The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  When I had worked about half a year, a weakness fell into my knees and ankles; it continued, and it got worse and worse. In the morning I could scarcely walk, and my brother and sister used out of kindness to take me under each arm, and run with me, a good mile, to the mill, and my legs dragged on the ground in consequence of the pain; I could not walk. If we were five minutes late, the overlooker would take a strap and beat us till we were black and blue . . . I was as straight and healthful as any when I was seven years and a quarter old . . .

  Your mother being a widow . . . could not afford to take you away? – No.

  Was she made very unhappy by seeing that you were getting crooked and deformed? – I have seen her weep sometimes, and I have asked her why she was weeping, but she would not tell me then, but she has told me since . . .34

  Condemned to work the same hours as their parents, and to shoulder as nearly as possible an adult workload (several cases were reported in which a full-grown male miner ruptured himself by lifting his child’s load of coals on to its back) the ‘offspring of the labouring poor’ were children only in name. If they faltered under these unreasonable demands, the punishments could be brutal and sadistic: a ‘bad’ boy nail-maker would have his ear nailed to his workbench, a ‘disobedient’ girl risked being dragged the length of the factory by her hair. Between fear of a repetition of the punishment, and fear of losing the ‘place’ and with it the child’s income, most families were powerless to challenge the abusers of their children. For one woman, however, when her young son was beaten with a ‘billy-roller’ (a wooden loom-shaft between two and three yards long, and about five inches in diameter) till he vomited blood, it was too much. In the boy’s own words:

  I entreated my mother not to make a complaint, lest I be further beaten. The next morning after I went to work, she followed me, and came to the slubber that had used me in that way, and gave him a sharp lecture . . . as soon as she was gone, he beat me again severely for telling, when one of the young men . . . went out and found my mother, and told her, and she came in again and enquired of me what instrument it was I was beaten with, but I durst not do it; some of the bystanders pointed out the instrument, the billy-roller, and she seized it immediately, and beat it about the fellow’s head, and gave him one or two black eyes . . .35

  Stories like this provide welcome evidence that the experience of the Industrial Revolution was not one of unrelieved female submission to the purgatory of cruelty, suffering and deprivation. Nor was pre-industrial life the rosy pastoral that it has often seemed; there was no sudden pantomimic scene-change from agrarian utopia to dark satanic mills, and the country women described by La Bruyère as living, working and dying in holes in the ground ‘like wild animals’ would have been most surprised to learn that theirs was about to become a paradise lost. Nor can all the evils of this crowded century be blamed on factory organization. The soaring population, for instance, as more babies survived their birth and infancy and more women survived childbirth to complete their reproductive years, certainly contributed to the contemporary evils of urban overcrowding and desperate poverty; but it was itself a force of nature, attributable to the oldest source of power, not to any of the new-fangled discoveries.

  It has been argued, too, that the Industrial Revolution, despite the sufferings of those who went down in the struggle against the machine, was a convulsion unavoidably necessary for society to survive. ‘He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils,’ warned Francis Bacon, one of the earliest social philosophers of the modern age; and the alternative scenario, of the disaster averted rather than the cataclysm that occurred, is forcefully outlined by a leading historian on the period, T. S. Ashton:

  The central problem of the age was how to feed and clothe and employ generations of children outnumbering by far those of any earlier time. Ireland was faced with the same problem. Failing to solve it, she lost in the forties about a fifth of her people by emigration or starvation and disease. If England had remained a nation of cultivators and craftsmen, she could hardly have escaped the same fate . . . There are today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil with them by day and share their places of sleep by night. Such Asiatic standards, and such unmechanised horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an Industrial Revolution.36

  As a counter-balance to the doomsday version of these historical events, this argument has much to commend it. The march of progress, however, is rarely welcomed by those it tramples underfoot. To the women faced with feeding the machines brought into being by man’s resistless innovation, women condemned to serve the new gods of power for an insult of a pittance, invention was truly the mother of necessity. With this work, on these wages, women could not live. Married or marriageable women were therefore manacled to matrimony by the steel-strong fetter of the survival imperative, while single women paid for their anomalous state with all they had – or, brutally, did not have. Female vagrants took to the roads in unprecedented numbers; in the one month of June 1817, the parish of Rugby in the English Midlands relieved eighteen vagrant women, one of whom was ‘lying in’, to eight males. London magistrates recorded a steady rise in female suicides. Other women simply lay down and died – the prospective purchaser of a house near St Paul’s was horrified to discover that it contained three dead women, terribly emaciated, and in the garret two more women and a girl of sixteen on the point of death from starvation.37 And while women were thrown back into dependence as the price of life, men confirmed their mastery over nature and machines, in a wide-ranging and interlocking scheme of domination that has yet to be dismantled.

  Every revolution is a revolution of ideas – yet to innovate is not to reform. The revolutions of the eighteenth century, so different from each other in some of their most profound particulars, yet had one simple truth in common – each was a revolution for some, and not for all. And only some ideas were overturned in the general bouleversement. Of those that survived, the most enduring proved to be that of the natural superiority of man. And when borne on the great wave of expansion, as adventurers and empire-builders struck out for foreign fields, this antique nostrum travelled with them like a plague virus unexamined and unchecked, it was the first of the items of the white man’s burden to be distributed throughout his new dominions.

