The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  Mary Slessor was a true daughter of a long line of women travellers and explorers, from the phenomenal Jane Digby, who at the age of forty-six enslaved a Syrian sheikh and became queen of his tribe, to Lady Anne Blunt, the first woman to penetrate the Arabian peninsula. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the extent to which travel offered some fortunate women the chance of escape from the excruciating boredom of their lives at home: Isabella Bird was so ‘delicate’ that ‘the quietest life in London’ reduced her to ‘nervous prostration’, but anywhere else she could ride thirty miles a day, sleep rough in a blizzard, and outface grizzly bears and howling Chinese mobs.

  Adventuring women could escape, too, from the rigours of Victorian sexual repression. The redoubtable Bird, having investigated the menfolk of Australia, the Pacific, China, Iraq and Tibet, and by now the first woman Fellow of the British Geographical Society, lost her heart in the American West to a ‘dear desperado’, ‘Rocky Mountain Jim’. The famous lepidopterist Margaret Fountaine briskly collected more than butterflies in her travels, and when she startled a toothsome young dragoman in Syria, she made this particularly fine specimen her common-law husband. Louisa Jebb, who with only another woman for company had ridden through Turkey and Iraq narrowly escaping death at the hands of Islamic fanatics, described coming upon a ‘screaming circle of dancing, stamping men’. Although vividly remembering ‘I once did crochet-work in drawing-rooms!’ Louisa did not hesitate:

  A feeling of wild rebellion took hold of me: I sprang into the circle.

  ‘Make me mad!’ I cried out. ‘I want to be mad too!’

  The men seized me and on we went, on and on with the hopping and turning and stamping. And soon I too was a savage, a glorious free savage under the white moon.27

  Whist in Winchester, checkers in Cheltenham and Mah Jong in Marlborough would all pale as a form of entertainment in comparison with this: and could the veleta or the St Bernard’s waltz ever be the same again?

  No less adventurous were the women who travelled to make their fortune, like the Jamaican businesswoman, traveller, gold prospector, writer and ‘doctress’ Mary Seacole, a Creole of slave ancestry crossed with Scots, who left a thriving business in Kingston to follow the British army to the Crimea, where she became nationally famous for her dedication in provisioning the troops. As a widow, Mrs Seacole was keen to stress that this was her choice and not something forced upon her: ‘it was from a confidence in my own powers, and not at all from necessity, that I remained an unprotected female.’28 Like Seacole, Mary Reibey had every reason to feel ‘confidence in her own powers’: transported to Australia in 1790 at the age of thirteen for stealing a horse, this Mary became in time a hotelier, grain trader, importer, shipping magnate and property developer, Australia’s most successful businesswoman in the history of the island.

  Most of the Empire’s businesswomen traded, however, in a more immediate commodity: flesh. Of these, the saloon-bar girls of the Wild West have passed into mythology, though their real-life stories needed no embellishment. As the laconic tribute on a played-out silver mine in Johannesburg, California, ‘dedicated to Hattie, Little Eva and the Girls of the Line’, ruefully records, ‘While The Men Dug For Silver, They Dug for Gold’.29 One terrified traveller described the experience of seeing ‘about seventy-five’ dance-hall girls descending on him:

  All of them had nicknames such as the Virgin, Cheekako Lil, Buntie, the Oregon Mare, the Utah Filly, Punch Grass, the Black Bear and her sister the Cub, another called ‘Wiggles’, and so on down the line. You could pay your money and take your choice. If you didn’t watch out they would help themselves to your money! . . . Do you wonder that we were anxious to leave that place where everything cost dollars [and] painted-cheeked ladies tempted us on every street corner?30

