Women of the regiment: Marriage and the victorian army

Women’sSfudiesInt.

Forum.

0277-5395/!&l $3.00+ .oo 0 1990 Pcfgamon PresspR

Vol.13,No. 4. pp.40-410, 1990

Printed in the USA.

BOOK REVIEWS

A VOWER

Ouu THE LIFE OF MARY KINGLSEY, by Katherine Frank, 333 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1986. Hamish Hamilton, London, 1987. Price cloth LJSSl8.95, UKf14.95. SPINSTERS ABROAD: VICIORIAN LADY EXPLORERS,by Dea Birkett, 295 pages. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989. Price cloth UKf 14.95.

These two splendid books differ in their aims, dimensions, and genres. Katherine Frank brings her background in English literature to the fashioning of a classic biography. Historian Dea Birkett presents a galaxy of Victorian “lady explorers” to reveal the common quest pattern of their lives. Yet, in their separate ways, the authors use incisive feminist analysis to show how “exceptional” Victorian women became brave voyagers to foreign lands in order to chart the unknown regions of their inner selves. For seven years between the deaths of her parents and her own fatal illness in k900, Mary Kingsley grasped a precarious freedom to shape her personal destiny. She made two journeys to West Africa to collect specimens of fish and to study African religious (“fish and fetish”), exploring areas not before reached by Europeans, travelling unimpeded by the usual colonial retinue - “tentless and eating native food,” navigating a ship across the formidable bar on the Niger Delta, and becoming the first white woman to climb Mount Cameroon. Back in Britain, she gained considerable influence in the “haut politique” (as she called it) of ruling imperialist circles through her bestselling books, vivid popular lectures, and her impassioned networking behind the scenes. During those seven years, she transformed herself from a typical spinster catering to the needs of her bedridden mother and her globetrotting father to an independent woman deeply involved in imperialist politics. Today she might well be seen as a model of feminist self-creation against enormous odds. Yet she rejected the label of “New Woman” and took a vigorous stand against women’s suffrage and their entry to learned societies. Frank confronts this contradiction in this finely wrought biography which probes the inner consciousness of this “tortured soul” (Kingsley’s phrase) and shows her affinities with Africans. Writing with grace and a tuned intellect, Frank achieves a beautifully rendered life of this remarkable Victorian woman who was (as Kingsley herself described the Fang) “full of fire, temper, intelligence and go.” Dea Birkett has taken on a project in some ways more original, more ambitious, and more risky. With deft narrative sketches, she portrays stages from the lives of Victorian women travellers-Marianne North, Gertrude Bell, Mary Gaunt, Isabella Bird, Mary Kingsley, to name only a few-weaving the strands into a collective biography of their quest for identity and meaning. Mainly from upper class families, they were severely constrained in their daily lives by ideals of feminine self-sacrifice and duty, often nursing depressed

mothers or domineering fathers. Learning the lessons of women’s cramped lives, they identified with their fathers and a male lineage of freedom exploring exotic worlds. When the opportunity came, usually through the death of one or both parents, they weighed the option of a stifling domestic sphere and chose to escape. Arriving in a distant part of the empire, they found the exaggerated gentility of colonial wives attempting to recreate the British social world abroad. These women explorers soon moved beyond the colonial enclave into the real worlds prefigured in their dreamscapes. They climbed mountains, crossed deserts, made their way through jungles. Danger empowered them, testing their strength of mind and body. In these foreign worlds, they could act as men. They followed professional pursuits of the day: anthropology, archaeology, natural science. Birkett acutely discerns the racial status underlying their freedom of movement: as Europeans, they embodied the power and prestige of the ruling group. Returning to Britain, they were celebrated as female travellers. Now they became public figures: authors of books, in great demand for popular and professional lectures, consultants to politicians or natural scientists. In an elevated status themselves, they often took the side of social conservatism in opposition to women’s suffrage. Many continued their travels in spite of age and infirmity. They lived in multiple worlds of memory and reality, of Britain and abroad, and some chose their final home in the distant land of their self-discovery. This is a many-sided book, copiously researched and sharply analyzed, full of telling vignettes and nuanced insights. If occasionally too many women explorers threaten to break the continuity of life stories, the author supplies an appendix with biographical profiles. For those interested in European women in the colonial world, these books by Katherine Frank and Dea Birkett combine scholarship and imagination to show how spirited Victorian women travellers negotiated boundaries of race, class, and gender (not always admirably) to give purpose and meaning to their lives. HELEN CALLAWAY UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD OXFORD, ENOLAND OX1 3LA

