White Womanhood, Sexuality, and Empire

White women went to the colonies in fewer numbers and for more varied reasons than their male counterparts. They went as missionaries, governesses, wives, and barmaids; they went in search of marriage, of experience, and of adventure not available in Europe. Like working-class soldiers, they were in a complex in-between position. White women were members of the racial elite but without many of the opportunities for autonomy, domination, and pleasure afforded to men of the same social standing. As Stoler observes, ‘European women in these colonies experienced the cleavages of racial dominance and internal social distinctions very differently than men precisely because of their ambiguous positions, as both subordinates in colonial hierarchies and as active agents of imperial culture in their own right’. 

As we see with the figure of the Eurasian, the in-between is crucial to our understanding of imperial governance; it is where the work of upholding racial regimes becomes visible. It is also in these in-between characters – those who shore up white bourgeois masculinity while also, always, threatening to undermine it – that we can catch colonial race-making in the act.

Across the board, whether they came as missionaries or sex workers, white women were viewed by colonial authorities as the bearers of the white race. There’s also some evidence they saw themselves in this way. Mary Procida’s work on colonial biographies suggests that in autobiographical narratives of the English in India, bourgeois writers regularly present their personal narratives as fundamentally intertwined with – and as justification for – the colonial project. She notes that memsahibs (the wives of the colonial bourgeoisie) tend to present themselves as ‘die-hard imperialists’ and suggests that this is because their ‘lives in the Raj offered them a unique opportunity to construct existences of public interest and political significance’, an opportunity in short supply back in the metropole.

Despite this sense of political importance, for the English women who came to the colonies as wives (whether to officers, civil servants, or other men involved in the colonial project), life revolved around the domestic sphere and exclusively European social clubs. This confinement reflected their role – they were there to uphold the white race. Victorian whiteness ‘was an extraordinarily ambitious social project’, as Alastair Bonnett observes. He reminds us that ‘it made enormous demands upon its progenitors’. The demands on white women were particularly acute.

As such, the contact between memsahibs and natives had to be scrupulously limited and carefully choreographed in comparison to European men, who were afforded a little more freedom. As Vron Ware puts it, ‘[white women] not only symbolised the guardians of the race in their reproductive capacity, but they also provided – as long as they were of the right class and breeding – a guarantee that British morals and principles were adhered to in the settler community, as well as being transmitted to the next generation’. For bourgeois white women in the colonies, respectability and domesticity, then, were just as crucial as performing sexual labour.

The responsibility borne by the memsahib was counterposed by an omnipresent sense of threat to her body and dignity and, by extension, to the racial regime she was understood to represent. Graphic and debased stories of white women’s violation by native men channelled the contradictions of colonial rule and the perpetual risks of ‘the native problem’ into a sexual script. As Ware observes, ‘Whether as Mothers of the Empire or Britannia’s daughters, women were able to symbolise the idea of moral strength that held the great imperial family together. In their name, men could defend that family in the same spirit as they would defend their own wives, daughters or sisters if they were under attack’. 

This symbolic value was undergirded by everyday life among the colonial bourgeoisie, in which the myth of native men as sexual aggressors was used to control the mobility and social freedom of white women, determining where they could go, with whom, and for what purpose. As such, control ran in two directions: white women were subject to control and used to limit contact between white men and native women. The racial weight of gender complementarity, calcified by natural science, was essential to the management of the colonial elite.

In her writing on European women in colonial Nigeria, Helen Callaway observes that ‘the question of European women’s “sexual fear” appears to arise in special circumstances of unequal power structures at times of particular political pressure, when the dominant group perceives itself as threatened and vulnerable’. Her analysis tracks with the British response to the 1857 uprising, in which violent and debased stories of white women’s violation at the hands of native men circulated – in the metropole as well as among Europeans in India – as evidence of Indian depravity. Ware recalls a story that circulated in the Englishwoman’s Review and Home newspaper: ‘On finding the remains of one of General Wheeler’s daughters, the men divided up every hair of her head between them and took a solemn oath to kill as many “natives” as each strand of hair in revenge for her unspeakable fate’. 

As Ware goes on to summarise, ‘The colonized people were to be made to punish and pay for their revolt against colonial rule, but the severity of the punishment was given the appearance of legality by being carried out in the name of avenging the womenfolk’. The apparent depravity of Indian men served to justify the imposition of direct rule on the subcontinent, shifting power from the East India Company to the Crown.

These stories continued to circulate in popular narratives in Britain well into the twentieth century, with even the Runnymede Trust, whose remit is ‘racial equality’, quoting a paper in 1974 claiming ‘Pakistanis are disproportionately involved in sexual offences’. Stories of Asian men raping white women have tremendous purchase in contemporary periods of political crisis too, as we see in relation to the moral panic surrounding ‘grooming gangs’. In the context of 1857, however, we might also observe that the focus on white women as victims of native male sexual aggression were partly to deflect from the violence experienced by white men – their humiliation at the hands of native rebels – as well as the violence they enacted.

The trope of respectable white women – mothers and wives and governesses and missionaries – as potential victims of native sexual depravity was shadowed by a figure more disturbing to the colonial administration and who haunted British rule in India: the white prostitute. As Levine explains, ‘The European prostitute, by her very presence, challenged white supremacy in distinctive and critical ways, which reveal dramatically and vividly the importance of sexual politics in colonial rule’. 

Just as the native prostitute could figure as a stand-in for the sexual availability of all racialised women, sex workers of European extraction threatened the notion of white womanhood as uniquely vulnerable and in need of protection. Colonial authorities dealt with the challenge of European sex workers in British India in two ways. First, they subjected European prostitutes to greater surveillance than their Indian counterparts, including, crucially, through segregation along racial lines. Increased control of white women in the colonies was enabled by emergent twentieth-century ideas of ‘white slave’ traffic that, despite evidence to the contrary, constructed white sex workers as helpless victims.

Meanwhile, the internal trafficking and overall condition of Indian sex workers, who were economically worse off than Europeans, went largely unnoticed. At the same time, it has been argued that the presence of white sex workers played a key role in imperial feminists’ fight against the CDA in India. Second, while exercising control over European prostitutes and brothels, British officials symbolically distanced themselves from them. They did so by reporting that most of the European prostitutes in India were either Roman Catholics or Jews from Central or Eastern Europe – and that even the few that were British were of Jewish heritage. As such, European sex workers were racialised within the colonial project, given a distinct and denigrated racial position, through which the colonial elite could attempt to maintain the moral function of white womanhood as the elevated symbol of racial hygiene.

— An edited excerpt from Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race by Sita Balani (30% off as part of our Valentine's Day reading - ends February 16th).

Deadly and Slick

by Sita Balani

If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded ...

This essay is part of a series of pieces that we are running this Valentine's week, looking at love, desire and relationships at the intersection of capitalism, the state, and politics. Read everything here.

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