  9

  The Rod of Empire

  Whoever sees Virginia,

  This he shall surely find

  A land for men . . .

  MICHAEL DRAYTON, ‘Ode to the Virginian Voyage’, 1605

  Women therefore must go into the Colonies as well as men, that the plantations may spread into generations, and not be forever pieced from without.

  FRANCIS BACON, addressing the English Royal Council for Virginia, 1609

  No, no – surely not! My God –

  not more of those damned whores!

  LIEUTENANT CLARK OF THE FIRST FLEET ON SIGHTING A FEMALE CONVICT TRANSPORT SHIP COMING INTO SYDNEY HARBOUR, JUNE 1790

  Women are women the world over,

  whatever their colour.

  RIDER HAGGARD, King Solomon’s Mines (1886)

  If the Industrial Revolution brought the rape of nature, the imperial thrust which stimulated its growth and provided its market meant the rape of the world. Between 1796 and 1818, Britain seized Ceylon, South Africa, India, Burma, and Assam. By the Opium War of 1842, the body-count had risen to include Hong Kong, the Punjab, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Singapore. Nor was empire a purely British theme – Dutch, Spanish, French and Portuguese all scrambled to the global carve-up like boys to a muss, while the American expansion westward echoed the imperial theme of the country’s first founders and gave it an internal empire within its own shores greater than many beyond. The sum of these moments has proved a decisive legacy in the shaping of the modern world; in everything from apartheid in South Africa to the firearms folie of the
USA, the spoor of the great imperial male stalking gun in hand across the sands of time may be detected to this day.

  In song, story, myth and memory, and above all in official history, empire has always been seen in this way as an heroic male endeavour. Since Alexander the Great broke through to the limits of the last known frontier, then wept because there were no more worlds to conquer, women have been absent from the annals. Of those who sailed in the historic Mayflower voyage of 1620, the names of the Pilgrim Fathers are memorialized in stone on the Plymouth quayside – of the eighteen women Who sailed too, there is no mention. And as the bounds of empire spread wider still and wider, pushed outward by Kipling’s cold-eyed adventurers ‘that smell of tobacco and blood’, the classic fiction of men-against-the-odds is summed up by the boast of the hero of the Rider Haggard epic, King Solomon’s Mines: ‘I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history.’

  Yet as the place names from Port Elizabeth to Maryland indicate, the female influence cannot be denied. For women were always there, active as colonizers from the days of the Greeks, essential to the survival of empire, as Bacon had insisted from the outset. In the North American venture, the first-ever imperial baby was a girl, the aptly named Virginia Dare, safely delivered on Roanoke Island on Ascension Day 1587. Similarly the first white Australian was the baby Rebekah Small, who arrived shortly after the First Fleet landed in 1788; although born to one of the ‘damned whores’ who had so disgusted Lieutenant Ralph Clark, Rebekah lived this down to marry a missionary and to present her new country with no less than fourteen little Australians.

  In the history of empire, women were always there because, quite simply, the men could not manage without them. Worldwide, secure and long-term settlement was virtually impossible without female workers; the first governor of the Cape Colony, the Dutch Colonel Van Riebeck, was horrified at his men’s inability to tend cattle, make butter and cheese, or to do anything for themselves. An immediate draft of girls from orphanages in Amsterdam and Rotterdam had to be ordered to supply the deficiency. England, alerted by Bacon, recognized the problem from the outset – the London Company responsible for the successful foundation of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia systematically despatched to the New World ‘young women to make wives’, to be ‘planted’ alongside the men. These had to be ‘handsome and honestly educated maids’, and ‘specially recommended into the colony for their good bringing-up’. But neither their looks, education nor upbringing were to save them from being treated like the merchandise they were, and on arrival in Virginia they were ‘sold’ for 120 pounds of best tobacco, the equivalent of $500 dollars apiece, and thereafter committed to the colonists who took them, as servants or wives, for life.

  Other young girls had even less say in what happened to them. Pauper and orphan girls were swept up off the streets of London and despatched with unbecoming alacrity to indentured apprenticeships under masters they had never seen, in a country they had hardly heard of. These reluctant conscripts were usually embarked to the accompaniment of loud harbourside speculation about which five of every six would be dead before the ship made landfall, and how fast the survivors would succumb to the mosquitoes, malaria and fever-bearing swamps of the badly sited Jamestown, where strong men died like flies of ‘the bloody flux’, ‘calentures’ and ‘agues’, or ‘starved to death with cold’.

  The harsher the country, the greater the abuses that were needed to feed the female famine. In the prison colony of Australia women were from the first transported for far milder offences than the men’s. Male transports had to be guilty of capital offences, or vicious and repeated acts of crime. Female criminals, then as now, were in a tiny minority, less than one in ten of all convicts. As a consequence, English judges, obsessed with the imperial imperative to keep up the numbers of women, would transport a female offender for the most trivial of transgressions, and the lady’s maid who had ‘borrowed’ her mistress’s gloves or sidecombs found herself on a par with the most brutal footpad, ‘resurrectionist’ or murderer.

