By Hannah Maddison Cragg
Edited by Tyler Morgan and Mark Potter
Within the context of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, ideas of gender and sexuality were, more often than not, intrinsically linked to empire-building and developing notions of race. Considering both the stellar multidisciplinary explorations of gender historians in recent decades, most notably those of Anne McClintock and John Tosh, as well as contemporary images and declarations, we will uncover an image of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British Empire that blends ideas of race and gender as one in the palette of colonial subjugation. This essay aims to prove that race, gender, and empire were constantly entwined in the time period, and that none can be mutually exclusive from the other.
Central to our understanding of Victorian and Edwardian notions of gender is the crisis of
masculinity that dominated the attitudes and actions, subconsciously or not, of many men at the time. As Michael Kimmel, a leading sociologist on issues of gender, professes, men preoccupied with gendered visions of manhood become plagued by a state of “chronic anxiety”, a phrase which can undoubtedly be useful in studying the male experience of empire. Within this framework, then, contemporary men in Britain and its colonies would have been under constant pressure to prove their masculinity through codes of chivalry and manly pastimes such as sports and hunting (which often proved disorderly especially in school contexts), but also through the masculine virtue of control- over their wives, households, and ultimately, over feminised colonies.[1] A career in the military, as an expressly male arena, was to be the paramount goal for all young men, and serving
the country in fields abroad was a competition of Victorian male ideals. Participation in the military allowed men to guarantee their place in the hierarchy of masculinity, competing against other men in a contest of male prowess. Recent scholarship posits Victorian military culture as a national experience, whether its participants had actually served or not; through literary and art cultures as well as school experiences such as the Boys’ Brigade (1883) or later, the Boy Scouts (1910), helping to extend national pride in the military and war to all sectors of society.[2] At its core, though, the active role of bearing arms and the camaraderie of the military were gendered as exclusively male privileges.
If military participation was a contest of masculinity between individual men, then the empire brought those gendered trials to the world stage. Superbly summarised by John Tosh, imperial power came to represent a “test of a nation’s virility”, indicating that imperial struggles were seen as contests of masculinity, not only through wars, but through the ability to control, subjugate, and extract resources from defeated lesser, feminine-coded colonies.[3] Here, the crisis of gender takes on a role as something that must be constantly asserted, regulated, and if necessary, proven through the physical means of brute force and mobilised combat. Empire and its associations, it has been suggested, were understood as embodiments of sexuality.[4] Nationhood and civilisation are necessarily pictured as male forces to justify the domination over places that the Victorians viewed as backward or uncivilised, just as men were expected to dominate their wives and women around them. The cult of domesticity established at home thus fed into tropes of dominance on an international level.
Of course, it was not just the military structure that presented ordinary Britons with notions of imperial manliness versus exotic femininity. Each level of society played its part in the building of imperial prowess, and in turn empire found its way into the daily lives of Victorians and Edwardians in unexceptional ways in what Michael Billig refers to as “banal nationalism”.[5] In studying children’s fiction and prominent authors at the time, we can discern a collaborative effort to introduce themes of empire to impressionable children and ingrain the associated ideas of masculinity and patriarchy unto young minds. Authors such as H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines, She), Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book, Kim) and Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) among others, helped to shape the minds of young Victorians and instil a sense of adventure and exploration as masculine ideals.[6] Here, exploration of virgin lands and unconquered territories comes to subliminally represent sexual conquest over women. Anne McClintock starts her prolific Imperial Leather by examining the explicit symbolism of the map in Haggard’s infamous King Solomon’s Mines as a thinly-veiled reference to female anatomy, with the sexual organ on the map at once symbolising the white man’s economic prosperity in plundering foreign gemstone mines,
and the sexual conquest over women (Figure 1).[7] Here, the masculine goal of exploring,
conquering, and charting uncivilised territory is equated with sexual dominance, and by extension, imperialism is associated with the creation of (ideally, white male) heirs and the continuation of family genes. Undeniably, the Victorian and Edwardian correlation between race and empire was a mindset that began from childhood.
Building from our understanding of an omnipresent empire in Victorian and Edwardian society, the role of commercialism and advertising in building British nationalism is not to be taken lightly. Advertising took on a gendered aspect in that consumer products targeted women and emphasised domesticity, even though they would have been viewed in the public sphere of shop windows, buses, and billboards. Even the most mundane household goods built on imperial pride, and products were also increasingly directed towards wives in colonial marriages abroad.
