The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  In the second wave of imperial expansion, the use and abuse of women reached epidemic proportions. This sprang in part from the nature of the Australian experience: set up from the first as a penal colony, the country was never designed as a haven from persecution, nor even as a mirror image of contemporary life back home in England. But these circumstances conspired to make transportation, severe enough in itself, a double punishment for women, who suffered in addition to their sentence because of their sex. For their status as convicts served to rob them of all human rights of personal autonomy, and from the moment of sentence they became fair game. The sexual abuse of female convicts began with the crews of the transport ships, as one distressed observer reported to the Select Parliamentary Committee on the State of the Gaols, in 1819:

  These women informed me . . . that they were subject to every manner of insult from the master of the ship and the sailors; that the master stripped several of them and publicly whipped them; that one young woman, from ill-treatment, threw herself into the sea and perished; that the master beat one of the women with a rope with his own hands, till she was much bruised in her arms, breasts, and other parts of her body . . .7

  The same witness recorded that ‘the youngest and handsomest of the women were selected from the other convicts . . . by order of the master . . . for the vilest purposes.’ Even the professional men on board were not above this grotesque abuse of their female charges: one convict woman, Elizabeth Barber, denounced the assistant surgeon of the ship on which she was transported as ‘a poxy blood-letter, who seduced innocent girls while treating them for the fever, using his surgery as a floating whore-house’.8

  To be a convict woman, in the eyes of any right-thinking man, was to be abandoned, and to be abandoned was to be a whore. Prejudged, the women were all tarred with the same brush. One of the colony’s first magistrates, ironically a former convict himself, described them as ‘the most disgusting objects that ever disgraced the female form’. Another commentator put it even more bluntly: the women were ‘the lowest possible . . . they all smoke and drink, and in fact to speak plain language, I consider them all prostitutes.’9

  Undoubtedly some of the convict women transported to Australia (192 in the First Fleet of 1788 as against 586 men) were prostitutes. But it made no difference whether they were or not, since on arrival they were all treated as such, being immediately disposed of to the first man who cared to step up and ask for them. This custom, to disinterested observers quite breathtaking in its unabashed brutality and simplicity, caused much comment. One free settler wrote home:

  It will perhaps scarcely be believed that, on the arrival of a female convict ship, the custom has been to suffer the inhabitants of the colony each to select one at his pleasure, not only as servants, but as avowed objects of intercourse . . . rendering the whole colony little better than an extensive brothel.10

  Nor was there even a limit on the number of female prisoners a man could have for his own personal use. Convict women were in fact given out to the men along with the rest of their share of the incoming commodities. There was even a special army issue: in 1803 forty female transports were brazenly accounted for as ‘women allowed to the New South Wales Corps’.11

  This giving of women into prostitution ensured that they were punished twice over for their original offence, once by transportation, then by enforced whoredom. The best hope for a woman in this situation was to attach herself strongly to one male protector; the norm, however, was for ‘last fleet’s woman’ to be thrown out on to the streets as soon as the next ships made landfall with their cargo of ‘fresh meat’.

  Yet under the same rules by which women who were denied access to society’s privileges were still subject to the fullest of its penalties, imperial women, however low their status, bore an equal share of all the burdens of empire shoulder to shoulder with their men. There was no sex exemption, for instance, from the tortures of an intemperate climate like the heat: ‘hot as hell! – like Dives we were “in torments’“, recorded one victim of India’s ‘six-month heat-waves’ when the temperature rose to 114 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, never falling below 95 even at dead of night, and round the clock the air felt ‘like hot iron to your face’. Other trials included waking up to find the bed swarming with red ants – the infallible remedy, from Assam to Arizona, was to put tin cans full of water under each leg – or collecting a legful of leeches on a walk to a local beauty spot: ‘I cannot tell you how pretty the place was, the banks covered with the loveliest flowers and down at the bottom the clear water running among grey stones . . . quantities of leeches biting me, nasty fat black creatures . . . bitten in twenty-five places and these bled a great deal though they did not hurt at all . . .’ recorded one burra memsahib calmly.12

  As this shows, the highest rank was no protector of persons. Arriving at Simla exhausted from her duties and after a ‘ghastly nightmare of a journey’ spent wrapped in towels to soak up her uncontrollable perspiration, the Vicereine of India counted fifty mammoth blood-sucking insects on her bed, and was awake all night dealing with them: ‘I killed up to four in the morning . . . delighted to be back,’ she wrote laconically to her daughter.13 This kind of resolution became even more necessary when the hungry predators were wolves, as in the American West, or more dangerous still; Ann Moffat of the famous Scottish missionary family in Africa once saved herself from a lion’s spring by a well-judged leap straight into her ox-waggon, where she lay all night listening to the great cat crunching on the bones of her ox, which had suffered in her place.