VOrCEs AND ECHOES: TAJXSFROMCOIDNLU WOMEN, by

Joan Alexander, 223 pages. Quartet Books, New York, 1983. WOMENOFTHE REGIMENI:MARRJAGEAND THE VICIDRIAN Amy, by Myna ‘Ttustram, 262 pages. Cambridge

University Press, New York, 1984. The field of British imperial history has experienced a modern revolution in scholarship that has come in the wake of the break-up of the British empire. Stages of 405

406

Book Reviews

imperial growth and phases of colonial development, painstakingly worked out by scholars in the field in the earlier 26th century, orchestrated the history of empire as a set of set pieces all inevitably evolving into a single story of self-government and the creation of a British commonwealth of nations. With a shift of scholarly focus away from the strictly political and constitutional toward broader economic, social, and cultural history. the rigid framework for imperial history began to collapse. A new consciousness of the elements of invented tradition and myth-building that sustained empire at home and the structures that maintained it abroad have developed at a time when the use of gender as an analyti-. cal category promises to open up yet further this process of reassessing imperial history. It is already clear that among the many assumptions of the old imperial history that need to be reassessed are the stereotypes about colonial women created by such male literary voices as Joyce Car-y, E. M. Forster, and W. Somerset Maugham for such places as West Africa, India, and Malaya. Critical first attempts to point the way methodologically were made by Janice Brownfoot (Malaya), Beverley Gartrell (Uganda), and Deborah Kirkwood (Southern Rhodesia) in The Incorporated Wife, edited by Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener (Iondon: Croom Helm, in association with the Center for Cross Cultural Research on Women, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, 1984). Their efforts made clear, for example, how critical was the need to reexamine the muchreseated “truism” (as in even so recent a book as Kenneth Ballhatchet’s Race. Sex and Class under the Rqj: Imuerial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics. I7931965, 1980) that the presence of colonial women was responsible for increasing the social distance between the colonizer and the colonized and worsened race relations between them. Helen Callaway, in Gender Culture, and Empire: Europeon Women in Colonial Nigeria (1987), has now provided us with the next step, an analysis of the meaning of the phrase “a woman in ‘a man’s country”’ in the structure of colonial service in Nigeria. Voices and Echoes, despite its focus on colonial women, belongs to the older tradition. The book provides eight anecdotally organized chapters of colonial women’s voices from places within the British empire as it existed for another two decades after Indian independence in 1947. Alexander’s introduction brings in every imperialist cliche that has ever been enunciated from a male perspective. She assures the reader that it was “Wittle wonder” that “husbands or any man . . . took native concubines” (though she does not say why) and that colonial women (but apparently not colonial men) brought with them unthinking prejudices against the “natives.” Yet her tales of colonial women’s lives, drawn from interviews, offer a complex reading of imperialist attitudes and gender problems. Despite the rather contextless nature of the chapters, the book can be read as a primary source. When allowed to speak in their own voices, these women reveal a good deal about gender, class, and racial attitudes as well as information about domestic lives, diseases, childcare, and the toll taken upon them by the imperial system in which they were caught. These are the voices of colonial women who did their best to play their assigned supporting roles, women imbued, like the author, with respect for the abilities of the men who ran the empire and, inevitably, a lower sense of esteem for themselves. Per-