Glancing at Figure 2, a poster publicising an anti-mosquito soap, it is clear that women were a central focus of many consumer products, not least because they were expected to be in charge of domestic shopping.[8] Indeed, the central focus of the poster is two lounging, aristocratic women, one adorned in silk as was typical of many colonial women, but perhaps even more so in Britain itself where imported fabrics from the subcontinent were highly prized by women who might otherwise not encounter them.[9] The requisite to advertise mosquito soap is of course, spurred on by an increasing European presence in the tropics and warmer climates, but equally connotes the new Victorian obsession over cleanliness, both within the household and in a racial sense- soap and its associated purity became something that distanced white Victorians from racial “others”, or even from the dirty working classes.[10] While this particular advertisement is not explicitly patriotic, the fact that it is specifically targeted towards women living in the colonies reflects the racial partition created by white middle-class women who flaunted cleanliness against the impoverished and dirty subjects on the Indian subcontinent.[11] One of the facets of racial superiority was thus Victorian standards of cleanliness, itself constantly entwined with gender and beauty standards, which (as advanced by imperial historian Catherine Hall) were ironically dependent on imperial imports and products.[12] If, as Stoler and Cooper argue, the distancing and othering of colonised people “had to be defined and maintained”, then products such as soap, but also food and articles of clothing, had to become markers of British civilisation to provide a constant superiority and thus a reaffirmation of their right to control the territory.[13]
Alternatively, Figure 3, the cover of a weekly magazine entitled The Mirror of British Merchandise and Hindustani Pictorial News, presents explicit imperial imagery as a means of subjugation and assertion of British racial superiority through gender.[14] Featuring depictions of the female encapsulation of British imperial power, Britannia, guarded by a lion, as well as typical Mughal Indian imagery of a camel, elephant and Taj Mahal, one might initially suspect its aim is to create a sense of cultural unity between the British rulers and subjects, but in reality the message is one of continued imperial dominance. The artist represents international commerce and British industry through steamboats in the background, reflecting the reality of the mass exploitation of colonised territories, and the pinnacle vision of British colonial glory is completed through the setting sun, an obvious reference to the ‘sun never sets’ imperial motif. Intensely patriotic images such as this allow us to grasp the duality of British women in the face of empire- they were at once expected to stay out of politics and directly engaging with empire, and yet in many ways they were
idealised in propaganda, either as Britannia, the fierce defender of imperial projects, or as victims of the lusts of native men, particularly in the face of conflict such as in the Indian Mutiny.[15]
How, then, did women fit into the relationship between race, empire, and gender? Between the Victorian and Edwardian eras, women were presented primarily as the mothers of empire, and importantly, the child-bearers of the British race. Scholarship places the military failure of the Boer War as the spark that lit the torch of nationalistic fervour over childbirth and motherhood, as the poor physique of many imperial soldiers pointed to the ill effects of prolonged childhood malnutrition and inadequate parenting.[16] The crisis of childbirth led to increased attention to the hygiene of mothers, breastfeeding, as well as the health of infants. In a sense, healthy babies became a national commodity; as the population of the British Empire grew, strong men would be required for peacekeeping, building infrastructure, and if it came to it, waging war. Briefly viewing Figure 4, a comic strip by a leading cartoonist from 1909, it is clear that even under the guise of humour, the necessity for childbirth in the creation of future soldiers was paramount, especially in the years leading up to the First World War.[17] Going hand-in-hand with the demand for healthy babies, the popularity of eugenics dictated that mothers prioritise childbirth over everything else, including education.[18] Events such as a National Baby Week and the emergence of magazines, pamphlets, and welfare groups targeted at mothers were testaments to the new focus on babies. The underlying current to infant welfare was entirely racial- white, British babies had to be strong enough to eventually carry the flag of the British race and to ensure that local populations in the colonies did not overwhelm the British presence. Childbirth was rendered doubly important in the tropics, principally because of the assumption that it was impossible for women to produce offspring in warmer climates- women in the British Isles would therefore have to birth more children to make up for this detriment.[19] In this sense, women were increasingly seen as the providers of empire, and essential to the continuation of the British race in its assertion of racial hierarchies across its dominions and colonies. Gender here becomes the foremost tool in the creation of race.
Aside from their primary role as imperial mothers, some Victorian and Edwardian women also had a more direct role in discourses of race and empire. A notable example is of course, Flora Shaw, whose reports and articles on the colonies not only informed government policy but also granted her a certain amount of independence as a wage-earning woman. Described by contemporary sources as the “Dame of the British Empire” and a “crusader”, her staunchly pro-imperial views were echoed by many prominent women of the period, including suffragettes (which Shaw was certainly not).[20] Other middle-class women championed the rights of Indian women, making an effort to ban the practice of Sati or widow-burning, but such movements were often misguided and emphasised the heroine or white saviour complex of many white women, who saw their role in India as maternal rather than compatriotic.[21] Crucially, by directing philanthropic efforts on the less fortunate women in India, British middle-class women were able to divert their preoccupations with their own situation at home, particularly in the face of feminist movements. Women also made elusive appearances as missionaries, using the Christian religion as a signifier of Western dominance, as well as nurses, particularly during pandemics, although these roles were generally rare, and women were often withdrawn quickly due to fears of sexual promiscuity. [22]
In essence, then, gender, race, and empire were perpetually interconnected in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Women and men played distinctive roles in the production, maintenance, and defending of imperial projects and by extension, the British race. Contemporary views of race, fuelled the role of eugenics and Social Darwinism, meant gender was in constant peril, as only through a large white British population could imperial prosperity be achieved.
