In 1879, when presenting a paper on female suffrage, Louisa Bigg told her audience that,
“An Eastern traveler, struck with the unbearable tedium and monotony of life in the Harem, asked a native gentleman whether he should like to be treated as he treated his wives who were shut up in their dreary prison from one year’s end to another. “Oh, no,” he answered, “I am a man.” It is this sprit which dictated the Suttee*, which prompted the Mahomedan spirit to deny that woman has a soul, and which bids the Englishwoman stay at home and darn the stockings.”1
*widow immolation
Bigg’s statement encapsulates early feminist strategy that used the “Eastern” woman as a foil against which the Englishwoman (and Western woman more generally) could define and represent herself as a civilised and enlightened counterpart to the Western man – thereby bolstering arguments for female emancipation.
Though references to her may be fleeting and not always explicit, the Eastern woman is present in the writings of Western feminists from the beginning. Her role as the “Other” woman was crucial in convincing opponents of female emancipation that, if their demands were not met, the very future of Western civilisation was at stake. As we shall see, feminist arguments were built around the passivity and servility of an imagined Eastern womanhood; she was invoked as an example of what an unacceptable womanhood looked like – and rejected on the basis that her culture and religion denied her emancipation. Furthermore, the same Eastern women became an object of humanitarian concern, and a pretext for feminist imperial intervention.2
Orientalism and the female Other, were, thereby, a conceptional foundation of Western feminist thought.3
Feminist Orientalism
According to Joyce Zonana, “…feminist orientalism is a rhetorical strategy (and a form of thought) by which a speaker or writer neutralizes the threat inherent in feminist demands and makes them palatable to an audience that wishes to affirm its occidental superiority.”4
The challenges and hostility Western feminists faced in implementing change in their own societies is well known and need not be commented on further here. What is less well known is how in response to these very challenges, orientalism became a major premise in the formulation of numerous feminist arguments.5
In Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the foundational text of Western liberal feminism, this strategy is employed in the clearest terms. She describes the objectionable treatment of women in Western societies, by Western men, as “Eastern”, or “Mahometan” (Islamic); indeed, on the very first page of her treatise, this treatment of women is described as in “the true style of Mahometanism…subordinate beings, and not as part of the human species…”6
The text is full of numerous such examples; she even accuses the poet Milton in his description of women, as having deprived them of souls “in the true Mahometan strain.”7 (This false claim about Muslim women being denied souls in Islam, is found repeated in numerous European texts.8)
Though Wollstonecraft likened aspects of Western life to Eastern, this does not, of course, suggest that she considered them to be on equal (civilisational and cultural) footing; the former, though behaving like the latter, is still distinct from and superior to it.9 The tyranny associated with Eastern man, is inherent to his race, culture and religion; while the Christian, Western man, though treating his women in the “Eastern” way, is going against the grain of his race and culture10 – and can yet be elevated.
This orientalist strategy was employed not to bring attention to the perceived plight of the Eastern woman, but rather to bolster the feminist argument for its own needs. By comparing Western woman to her Eastern counterpart, the argument for the emancipation of the former from the patriarchal norms of Western societies, could be “represented not as a radical attempt to restructure the West, but as a conservative effort to make the West more like itself.”11
The belief that the West was superior to the East was so entrenched in Western culture and consciousness (usually by means of stereotypical representations of the East in literature, art and later, photography) that it meant this rhetorical strategy needed little elaboration; there was a preexisting understanding (a cultural code12) between writer and reader / speaker and audience that the East and anything Eastern (Islam, Muslims, and indeed, all other Eastern religions and peoples) represented barbarity and backwardness – the opposite of the enlightened, civilised West. Hence the mere mention of the East and all of its iterations in feminist texts was sufficient in conveying the intended point: ‘We’ should not behave like ‘Them.’
In the Enfranchisement of Women, Harriet Taylor’s influential 1851 essay on female emancipation, she creates a hierarchy of women in line with British imperial thought of the time. “Savage” tribal women who “were and are the slaves of men for purposes of toil” are placed at the bottom, while “Asian” women, slightly better placed “were and are the slaves of men for purposes of sensuality.”13 Though Taylor places European women at the top of this imagined hierarchy, she contends that they too have not yet achieved equality with their men.
However, these ‘other’ women, unlike Europeans, have become “servile-minded” and that “instead of murmuring at their seclusion, and the restraint imposed upon them, pride themselves on it…”
Though, Taylor admits that no woman would choose submission over liberation (suggesting servility is not inherent, in contrast to Wollstonecraft’s vision of the East) she claims that “The vast population of Asia do not desire or value, probably would not accept, political liberty; nor the savages of the forest, civilization…” – due to “custom” which has hardened them “to any kind of degradation, by deadening the part of their nature which would resist it.”14
Blaming “custom” for the ‘ills’ of the East was, by now, routine in Western thought. Two decades later, Millicent Garrett Fawcett reinforced the same argument by telling her audience in 1872 that “among the savage races women have little better lives than beasts of burden. In India a widow is sometimes compelled to sacrifice her own life at the death of her husband. In the semi-civilisations of the East we know that women are principally valued as inmates of the Seraglio.”15
Fawcett’s remark, like Louisa Bigg’s after her, makes mention of two of the most recurring images associated with the East in feminist orientalist literature: the harem (saraglio) in Turkey and the Middle East, and sutti* (widow immolation) in India. Both were used to depict Eastern women as servile and submissive, and Eastern men as barbaric and despotic.
