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ABSTRACT
British counterinsurgency thinking today remains strongly influenced by the Malaya Emergency (1948–1960) but little-known is the extensive women’s outreach program, pioneered by Lady Templer, involving the Women’s Institute and British Red Cross. Through discourse analysis of archival records, this article identifies four discourses characterizing British women’s participation, used, at the time, to make acceptable their presence whilst distancing them from the counterinsurgency campaign. By exploring how women’s presence has been negotiated and marginalized, I will reveal the blurred boundaries of counterinsurgency, questioning how the role of the counterinsurgent is constructed and sustained over time and for what purpose.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr Oliver Walton, Dr Sarah Bulmer, Dr Alice Cree and the anonymous reviewers for their really helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank the Templer family and the Brunner family for kindly sharing their private archives.
Disclosure statement
No potential competing interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Templer, G. Letter to Lyttelton 1952.
2. Lady Ethel ‘Peggie’ Templer was the daughter of Beatrice and Charles Davie, the latter a Devonian lawyer, and married Gerald Templer in 1926. She became a Lieutenant Colonel in the St John’s Ambulance during the Second World War. She had two children, Jane and Miles. During their time in Malaya she set up a hospital outside Kuala Lumpur which is named after her. (The Times, 7 April 1997).
3. Templer, G. Letter to Lyttelton 1953.
4. Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgencies; Kitson, Low Intensity Operations; Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup.
5. Komer, Malayan Emergency in Retrospect, v–vii.
6. The Briggs Plan was written in 1950 by Lieutenant General Sir Harold Briggs, then Director of Operations in Malaya, recognising the political dimension to the campaign and emphasising the need to protect the population from the Communists ad win their support, Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup, p.71–72.
7. Dixon, British approach to counterinsurgency, 12.
8. Parashar, “Feminism and Postcolonialism” and Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”.
9. Syed and Ali, “The White Woman’s Burden”.
10. Harper, The End of Empire, 324 and Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup.
11. Stubbs, “Evolution of British Strategy”, 116.
12. LWC, Field Manual Countering Insurgency.
13. Marston and Malkasian, Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare, 14.
14. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 8.
15. Ibid., 4.
16. Robinson, Force to reckon with, 183.
17. Schwartz and Cook, “Archives, records and power”, 7; Voss-Hubbard, “No Documents No History”; Lerner, Creation of Feminist Consciousness; Spry “Performing Autoethnography”, 720; Muncey, Creating autoethnographies, 31.
18. Noakes, “Gender, War and Memory”, 666.
19. Henniker, Red Shadow Over Malaya.
20. Schwartz and Cook, “Archives, records and power”, 12–13.
21. Pell, “Radicalising politics of archive”, 35 and Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.
22. Schwartz and Cook, “Archives, records and power”, 2.
23. Merton, “Insiders and Outsiders”; Greenwood, “Chameleon masculinity”; Henry, Higate, and Sanghera, “Positionality and Power”; Yuval-Davies, “Intersectionality, Politics, Belonging”.
24. Parashar, “Feminism and Postcolonialism”, Pettman, Worlding Women.
25. Icaza, “Social struggles and coloniality”; Syed and Ali, “The White Woman’s Burden”.
26. Pettman, Worlding Women.
27. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 7, explores Iran/Contra Affair asking “where are the women?” and Vince, Our Fighting Sisters, 4 describes how the patriarchal nationalist movement removed women’s participation as combatants from the historical narrative.
28. Hack, “Everyone lived in fear”; Hack, Using and abusing past; Ucko, “The Malayan Emergency”; Marston and Malkasian, Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare; Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency; Jones and Smith, “Myth and small wars”; Ramakrishna, ““Transmogrifying” Malaya”; Strachan, “British COIN Malaya-Iraq”; Smith, “General Templer and COIN”.
29. Levine, “Gendering Decolonisation”.
30. Mizokami-Okamoto, “Colonial Welfare’.
31. Cloake, Templer, Tiger of Malaya; Harper, The End of Empire; Strobel, European Women and Empire; Robinson, Force to reckon with; Sunderland, Winning Hearts and Minds.
32. Bhattacharya, “Gender, insurgency and, terrorism”.
33. Bruce-Lockhart, “Unsound minds, broken bodies”; Muzenda, Invisible trauma of women.
34. With the exception of the French in Algeria where mobile social and medical teams (Equipes Medicales Sociales Itinerant) were employed directly by the Army to reach out to women in the community, encouraging reforms (Seferdjeli, “French Army, Muslim Women”).
