Against White Feminism Read online

  The Glamour magazine of the 1860s, The Englishwoman’s Review, was launched to create a platform for this very argument: that white British women, now the leading ladies of empire, should have lives that were visible, free, and politically meaningful, in contrast to the sequestered, conquered, invisible women of the East. It was impossible, after all, that the lives of British women be defined by constraints and constrictions similar to those faced by the lesser women of the world, who had yet to be civilized.10

  The question of exactly how uncivilized Indian women really were raged on for years in the pages of the magazine. This argument cut both ways: on one hand it appealed to pity and the generosity of rescuers (See how badly Brown men treat Brown women? White men would never be so barbaric) and it also made an appeal to white dominance (Whatever Brown women have, white women must have more and better). The writers of the Englishwoman’s Review saw their screeds and essays as the material of the continued ascendancy of feminism in Britain, and themselves as “workers in a women’s cause who were making history.”11 Some, like the author Bayle Bernard, thought that the wretched Indian women living the “sunless airless” existence were nevertheless educable and hence redeemable, which is why all Englishwomen inside and outside India should “throw their hearts into the work [of educating them] and determine never to rest until they have raised their sisters to their own level and then may the women of India at last attain a position that is honorable to themselves.”12

  Other articles critiqued the use of words like “primitive” or “uncivilized” about people of color and colonial subjects, though of course even these did not include the actual participation of the women in question. Such women were divested of politics of their own, useful only “when explained, modified and put to feminist use.”13 Just like Eve Ensler and countless other white feminists today, Englishwomen writing in these colonial gazettes sought to speak for the women they were trying to save. Then and now, the virtue of saving women of color entitles white women to bylines, enhancing their reputations and elevating their professional status, with no reference to the irony of this transaction.

  Whatever the sincerity of the Review’s debates about lifting up Brown sisters, in practice they functioned as a glue that united a vast variety of British women under the imperial umbrella, all of them believing in and projecting the vision of imperialism as a benevolent force. As Ensler’s bravery in traveling to Congo renders her the altruistic heroine of her report, so the nineteenth-century Englishwomen who decamped to the colonies proved to all the others who stayed at home that empire was not simply the project of the British man but that it belonged to women as well. In this “feminized” imperialism, the duty of the imperial woman was to stand with the men who served the empire in shouldering “the white man’s burden.” An ad in the Englishwoman’s Review from January 1888 said it all: “An Opening for Women in the Colonies” beseeched readers to offer their services to colonial peoples because their plight, particularly that of Indian women, should be a “special and deserving object of feminist concern.”14

  The white women who arrived in the colonies to build girls’ schools or to train teachers were ill prepared to cope with basic cultural differences—for instance, in clothing. If European feminists are terribly annoyed at Muslim women who insist on covering up their bodies today, they were equally annoyed by the lack of coverings worn by Hindu women then. Annette Akroyd was a British woman who set off for Bengal to build a school (inspired by an encounter almost identical to the one described by Ensler two centuries later as the reason she had made her journey to Congo). She found the sari, as a garment, both “vulgar and Inappropriate” as it left women, in her view, semi-nude. “There must be a decided change to their lower garments,” she complained in a letter home after her arrival, “for they cannot go into public with such costumes.”15 Even when she encountered a well-to-do Bengali woman, she likened the way that she dressed and sat to a “savage who had never heard of dignity or modesty.”

  The white women, ostensibly there to help their colonial sisters reach their potential, were quick to use signifiers like clothing and posture as evidence that Brown women were limited by an innate primitivism and that because of this they were in urgent need of white assistance. Meanwhile, by the mid-nineteenth century, almost fifty years before Gertrude Bell arrived in the colonies, Indian women had already created reform-minded women-only organizations. By the 1870s Indian women were already publishing their own magazines that dealt with women’s issues with such gusto that the “Women’s Press” emerged in the North Indian province of Maharashtra.16

  In the 1870s, Indian women such as Pandita Ramabai, Soonderbai Powar, and Krupabai Satthianadhan were translating literary texts from English and other European languages into local languages and were active in speaking against their own subordinate role within society.17 By 1882, not long after Akroyd’s ill-fated trip (she soon gave up on the school and got married instead), there were 2,700 educational institutions for girls in India, with a total of 127,000 students and fifteen training schools for teachers.18 A couple of years later, in 1886, Swarnakumari Devi began the Ladies’ Organization, and she was followed in 1892 by Pandita Ramabai, whose Sharda Sadar was dedicated to the education and employment of women.19 A decade later, the Hindu Ladies Social and Literary Club held its first meetings under the auspices of Ramabai Ranade. From the 1890s onward Indian women were graduating from Indian colleges and universities and agitating for increased educational opportunities.

