Suffrage for British Women Alone: Identifying the Imperial Overtones of Helen B. Hanson’s From East to West

In September 1911, the Church League for Women’s Suffrage published Helen B. Hanson’s pamphlet entitled From East to West: Women’s Suffrage in Relation to Foreign Missions. In this work, Hanson, once a missionary doctor in India, appeals to the Anglican Church and calls for women’s suffrage by linking it to British missionary work. In Elora Shehabuddin’s 2021 book, Sisters in the Mirror, she discusses the relationship between feminism in the West and the East from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century. She argues that colonialism and Britain’s claimed superiority over India shaped discussions of women’s rights and social norms. Shehabuddin’s text contextualizes Hanson’s appeal against her imperial backdrop. I argue that in From East to West, Hanson crafts her argument in support of suffrage for British women around imperial notions of racial supremacy and moral superiority. Her appeal reflects Shehabuddin’s characterization of imperial feminism at the turn of the twentieth century.

Hanson calls the Anglican Church backward for ignoring feminist issues as she crafts her appeal for British women’s suffrage around the perceived moral superiority of the British over Indians. She describes the World’s Missionary Conference of 1910, during which its leader suggested that “some inherent weakness of Christianity, as practised at home, might be the cause of its comparatively slow extension abroad.”[1] Hanson argues that this referenced weakness lies in the Church’s tendency to overlook the women’s movement.[2] She writes that “suffragism [makes] for practical Christianity,”[3] though she does not expound on this relationship beyond suggesting that suffrage will improve women’s general welfare. She criticizes the Anglican Church, questioning whether “the Church at home [has] advocated Christian principles”[4] in its neglect of women’s issues. Referring to the Anglican Church and its missionaries, she sees it as an irony that “we compass sea and land to make one proselyte, [...] yet we refuse our moral support to the enfranchisement of women at home”;[5] the Church fails to support domestic women’s suffrage, yet it employs missionaries to preach proper Christian treatment of women abroad. To Hanson, this hypocritical failure of the Church “is responsible for the loss of sympathy on the part of people at home.”[6] In illuminating this contradiction, she aims to capture the attention of the Anglican Church.

Hanson’s argument for British women’s suffrage reflects her imperial context, as visible through the racially charged language she employs to describe Indian women. She highlights that one of the Church’s “chief indictments against non-Christian religions is the low position they accord their women.”[7] She turns the Church’s own indictment against itself. Hanson quotes a missionary bishop who, discussing women’s suffrage, “‘wonders if Christian England is, after all, much more than are the heathen he knows.’”[8] Through her inclusion of this quote, Hanson demeans Indian women to justify the introduction of women’s suffrage in Britain. Without voting rights, in her view, “woman qua woman is still governed in the West as she is in the East, without her consent—the very definition of slavery.”[9] She argues that even Indian women have historically maintained wider rights than British women; she emphasizes that the “Mohammedan woman was mistress of her own property, but the Christian married woman till 1882 had no control over hers.”[10] Hanson, thus, presents Indian women as a lower bound for women’s rights. If the British can truly claim superiority to Indians, moral or otherwise, Hanson asserts that women in Britain must be granted voting rights, a right not then held by Indian women.

Hanson’s appeal for British women’s suffrage is grounded in imperial power dynamics and the perceived superiority of the United Kingdom over India. Hanson challenges the stability of this dynamic by citing a letter from an “educated Hindu,” in which the author questions “the superiority of Christianity in its treatment of women.”[11] Hanson references further Hindi, Muslim, and Parsi papers that mock the English for “expounding the right way of treating women when they so treated their own.”[12] She echoes their warning that the East is “waking up [and] will soon be ahead of Christian England”[13] in matters of women’s rights. In the context of imperial Britain, this realization lends urgency to Hanson’s pamphlet. Capturing this Indian perspective, Hanson strengthens her appeal for women’s suffrage by framing the Church’s neglect of women’s issues as a direct threat to British supremacy and Christianity in the Empire. She aims to motivate the Church to action by tying women’s suffrage to the Church’s own interests. She thus employs imperialist thought to advance the matter of women’s suffrage in Britain.

