SEX AND GENDER

Manuscript Sources from the Public Record Office

Parts 1 and 2: Empire and Suffrage

Editorial Introduction by Professor Christopher Fletcher

In recent years, historians of empire and of gender and sexuality have queried the role of the archive in shaping our knowledge of the past. Reading the archival record for the presence, agency, and significance of women, people of diverse sexual orientations and expressions, people of colour, colonial subjects, and indigenous people is rarely a straightforward endeavour. Even when members of these groups appear in official files, care must be taken to clarify the context and condition of their visibility. For example, one must distinguish between self-representation by such individuals or groups in a petition or delegation and official representations of these "others" in the course of a discussion of policy. Nevertheless, official files often contain a surprising mix of items that shed light on the "people without history" as well as the powers that be. Appreciating how those in authority sought to understand and act upon the domains of "sex and gender" forms an important part of analyzing the dynamic interactions between the state and various movements, communities, and publics.

Reflecting the British empire's global reach, the Public Record Office in London is an extraordinary archive. Its rich holdings encompass the metropole and colonies as well as relations with the rest of the world. Building on Women's Suffrage and Government Control, 1906-1922: Papers from the Cabinet, Home Office and Metropolitan Police Files, previously issued by Adam Matthew Publications, Sex & Gender: Manuscript Sources from the Public Record Office offers researchers an exceptionally wide-ranging selection of materials for the historical study of gender and sexuality in imperial and global perspective. Both students and advanced scholars will find valuable documents and sources relevant to a variety of research interests and projects. Parts 1 and 2 of the Sex & Gender collection deal with the overlapping fields of imperial history and suffrage history. This brief introduction highlights a few of the thematic strands that run throughout the collection: the link between empire and suffrage, the many gendered dimensions of colonialism, and the continuity between the imperial and international eras in the history of women.

At first glance, the conjoining of empire and suffrage might strike one as odd, but a moment's consideration should convince us otherwise. Women were everywhere in the empire, as colonial subjects and as members of diasporic populations created by the slave and labour trades and by overseas settlement, not to mention as an increasingly mobilized sector of the UK public at the imperial centre. One of the chief justifications of the imperial "civilizing mission" was the supposedly downtrodden status of women in Africa, Asia, and the Islamic world. And one of the major arguments for enfranchising women in the UK was the belief that such women could and should speak on behalf of their allegedly powerless sisters around the empire. Of course, the rise and spread of the women's rights and women's suffrage movements was worldwide. The "imperial" argument advanced by British suffragists for their emancipation was matched by the "colonial-nationalist" case made by white settler women in the self-governing dominions and the "anti-colonialist" case made by women in India and other dependent colonies. At the same time, colonialism fostered various ethnic and religious collectivities, resulting in proposals to enfranchise members of some groups as opposed to others in a given society. But with universal suffrage becoming a widely recognized norm of the modern nation-state by the middle of the twentieth century, voting rights for both men and women emerged as a key demand and expectation of nationalist movements pushing for decolonization and independence. Thus suffrage, far from remaining a marginal concern, was an increasingly central political issue for the imperial state from its heyday in the early twentieth century to its dramatic contraction in the second half of the century. In addition to files on suffrage militancy in the UK included in this collection, researchers interested in the expansion of suffrage will discover intriguing material from the Bahamas, Bermuda, Ceylon, Fiji, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Zanzibar, and elsewhere.

As the "civilizing mission’s" rhetoric of uplifting women suggests, the colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a deeply gendered project. British rule created legal and institutional frameworks for governing colonial subjects across many fronts, from labour and property to everyday social and sexual life to religion and education. Colonial policies underpinned by metropolitan gender ideologies, such as the notion of "separate spheres" for men and women, often clashed with the workings of indigenous gender relations and hierarchies. If the purpose of this regulation and management was ultimately to secure the colonizers' position and to remake colonized societies according to "modern" needs and norms, it still required negotiation of many interests, from local elites, both indigenous and settler, to lobbies back in the UK. The bodies of women in particular became the site of contestation and change. The very structure of the imperial state, linking as it did the polities of the core and the periphery, meant that global issues such as prostitution or sexually-transmitted diseases would
resonate across the metropole and colonies. Pressure exerted at one end might be met by pressure from the other, with officialdom seeking expedient policy options that promised the least resistance or upset to continued rule. As attention to "native" women in households, schools, and workforces grew, one can discern the emergence of welfare states in the dependent colonies that paralleled, if not exactly complemented, those in the UK and the dominions. Researchers concerned with a range of topics, from footbinding in China to female genital mutilation in Kenya to women's activism in Palestine, will find significant caches of documentation and discussion in this collection.

The twentieth century witnessed the momentous shift from a world system of empires and colonies to a new world order predicated on sovereign nation-states bound together in the League of Nations, the United Nations, and other international bodies and treaties. Women from Egypt to India were an early as well as important force in the anti-colonial, nationalist, and democratic movements that set decolonization in train. Nevertheless, there are striking continuities from the age of imperialism and colonialism to the age of internationalism and developmentalism (the systematic "development" of human and natural resources in the "developing" world, supposedly in the interest of all rather than simply for the benefit of transnational corporations from the "developed" world). Once again, we see that the condition of women was regarded as a benchmark of modernity. In the age of empire, the status of women was understood as a matter of nationality ("British" women) and race ("native" women), complicated in the case of British women by marriage to foreigners and in the case of colonized women by concubinage to British men. In the succeeding postcolonial and international order, a supposedly more capacious and "universal" set of standards, grounded on notions of civil rights and social entitlements, came to predominate. And yet, even as one recognizes the moral imperative of liberating all human beings from exploitation, oppression, and coercion, we can see the old distinctions, of custom and law, bondage and freedom, backwardness and progress, at work in the definition of these new norms, with the West serving as the model for the rest. Again, users of this collection will find much of interest here as well as a reminder that the imperial past preserved in the Public Record Office holds many clues to issues of sex and gender in our own times.

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