DISEMPOWERING WOMEN IN THE COLONIES: The Victorian Regime and Colonial Expansion

During the Victorian Era, under the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), the British Empire was at its peak of power. Along with other European countries, it had secured colonial expansion in different parts of the globe. These nations did not only build economic empires through their colonies but they also enforced moral and cultural values which affected gender, ethnic, and class relations in the colonies.

The Victorian Era was an era of ambivalence. Full of contradictions. It was an era of progress in the sciences and technology brought about by the Industrial Revolution; however, women were seen as naturally inferior to men. In the British homeland, it was an era of strong patriarchal control under the rule of a queen, where women had few rights. The era gave birth to the wealthy male industrious middle class. Middle- and upper-class women were domesticated while poor women worked in factories and the mines, or in the sex trade. Social mobility was most unstable, making it easier for the hard working middle-class to move up the ladder and for the nobles to slide down. Puritan values were the dominant code amidst a growing sex industry. At the same time, it saw the emergence of social movements that failed to achieve much, but would pave the way for major social changes in the following decade, including in the colonies.

This post looks at how the Victorian regime domesticated women in Europe and in turn disempowered women in the colonies through the development of the Western patriarchal family model.

Nineteenth Century Europe

Queen Victoria by John Calcott Horsley

Nineteenth century Europe saw the historic socioeconomic changes which emerged out of the Industrial Revolution and what would create the wealthy middle class. Increased scale of the industry, overseas trading, and the expansion of the empires all contributed to the growth of the commerce and transportation sectors. As a result, vast demands for human resources as well as new businesses in cities and towns gave way to the emergence of a new group of people called the “middle class”. The middle class was associated with modernity, economic growth, and urbanization.

Not surprisingly, the middle class’ economic expansion enabled this group to secure its interests in the political agenda of the time. The principle that it is hard work and merit—and not privilege—which raise an individual’s position in society challenged the power of the aristocracy and brought about a number of reforms in favor of the middle class.

Before the rise of the middle class, women provided an important contribution to the economy of the family by being involved in the family business. Prior to industrialization, many European women worked in the agricultural sector.

As new wealth emerged with the middle class, values about morality, work ethics, and gender upheld by this group quickly became dominant. The Victorian Age in particular saw the rise of puritan values. Discipline and productivity founded the principles of social and moral conduct.

The middle class of nineteenth century Europe exerted a particular set of values about the home and the public sphere. The wife should provide the industrious male with the emotional environment required for his happiness after a hard day’s work. The household was the center of European women’s life and the public sphere belonged to men. Only poor women worked outside the home and many worked in the factories.

Middle-class women of this century had access to education, but they were encouraged to learn only a number of subjects viewed appropriate for women’s domestic life. Lower-class women worked and had a degree of economic independence; however, they were in low-waged jobs.

In the ideal Victorian family, the father is the head of the household. A woman will lose her ownership of property to her husband upon marriage and she would be legally represented by her husband.

The clear line dividing the genders brought about a significant change in the status of women in nineteenth century European middle-class families. Their reduced economic role affected their wealth as well as their social and legal status.

These middle-class values and sexual division of labor were transferred to the colonies as capitalist economic structures and the patriarchal family model were established there.

Colonialism and the Disempowerment of Women

European colonial expansion had a number of objectives: economic profit; exploration and discovery of new land; scientific interest; religious mission and ideological motives; and territorial, political, and military expansion of power. After the Industrial Revolution and Europe’s new commerce, new needs for raw materials and desire for wealth developed. As a consequence, aggressive expansion polices were pursued.

Simon Willem Maris, 1890s

As objectives were not limited to economic and political power, there were moral, cultural, and ideological justification of why structural changes should be imposed on the colonies. Missionaries saw that it was their moral duty to turn the natives into “civilized Christians”. Furthermore, notions of white supremacy justified western culture as being superior. Economic, bureaucratic, and political institutional arrangements were set up in the colonies, to some extent, to mirror those in the colonial homeland. By the nineteenth century, the patriarchal family model were imposed upon the colonies.

The exercise of puritan morality amidst industrialization and the urbanizing of the colonies also took place just as it did in Europe. Hard work and upward mobility as well as the transformation of the family structure to the patriarchal form were justified by this morality.

During the vast development of the modern industry in the colonies in the 1870s, native women’s important involvement in the labor sector was significantly reduced with the utilization of modern machines. The absorption of male labor increased, while most work available to women were in domestic settings. Industrialization and bureaucratization under foreign ideologies expanded the male sphere and domesticated women through their exclusion from the public domain. Workplaces had the European pattern of male domination and working women received lower wages than men. When elite native women had access to education, they were restricted by moral values about being devoted mothers and homemakers.

As notions of modernity were equated with progress and the West, colonial regimes altered customary practices to fit with Western ways of doing things. European imperialists as well as indigenous nationalists established patriarchal models of ruling.  As a result, it undermined native women’s participation in decision-making in familial and community affairs.

The patriarchal model furthermore reduced native women’s access to ownership of property. In matrilineal West Sumatra, for example, attempts to combine adat with the Dutch concept of ownership, in addition to economic changes and an increasingly hierarchical and centralized political system, weakened the authority of senior women over traditional forms of land ownership.

In parts of Africa under a patrilineal system, the few rights native women had to land were further weakened by colonial intervention which imposed policies that privileged male landholders.

Women in the colonies were deprived of most of their rights due to property rights that followed European legal forms of ownership and favored native men. With lack of property rights and reduced access to labor participation, native women gradually lost their wealth and became dependent on the patriarchal marriage and family model.

Segregation

Racial segregation policies which were enforced through spatial arrangements, further disempowered the natives and, in fact, continued to cause ethnic tensions after independence. Europeans settled in the center of the cities and the native people were placed outside the cities, while other non-Europeans, such as the Arabs, Chinese, and Indians were usually positioned in areas closer to center. This was the case in the Dutch East Indies or colonial Indonesia. The British Empire in India on the other hand, adopted a caste organization into its administration which provided privileges to the upper-caste.

Anton Ebert

Segregation polices served cultural, political, and economic purposes. They differentiated the ruler from the ruled and enforced domination and subordination. They strengthened cultural domination through its architecture, tradition, and life style. They were a mechanism to secure social control as well as economic access to a limited elite. In terms of gender and race intersection, if native men were labeled as inferior, native women were seen as even more inferior.

European women in the colonies were also somewhat confined by these segregation practices. European women who followed their husband or family to the colonies lived an exclusive life and was mostly isolated from other non-Europeans, except for their servants and other helpers. However, this arrangement resulted in European women exercising power over the domestic helpers and having a source of power they may not be able to possess back home.

Women’s Rights

Even with the segregation of European women from the native people in general, these women were able to develop relations with some of the elite native women, who also faced cultural constraints. Although motherhood and domesticity were what was considered suitable for the elite women of both sides, this connection had provided a channel for communicating new values that promised women more freedom. The end of the Victorian Era saw the rise of middle-class social movements supporting women’s rights. Contact between these European women and elite native women may have also been instrumental in further spreading ideas on women’s rights—or what some call Western feminism—in the colonies and fostering change.

Although there is a general perception that the spread of Western values gave way to changes in native women’s poor socioeconomic condition in the colonized countries, on the contrary, studies have claimed that native women in the colonies in fact experienced more gender equality than their Western sisters. In general, native women of the less-privileged class had relatively more rights and wealth during the pre-colonial period and prior to the Industrial Revolution than nineteenth century European women. New socioeconomic structures imposed on the colonies affected gender relations and largely disempowered native women.

References

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