haps for this reason some are filled with nostalgia for the past responsibilities, opportunities, dangers, and excitements provided them by their membership in an elite ruling group. ‘Ib these women, as to Alexander, the “smart” official uniforms, the ceremony of raising and lowering the British flag to the blowing of trumpets, was all “rather splendid.” ‘Bustram, in contrast, offers a very scholarly analysis of the incorporated regimental wife, the woman married to the British infantry soldier of the 19th century, especially between 1860 and 1880. She concentrates on the situation in England and not overseas, but as threequarters of the infantry was serving in imperial defense at any one time during the century, the issues she raises are critical for an understanding of army life abroad as well. The detailed work on gender in the army overseas still remains to be done (a first attempt being Ballhatchet, noted above). l?ustram’s work makes clear that despite the increasing professionalization of regimental life, what is striking about the lives of both soldiers and their wives is the arbitrary nature of these arrangements. With all the legislation as to length of service and responsibilities toward women they were permitted to marry, in their marital and domestic arrangements, army men had to rely on the personal decisions of commanding officers and the vagaries of troop movements due to imperial defense needs. This meant that even recognized army wives and children were subjected to a nomadic existence without the support of kinship ties, and for the far larger number who were not married with permission of commanding officers and not counted “on the strength,” it meant little provision beyond what they could earn to keep themselves and some forms of charity. In the best of conditions, soldiers’ wives-not more than 6% officially married at home, and rarely as much as the allowed 12% in India-were tightly reaulated and disciplined by regimental rules and-customs with the ultimate punishment of being struck “off the strength.” The period of army reform ihat followed the Crimean War in the 1850s saw increasing attempts to regulate marriage and sex for the military which were, at base, moves to confine and control women’s roles as wives, mothers. prostitutes, and workers. Over time, an increasingly professional and bachelor army limited soldiers’ access to women and conventional forms of courtship and family life. A soldier’s first loyalties were expected to be to his regiment, not to his wife and children, and sudden shipment out could leave a man’s family abandoned and destitute. By the late 19th century, some of this dismal picture had begun to change: a soldier’s exemption from the obligation to maintain his family was declining. state efforts to regulate prostitution were revoked, and care of the soldier’s family, both off and on the strength was becoming a recognized national concern. Trustram’s analysis is carefully constructed and, though dense with details, rewarding to the thoughtful reader. Yet this reader kept hoping to catch a glimpse of the experiences of these soldiers’ wives at fist hand, to hear them speak with their own voices. The only instance comes in the Epilogue, in the voice of a woman at Woolwich detained under the Contagious Diseases Acts: ‘We are Government women. . . . Are we not examined by Government men, and taken in hand by the Government police, and this without pay. Don’t we go into

Book Reviews

Government hospitals, and are not we kept there free of expense? This is just as soldiers are, and we are like them” (p. 193). Would that we could hear her sisters. Do~aray 0. HBLLY HUNTBRCougoa CUNY NEW Yoan, USA

Wsrrl’E WOMEDM FDr, 1885-1930: Tlilr Rvm OF hiPIRE? by Claudia Knapman. Allen and Unti, Sydney, 1986. THE cOMPASSIONATE M~ams: WELFAREAcrtvr’rrns BurrraD WOMEN M INDIA, 1988-1947, by Mary Ann Lind. Contributions in Women’s Studies, Number 90. Greenwood Press, New York, 1988.