*Sutti (sutee, sati) or widow immolation, is a rite that involved a Brahmin widow casting herself onto the funeral pyre of her husband. Though this article will not focus on it here, is worth noting that sati was not actually witnessed in person by any Westerner. Rafia Zakaria has written about the “moral panic” manufactured by colonisers in India in response to this barbaric ritual that was, in reality, rare. The British attempted to prove that it was a prevalent part of Hindu culture that must be banned. In doing so, they “created the ‘moral’ case for imposing further colonial laws” in India.16
The Harem
The image of the harem was used not only in feminist writings, but in wider European literature from at least the early eighteenth century onwards. The harem or seraglio was depicted in both literature and art (and later photography) as a sexually charged space in which the multiple wives of a single man were confined.
In reality, a harem was simply the female quarters of a household, in which only mahrams (immediate male family members) were permitted. Inhabitants of the space could include the wives of a single husband in a polygamous marriage, but also his other female relatives, including mother, sisters and aunts.
As Leila Ahmed has shown, depictions of the harem in Western literature are based on the “prurient speculation” of Western males, “often taking the form of downright assertion, about women’s sexual relations with each other within the harem.”17 Though written with great assurance, they are not based on actual observation given that Western males had no conceivable means of access to female spaces.
Nonetheless, the image of the harem as imagined by Western male writers became deeply entrenched in Western consciousness, and feminist writers invoked it regularly to warn their audiences of the consequences if calls for female emancipation remained unanswered. It was used as an example of what happens to a society if its women are not granted the same freedoms as its men.
Thus Wollstonecraft denounced those Western women more concerned with beautifying themselves than emancipation, as “weak” beings “only fit for a seraglio!”18 Fawcett decried the “dull and vacuous“ nature of the harem,19 while Sidney Smith asked, “What has ruined Turkey and every eastern country…but leaving the culture of each rising generation of the governing classes to the sultanas and female slaves of the seraglio and the harem?”20
In this sense, the harem came to function as a metaphor for the Western oppression of women.21 It was invoked not to criticise the concept of a harem itself, or in support of Eastern women in view of their ‘plight’, but rather to aid the feminist project in the transformation of Western society.
As European travel to the ‘Orient’ and the colonies, became more common, harem or, in India, zenana, visits were a popular tourist activity. Western women visiting the female quarters of wealthy households or palaces, sought to experience the inside of a harem – based on their pre-conceived notions. Female accounts of such visits (to the best of my knowledge), did not describe hedonistic, sexually charged environments supposedly observed by Western males before them. Instead, it was the pitiful nature of the ‘confined’ women that concerned them. Mary Carpenter complained of the zenana’s “dreary walls”22 while Bayle Bernard lamented the “sunless, airless” existence of its inhabitants.23 (It is worth noting here, that the vast majority of feminist writers who invoked the harem in their writings had not themselves actually visited one, or indeed even travelled to the ‘East’.)
During her travels to Egypt, in 1850 Florence Nightingale visited Engeli Hanum, the wife of Said Pasha (son of Mehmet Ali) at their palace. Nightingale is impressed by her beautiful appearance, describing her as “tall and with a beautiful figure, unlike these Turkish women” and “unique among the Turks,” (Egypt was then ruled by the Ottomans) but is nonetheless in a hurry to leave “for certainly a little more of such a place would have killed us.”24 She goes on:
“Oh, the ennui of that magnificent palace, it will stand in my memory as a circle of hell! Not one thing was there lying about, to be done or looked at. We almost longed to send her a cup and ball…the very windows into the garden were wood-worked, so that you could not see out. The cold, and the melancholy of that place! I felt inclined to cry.”25
Not even beauty, status and the riches of the palace could prevent Nightingale pitying this Eastern woman. So entrenched were the associations of the harem as a place of degradation and enslavement, that just a short amount of time spent as a guest in the company of a Pasha’s wife was enough for Nightingale to confirm her pre-existing expectations and dismiss the woman as a pitiful creature with such assurance. Upon leaving her company, she was relieved that the “penance” was over.
As Antoinette Burton points out, “Even when tempered by what contemporary feminists considered to be compassion, the harem was understood to serve as shorthand for Eastern slavery and female oppression- and always used as an argument for the necessity of female emancipation for British women.”26 Nightingale’s observations, though not explicitly attached to feminist thinking, nonetheless leave the reader in no doubt that the ‘other’ woman, imprisoned by her culture, is not like ‘us’.
