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ABSTRACT
The intervention of British feminists in the South African War is a chapter of feminist history that is rarely included either in the memorialization of the suffrage movement or the genealogies of global counterinsurgency. The careers of pacifist Emily Hobhouse and suffragist Millicent Fawcett provide rich opportunities to examine the gendered and racialised politics of British imperial militarism. By exploring the confrontation between these two white women within the wider context of aggressive colonial expansion, this essay will draw out the implications of their differing stances towards the conduct and practice of war, particularly as it impacted on female civilians in the war zone. In doing so, it will contribute to our analysis of the interconnected histories of racism, imperialism, feminism and militarism that have undeniably shaped the politics of global security today.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Vron Ware is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Kingston University, London, UK. She writes about race, gender and the social construction of whiteness; national identity; militarisation; and the cultural heritage of war. Her first book, Beyond the Pale: white women, racism and history, Verso (1992/ 2015) was followed by Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture, University of Chicago, (2002) co-authored with Les Back. Military Migrants, Palgrave, (2012) examined contemporary questions of culture and racism in the British Army. She is currently researching the politics of land and soil in the English countryside.
Notes
1 In the event, the 1915 peace conference was attended by delegates sent from Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Sweden and the United States, laying the foundations for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom which still exists today. No French women were allowed to travel at all, and only three of the 180 British women who applied were successful in acquiring passports. One of those who would have attended, had health permitted, was Emily Hobhouse.
2 See, for example, Howe (Citation2002) on Caribbean soldiers in WW1; Williams (Citation2010) on African Americans and WW1; Das (Citation2014) on Indian soldiers on the Western Front; Bourne (2014/9) on Britain's black community and WW1.
4 Carol Christ quotes John Ruskin's address to the girls of England in Sesame and Lilies:
There is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women are answerable for it; not in that you have provoked, but in that you have not hindered. Men, by their nature, are prone to fight; they will fight for any cause, or for none. It is for you to choose their cause for them, and to forbid them when there is no cause. (cited in Christ Citation1977).
5 As Sylvia attended the WSPU meeting held to suspend campaigning activities, she listened to her mother ‘with grief, resolving to write and speak more urgently for peace’ (Hochschild Citation2012, 106). A few weeks later, she spoke out against the war at a meeting in Glasgow, becoming one of the first suffragettes to do so.
7 Seacole's statue stands in front of a 4.5 metre-high disc, cast from shell-blasted Crimean rock. The sculptor is Martin Jennings. ‘There's a kind of anomaly to a sculptor in the early 21st century making a monument to a great figure of the mid-19th. You need to acknowledge the historical gap, and a good way of doing that was to locate her in her time and place’. Jennings sees her as a figure against a battlefield, of the Crimean war, but also of gender and race. ‘Not only that’, he says, ‘there's this patch of war-torn land, directly facing Parliament, as if to say, “Was it just to win dusty scraps of earth like this that these great imperialist wars were fought?”’ https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/21/sculptor-defends-his-mary-seacole-statue-if-she-was-white-would-there-be-this-resistance (accessed 17 June 2019).
8 The sculptor was Thomas Thornycroft, father of the more well-known William Hamo Thornycroft. He started on the group in the 1850s, exhibiting a head of Boudicca in the mid 1860s, but the full sized bronze was only erected here in 1902, the gift of another one of his sons, some years after the sculptor's death in 1885.
9 See Churchill's view of the whiteness of the Boers (Khalili Citation2013, p. 214).
10 Kitchener went on to say:
The people who have lived all their lives with them have only seen the veneer, hence they have no idea what bringing up in this wild country has produced, savages – the Boer woman in the refugee camp who slaps her protruding belly at you, and shouts ‘when all our men are gone, these little khakis will fight you’ is a type of the savage produced by generations of wild lonely life – back in their farms and their life on the veldt, they will be just as uncivilized as ever, and a constant danger (Doherty Citation2019).
11 For more details of this episode and the camps themselves, see South African History Online; https://www.sahistory.org.za/about-us.
12 Although this was the first time that women had been asked to travel to a war zone to document the impact of military strategy on female civilians, a precedent had been set only a few years earlier. In the mid 1890s, thanks to the campaigning work of Josephine Butler and her associates, two American women travelled to India to document the treatment of prostitutes reserved for the use of British soldiers (Ware Citation2015, 153). Their report, The Queen's Daughters in India, was published in 1895 and resulted in the closure of all brothels within cantonments as well and an end to all compulsory medical examinations (154). In other words, women had been instrumental in recording the degrading treatment of women held in camps set up by the British army, a practice that was integral to military strategy and sanctioned by British law. Their report resulted in the repeal of the Cantonment Act, although this was to have further repercussions as history then proved.
13 Hyslop (Citation2011) continues: ‘And in agreeing that the camps of such colonial wars were predecessors of the vastly more lethal camp systems of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and many lesser dictators, scholars have also recognized their significance for the major catastrophes of the subsequent age’ (p. 4). The US detention centre ‘Camp Delta’, otherwise known as Guantanamo, was a direct legacy of the colonial concentration camp first set up in Cuba by the Spanish government in 1894, continuing a system of incarceration where, as Gilroy (Citation2004) observes, prisoners are simultaneously held ‘inside and outside of the law’ (p. 24). Today the system continues wherever migrants are detained out of site in inhuman conditions, particularly minors and those without papers. For details of the latest atrocity that has come to light, see Pitzer (Citation2019).
14 For this reason she was keen to endorse international links, particularly with peers in the USA and northern Europe. Following the South African War she was instrumental in forming the International Women's Suffrage Association, in 1902. The elderly Susan B. Anthony, the doyenne of the US women's suffrage movement, was honorary president, and Carrie Chapman Catt, also from the USA, and Fawcett were first and second presidents, respectively. The IWSA held the first conference in Berlin in 1904, attended by delegates from Australia, Chile, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Russia and Turkey (International Women's News 2004, p. 7).
15 This point relates to the surge in writing about the fate of monuments that celebrate racist, genocidal and otherwise unacceptable heroes. See Demetriou (forthcoming) ‘Ashes of Our Fathers: Racist Monuments and the Tribal Right’.