OF

WOMENOF rr~s R,u. by Margaret McMillan. Thames and Hudson, London, 1988. Students of colonial societies, although relative latecomers to women’s history, are also beginning to discover the insights that can be gained from integrating gender into their framework of analyses. Not only do such perspectives cast a more penetrating and critical light on widely held misconceptions but they also open up new historiographical vistas. One notion that has long enjoyed the status of conventional wisdom and is only now undergoing re-examination is the stereotype of the memsahib (the lady sahib or the master’s woman). A standard image of European or white women in colonial and imperial settings, Kipling eternalized this archetype for India in the person of Mrs. Hauksbee, a woman who boasted she could “act, dance, ride, frivol, talk scandal, dine out, and approprlate the legitimate captive of any woman I choose, until I d-r-r-rop, or a better woman than I puts me to shame.” In Fiji she was the planter’s wife, a “frivolous, idle, illtempered, narrow-minded, gin-drinking and servant-harassing white woman” (Knapman, p. 14). Mrs. Hauksbee also wore another face. For when she was good, she was very, very good-a characterization of superior morality supposedly embodying the high standards and values that enabled her to stand above the crowd of heathen “natives” and to recreate her own world in the rugged and rude surroundings of an alien land. More a creation of the popular imagination than careful scholarship, the memsahib image is to a large extent an invented portrait. Nevertheless, it has gained wide currency, even in scholarly works, an acceptance that Knapman rightly attributes to a “strong male bias,” more revealing of the “values of the authors, and the pervasive values of our society, than about the attitudes and behavior of men and women in multi-racial colonial societies” (p. 15). Whereas Knapman’s book seeks to unmask the memsahib stereotype, the works by McMillian and Lind are largely content to accept it as a given. Thus, notwithstanding McMillan’s interest in disassembling the “stock figure of the memsahib,” Women of the Raj me described as “obliged to match themselves against a narrow definition of a good woman” (p. 11). European women in India, in other words, became memsahibs “by circumstance as much as choice-and the men also wanted it” (p. 10).

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Lind’s book also valorizes the memsahib archetype although it features women who marched to a different drummer. But commendable as this brief study of 15 2Oth-century woman who were engaged in reform and welfare activities is in mveahng another side of European women’s experiences, it does not ultimately return the dividends the author expects from “an added perspective of the Raj” (p. 110). Not that the The Compmdonate Memsahik who attempted “to break away from the confines of the traditional memsahib life . . . Iby] making an effort to travel in India, to become familiar with the nation’s needs, and to make acquaintances with Indians” (p. 105) misrepresents the lives of these women, but that such a portrayal reifies them into another ideal type, a representation constructed to form an exception to the “norm” of the idle and frivolous memsahib. Much of the book is a description of their welfare and reform activities. It makes little attempt to probe into their minds and ideologies or to see their public and private lives in the round so as to better explain why some women became “compassionate memsahibs.” Lind also takes other myths at face value, for instance, the belief that “Conquerors have come and gone in India, but the rhythm of life id India’s villages remahrs relatively unchanged” (p. 72). McMilhm’s Women of the Raj also misses out or bypasses opportunities to chart new historiographical dinctions. Although she views memsahibs as part of the larger colonial society, she does not delve into that context to delineate its structural and ideological framework. Instead, much of the book is descriptive, a colorful patchwork of details regarding “The Voyage .Out” and-“First Impressions“ (chi 1 and 2). their emergence as memsahibs in ‘The Society of the Exiles” (ch. 3) as they took up residence in “The Land of Exile” (ch. 4). the “Facts of Life” of their daily existence (ch. 5) and the extraordinarv “facts” of the lives of “Women in Danaer” (ch. 6). Additional chapters deal with “Courtship&d Marriaae” (ch. 7). “Children” (ch. 8). “HousekeeDina” (ch. 9),%&ial Life and Amusementt’ (ch. 10) and “Gn Holiday” (ch. 11). Those who did not emulate the standard model of “good wife, mother, housekeeper” (p. 200 -including Lind’s “compassionate” Ursula Graham Betts who worked and lived among the Nagas in the 1930s and 40s~are the subject of “Unconventional Women” (ch. 12). Some attention, throughout the book but especially in the beginning and in the end (ch. 13, “Women in a Changing World”), is also paid to the changing experiences of the Women of the Rqi as the sun rose and set on the Empire. Considerations of memsahibs as the frivolous or heroic Mrs. Hauksbee are often linked to another highly questionable proposition: that their coming in appreciable numbers created the decisive rupture between the rulers and the ruled. Widely upheld without much substantiation and analysis, such a view endows European women, who are otherwise privileged with little voice, considerable historical agency. Largely untested, however, are the foundations on which this proposition rests: namely, the idea that social relations between white men and their subjects were better before the arrival of significant numbers of women (numbers that are rarely ever specified), that European women had more racist attitudes than men (in part because of their roles as the servants’ mistresses). and that estrangement was an outgrowth of their sexual jealousy towards an earlier era’s