35. Mama, “Colonialism”.
36. See note 26 above.
37. Dyvik, “Women “Practitioners” and “Targets””.
38. See note 7 above, 79.
39. Dyvik, “Women “Practitioners” and “Targets””, 411.
40. Kilcullen, “State of controversial art”.
41. Duncanson and Cornish, “Feminist approach to counterinsurgency”, 147; Goldstein, War and gender.
42. Owens, Economy of Force.
43. McBride and Wibben, “Gendering of counterinsurgency”.
44. Khalili, “Gendered practices of counterinsurgency”.
45. Herbertson, Letter from Malaya.
46. Hinton, Women and social leadership, 157, 177.
47. NFWI, Annual Report 1952, 18–19.
48. Margaret Herbertson had been in the employment of the NFWI as General and Public Questions Organiser for 6 months when she successfully applied for the post as WI organiser in Malaya (NFWI, Annual Report 1952, 19). Daughter of a retired Foreign Office Official, she worked as a code and cipher operator with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry during the Second World War in Egypt and Italy before working as a house mistress and in the probation service (Woman’s Week, 2 October 1952).
49. See note 47 above, 19.
50. Diemer, “Setting Up National Body”, 11; Barton, Instructor’s for Malayan WIs, para 2.
51. European planter’s wives similarly challenged gendered expectations by engaging in public political debate despite their isolation and demanding living conditions (Datta, “Wives of European Planters”). Their agency is portrayed in the 1952 film, “The Planter’s Wife”, where Claudette Colbert plays the tough wife called upon to defend the plantation from attack (See Rich, Cinema and Unconventional Warfare).
52. Barton, Instructor’s for Malayan WIs, para 3.
53. See note 45 above.
54. Home and Country, More News From Malaya, 116.
55. Gurney, Letter to Countess Limerick, 1; Spens, Preliminary visits to Malaya, para3.
56. BRCS, Notes of conversations, 2.
57. BRCS, Broadcast by Charles Mathew, 1, para 3.
58. New Villages were “settlements for the Chinese squatters, estate workers, and villagers that protected them behind chain link and barbed wire fences lit with floodlights and patrolled by Chinese Auxiliary Police Forces” and included “schools, medical aid stations, community centers, village cooperatives” and their own Home Guard (Nagl, Learning to eat soup, 75).
59. Malacca Branch recorded 19 life members, 77 first aid detachment members, 84 serving associates, 329 subscribing associates and 370 junior cadets (BRCS, Malacca Branch Report 1953); and Perak Branch recorded 87 life members, 490 first aid detachment members, 739 serving associates, 105 subscribing associates and 1213 junior cadets. (BRCS, Perek Branch Report 1953)
60. British Journal of Nursing, Work in New Villages, 90.
61. Thompson, “Humanitarian principles to test”, 60–61.
62. Enloe, Does khaki become you?, 73; Goldstein, War and gender, 381; Hyde, Inhibiting No-Man’s-Land.
63. Papenek, Two-person career, 852.
64. McCarthy, Women of the World, 323–326.
65. Ibid.,326.
66. Enloe, Does khaki become you?, 50, 49, 73.
67. Harrell, “Army Officer’s Spouses”, 55.
68. Diemer, “Setting Up National Body”, 11.
69. See note 26 above.
70. Pettman, Worlding Women, 30.
71. Parashar, “Feminism and Postcolonialism”.
72. Hyde, “Civilian Wives of Military”, 202.
73. Bamfield, The British Army Wife, 9–10.
74. Legg, Military wives, 50–52, 88–92.
75. See note 72 above, 202.
76. See note 70 above70, 27.
77. Diemer, “Setting Up National Body”, 11.
78. Cloake, Templer, Tiger of Malaya, 216.
79. Briggs, Federation Plan for Malaya, 2.
80. Griffiths, Raising Social Standards, 1.
81. BRCS, Central Council Meeting 1952, 17; Spens, Preliminary visits to Malaya, para 3; NFWI, Annual Report 1952, 18–19.
82. Home and Country, Thanks from Malaya, para7; Lyttelton, General Templer February 1953, 4.
83. Lees, Letter Assistant District Officer, 1; Matthew, Letter to Editor.
84. Lyttelton, General Templer September 1952, 2.
85. Lyttelton, General Templer May 1952, 6.
86. Matthew, Letter to Editor.
87. Female Engagement Teams (FETs) were groups of female soldiers deployed by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan to work with the local population by reaching out to women (and some men) in the local communities. The British policy ran from 2010 to 2014.
