on a colonial idea of femininity that included elocution, music, needlework, drawing, and “elements of the natural sciences.” Excluded were geography, history, and arithmetic that would have been taught in Britain. In 1883, the state formalized the distinction between funding for Eurasians and their Indian sisters by instituting the European Code that offered funding for Eurasian schools. “It was directly applicable to a student ‘of European descent, pure or mixed who retains European habits and modes of life’” (p. 205). The state saw middle-class Eurasian women as exemplars of the newly “accomplished” woman and, ultimately, the messengers of British feminine refinement.
Separated from the missionary schools that gained in importance for educating Indian girls, the state schools both educated and hired Eurasian women to teach the children of government employees, perpetuating the accepted notion of “deficiencies” in the ability of Indian girls to learn.
Allender contrasts the Code schools with the missionary schools for Indian women and girls based on a curriculum geared to literacy for conversion. In his view, education for Indian girls consisted largely of missionary schools taught by European women, asserting an incongruously Western agenda, with its “uncertain relevance for an emerging India” (p. 2). Even the missionary schools, however, solicited Eurasian girls whose families could pay tuition and who brought with them state-funded support. Inside the walled mission, Allender paints a picture of a racially divided space where Eurasian and European girls were separated from Indian girls. Outside the walls of the mission, missionaries sought the acceptance of Indian women inside the zenana, or women's space, within their homes. Here the missionaries were the cultural outsiders seeking acceptance.
Two chapters of the book are devoted to the realm of medical care, education, and treatment, which proved to be more successful arenas of mutuality and less-racialized interactions between European and Indian women. Built and funded largely through missionary societies, it was easier to train Indian women as physicians, nurses, and midwives, where the absence of interference or funding from the state allowed for the breakdown of racial barriers more commonly structured into the government education systems.
Learning Femininity in Colonial India offers a picture of education for women in schools and in the burgeoning field of women's health care over more than a century. The book reveals the racialized construction of privilege for certain women through access to education, notably for European, Eurasian, and Indian women with close ties to the raj. It also demonstrates the arena of medicine in which racial barriers were more permeable, particularly where they operated outside of the state's fiscal incentives for racial separation. In these ways, Allender accomplishes his central intention to examine the influence of a British concept of femininity as it was imposed by Western educators through education and medical training, mediated by state-sponsored goals for producing “accomplished” teachers. Allender's narrative style is often peppered with digressions to other times or places, which can be distracting. Nevertheless, overall the work sheds light on the evolution of state and missionary education over the century, and the construction of an “accomplished” corps of women teachers and medical professionals schooled in a British version of femininity.