  Schemes to bring in ‘honest’ women were easier to devise than to carry out. From the first, the situation was ripe for exploitation. One clerk of the London Company forged himself a personal ‘Commission to take up yeomen’s daughters to serve his Majesty for breeders in Virginia’, where the price of a woman had rocketed from 120 pounds of tobacco to 150 pounds within two years. Another would-be fleshmonger, appropriately named R. F. Breed, solicited from the British government 150 guineas a head for shipping ‘sixteen respectable young females under twenty-three’ to Hobart. Charitable institutions under the direction of the London Emigration Committee selected ‘deserving cases’ for assisted passage, and shipping them out under the care of the contractor John Marshall. On arrival, however, the eagerly awaited cargo proved to have a high quotient of the undeserving in its ranks (‘prostitutes and paupers!’ said the critics), whom Marshall had ‘swept off the streets of London’ to make up his full complement of passengers. Once on board, the undeserving had wasted no time in bringing the deserving round to their own way of thinking:

  Management on board had been lax, leading to riotous scenes of drunkenness [and] debauchery . . . the women creating disgusting scenes on arrival, augmenting the population of prostitutes in the colony and doing more to corrupt than to civilize Australia . . .1

  Even when the Female Emigration Societies had cleaned up their act, the problem of the female famine was not solved. As late as 1879, Australian men were still feeling the pinch, as these advertisements in the Matrimonial Chronicle, a paper devoted wholly to those seeking marriage, will indicate:

  – Wanted a wife by a young man in the country, with a house and £500 a year.

  – Wanted a wife who can work; by a selector in the Manora district. He has a large amount of land and sheep.

  – Wanted a wife by a young man in Queensland . . . the lady must be well able to read and write, so that she can assist him in his business.2

  Essentially, though, women were required for much, much more than their working capacity. There is no doubt that the primary production of imperial women was reproduction, the more so as hostile climates, disease and danger maximized infant mortality everywhere. The wife of the Reverend Samuel Sewall of Massachusetts bore him fourteen children in forty years of marriage, yet within four months of her death the patriarch was looking out for a new bride, ‘one young enough to bear’. Women were equally expected to keep up their less tangible sexual duties, of setting a tone, maintaining standards and civilizing the men. Dismayed by the number of colonial administrators who fell victim to the temptation of ‘going native’, the British government exported ‘English roses’ by the shipload. These soon sent native concubines packing with a double-barrelled blast of Christianity and carbolic, to the open admiration of traveller Baron von Hubner: ‘It is the Englishwoman, courageous, devoted, well-educated, well-trained – the Christian guardian of the domestic hearth – who by her magic wand has brought this wholesome transformation.’3

  As this shows, English women were consciously used as a weapon of empire, to keep the master-race pure and to avoid the contemporary bogey of ‘miscegenation’. Even the presence of his sister, old imperialists felt, ‘saved many a young fellow from drink and ruin’ [intercourse with native women]. Exquisitely pink and white, fresh and fragile, innocent and inviolable, the Englishwoman incarnated all the values of ‘England, home and beauty’ for which so many men suffered and died. But the task of keeping the moral conscience of the race was not merely a preoccupation of multiracial imperial outposts, nor merely of patriarchal males. In 1847 the philanthropist Caroline Chisholm, whose devotion to the welfare of women was beyond question, issued this directive to the British government as a recipe for ‘the formation of a good and great people’ in Australia: ‘For all the clergy you can dispatch, all the schoolmasters you can appoint, all the churches you can build, and all the books you can export, you will never do much good without what a gentleman
in that Colony very appropriately called “God’s police” – good and virtuous women.’4 Even women whose own mothers could not have called them good or virtuous had a key role to play in keeping the menfolk in line, according to a historian of the ‘old Wild West’: ‘When one considers the crudity of what was predominantly a male society, it must be admitted that the scarlet representatives of the gentler sex played an important part in taming the West.’ As one old Montanan put it, ‘many’s the miner who’d never wash his face or comb his hair if it wasn’t for thinkin’ of the sportin’ girls he might meet in the saloons’.5

  From the first, then, women only entered the empire adventure on male terms, as instruments of the overriding imperative of the patriarch: dominion and domination. Once they were there, strong systems continually reminded them of their purpose, and reinforced their status as the perennial under-class. In America, early laws prohibited the grant of land to single women, who were expected to live under ‘family government’. In Maryland, a law of 1634 required every woman to marry within seven years of inheriting land, on pain of losing it to her male next-of-kin. A Salem woman was sentenced to be flogged for ‘reproaching the magistrates’, after which she ‘had a cleft stick put on her tongue for half an hour’ for similarly ‘reproaching the elders’. She at least survived – the ‘preaching woman’ Mary Dyer, ‘of a very proud spirit and much addicted to revelations’, was banished from Boston, but returned and was hanged.6