Elora Shehabuddin provides critical context for understanding Hanson's appeal for women’s suffrage in Britain: “missionary leaders, like other men of their time, downplayed British feminist demands for change by pointing out how much better off British women were than their heathen sisters.”[14] Hanson attempts to counter this male narrative by arguing that British women were, in some ways, worse off than their Indian counterparts. Shehabuddin captures Hanson’s strategy by emphasizing that during and after the European Enlightenment, European writers “invoked the oppressed women of the East with increasing frequency in their discussions about women’s status in their own societies, though in different ways and to different ends.”[15] She marks a shift in these discussions, citing the nineteenth-century emergence of an “imperial—and indeed a more explicitly feminist—arrogance” as “British women’s demands for rights became increasingly intertwined with their nation’s imperial might and notions of racial superiority.”[16] As seen through the evidence Hanson employs to strengthen her call for British women’s suffrage, her pamphlet reflects Shehabuddin’s described shift towards a version of feminist discourse with more explicitly imperialist overtones. Hanson hinges her appeal on imperial power dynamics and racial difference in alignment with Shehabuddin’s claims.

In From East to West, Hanson presents an argument for British women’s suffrage grounded in the primacy of Britain over its imperial subjects. She cites the weaknesses of the Anglican Church and invokes fears of impending Indian dominance to compel the Church to offer support for women’s suffrage in Britain. She hinges her claims on the perceived inferiority of Indian women, who she believes should not have rights that exceed those of British women. Hanson notably calls for suffrage for British women alone, rather than for universal women’s suffrage. Her imperial context seeps through her work as she leverages beliefs of national and racial superiority to craft a compelling argument for British women’s suffrage in alignment with Shehabuddin’s depiction of imperially charged feminist rhetoric in Britain.

Bibliography

Hanson, Helen B. From East to West: Women's Suffrage in Relation to Foreign Missions. Church League for Women’s Suffrage, 1911. ProQuest, https://ezproxy.rice.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/books /east-west-womens-suffrage-relation-foreign/docview/ 2633855590/se-2.

Shehabuddin, Elora. Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism. University of California Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1525/ 9780520974647.

[1] Helen B. Hanson, From East to West: Women’s Suffrage in Relation to Foreign Missions (Church League for Women’s Suffrage, 1911), 1.

[2] Hanson, 1.

[3] Hanson, 19.

[4] Hanson, 13.

[5] Hanson, 14.

[6] Hanson, 14.

[7] Hanson, 1.

[8] Hanson, 11.

[9] Hanson, 3.

[10] Hanson, 5.

[11] Hanson, 17.

[12] Hanson, 17.

[13] Hanson, 17.

[14] Elora Shehabuddin, Sisters in the Mirror (University of California Press, 2021), 83.

[15] Shehabuddin, 33.

[16] Shehabuddin, 95.

The Feminine Mystique: Betty Friedan and the Origins of Second-Wave Feminism

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is considered to be one of the most influential feminist books of all time, and it is widely credited as giving momentum to the second wave of the feminist movement in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Despite criticism of some of the theories Friedan espoused in her book, and especially for her focus on the experiences of middle-class white women, The Feminine Mystique gave a voice to the disillusionment many American women felt regarding their roles as housewives and mothers after World War II. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan discusses “the problem that has no name,” which she terms the feminine mystique. Friedan argues that post-World War II society and media as well as the popular teachings of Sigmund Freud taught women that femininity was the ultimate goal to strive for rather than a career, higher education, or political rights, which she claims were the goals of “old-fashioned feminists.” Instead, women ought to be fulfilled in their lives as wives and mothers. 

Friedan cites the lowered marriage age of women and increasing birth-rates post-World War II as evidence of the desire of young women to adhere to the gender roles imposed on them. The idealization of the American housewife caused women to feel that their unhappiness was a personal shortcoming, rather than a result of the pressure to conform to a feminine identity that centered on the domestic sphere. This unhappiness was often attributed to being too educated or too independent. Many women numbed their feelings of discontent through tranquilizers or alcohol. Friedan’s evidence clearly reflects the experiences of many women who returned to their domestic roles after the war ended, which allows the reader to form a connection between their own experiences and the personal stories of other women.