Figure 1: H. Rider Haggard, ‘The Way to Kukuanaland’, King Solomon’s Mines (1885).
Figure 2: Unknown Artist, ‘Calvert’s Anti-Mosquito Soap’, F. C Calvert & Co, (c. 1890).
Figure 3: Unknown Artist, ‘January Cover’, The Mirror of British Merchandise and Hindustani Pictorial News, (January 1893).
Figure 4: William K. Haseldon, “The Child-Army of the Future”, Daily Mirror, (19 January 1909), Comic Strip, Courtesy of British Cartoon Archive.
Notes
[1] John R. Mallea, “The Victorian Sporting Legacy”, The McGill Journal of Education, 10:2 (1975), pp. 184-196; Suzie Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture, and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain, (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 166.
[2] Michael Brown and Joanne Begiato, Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 29.
[3] John Tosh. Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family, and Empire, (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005), pp. 193.
[4] Philippa Levine, “Sexuality and Empire” in Hall, Catherine, and Rose, Sonya O (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 122-142.
[5] Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism, (London: SAGE Publications, 1995).
[6] Helen Goodman, “Masculinity, Tourism, and Adventure in English Nineteenth Century Travel Fiction”, in Thomas Thurnell Read, and Mark Casey (eds.), Men, Masculinities, Travel and Tourism, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 13-27.
[7] H. Rider Haggard, “The Way to Kukuanaland”, King Solomon’s Mines, (London: Cassell and Company, 1885); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Colonial Conquest, (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 3.
[8] Unknown Artist, “Calvert’s Anti-Mosquito Soap”, F. C Calvert & Co, (c. 1890), Advertisement, Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London.
[9] Nupur Chaudhuri, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp, 235.
[10] McClintock, Imperial Leather, pp. 32.
[11] Chaudhuri, Western Women, pp. 197.
[12] Catherine Hall, “Introduction” in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 25.
[13] Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, (California:University of California Press, 1997), pp. 7.
[14] Unknown Artist, ‘January Cover’, The Mirror of British Merchandise and Hindustani Pictorial News, (January 1893), Magazine Cover, Courtesy of British Library, London.
[15] Alison Blunt, “Embodying War: British Women and Domestic Defilement in the Indian “Mutiny”, 1857-8, Journal of Historical Geography, 26/3, (2000), pp. 403-428.
[16] Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’ in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, (California: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 87-151.
[17] William K. Haseldon ‘The Child-Army of the Future’, Daily Mirror, (19 January 1909), Comic Strip, Courtesy of British Cartoon Archive.
[18] Davin, ‘Imperialism’, pp. 99.
[19] Nancy Rose Hunt, ‘“Le bebe en brousse”: European women, African Birth Spacing, and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, (California: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 287- 321.
[20] Helen Callaway and Dorothy O’Helly, ‘Crusader for Empire: Flora Shaw/ Lady Lugard’ in Nupur Chaudhuri, and Margaret Strobel (eds.), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 79- 97.
[21] Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India”, Cultural Critique, 7/1, (1987), pp. 119- 156; Antoinette M Burton, “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and “The Indian Woman”, 1865-1915’, in Nupur Chaudhuri, and Margaret Strobel (eds.), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 137- 157.
[22] Nancy Rose Hunt, ‘“Single Ladies on the Congo”: Protestant Missionary Tensions and Voices”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 13/4, (1990), pp. 395- 403.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Haggard, H. Rider. “The Way to Kukuanaland”. King Solomon’s Mines. London: Cassell and
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Haseldon, William K. “The Child-Army of the Future”, Daily Mirror, (19 January 1909), Comic Strip, Courtesy of British Cartoon Archive
Unknown Artist, ‘Calvert’s Anti-Mosquito Soap’, F. C Calvert & Co, (c. 1890), Advertisement,
Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London
Unknown Artist, ‘January Cover’, The Mirror of British Merchandise and Hindustani Pictorial News, (January 1893), Magazine Cover, Courtesy of British Library, London
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Imperial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005
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Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo’, in Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura, (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. California: University of California Press, 1997
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Mani, Lata. “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India”. Cultural Critique. 7/1. 1987
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Colonial Conquest. New York: Routledge, 1995
Steinbach, Suzie, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture, and Society in Nineteenth
Century Britain. London: Routledge, 2017
Tosh, John. Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain: Essays on Gender,
Family, and Empire. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005
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