Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, Philippa Levine, eds. Women’s Suffrage in
the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation, and Race. Ser. Routledge Research in Gender and History.
London and New York: Routledge, 2000. xxii + 252 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-20805-5.
Reviewed by Marilyn Booth (Research Scholar, Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies, Center for African Studies, and Program in Comparative and World Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Published on H-Gender-MidEast (April, 2002)
Imperious Ironies: Politics of Suffrage, Discourses of Citizenship, and Facts of Empire
Imperious Ironies: Politics of Suffrage, Discourses of
Citizenship, and Facts of Empire
ing of women’s suffrage as indicator, mechanism, and
multivalent symbol in struggles over democracy’s expansion and as a key domain in individual and collective identity formation during nation-state consolidation.
For these scholars, suffrage, rather than being seen as a
touchstone within women’s history, holds center stage in
formations of national and international politics. Inseparable from this–and central to every essay in this book–
is the multiple force of women’s suffrage in maintaining,
extending, and resisting imperial authority in the age of
high imperialism, specifically in the British Empire, formal and informal. From the dominions settled by white
immigrants to the direct colonial hegemony in India, the
less formal Mandate authority in Palestine, and Britishversus-Russian “spheres of influence” in Iran, competing
discourses and activisms around women’s suffrage in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had everything to do with the stakes of imperious London’s future.
For “the woman question” as a thermometer of civilizational “levels” (a discourse appropriated and shaped by
elites the world over) had its mirror-image in the rhetoric
of an imperial civilizing mission whose self-definition as
the savior of colonized womanhoods through the proliferation and example of “the (British, or European, or
white, or Christian) race” served as convenient justification for Britain’s continued multi-continental hegemony.
If “the race” was supposedly “the human race,” only certain segments of it had access to political authority. What
interests did different categories of imperial citizens and
Getting the vote has been of central symbolic as
well as practical import in women’s collective struggles
for gender justice in the modern age. Consequently,
women’s suffrage was one of the earliest foci of Westoriented historiography on gender activism, a key trope
in the construction of a liberal Euro/North American
feminist narrative of historical struggle and triumph. The
vote was no less resonant as a signifier of possibility, participation, and transnational empathies for women engaged in national liberation struggles the world over. In
post-World War I Egypt, for example, elite women appropriated the imagery of European women’s wartime
work as the road to the vote to argue for their own ambitions to political participation in a putatively independent nation.[1] It is no wonder, then, that women’s suffrage structured much early feminist historiography. As
the study of gender has ramified and grown in sophistication and coverage, though, the vote has receded as a
peg from which to drape feminist scholarship. Equally,
and ironically, suffrage as a political process has tended
to drop out of the picture, in favor of seeing it as a signifier of the social: a measure of women’s “progress” in
attaining access to social goods, cultural capital, and economic latitude.
This collection of essays argues the pivotal position-
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subjects have in proposing–or in opposing–women’s political participation as voters, posed at different intersections of imperial authority, civil society, and anticolonialist nationalisms? How did women’s suffrage–
whether enacted or not–affect the meanings accruing to
circuits of political participation, the national or the imperial?
Attending to the mutual impact of colony and
metropole in discrete contexts, as a set of essays this volume tends to look like the spokes of a wheel. There is
little attention to colony-colony interaction except perhaps in the inevitably tangled narrative of Arab Palestinian and Zionist nationalisms in Mandate Palestine;
Ellen Fleischmann on Palestinian women’s activism and
Ruth Abrams on Jewish women’s Equal Rights Association show the loud silences that bound women’s activisms there. Abrams shows the dependence of the Jewish association on bourgeois feminist organizations in
Europe, noting the paradox of supporting an ideal of
liberal nation-state citizenship but in “a national ideology born in the midst of a rejection of liberal values”
(p. 121), where “democratic” and “theocratic” outlooks
competed. Not only were the professional women who
founded this organization silent or patronizing toward
Arab women; they also put themselves in an heirarchized, quasi-imperial position with regards to other Jewish women, those of Sephardi communities, linking them
discursively to Palestinian Arabs by characterizing both
groups as mired in practices that mitigated against support for women’s emancipation agendas such as that of
the Europe-gazing ERA. Yet, Abrams points out, one cannot trace the fissures in support for suffrage according
to communal adherence: Ashkenazi haredim were implacably opposed to any public role for women, while
Sephardi, more distant from Orthodox interpretations,
were “more flexible” (p. 125).