Friedan also criticizes functionalism, a theory developed by social scientists that rigidly defined the societal role of women, along with their fundamental and unshakeable differences from men. Because men and women must complement each other through their separate roles, the functionalist argues that it would not be possible for a woman to break away from her role by pursuing a career. In contrast to the functionalist perspective, Friedan argues that women must find a way to free themselves from societal expectations. Women who live under the constraints of the feminine mystique can “never realize their human potential” and sense of self, because they limit themselves to what society expects of them as mothers and homemakers. Education, meaningful work, economic independence, and “participating in the mainstream of society, by exercising their own voice in all the decisions shaping that society” are the main ways in which women can break free from the feminine mystique.

Friedan’s writing illustrated and gave a voice to the growing dissent amongst American women in the 1960s, which was published during the rapidly expanding second-wave feminist movement. According to scholar Imelda Whelehan, the second wave of feminism arose from the realization that women’s oppression and gender inequality were institutionalized and ingrained in society and could not be dissolved with just one achievement, such as the right to vote. Therefore, the second wave of American feminism came to be defined as a reaction against the conventional definition of the societal role of women. 

After publishing The Feminine Mystique, Friedan continued to be a prominent figure in the women’s rights movement. She co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 and became its first president. NOW was one of many organizations that pushed the feminist movement and fight for equal rights to the forefront of American society. NOW’s 1966 Statement of Purpose was written by Friedan, and listed the organization’s intent to actualize the different ways in which women must “have the chance to develop their fullest human potential” and achieve equality in society. The main ways in which this goal can be achieved is through the ability to pursue education and a career, which was a direct follow-up to Friedan’s argument in The Feminine Mystique.

In 1973, after a five-year-long campaign by NOW, the Supreme Court ruled to prohibit sex-segregated employment advertisements, and in 1972, as a result of NOW’s lobbying, Congress passed the Education Amendments of 1972, which included Title IX, a guarantee of equal educational opportunities, including sports. NOW consistently petitioned for abortion rights, and NOW chapters protected women visiting newly-opened abortion clinics after the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. NOW also helped instate the first women’s studies courses in universities, starting with San Diego State University in 1970.

Friedan writes with a compelling voice that illustrates the frustration and difficulties that many middle-class American women faced in their daily lives. However, white working-class women, poor women, and women of color are neglected in her argument, many of whom had no choice to pursue higher education and worked lower-class jobs such as domestic work and factory jobs. Friedan clearly did not envision industries such as these when she argued for women to pursue meaningful careers. Her message equated the experience of educated, middle-class white women as the experience of all American women. 

Despite the valid criticisms of Friedan’s work, The Feminine Mystique is an indispensable work of literature because it helped many American women understand and voice their discontent with the roles pushed on them by society and mass media after World War II. This return to conservatism created the expectation that women ought to let go of the careers they had attained during the war in favor of returning to their existence as housewives and mothers. Friedan’s inclusion of the personal experiences of many different women across America allowed readers to understand that they were not alone. Friedan crafted a persona for her book that allowed readers to identify and sympathize with not only the other women she discusses, but the author herself. Friedan’s words appealed to the emotional struggles of women, and the book bolstered personal stories with statistics that revealed the everyday inequalities that women faced in post-World War II America, which helped women come together and gather support for the feminist movement. The Feminine Mystique’s long-lasting impact on the central concerns of the feminist movement can still be seen in feminist discussions today. Despite its shortcomings, The Feminine Mystique stands the test of time.

Sources:

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Introduction by Anna Quindlen. W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. First published by W. W. Norton, 1963.

Michals, Debra. “Betty Friedan.” National Women’s History Museum. Published in 2017. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/betty-friedan.

NOW. “Statement of Purpose.” About: History. Accessed 9 November 2024. https://now.org/about/history/statement-of-purpose/.

