Universal Feminist Emancipation and Cultural Superiority, Essay Example

The role that European metropolitan women played in shaping the colonies is inherently complex. Many European bourgeois women attempted to advance feminist causes in the colonies, yet the particular manner in which they did so suggests the practice of an implicit cultural chauvinism. On the one hand, activists stressed the importance of women’s emancipation and rights, irrespective of cultural background. On the other hand, the colonies and their own unique traditions were viewed as fundamentally incompatible with such universal ideas. Whereas certain exceptions to this basic perspective exist, such as the works of Besant, such a trend appears present in both the primary and secondary literature on the topic. This implies that metropolitan women by in large believed in their own implicit cultural superiority, as only their social framework was deemed civilized enough to carry out the emancipatory feminist project.

Many feminist activists attempted to actively “civilize” colonial societies, primarily by attempting to actuate the universal egalitarian kernel which they believed existed at the heart of European discourse of the time period. Hence, the French feminist Hubertine Auclert was not only active in issues of European suffrage, but also extended her work to the French colonies, arguing for women’s rights in the latter. Auclert’s petition against the French government for abolish polygamy in 1881 represents a remarkable sensitivity to the rights of women irrespective of their status as French citizens or colonized subjects. Namely, Auclert evokes a clear contradiction in French policy, insofar as “Arab women…are treated with such barbarism with the full tolerance of France.” (1) Auclert is primarily concerned in her petition with the practice of polygamy and the negative effects it has on young women, whose autonomy is essentially negated by Arabic cultural traditions. Auclert thus accuses France of a fundamental hypocrisy, insofar as by allowing this to continue The French republic “act(s) in contradiction with its own principles” (1), which, for Auclert, entails the commitment to a form of liberty and equality without exception. Whereas on one level Auclert thus views Arabic women as no different than French women, the inconsistency within Auclert’s complaint is that she essentially contradicts her own universal principles. Hence, she writes that “Arabs have been allowed for too long to maintain their laws, their customs, their language. Don’t you believe that it is now urgent to make them children of the Republic, to educate them, to assimilate them with the French.” (1) Accordingly, Auclert betrays her own commitment to universalism by construing the cultural heritage of the Arabic world as incompatible with the notions of human rights. Rather, it is only the local French culture that can clearly realize such an equality, a notion that is consistent with an implicit notion of French superiority. In essence, Auclert’s discourse is symptomatic of the ambiguities and inconsistencies of the positions of metropolitan women in regards to the colonies. On the one hand, she views all women as equal, regardless of the culture from which they emerge; on the other hand, she views some cultures as inherently incompatible with human rights. Accordingly, Auclert’s viewpoint views the complex manner in which metropolitan women shaped the colonies, as accusations of inherent cultural inferiority were combined with a notion of the universality of women’s rights without exception.

Not all metropolitan women, however, employed such a contradictory position, as demonstrated by the work of Annie Besant, who continually argued for the emancipation of India and the importance of education for Indian girls. Hence, unlike Auclert, Besant stressed the necessity that India become a sovereign state, such that the rigid caste system in the country was not viewed as an irredeemable feature of Indian culture, but rather that the latter could be transformed in consistency with a universal idea that is not inherent to particular nations. Hence, Besant objects to the superiority of the colonializing culture as well as the ideality of the colonized culture, noting that “Indian women have fallen between two stools; English education of men and the Pandit education they used to have in earlier days…both have been taken from them.” (331) Besant thus does not approach the issue of equality of women and colonial life from a position of idealizing one culture at the expense of the other, but rather commits to a truly universal idea irrespective of particular cultures. In this regard, the metropolitan effect of Besant’s discourse is to eradicate the difference between the colonial power and the colonized, in favor of a universal notion.

However, it also can be noted that a case such as Besant’s may be considered an exception. In the case of British and Indian relations, Victorian feminists also evoked an image of cultural superiority, similar to that possessed by Auclert. As Burton notes, “what remains clear is that bourgeois British women involved in all manner of reform projects during the nineteenth century invoked the racialized languages of social Darwinism and emergent anthropology to justify their intervention in the lives not just of working-class men, women, and children, but of colonial peoples, and especially of Indian women, as well.” (180) Accordingly, although a commitment to feminist issues remained a feature of the activism of metropolitan and bourgeois women throughout the period, the manner in which such feminist discourse was constructed bore an allegiance to a covert imperialism. Much like Auclert, the civilizations of the colonies were generally viewed as culturally and anthropologically incapable of attaining the universal cultural rights that were deemed to be a part of European culture. Accordingly, the argument for women’s rights paradoxically became an argument for the superiority of European culture, and thus a new form of colonialism was perpetrated under the mask of a commitment to universal women rights.

Hence, the manner in which European metropolitan women shaped the lives of the colonial subjects remains incredibly nuanced. On the one hand, such activists were committed to notions of universality and equality, irrespective of cultural differences: women in the colonies deserved opportunities similar to those of women native to the colonizing powers. Yet because the colonies themselves did not contain the potential for this universal and egalitarian discourse, metropolitan women practiced their own form of discrimination, viewing such societies as incapable to the task. Whereas exceptions to this trend exist in the form of activists such as Besant, it appears that the majority of metropolitan women with feminist concerns equivocated their own universal commitments with the particular cultural milieu that engendered them, thus implicitly arguing for the superiority of their own cultures.

Works Cited

Auclert, Hubertine. “Hubertine Auclert Petitions the French Government to Abolish Polygamy.”

Besant, Annie. “The Education of Indian Girls.”

Burton, Antoinette. “Women and ‘Domestic’ Imperial Culture: The Case of Victorian Britain.”