Women and War in the British Empire

Abstract

This provocation stimulates reflection on the Eurocentricity of Second World War histories and reflects on how new work can extend the boundaries of the subjects of the war. It argues that women in the British Empire were affected by the war in ways which have, thus far, been under-appreciated.

Keywords:

• Gender
• Second World War
• South Asia
• labour
• India

As war histories of Europe in the First and the Second World Wars have long shown, warfare had ambivalent effects on gender relations. It is a contradictory story. On the one hand, wartime delivered opportunities: for working; for employment and paid work; for the provision of childcare; for the camaraderie of military or civilian employment; for the transgression of sexual and social norms. The gender boundary between paid work, work in the armed forces, and civilian status was blurred. It also delivered a casus belli for the campaign for women’s enfranchisement and political empowerment with French women finally achieving enfranchisement in 1944.

On the other hand, these liberations can be over-exaggerated and were contingent on the needs of wartime rather than major structural changes to gender relations. Most feminist historians now would probably acknowledge that any liberations should be considered as happening beneath a glass ceiling, which was always in place even when invisible, ready to be lowered the minute demobilisation began. The foundations of inequality and misogyny remained the same, with women’s war-work given secondary status.

But these debates about European women during the Second World War have been curiously bound by national borders and disconnected from histories of women in global and imperial contexts. The wider question of women’s experience globally in the Second World War has seemed peripheral to wartime. Sometimes this is a question of the optic, the framing of the history of the 1940s as wartime or otherwise: what we might think of as Second World War history can look completely different in other parts of the world. And the nationalist frame matters. As Cynthia Enloe points out, ‘First, any war is in fact comprised of myriad wars. While some “theatres” of battle may gain prominence in the postwar tellings, they are not the totality of that war’.¹ There are, naturally, studies of women in the Communist party and the Sino-Japanese war, or of the role of South Asian women in Indian and Pakistani nationalist movements. For women in these countries, the histories of national wars of liberation have often preceded the framing of the 1940s as global war. In other words, the vantage point, the perspective, the shoes inhabited in that re-telling of war experience have deep ethical and historical implications.

But in Second World War histories more generally, and particularly those originating in Europe, I have been struck by a lack of curiosity in public histories of the Second World War, about the effects of that war on non-western peoples, and especially women. If empire is the elephant in the room when we discuss the war in Britain, then women are doubly invisible. The presence of women from the British Empire in the war is almost completely missing from even recent publications such as the state-of-the art three-volume Cambridge History of the Second World War. This publication, with numerous articles spanning the global war, does not have much at all to say about gender history. Women do not feature in the index for the first two volumes, and the third volume includes one chapter, which is focused on sexuality and sexual violence in Europe.² Women living outside of Europe, in Asia and Africa, seem to vanish on the horizon. This is curious when we think of the historiography around women in Europe and America during wartime, which is both broad in subject matter and deep in theoretical sophistication. While studies of male soldiers from the colonies have developed apace, women – the bedrock of their families and communities – have often been disregarded. There is an implicit hierarchy of wartime experience pronounced in our historiographies in which female, non-white bodies come lowest in the pecking order. Even more exceptional cases of women in armed units, such as the Rani of Jhansi unit in the Indian National Army, are often treated as anomalies and an aberration rather than symptomatic of more systemic gendered change in the 1940s.

Feminist war historians and political scientists Cynthia Cockburn, Cynthia Enloe, Sonya Rose, and Mary Louise Roberts among others have been deeply engaged with the effects of war on women in provocative ways.³ Enloe has written about militarisation as a process – the way that gendered labour is essential to war and that warfare in society has repercussions for gender relations; women as fighters, women as insurgents, women as nurses and caregivers, women as sexual labour: the whole range of ways that women are affected by and affect war. Enloe’s own position as scholar-activist, deeply motivated and shaped by her own anti-Vietnam war activism, gives a unique perspective on the way that militarisation creates circumstances which affect the social and economic well-being of people beyond the frontlines of military battles. Some scholars, most notably Santanu Das for the First World War, have demonstrated how far the lop-sided nature of sources and the difficulties of recovering the ‘subaltern voice’ of women and girls can be overcome by careful critical reading, using sources in vernacular local languages and by mining unusual family and local archives. He cites, for instance, the youthful Gurmukhi script of a young girl named Kishan Devi, scribbled on a postcard to her father serving in Egypt, expressing her fears for him and asking him to come home.⁴

In the context of the British Empire in the 1940s there are a number of ways such ideas might apply: women’s labour was drawn upon to undergird the war effort in factories, mines, and on road building projects across the empire. Women worked extensively in factories in some imperial cities or picked up the additional burden of farm work and food production when less able-bodied men were available because of wartime conscription or service. Women worked in India in factories producing weapons and war materials, textiles, and uniforms. They also did hard labour on roads such as the Ledo road, levied from the tea-plantations in India’s North East.⁵ Urvi Khaitan discusses how central women were to coal mining in India, for instance.⁶ Women had been banned from working underground in mines due to earlier legislation in 1937, but this was overturned in 1943 because of the needs of the war. These women, often low caste and adivasi, were subject to the whim of legislation decided in Delhi or London. She proves that this is not a peripheral or tokenistic question but actually deeply connected to the productivity of the imperial wartime economy. We see here Asian women literally fuelling the fight with Japan. More broadly, in times of scarcity and food shortage, particularly when famine hit, the economic effects of wartime were deeply gendered, as Judith Byfield’s work on Nigeria and recent studies of the Bengal famine have emphasised.⁷ Colonial command economies, particularly in the conditions of wartime, could be coercive and authoritarian. The effects were felt across the globe, and in particular ways by women.