88. MacGillivray, Letter to Lady Limerick, 1.
89. See note 26 above.
90. Enloe, The Morning After, 166.
91. See note 54 above, 115.
92. BRCS, Report of Travelling Dispensary, 1; BRCS, Federation Annual Report 1951, 1; BRCS, Work Red Cross Branches, 1.; Templer, E. Letter to Lady Brunner, 1.
93. Thompson, “Humanitarian principles to test”; Davey, Borton, and Foley, History of humanitarian system, 26; Rist, The History of Development.
94. Thompson, “Humanitarian principles to test”, 54.
95. Thompson, “Humanitarian principles to test”; Davey, Borton, and Foley, History of humanitarian system.
96. Thompson, “Humanitarian principles to test”, 51.
97. See note 42 above.
98. Syed and Ali, “The White Womans Burden”, p.352
99. Sabaratnam, Decolonising Intervention – International Statebuilding, Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”.
100. Thompson, “Humanitarian principles to test”, 58, 64.
101. BRCS, Broadcast by Charles Mathew, 1.
102. Mizokami-Okamoto, “Colonial Welfare”, 28, 43; Robinson, Force to reckon with; NFWI, International Sub-Committee May 1951; NFWI, International Sub-Committee November 1951, 1.
103. Thompson, “Humanitarian principles to test”, 52–53
104. Brown, Suggested Teams for Malaya, 1.
105. BRCS, Broadcast by Charles Mathew, 1.
106. Pery, Diary of Lady Limerick, 8; Junior Red Cross Journal, Federation of Malaya, 18–19.
107. NFWI, International Sub-Committee October 1953, 4.
108. Azarbaijani-Moghaddam, Seeking out afghan sisters.
109. NFWI, Executive Committee May 1953, 6.
110. Mizokami-Okamoto, “Colonial Welfare”, 37.
111. Home and Country, WI Outing in Malaya, 223.
112. Robinson, Force to reckon with.
113. See note 111 above, 223.
114. Goldstein, War and gender, 312.
115. Unknown, Winning hearts of people, para 7–9.
116. Diemer, “Setting Up National Body”, 11
117. Diemer, “Setting Up National Body”, 11
118. See note 45 above.
119. See note 54 above, 115.
120. Russell, Blessing of Good Skirt, 14.
121. See note 70 above, 25.
122. Nelson, Race for Space, 67.
123. Ibid., 67.
124. Unknown, Winning hearts of people, para 4.
125. See note 70 above, 29.
126. Herbertson, Letter to Lady Brunner.
127. Smith, Takes WI into jungle, 1.
128. Ibid., 8.
129. Templer, Letter to Oliver Lyttelton, 8–9.
130. Baskerville, The White Picture.
131. Peterson, D.G.I.S. to Lady Templer, 1.
132. Ibid., 1.
133. Templer, E., Letter to Lady Brunner, 1.
134. Viola Williams had been the NFWI Agricultural Organiser before being appointed to follow on as WI organiser in Malaya after Margaret Herbertson. Growing up in Wiltshire to a family embedded in the WI, she had experience of Malaya from her service there in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Welfare Unit during the Second World War. (Home and Country, To and From Malaya, para2).
135. Home and Country, Thanks from Malaya, para5.
136. Barton, Instructor’s for Malayan WIs.
137. Patterson, Trengganu Branch of BRCS, 3.
138. Thompson, “Humanitarian principles to test”, 57–58.
139. See note 131 above, 1.
140. Funded by the Malay government the NFWI sustained a rolling appointment of a WI organiser for four iterations before training a Malay replacement (NFWI, International Sub-Committee October, 1954, 5). The British Red Cross deployed 25 Nurses accompanied by 25 Welfare Officers (BRCS, Broadcast by Charles Mathew, 1, para 3). British women were also present in country as planter’s wives and the wives of colonial administrators, some of whom supported these outreach programs, although numbers are unclear (Barton, Instructor’s for Malayan WIs, para 3). Servicewomen also deployed with 4 Independent Company, Women’s Royal Army Corps although being stationed in Singapore only limited numbers visited Malaya (The Telegraph, 26 July 2011).
141. See note 42 above.
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Hannah West
Hannah West is a final year PhD student at the University of Bath. Her research explores the tensions surrounding women’s participation in counterinsurgency and British Army attempts to control women’s war labour. Through exposing women’s stories her study undermines women’s exclusion, reclaiming their histories and re-centering them as part of the narrative of ‘front-line’ ‘combat’ as a form of feminist activism. Hannah is using creative methods to reflect on the gendered aspects of her own military service (hannah-west.org) and is also the Chair of the Defence Research Network (defenceresnet.org).