Only three of this volume’s fourteen essays treat societies of the Middle East directly, but scholars of the
Middle East will also benefit from other essays’ careful
historicizing of imperial-colonial relations and the roles
played by gender-based rights campaigns therein. Analyses of maternalist discourses as useful both to women’ssuffrage advocates and to its opponents (as in Donal
Lowry’s fascinating portrait of a Rhodesian anti-feminist
who became the British Empire’s first female parliamentarian!) resonate against the symbolic uses of motherhood by early Arab feminists, for example. And the varying valences of commonality, appeal, resistance, and conflict that colonized elites (including feminists) throughout the formal and informal empire demonstrated with
respect to the metropole are pertinent to the study of
feminisms in the Middle East.
The editors make clear their participation in the relatively new scholarly allegiance to “the transnational” as
methodology as well as scope, that is, to the notion of
empire as a set of flows and multi-directional relations,
“both centripetal and centrifugal, between colonies and
metropole, ̂Å[a] web of interactions includ[ing] relationships between colonies” (p. xiii). This perspective also
foregrounds the argument that while suffrage as institution is formulated within national boundaries, suffrage as
theater of action need not be. It was not only that women
of different national communities made alliances; white
women of settler colonies–and to a much smaller extent, indigenous women from colonized territoriesmade
their presences felt in London politics. Ian Christopher
Fletcher notes the transnational character of suffrage politics in the Isles themselves, for Scottish, Irish and English
women adopted variant styles of “transnational solidarity” attendant partly on the status of national struggles
“within” the “United” Kingdom. Groups sensitive to diversity in the “local” suffrage struggle, were less sensitive
to struggles elsewhere in the empire, silent on a “hidden
imperial racial hierarchy” (p. 112). Angela Woollacott
shows that Australian feminists both drew from their experience in the metropole’s feminist circles and formulated a more egalitarian “Commonwealth” feminism that
eventually took note of “mutual interests between India
and the self-governing dominions” (p. 208).
But many essays do make the point that if the spokes
were all attached to London, they did not necessarily
“flow” that way: women campaigning for suffrage did
not necessarily look to Britain, and those who had attained the vote in advance of British women–or of some
British women–used that chronology advantageously,
as they also resisted notions that the imperial “center”
could paternalistically (or maternalistically) speak for all.
These essays decenter Britain even as they return periodically to London. Mrinalini Sinha’s essay on Indian
and English women’s organizations divergent positions
on Indian women’s suffrage, in the years after women
over 30 had gotten the right to vote in Britain, analyzes
these groups’ “shared, but contradictory, investment…in
the rhetoric of internationalism” (p. 225) but to very different purposes. Imperial feminists saw “internationalism” as a continuance of imperial reach, and most did
not address the hierarchical and racist assumptions that
shaped their own outlooks. Gender activists in India,
whether they regarded themselves as feminists or not,
also drew on the notion of “women” as a “potentially uni-
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fied political category” (p. 225), evincing a debt to bourgeois liberal feminist ideals. Yet for them, the category
of “women” as voters of the future conveyed a concept
of autonomous national communities within an international framework cemented partly by “sisterhood”–but
not the big-little sister relationship envisioned by their
British counterparts. At the same time, Indian women’s
suffrage could be imagined as the recuperation of ancient Indian women’s societal position, thus offering nationalists an impeccable sign of both national “continuity” and “modern” progress while simultaneously posing a historical venerability against Britain’s “upstart”
empire. Similarly, Raewyn Dalziel shows the symbolic
importance to male nationalists in New Zealand of instituting the women’s vote in 1893, as part of a declaration of a vanguardist “social laboratory” that settlers
used to justify their presence and parade their “progressiveness” with respect to the “mother country.” Because
the women’s vote was a matter of social reform rather
than democratic expansion, “women found their new
power…strictly bounded” (p. 88).
kept safely at bay through equal investment in the hierarchies of empire.
Parts II and III hold material of direct interest to scholars of west Asia, the essays by Abrams and Fleischmann
already mentioned, and an essay by Mansour Bonakdarian tracing British suffragists interest in Iranian women’s
political activism in the period 1906-11, as the British suffragist campaign was at a pre-World War I height and
Iranian women were active in the constitutional crisis.
Bonakdarian finds that both stereotypes and culturally
respectful visions went in both directions; homogenizing
narratives of “other women” were countered by attempts
to understand specificities. British suffragists took note
of interest in women’s suffrage among Iranians so long
before women in Britain had attained the vote: a reminder that specific feminist campaigns in other parts
of the world were often simultaneous with, or preceded,
those in “the West.”