  Certainly there was gold to be dug out of the pockets of the men who had spent long, harsh, deprived months and years extracting it from the far less accessible sources underground. Honora Ornstein, known as Diamond-Tooth Lil, the last surviving ‘dance-hall sweetheart’ of Dawson, Texas, found her first fortune so easy to come by that she made a second, just like that. Among the ruling queens of the daughters of the game, Julia Bulette, who arrived in Virginia City just after the discovery of the fabulous Comstock lodes in 1859, charged the prospectors $1000 an hour for her service and amassed a collection of precious stones and jewels that would not have disgraced a tsarina or ranee. What is usually overlooked, however, in the romanticization of these women (the quintessential fantasy is Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return) is the risk they ran. Ornstein lost all her money and with it her mind, spending the last forty years of her life in mental institutions in the state of Washington, while Bulette was strangled by an unknown murderer in the gorgeous bedroom of her private palace, which was then denuded of all her jewels and valuables. The empire had a way with ‘unprotected females’ of reminding them why females needed protection. Essentially this was a male preserve, a masculine adventure – and when women adventured, they did so at the risk of incurring a supreme reminder of men’s dominion and domination, their own destruction.

  Gold-diggers, ‘business girls’, female travellers, traders and simple opportunists, these women colonizers had had at least some element of choice in their own lives. Most hapless and unprepared of all the women of the empire were those who were colonized; who simply by being born into a particular country fell victim to the domination of white males in addition to their own. For as the ‘gaming girls’ remind us, one of the invisible exports of colonization was the age-old patriarchal division of women into madonna and whore, imposing on the women of the new worlds all the values and oppressions of the old. Nor were these ‘virgin lands’, in the preferred imperial imagery, supinely awaiting the thrust of the great white male to rouse them from their primeval slumber. All had their own existing social and political systems, in most of which women were subordinate to men. With colonization, then, in a grim and unavoidable concatenation of interests, white male supremacy meshed with pre-existing male domination to ensure that native women, when all the permutations of sexism and racism were completed, found themselves at the very bottom of the pile, the lowest of the low.

  For even among their own people, the status of indigenous women could be horrifyingly degraded. One missionary to the New Hebrides, a Dr Codrington, recorded the case of a woman who accidentally witnessed a newly initiated youth undergoing his purificatory washing. She fled immediately to the mission school for forgiveness for her ‘sin’ – but when the men of her tribe came after her she gave herself up to them and submitted without a murmur to being buried alive.

  A similar disregard of the value of female life could be demonstrated in almost every imperial territory, and was undoubtedly a major block to any hope of the white ‘masters’ understanding the ‘subject races’, when their own denial of the reality of women as people took the opposite form of exalting the female mystique. To hardened imperial adventurers and fresh-faced puppies of colonial administrators alike, episodes like this sacrifice in 1838 of a young girl in her early teens merely confirmed their assessment of the native males as hopeless, irredeemable savages:

  . . . she was painted half red and half black, tied to a sort of ladder, slowly roasted over a slow fire, and then shot with arrows. The chief sacrificer tore out her heart and devoured it while the rest of her body was cut into small pieces and placed in baskets to be taken to a neighbouring cornfield. There the blood was squeezed on the new grains of corn to vitalize them. The flesh was made into a sort of paste which was rubbed on the potatoes, beans and seeds to fertilize them . . .31

  Anglo-Saxon males may have shrunk from roasting girls to death, especially if they were attractive enough to be put to other practical uses; but in all other respects, the behaviour of empire men to native women ensured that these women, already subject to their own men, were in effect colonized twice over. By a natural extension of the central metaphor of empire, the rape of the virgin land, so all the women of
that land were also the conqueror’s to do with as he pleased. Each country was therefore a limitless pool of potential concubines for the rest and recreation of the troops, and such was the assumption of supremacy that the women so treated were expected to feel themselves highly favoured into the bargain.

