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.