Imperial Feminism
As we have seen, the Eastern woman was used primarily as a foil against which Western feminists could define themselves and argue for their own emancipation. However, alongside this function, the Eastern woman became an object of humanitarian concern. Within a British context, due no doubt to Britain’s colonisation of India, this concern focused primarily on the “Indian woman”- who was, ultimately, a feminist construction, created to advance the feminist project.
As Burton has shown, the feminist press and publications such as the Englishwomen’s Review, were instrumental in allowing British feminists’ to display their imperial values; by regularly representing Indian women within their pages, they were able to demonstrate their ‘concern’ for colonial women.
The Indian woman was a ‘subject’ to be studied and discussed, while at the same time subjected to “feminist scrutiny and interpretation and distancing” on the grounds of her “Otherness.” Discussions about Indian women were centred around two things; first their inferiority to British women, and second the responsibility of the latter for ‘saving’ their Indian sisters.27
Some feminists, including Mary Carpenter and, later, Bayle Bernard, though in no doubt about the inferiority of the Indian woman, still believed she could be educated and therefore redeemed. They encouraged their fellow Englishwomen to take up roles in the colonies and come to the aid their Indian sisters.
Bernard wrote, exhorting English women: “Let them throw their hearts and souls into the work, and determine never to rest until they have raised their Eastern sisters to their own level; and then may the women of India at last attain a position honourable to themselves and to England, instead of, as is now so generally the case, filling one with feelings of sorrow and shame.”28
That there was no doubt about the hierarchy of the women in question can be seen clearly in Carpenter’s assertion that “the natives work well under the English, if…they fully realize the superiority of the British character and yield to its guidance with willingness.”29
Though such efforts may well have been sincere, according to Rafia Zakaria, 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.”30
Nineteenth century Englishwomen who took up professional roles in the colonies (while unlikely to have been able to attain such positions due to gendered restrictions at home), “proved to all those who stayed at home that empire was not simply the project of the British man but that it belonged to women as well.”31
In other words, the “white man’s burden” was hers too.
Conclusion
Western feminists defined themselves, from the very beginnings of the feminist movement, against an imagined female Other – the “Eastern woman.” She was invoked both as an inferior creature to be pitied, unlike ‘us’, and as a warning of an unacceptable womanhood – of what could happen to a society if demands for female emancipation were not met.
She became the object of humanitarian concern, providing feminists with the opportunity to demonstrate their imperialist capabilities. Ultimately, the Eastern woman was a feminist construct, created to further the needs of her Western counterpart.
By employing orientalist and imperialist rhetoric in their arguments, feminists were able to present their demands as part of the progress of Western civilisation – and not as a radical restructuring of society, and reaffirm the superiority of the West over the East.
In essence, orientalism and imperialism were a part of the very foundation of Western feminism.
Footnotes
1 Louisa Bigg, “Should the Parliamentary Franchise Be Granted to Women Housholders?,” paper read at conference in the Council Chamber at Luton, December 11, 1879, in Women’s Suffrage Pamphlets (1871-80), p.4, quoted in Antoinette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915, University of North Carolina Press, 1994, p.151.
2 Antoinette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915, University of North Carolina Press, 1994, p.116.
3 Ibid, 114.
4 Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of ‘Jane Eyre.’” Signs, vol. 18, no. 3, University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 594. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174859.
5 Ibid.
6 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, David Campbell Publishers Ltd, 1992, p. 1.
7 Ibid, p, 21.
8 For more, see Leila Ahmed,“Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem.” Feminist Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, Feminist Studies, Inc., 1982, pp. 521–34, https://doi.org/10.2307/3177710.
9 Zonana, 1993, p.601.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid, p.594.
12 Ibid, p.602.
13 John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, “The Enfranchisement of Women”, https://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/jsmill/diss-disc/eow.html
14 Ibid.
15 Millicent Garret Fawcett, “Mrs. Fawcett on Women’s Suffrage”, speech delivered in the Town Hall at Birmingham, December 6, 1872, in Women’s Suffrage Publications (1871-71), p.5, FL, quoted in Burton, 1994, p.122.
16 Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism, Hamish Hamilton, 2021, p.123-4.
17 Ahmed, 1982, p.524.
18 Wollstonecraft, p.4.
19 Quoted in Burton, 1994, p.117.
20 Quoted in Ibid, p.123.
21 Zonana, 1993, p.599.
22 Mary Carpenter, Six Months in India. Vol.2, p. 168.
23 Bayle Bernard, “The Position of Women in India,” EWR, July 1868, p.471-82. Quoted in Burton, 1994, p.117.
24 Florence Nightingale, Letters From Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-1850, Barrie & Jenkins Ltd, 1987, p.208.
25 Ibid.
26 Burton, 1994, p.118.
27 Burton, 1994, p.171.
28 Quoted in Ibid, p.182.
29 Quoted in Ibid, p,186.
30 Zakaria, 2021, p.20.
31 Ibid.