Although the editors state that their goals in this
volume focus more on how suffrage has permeated and
The editors have divided the volume into three parts, shaped inter/national politics than on how it has shaped
respectively on suffrage as political process and iden- the category “women,” less overtly, one issue that this
tity; imperial suffragism as a focus for comparative anal- volume raises and historicizes is that of the extent to
ysis; and transnational linkages. These divisions are which campaigns for women’s franchise, or other assays
onto the public political stage, can be considered “femioverwhelmed by the careful attention to complexities
nist.” In proposing women’s equal political participation
in most of the essays. In Part I, Laura Mayhall’s essay on British suffragists’ use of the struggle over set- (at least at the voting box), women’s suffrage must be
tlers’ political rights in South Africa, and the ensuing “feminist.” Yet, even without considering the potential
war of 1899-1901, to advance their own claims and the for negative impact of one feminism (an imperial femempire’s hegemony simultaneously, shows the forma- inism constructed on racist assumptions) on another (a
feminism emerging from, and part of, an anti-imperial
tion of political identities as necessarily transnational.
liberation struggle), it is clear that tactics women used,
Antoinette Burton, whose work on the mutual constitution of Victorian/Edwardian feminism and high British as well as explicit and implicit assumptions activists deimperialism has been key in opening up the intellectual ployed in their campaigns, could undermine as much as
spaces that contributors to this volume occupy, analyzes advance feminist goals, not only by accepting the stricJosephine Butler’s argument for supporting British par- tures of an existing political system not built on equality as the context in which to work, but also by posticipation in the Boer War to “save” black Africans from
ing gender difference as a basis for political activism.
Afrikaners–not incidentally, through the participation of
white British women in the mechanisms of empire. Bur- The only essay that explicitly raises the issue of feminist
ton utilizes Wendy Brown’s notion that “wounded at- definitions is Fleischmann’s narrative of Mandate-era
tachments” to the state, or partial belonging and partial Palestinian women’s activism, which political exigency
power, create the impetus among marginalized subjects set firmly within the national struggle. Thus, women’s
activism was complexly situated within not only local
to seek not only redress but also the status of citizen. Usbut regional and transnational histories, notably that
ing the “wounds” of colonized Others, imperial feminists
deployed a diction of “empathy” to claim their own polit- of British imperial support for the Zionist settlement
ical centrality as spokespeople within–and certainly not project. While these Palestinian women “did not articuagainst–the imperial formation. The female citizen as a late an explicitly feminist agenda” (p. 139), Fleischmann
signifier of modern political participation defined herself finds their use of “traditional gender norms” such as
notions of honor and women’s privacy to resist British
through investment in an Other whose claims could be
troops suggestive of an “indigenous feminism” that ex3
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posed contradictions in Mandate policies. Fleischmann
suggests that these women had found a “safe” way to
also challenge “internal patriarchal norms” in the interest of their future civil rights. Examining elite women’s
activism, Fleischmann unpacks the statist orientation of
women’s organizations, which unsurprisingly in the context of ongoing national struggle, “had a particular concept of the ’political’ which divested feminism of its political content, and instead relegated it to the domain of
the ’social’ (p. 146). Moreover, Fleischmann notes succinctly that the Mandate government’s policy of ”noninterference“ in daily life competed with changes that its
presence partly brought about, both in terms of growing
demand for middle-class professionals, women as well as
men, and in terms of a rapidly intensifying political situation from the late 1920s.