  And in 1905, around the time that Gertrude Bell was discovering her personhood and her superiority to the silly, cloistered women of the East, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, the wife of a Bengali civil servant, penned one of the leading feminist texts of Indian literature in English, “Sultana’s Dream”—in which the protagonist is transported to a wondrous world without men, where only women run the show. The story was fiction but it reflected the strategy of “separatism” that Indian women had adopted in their organizations, which did not allow men to hold any of the high offices.20

  On the odd occasion when a white feminist did come into contact with actual Brown women, the results were almost tragicomic. In one such encounter, the Egyptian feminist writer Huda al-Sha’arawi was approached by a Frenchwoman, Mlle. Marguerite Clement. Clement and her friends wanted to deliver a lecture to aristocratic Egyptian women in Cairo about the Western and Eastern attitudes toward the veil. To ensure that these aristocratic women actually attended the event, Clement asked al-Sha’arawi to find someone older and more important to sponsor it. Through al-Sha’arawi’s efforts, Princess Ayn al-Hayat Ahmad was persuaded to fill that role. On the day of the event, however, the princess ran late and the white women in charge of the event decided to begin without the presence of the honored guest, prioritizing the British notion of punctuality over the Eastern values of hospitality on one level and actively asserting the right of the white audience to begin proceedings when it suited them. The princess’s eventual arrival with her royal entourage caused a commotion that interrupted Clement’s lecture and peeved the Western women, who felt the words of one of their own should not have to compete with the arrival of an Egyptian royal, or rather that notions of white etiquette should be privileged over those of the Egyptian women. Eager consumers of the reviews and periodicals that situated colonized women as their inferiors, these white “feminists” began to criticize al-Sha’arawi, and Egyptian women at large, for not knowing proper etiquette. Al-Sha’arawi, in turn, was upset by this cultural condescension toward the Egyptian women who were present, and toward her personally.21

  There was an element of white fragility in the encounter as well, where white women could not bear being told to pause proceedings until the royal guest had taken her seat without becoming immediately defensive at the suggestion that they were being disrespectful. Then there is the issue of demanding that whiteness remain central: self-righteous indignation about lateness may appear very reasonable, but punctuality, like all qu
alities, does not have absolute and universal value. Its importance is culturally coded and points in this case toward asserting the supremacy of the white way of doing things as the correct and only way. In cases that involve a bringing together of disparate groups, then, there is the question of whose norms should be respected, whose baseline adopted by all. This is what is meant by “centering whiteness.” And such seemingly trivial impulses signal the direction of much more far-reaching ones, revealing the intentions of one group to make the rules for the other.

  In non-Western cultures, important guests are often late, and the other attendees duly wait for them as a mark of respect. This is an alternate etiquette to the Western one, neither inherently more right than the other. But for the white women at the lecture, punctuality—prized by white Western culture, at the nub of Protestant and capitalist values of productivity—could not simply be considered a rule for white and Western people: it must be imposed on everyone else too.

  The knee-jerk defensiveness of the British women upon being interrupted by al-Sha’arawi is a telling display of white fragility. It demonstrates the discomfort felt when people of color, seen as inherently inferior or in need of help (despite their material condition and experience), fail to show adequate gratitude to their white saviors, expose the shortcomings of those white people implicitly or explicitly, or point out the reality of their racial privilege. This internal discomfort is weaponized externally in any number of ways: as anger, victimhood, a refusal to cooperate or communicate.

  Race and feminism are nowhere more integrally connected than in the fight for women’s suffrage. It is possible to even argue that the claims of the suffragists were taken seriously only because they existed within and against the more troubling prospects of having to grant citizenship to Black, Brown, and Asian men who had been colonized and, in the case of some parts of the world like the United States, enslaved.

  Most British suffragettes made no bones about tying their right to vote to their racial identity as Anglo-Saxons. The archival materials of the age are full of evidence of this noxious truth: the suffragist Charlotte Carmichael Stopes began her account of British women’s “historical privilege” by citing the “racial character of our ancestors.”22 Helen Blackburn, who published her own history of the women’s suffrage movement, glibly agreed, attributing the early equality of the sexes in Britain to “Anglo-Saxon superiority over all the Indo-Germanic races.” Millicent Fawcett, who, like all other British suffragettes, thought that representative government had begun in England, asked the rhetorical question, “Why should she (England) not continue to lead as she has led before?”23

  As the early twentieth century began and British suffragettes drew closer to winning the vote, they wanted their lesser colonized sisters to engage in a parallel struggle. But the politics of women in the colonies at the time, particularly in India, were geared toward winning freedom from colonial rule. Indian feminists like the poet Sarojini Naidu, among scores of others, adopted Mahatma Gandhi’s famous slogan: “India cannot be free until women are free and women cannot be free until India is free.” Naidu was a leader in the “Quit India Movement,” demanding the British leave, or “quit” her homeland. She and hundreds of other women party members participated in civil disobedience and were arrested and jailed by the British.24

  Meanwhile, British suffragettes refused to support the fight against colonial domination abroad. Even though at home they were fighting the dominance of men who claimed that women could not govern themselves, they reinforced/joined/parroted/echoed these men when it came to arguing that Indians were incapable of governing themselves. They wanted the Indian suffragist women’s movement to look and behave exactly like a mini version of their own struggle, and saw the support of the Indian independence movement as a traitorous abandonment of the women’s cause.