  Yet the women so honoured often found themselves with the worst of both worlds. The prototype experience was that of La Malinche, ‘the Mexican Eve’, an Aztec noblewoman who was presented to Cortés in an effort to placate the conquistador when he invaded Mexico in 1519. She acted as his translator and adviser as well as his mistress, and is credited with consistendy moderating his policies towards her country and its people. Yet to her contemporaries she was known as La Vendida, ‘she who sells out’, or La Chinçada, ‘she who gets fucked’.32

  For some women, this situation could be the stepping-stone to advancement and influence. When Sir William Johnson, the British commander of the Northern Colonies of America and appropriately enough Superintendent of Indian Affairs, took a young Mohawk woman as his mistress, he may not have intended to change the course of local history. But ‘Molly Brant’, as he called her, made herself invaluable in Johnson’s relations with the local tribes, negotiating boundaries and other decisions that survive to this day. Johnson respected Molly enough to make her his official hostess, and she bore him nine children from 1759 onwards, living with him at the official residence as his wife until his death, when she was granted a pension for her services by a grateful British government.

  To some men, these women were no less than wives. Many treated their native women with affection and respect, like this officer of the Hudson Bay Company in Canada writing home to describe the Ojibwa tribeswoman whom he firmly declines to describe as his mistress:

  I have said nothing yet about my wife, whence you will probably infer that I am rather ashamed of her. In this, however, you would be wrong. She is not exactly fitted to shine at the head of a nobleman’s table, but she suits the sphere she has to move in better than any such toy . . . As to beauty, she is quite as comely as her husband . . .33

  The ‘country wives’ of empire men the world over were, however, more accustomed to hear themselves described as a ‘bit of brown’, a ‘squaw’ or ‘brown jug’, so-and-so’s ‘piece of circulating copper’, and much, much worse. Predictably too, love relationships of many years, even with a family of children, almost always failed to withstand the recall or transfer of the man back into ‘white society’ once again.

  Not infrequendy the sexploitation of native women assumed proportions of horrifying cruelty. Nowhere were matters worse than in Australia, where the white men treated the Aboriginals not merely as a lower form of human being, but as a lower form of animal and used them worse than their horses or dogs. This is the unvarnished testimony of Sarah, ‘an Aboriginal Female . . . about twenty years of age’, who was rescued by the Conciliator for the Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, in 1837:

  Q: Who took you away

  A: James Allen a sealer and Bill Johnson was in company with him

  Q: What age was you

  A: Was a big girl when they took me away

  Q: How did they take you

  A: They tied me round the neck and led me like a dog

  Q: Where did you go then

  A: We stopt in the bush one night when they tied my hands and tied my feet

  Q: Does the sealers beat the women

  A: Yes plenty – the Sealers cut off a boys ear and the boy died and they cut off a piece of a woman’s buttock

  Q: Did Dutton ever beat you

  A: Beat me with rope . . .

  As Robinson discovered, both the flogging of Aboriginal women and the removing of flesh from their buttocks when food was in short supply were practices so regular that the sealers fiercely resisted any attempts to restrict these ‘rights’ over their ‘gins’. Robinson had to collect a good deal more evidence of this sort before he could persuade the white authorities that the Aboriginal women were not, as was commonly believed, happy with their white masters and reluctant to leave them.

  On the credit side of the balance, relations between conquerors and conquered were not always so unrelievedly black. Empire women in particular were often strongly motivated by religious or humanitarian principles to help those who would certainly receive no other help on the earthly side of the grave. One Public Health instructor in turn-of-the-century Lahore was called to a difficult delivery in circumstances that were by no means out of the way:

  Three o’clock one cold winter’s morning . . . the house of an outcaste, a little mud hut with an interior perhaps eight by twelve feet square. In the room were ten people, three generations of the family, all save the patient fast asleep. Also a sheep, two goats, some chickens and a cow, because the owner did not trust his neighbours. No light but a glim in an earthen pot. No heat but that from the bodies of man and beast. No aperture but the door, which was closed. In a small alcove at the back of the room four cot beds planted one upon another, all occupied by members of the family. In the cot third from the ground, a woman in advanced labour.34

  The midwife-instructor was, however, too short to reach the patient, although there was not a moment to be lost. But by good fortune, the cow lay wedged against the bottom of the cot-pile – so standing on the back of the uncomplaining animal, the midwife, after a prolonged struggle, successfully delivered ‘a pair of tiny Hindus – boy and girl!’

