Post Colonial Article

As with everything, imperialism and gender collide much more often than people assume. If you haven’t read my Gender/Nation page, I suggest you read that before this one! Now that there is an understanding of how they silenced voices in the Victorian era, surely, they brought that with them as they tried to civilize other places.

            From the start, imperialism had everything to with masculinity. The authority they placed on others and placing upon those people the idea of unequal power such as women having no rights. According to Clare Midgley, there were popular ideologies that the colonies were not a place white woman should be in. White women eventually were able to come, to some of the colonies. This idea was brought on by the British idea of what a woman was. She was the moral values of homes around Britain. Bringing over white women greatly helped imperialism. White women brought over the idea that they were the superior race, and by doing so, this brought great impact to imperialism. While other women that weren’t white suffered, white women found new freedom when going to colonies. They were able to control their life a bit more. This is important to note that imperialism didn’t just help white men, it helped white women as well. This is not just a gendered issue, this is an intersectional issue along with race. As white women came in, they promoted the idea of being a housewife, promoting it to women who were not white, even if it was not part of their culture. An example would be in India where white women would look down on Indian women, saying that they don't dress fancy. To British people, Indian women blended in and had no identity of their own. This became a problem, because this meant that it further made white women who came over look better to the British eye. This is a perfect example about the effect women have on others. Therefore, we have to take into account that white women were victims, but they also helped imperialism. They were also partners to this horrific crime.

    

            During these times, the idea was to civilize other places, calling all of the places they go animalistic, and other degrading words. Imperialism in general was an awful thing that got rid of many people’s cultures and lives. However, what of a woman who was in one of these places? Women in those areas were seen as objects of sex or moral approval. According to Clare Midgley, “While indigenous women were equally essentialized as objects either of lust or of moral crusades, ‘saving brown and black women from brown and black men’.” Again, we see women being used by men, but this time not only do men see them as savages, they also see them as weak.

 This becomes so bad that eventually, families in these colonies feel like they have to send their kids to Britain to make them become successful in this new world which brought on stress to the family. Either the mother would have to go to Britain with the child or stay with her husband. Either way, she would often feel divided.  According to the Encyclopedia of European Social History, “A new dimension of British familial relations arose in the colonial setting. British parents in India felt a unique psychological stress when faced with an inescapable choice: the health and educational needs of children compelled many British families to send their children to Britain by the time they were about seven. The departure and long separation of children from their parents in the colony caused a major disruption in familial happiness. British mothers in India had to make a painfully difficult choice between their duties as wives and as mothers by either staying with their husbands in India or returning to Britain with their children.” This brought direct conflict in what the British mother was supposed to do. She was supposed to settle and make a family, but now the family is distraught and separated, which starts to strain on the identity that women were supposed to hold. 

            

            There was also the fact that White men manipulated all women to see the sexism in other cultures while not seeing their own. According to Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, “They signally failed to understand the particular form of male supremacy in their own culture, or to analyze how they created and reinforced aspects of male oppression within Indian culture, seeing no parallels between the different cultural forms of male dominance in the two countries.” Many British women would discuss the horrors that Indian women had to deal with such as beatings from their husbands and beating treated like a slave. Those were rumors going around throughout the public. They failed to notice that they weren’t treated well either. Look at what happened back when they didn’t agree with men, they’d be accused of hysteria and thrown in an asylum! According to Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, “she discusses in horrifying detail some of the atrocities committed against Indian women, including child marriage and widowhood, premature consummation and pregnancy, female infanticide, purdah, temple prostitution and sati. These abuses of a male-dominated culture she relates to the weakening of the Indian stock” 

            The most interesting thing though, is that the leader of the British was a white woman. The Victorian period got its name after her. The more research I did for this topic, the more my eyes were opened that white men did a lot of awful things to women. White women were complicit in imperialism though! Like Queen Victoria, it gave women advantages that they had never dreamed of having, as stated before. Were women plagued by the sexism that men caused? Was Queen Victoria disgusted by the things other cultures did to their women? According to Hassan, “the British empire expanded under the rule of a mighty woman, Queen Victoria, whose name defines the age of empire and denotes victory over those she subdued. In a sense, the rape of Africa and the penetration of its secrets were committed by, or in the name of, a British woman who takes on the phallic attributes of colonial violence. Colonialism made Victoria an omnipresent, omnipotent, and violent goddess.”

            This is not meant to victim blame women, but to show that sometimes we can be our own enemies. Men used sexism against women in many different ways to control women. Things like racism and being rich pitted women against each other to the point of no return. Even to this day women are taught to analyze each other as if they’re objects. There is more to feminism and women's rights than just being a woman, a woman's sexuality or race also factors into their rights as a woman. That intersectionality is something we as a society must work towards, so we don’t end up like this again.

Work Cited

Hassan, Waïl S. “Gender (and) Imperialism: Structures of Masculinity in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North - Waïl S. Hassan, 2003.” SAGE Journals, journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1097184X02238529.

“Imperialism and Gender.” Encyclopedia of European Social History, Encyclopedia.com, 2019, www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/imperialism-and-gender.

Liddle, Joanna, and Rama Joshi. “Gender and Imperialism in British India.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 20, no. 43, 1985, pp. WS72–WS78. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4374973.

Midgley, Clare. Gender and Imperialism. Manchester Univ. Press, 2005.