Women were also more directly connected to soldiering; by aiding or hindering recruitment (particularly when, as in many parts of the empire, men joined up voluntarily rather than by conscription) and by supporting the injured and disabled. There is surprisingly little known about female nurses who moved around the world, often from the dominions to the centres of conflict. Roles in auxiliary services were hard won and often meant overcoming resistance from Whitehall. The majority of the 11,500 women who joined the Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India) were Anglo-Indian or Anglo-Burmese and others belonged to the Indian Christian community. Some of the women came from princely families with old ties to the Raj; others found the work appealed because of an opportunity to circumvent domestic constraints, to travel and to enjoy the adventure of war. Women fought for recognition as part of the Allied forces and struggled to be permitted to take on roles in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and other services. Caribbean women volunteers, who believed they were coming to the assistance of an imaginary homeland, had their initial appeals to join the ATS rejected.

Sex matters too. The sexual exploitation of women has often been associated with the Axis powers; the so-called ‘comfort women’ and histories of sexual slavery in Japan have been an important exception to the lack of gendered analysis of wartime experience in Asia. But under more laissez-faire conditions in Allied zones, prostitution was prevalent. Other issues include the military control of urban space; the use of colonial port cities as rest and recreation grounds where soldiers interacted with local women; the ways in which marriage and relationships were controlled between soldiers and ‘natives’; and the lives of children of any such relationships.⁸ In Cairo, where large numbers of troops from Britain, India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia had massed by the early 1940s ready for the Middle Eastern and North African campaigns, the red light district was a well-known attraction and almost a mandatory part of the soldier’s itinerary. This had a semi-official status, as the brothels were called ‘tolerated brothels’ and the women were ‘licensed’. A system of twice-weekly medical inspections of female sex-workers by Egyptian doctors was directly supported by the British Army which continued to sanction the inspection of women by medically-trained civilians, right up until 1943.

Even after 1943 ‘tolerated brothels’ continued to exist in areas of the Middle East and North Africa. The enforcement of ‘out of bounds areas’ or prohibition on visiting brothels varied depending on the strength of conviction of the local commander and the efficiency of the military police.⁹ In Haifa and Tel Aviv, the system continued while restrictions were placed on Port Said and Suez. In Alexandria, representatives of the Royal Navy made a successful appeal that local brothels should remain ‘in bounds’. Claims were made about natural rights of men, and there was often the latent fear of homosexual relationships. In West Africa, on the Gold Coast near the airbase at Takoradi, there was an increase of girls and women trafficked from Nigeria. Indeed, the government there was forced to pass a law on anti-trafficking in 1943 as a result.

The challenge and prospect is to consider war histories that think deeply about the effects of gendered structures of warfare on global change. We still know very little about the after-effects of wartime and demobilisation on women in Asia and Africa, or on the possibilities for social mobility enabled, if at all, by war-work. There are whole dissertations waiting to be written on the ways in which women in the war were represented in visual and literary propaganda, let alone the literary depictions of the ‘oriental’ woman in the work of European war writers.

This is an exciting possibility. Although Second World War histories may already seem exhaustive and much understood, there are still whole new expanses, fresh archives, and ways of approaching the war that remain to be realised. These, in my imagination, would not displace or dislodge the centrality of Europe from the war, but would rather enhance the story of Europe’s place in the world in the 1940s and the importance of the war’s effects. They would not treat examples of sexual violence or women’s military power as egregious or exceptional. Rather, these histories might help to connect histories of anti-fascism and anti-imperialism, and show the complex intersections across these global struggles, while also revealing the very challenging ways that warfare diffuses across space and impacts women: the ways in which even a war fought for the right reasons has unanticipated implications and repercussions that shape lives far from the epicentre of the earthquake.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yasmin Khan

Yasmin Khan is an Associate Professor of British History at the University of Oxford. She has published on the decolonisation of South Asia including refugees, war and the Partition of 1947, most recently The Raj at War (Bodley Head, 2015). In 2018 she presented a short series, A Passage to Britain, on BBC2.

Notes

1 C. Enloe, ‘Gallipoli, the Somme and The Hague: Feminist Reflections on the Myriad Wars of the First World War,’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 21.3 (2014), 300.

2 J. Ferris, E. Mawdsley, R. Bosworth, J. Maiolo, M. Geyer, and A. Tooze (eds), The Cambridge History of the Second World War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). I admit to also contributing to volume III of this history without making any significant reference to gender.

3 See, for example, C. Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis (London: Zed Books, 2007); C. Enloe, Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); C. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); S. Rose, Which People’s War?: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); M. L. Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

4 S. Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

5 Y. Khan, The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (London: Bodley Head, 2015).

6 U. Khaitan, ‘Women Beneath the Surface: Coal and the Colonial State in India during the Second World War,’ War & Society, 39.3 (2020).

7 J. Byfield, ‘Women, Rice and War: Political and Economic Crisis in Wartime Abeokuta (Nigeria) ,’ in Africa and World War II, ed. J. Byfield, C. Brown, T. Parsons, and A. Sikainga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); J. Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (London: Hurst, 2015).

8 One recent contribution is J. A. Bennett and A. Wanhalla (eds), Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and U.S. Servicemen, World War II (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016).

9 Y. Khan, ‘Sex in an Imperial War Zone: Transnational Encounters in Second World War India,’ History Workshop Journal, 73.1 (2012), 240–58.