  While refusing to support Indian women in their political goal of self-rule, British suffragettes insisted that they were allies in the project of getting women the vote in a country where no one, male or female, was free. The words of one Indian woman protesting a conference convened by British women could well have been spoken today: “I disputed the right of the British women to arrange a conference on Indian social evils in London, where all the speakers were British and many of them had never even visited India,” said Dhanvanthi Rama Rau. “We (Indian feminists) were already assuming responsibility ourselves and we were sure that we could be more successful than any outsiders, especially those that were ignorant of our culture.”25

  Seeing that the Indian feminists were not playing ball, the white suffragists decided to go about fighting for Indian women’s right to vote (but not freedom from colonial subjugation) themselves. In 1917 the “Women’s Indian Association” was founded in Southern India, geared toward the specific project of getting the franchise for Indian women. The founders of the organization were mostly white women, even including theosophist Annie Besant.

  From the beginning of the organization’s existence, the leadership of the committee began to lobby various British parliamentary members. They included a radical Jewish MP, Edwin Montagu, who they hoped would support their proposal for franchise for Indian women. In 1918 the proposal to extend the franchise to Indian women was presented before the Delhi Congress. The proposal passed with support from now Dame Millicent Fawcett.

  Ultimately, however, white women could not win the franchise for Brown women from white men. In 1918, Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, along with Edwin Montagu, convened the Southborough Franchise Committee to interview Indian women regarding the feasibility of women’s franchise. In 1919, the committee, which had only interviewed women in the provinces of Bengal and Punjab, declared that it had not found support for the vote among Indian women. The reason was obvious. Indian women wanted the vote, but in a country free from colonial subjection to the British. What indeed was the power of a vote in a country enslaved? Indian women knew that once the struggle for independence was won, their own right to vote would come with it, as the Congress Party had promised in 1931 that they would provide all women with the vote when they came to power.26 When the British finally left India in 1947, both the countries created in their wake (India and Pakistan) granted the vote to women in their constitutions.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Is Solidarity a Lie?

  In the winter of 2012, I received an email from a man who at the time taught Middle Eastern politics at the satellite campus of a large Midwestern university. We knew each other because of our circulation on the adjunct circuit of the colleges and schools in the area, and my own students had told me that he was an attentive and thoughtful professor. In the email, he said that some close female friends of his were arranging an informal event that would bring together feminists from different parts of the world for a conversation about women’s rights. The idea was to have the event open to the larger public to generate local interest in international issues.

  Skeptical of these sorts of well-intentioned but vaguely described events and conversations (and not knowing him particularly well), I ignored the email. I was, in those days, spending my days representing women at a domestic-violence shelter and this took up a good deal of my time. The crisis-based legal assistance I was providing to my clients, most of whom were Black, Brown, and Asian immigrant women, kept me busy with the urgent and pressing issues of immigration and child custody that their cases inevitably involved.

  Two days before the event, however, I received a call from a friend of mine. During the call, he urged me to attend, not least because it would also be an opportunity to introduce to the community the work I was doing at the shelter with immigrant women. Reluctantly, I said I would do it.

  On the day of the event, I spent my lunch hour jotting down some notes about feminism in Pakistan, the subject I understood I would be speaking on that evening. It was a cold and wet one as I trudged toward the venue, balancing bag and umbrella. As I approached, I could see the building was lit up and the hum of voices wafted out i
nto the night. It appeared to be a well-attended event, which made me feel hopeful about the evening.

  When I stepped in, a tall, willowy blonde with her hair in braids asked if she could help me. I introduced myself as “one of the speakers,” information that immediately led her to consult a printout, held together, I noticed, with a gold paper clip. “Oh you’re Rafia Zakaria,” she said, crossing off my name. “You’re late!” she exclaimed as she apprehended me again, now with a frown, “and you’re not dressed in . . .” The half sentence hung in the air as she searched and failed to find the correct word. “In your native clothes!” she finally said. I stood there shocked by the ease with which she chastised me.

  Before I could come up with a response, my blonde handler was back in action, leading me through a maze of tables that were interspersed throughout the room. Everywhere I looked there were white women, all of them flushed from the little cups of “free” wine that their “entrance fee” (of which I had only just learned) had got them.

  “Here is your table!” my handler declared after we had waded through the crowd. On a white table were a variety of trinkets that I recognized as tchotchkes sold at various tourist stores in and around the airport in Karachi. Someone had also printed out photographs of various Pakistani landmarks, the kind you would find in tourist guide books, and cute children, and placed them in the middle of the earrings, bangles, key chains, and cell-phone cases. Handwritten on a square piece of paper was Made in Pakistan.

  While I was woodenly taking all of this in, my handler decided I was the sort of stupid that requires specific instruction. She turned to me and said, “So the idea is that the ladies are milling about and you’re to try and engage with them and then tell them about your country and show them these handicrafts which are all for sale.” I looked around the room and, indeed, next to each table were Black and Brown women dressed in their “native garb.” Next to me was “Nepal” and a little ways off was “Kenya.” Some were just standing while others were being assailed with questions from white women who had decided this was what counted for participation.