mine the character of the new institutions to be created
under the British Mandate” (127). As in so many situations, women’s suffrage as an issue became a marker of
male political stances more than a goal in itself; feminist
campaigns also had to contend with the British imperial
practice of defining populations by religious belonging,
which precluded some feminists’ “quest for secular status” (p. 129) yet, ironically, allowed a Jewish lawyer to
argue for (and gain) the right to practice on the basis that
Muslim women were not prohibited from the practice of
law by any explicit injunction in Islamic law! In South
Africa, a maternalist construction of (white) women as
political subjects, largely silent on race, “helped consolidate white power through metaphoric images invoked
by suffragists about the relation between white women
and Africans” (p. 69), as Pamela Scully demonstrates
in “White Maternity and Black Infancy.” The enfranI agree with Fleischmann that in respecting multiple chisement of white women depended on disenfranchisallegiances one must not construct a “false dichotomy
ing black South Africans, infantilizing them as the obbetween women’s expressions of support for feminist or
jects of white women’s legislative energies. Scully’s esnationalist causes” (p. 139). But it seems to me that a re- say is powerfully explicit on the operation of silence
sistant use of gender norms–marvelously appropriate to in maintaining existing power structures, a theme that
shame British officers cognizant of the official discourse runs through this collection, and is sadly pertinent to
of “respect” for “native” norms–might tend to maintain as our own time. Abrams notes the continuity between
much as to loosen gendered boundaries of comportment,
Mandate-period Jewish women activists’ distance from
even as facts on the ground called women–especially
both Sephardi and Arab Muslim or Christian women and
non-elite women, as Fleischmann notes–to traverse pub- contemporary failures of communication. And for Fleislic ground as part of the resistance movement. Resorting chmann, “The intractability of the struggle which continto the rhetoric of “tradition” can be a dangerous strat- ues to this day has had an inordinate impact on the hisegy. Protesting British violations of women’s “traditional tory and development of the Palestinian women’s moverights” and the sanctity of the home was a great nament, resulting in an evolving, complex correlation betionalist tactic, and the women’s courage is undoubted–
tween feminism and nationalism the origins of which can
but was it a feminist move? If “the very existence of be traced to the Mandate period” (p. 139).
women’s dynamic activism defied the [conservative] definitional foundations of Palestinian nationalism” (p. 148),
Gesturing to the sad present as well, Sinha’s essay
does this constitute feminism? In any case, if suffrage notes that Indian women rejected the notion of sepaitself was an irrelevance in the urgency of the national rate communal electorates in India, an issue entangled
struggle, in the strains of the Mandate period one finds in the 1930s with that of women’s suffrage, while British
the shape of activisms to come.
women anxious to assert their self-defined mission of
speaking for the other women of the empire–and exIndeed, the screaming relevance of historical narra- tending that empire’s life–lobbied for communal divitives to fissures of the present sounds throughout this sions, a common tactic in imperial rule-books. Yet Indian
volume. Legacies of colonial boundaries made, racist women’s organizations, rejecting the “internationalism”
policies enacted, and religious-communal identities ex- of British feminisms, “provided cover to a hegemonic naploited are all entwined in histories of women’s suffrage.
tionalism that remained vulnerable to critiques of its unThe acceptance of racial hierarchies by feminists who
spoken gender, caste, class and religious hierarchies” (p.
argued against gender hierarchies meant, for instance, 236). Sinha has the last word in this collection–and it is
that to imperial feminists gazing at South Africa, de- one that speaks loudly to our riven times.
bates over male suffrage meant “white male suffrage”
Sinha shows that some in Britain–without apparently
(Mayhall). In Mandate Palestine, women’s political rights
were hostage to politics. Abrams notes that Jewish femi- sensing the irony or the arrogance of their words–argued
nists’ demands were “caught up in the struggle to deter- that only enfranchised British women, “and thus nei4
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ther organized and enfranchised women in India nor
male Indian politicians–could truly represent the cause
of Indian women before the imperial state” (pp. 226-27).
British women, some of them now enfranchised, wanted
to demonstrate their own influence over the future of the
empire before it was too late–before Indian women could
determine their own course! If the imperious ironies of
imperial feminisms now seem obvious to us, it is partly
because of the groundbreaking historical work of Antoinette Burton, Mrinalini Sinha, Philippa Levine, and
many others, including those working in west Asian and
North African contexts; and partly because of our own
historical moment and the narratives now that feminists
have created and challenged. Wherever we may be located, our own feminist and transnational age has imperious ironies of its own, but how fortunate we are as
scholars and activists to partake in excellent scholarship
that shatters the frameworks of near and distant pasts by
carefully examining them, splinter by splinter.
Notes
[1]. Marilyn Booth, “Women’s Constructions of the
Great War in Egypt,” conference paper, “The First World
War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern
Mediterranean,” The German Institute for Oriental Studies, Beirut, Lebanon, Apr. 27-May 1 2001.
Copyright 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net
permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate
attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social
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If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at:
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Citation: Marilyn Booth. Review of Fletcher, Ian Christopher; Mayhall, Laura E. Nym; Levine, Philippa, eds.,
Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation, and Race. H-Gender-MidEast, H-Net Reviews. April,
2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6155
Copyright © 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication,
originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews
editorial staff at [email protected].
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