  Nor was the exchange between the women of empire always confined to a one-way flow of benefits from the colonizers to the colonized. The Scots missionary Mary Moffat wrote endearingly of learning from her African neighbours how to keep house in the Kuruman Valley of the Kalahari desert, ‘You will perhaps think it curious that we smear all our room floors with cow dung once a week at least.’ On her own admission, Mary had tried very hard to manage without ‘that dirty trick’. But as she confessed:

  I had not been here long but I was glad to have it done and I had hardly patience to wait till Saturday. It lays the dust better than anything, kills the fleas which would otherwise breed abundantly, and is a fine, clear green . . . it is mixed with water and laid on as thinly as possible. I now look on my floor smeared with cow dung with as much complacency as I used to do upon our best rooms when well scoured.35

  On the whole, though, the advancement of empire meant not co-operation with the indigenous peoples, but the establishment of mastery, an aim which hardened rather than diminished as time went on. In South Africa, for instance, the white settlers bitterly resented any progress towards equality made by the black people who had hitherto, in true patriarchal style, been their ‘dependents’, and who could, if freed, compete for land with their own sons. This was one of the principal spurs to the Great Trek of 1835–48, when the Cape was abandoned by those who could not stomach black emancipation. In the new republics of Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, there was an avowed rededication to the colour bar just as it was beginning to fade away in the parent colony. This policy was pursued with such success that after the union of the new territories with the Cape in 1910, their descendants were strong enough to destroy any vestige of liberalism in its own homeland, and to impose the tyranny which subsequendy proved so destructive and so durable.

  As races, so individuals went under the heel, all suffering in different ways the imposition of the alien values of the white male. It is one of the graver ironies of imperial rule that colonial administrators, while powerless or disinclined to terminate traditions often brutally oppressive of women, had no compunction in striking at established customs that gave women some authority or economic control. In West Africa, for instance, women have always dominated the market economy, often rising to become major entrepreneurs. White colonialists, disapproving of this structure and determined to bring it in line with Western patterns, systematically set about suppressing the market women, and despite the women’s agitation and demonstration finally succeeded in vesting this power in the hands of the
males. Omu Okwei therefore became the last ‘Market Queen’ when she was elected chairwoman of the ancient Council of Mothers, a survival of the matriarchy which was finally destroyed when the British transferred supervision of all retailing from the women’s council to the local city authorities after Okwei’s death in 1943.36

  This then was the paradox of empire: that while some women discovered new and unknown worlds, ‘Britannia’s daughters’ in particular seizing the hope of escaping the stifling narrowness of home to become doctors, teachers, leaders, fighters or farmers in the field, others were condemned to the spiral of the old degradation from which women are still struggling to be free. Stories of the early pioneers show women adapting with great skill, courage and resourcefulness to the mixed message of their inherently inferior status, and yet at the same time of the vital necessity of their input to their infant communities. But as time went on, the toils of empire, itself only the parent country and society writ large, grew tighter, working to strangle women’s new-born independence and initiative before it had a chance to thrive and take root.

  In harsh contradiction to the jingoistic self-glorification in which the tales of empire have been couched, it is hard to look back on the entire historical episode as anything other than a massive bungled opportunity. For what the world has finally inherited in every instance is simply another version of the white male patriarchy that the imperialists had nominally left behind, and a restatement in the usurped name of the ‘mother’ country of everything father wanted, needed, and stood to gain from since time began. The pattern was established at the very dawn of democracy in America, when the Founding Fathers chose to reproduce the two-tier system, in the teeth of the forceful plea of Abigail Adams to her husband John: I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more favourable to them than your ancestors . . . put not such power in the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.’37