Whelehan, Imelda. Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to ‘Post-Feminism’. Edinburgh University Press, 1995.

Kalyani Rao is a sophomore double majoring in Classical Studies and History. She is especially interested in Classical art and archaeology and British history. In her free time, she likes to cook, bake, listen to music, and re-watch nostalgic media.

Book Review: Thirst, Water, and Power in the Ancient World

Steve Mithen’s Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World is a comprehensive survey of pre-industrial water use across the globe featuring 10 case studies: the Neolithic Levant, Mesopotamia, Greece, Petra, Rome, China, Angkor Wat, the Hohokam, the Maya, and the Inca. Mithen’s sources include archeological studies of ancient water management, and a variety of texts, such as administrative documents, poems, and histories. The case studies are encyclopedic, precise, and detailed. Nonetheless, the book’s travelogue style detracts from Mithen’s argument and contains undertones of orientalism. Mithen repeatedly devolves into irrelevant descriptions of his taxi rides or ruins tours. He tends to focus on either the magnificence of ancient structures or the peculiarity of ancient societies. In the conclusion to his chapter about Maya hydraulics, Mithen claims that the Maya are interesting because of their “monstrous acts” of human sacrifice and self-mutilation. This observation seems unrelated to his main point about water, and unnecessarily exoticizes the Maya by playing into stereotypes about their violent nature. In contrast, Mithen ends the chapter about the Roman world by describing his experience relaxing in a classically-inspired bath in Istanbul. This detail is not only trivial, but further idealizes the Roman state by glorifying its engineering feats. He doesn’t discuss how often such feats came at the expense of providing for the majority of the population.

The first word in the title is “thirst,” but we rarely get a sense of what it’s like to be thirsty in the ancient world because Mithen privileges state-sponsored projects that benefited the elite, and doesn’t explore water use among commoners. He writes primarily about elaborate water use among statesmen and nobles at well-known archeological sites (such as Machu Picchu) but seldom examines water use in the daily lives of the millions of ordinary subjects in ancient empires. 

To his credit, Mithen does acknowledge that ancient rulers tended to overuse water in order to legitimize imperial authority. The extravagance of Roman baths, for instance, was a political statement about the power of the empire to provide for its subjects. In Angkor Wat, or the “hydraulic city,” large reservoirs may have been a tool of state propaganda and an attempt to recreate heaven on earth. Yet that is  as far as Mithen goes. His reluctance to look away from the elites prevents him from achieving the goal implied by the book’s title–to understand the relationship between water and power in the ancient world . He sidesteps the relative powerlessness of most imperial subjects in ancient times, and the possibility that they were hurt by elite water management. 

Admittedly, Mithen did face obstacles to this kind of analysis. Ancient sources are inherently biased towards elites whose sturdy water structures are more likely to be preserved than the substandard infrastructure, such as temporary pipes and makeshift canals, used by the poor. However, he makes no effort to fill in those gaps. For example, Mithen could have discussed the lack of in-home plumbing in most ancient Roman apartments, and the strategies that poor Romans used to deal with this issue. He also could have investigated soil samples and satellite imagery to understand water at smaller archeological sites. Perhaps he could have explained how dangerous waterborne bacteria were frequent sources of epidemic disease. 

I recognize that my critique is from the perspective of the environmental justice movement, and examining inequality is not necessarily the point of the book.  Still, Mithen’s glorification of state power and excessive focus on elites undermines its purpose as a resource for scientists and policymakers, and limits its relevance to the modern day. In Thirst’s conclusion, Mithen offers six lessons for the future: hold accountable those who control your water supply, cut down trees at your own peril, remember that cities use lots of water, value local knowledge about the water supply, do not  waste water, and work with nature, not against it. None of these directly address the pressing issue of modern water inequality: What do we do about the massive differentials between developed and developing nations in both access to water and susceptibility to water disasters? Despite its strengths, Mithin’s characterization of ancient hydraulic management in Thirst is too narrow to help us address the contemporary environmental crisis.