  The most dangerous of all the great predators, however, was undoubtedly the two-legged animal, and pioneer women had to be ready to defend themselves at all times. Missionary preacher Dr Anna Shaw described her reaction to a rape threatened by a man she had hired to drive her through a remote frontier region:

  I slipped my hand into the satchel on my lap, and it touched my revolver. No touch of human fingers ever brought such comfort. With a deep breath of thanksgiving I drew it out and cocked it . . . he recognized the sudden click. ‘By God!’ he cried. ‘You wouldn’t dare’ . . . I felt my hair rise on my scalp with the horror of the moment, which seemed worse than any nightmare a woman could experience . . .14

  Anna’s terrifying journey, with her revolver trained on her would-be rapist as he drove all night through the depths of a black forest, had a happy outcome. When she reached the isolated timber camp, all the lumberjacks poured into town to see the lady preacher who packed a gun as well as a Bible. The collection at the end of the service was the largest ever taken in the history of the settlement, and Anna herself was a great success, though not entirely for her preaching. ‘Her sermon?’ said one of the men afterwards. ‘I dunno what she preached – but the little woman sure has got grit!’

  Experiences like Anna’s were a commonplace of empire, wherever men were men and women had to reckon with it. Nor was the solitary lustful male the only threat. Empire life was everywhere lived on the edge of danger, and women learned all manner of new skills as naturally as they had picked up needlework or domestic management in the Old World. They learned to ride long distances, on anything with four legs, ox, mule, camel or elephant, and to navigate when the guide slipped off like a thief in the night, leaving them to their own devices. They learned to cope with all kinds of crisis, like the philosophical Margaret Carrington of America’s northern plains, who rattled off her everyday calamities with no sense of grievance: ‘The snapping of a tent pole at midnight under three feet of snow; the blaze of the canvas as it touched a red-hot stove-pipe; the snowdrifts that slip through the closely drawn entrance and sprinkle the bed; frozen water buckets . . . the plains winds . . . whipping sheets and table-cloths into ribbons or blowing them across the prairie . . .’15

  Margaret’s washing days must have been an ordeal of the first water. But the housewifely concern here with niceties like table-cloths obscures the fact that in addition to their inescapable burden of ‘women’s work’, these
females had to master the traditionally male tasks as well. ‘I learned to handle a musket very well,’ declared Susie King Taylor, a black woman and former slave. ‘I could shoot straight, and often hit the target.’ Susie also knew how to load and re-load for firing, how to clean a gun, and how to dismande and reassemble it. She had learned her skill with firearms while serving with a Unionist regiment for four years during the Civil War, ‘without receiving a dollar . . . glad to be allowed to go with the regiment’.16 Susie’s dudes included nursing as well as fighting, so the Army had double value from what it was getting for nothing in the first place.

  Often the confidence and competence of these women seriously unnerved the men around them. Annie Blanche Sokalski was an army widow and real-life Calamity Jane, a famous sure-shot and trick rider. She dressed always in the skins of wolves she had killed herself, and went everywhere attended by her thirteen dogs, ‘the exact number of stripes in the American flag’, she would say. When this vision in wolf-tails galloped past General Sherman at the head of his troops, the astonished commander was heard to gasp, ‘What the devil of a creature is that? Wild woman, Pawnee, Sioux or what?’17

  For the women fortunate enough to enjoy the freedom of the empire along with high rank and social position, the rewards were great indeed. At its height the imperial life, ‘under the shadow of a dream’, in Kipling’s phrase, was an enchanted existence. The Vicereine of India describes here the guest quarters on a visit to a maharajah’s palace:

  . . . pale blue silk hangings with lovely dressings and bathrooms with every known bath salt and perfume from the Rue de Paix. Next day we visited the fort, carried up in red velvet and gold chairs . . . I wish you could have seen the Purdah Courtyard, all carved in white marble, like alabaster . . .18

  And these were only the daytime amusements. By night there were ‘moonlight revels’, parties of 500 or 1000 people in fancy dress dancing the night away on carpets of white waxed canvas surrounded by massed hydrangeas under trees festooned with red, white and blue lights. Even the old hands fell under the spell of India’s magic again at times like these: ‘a full moon, the entire garden surrounded by walls of Dorothy Perkins in full bloom – fairyland!’ pronounced the Vicereine with deep satisfaction. India above all called them, high-born or low: ‘I can never express how happy I am and how thoroughly I enjoy this delightful unconventional life here,’ recorded a young subaltern’s mother on her first and only visit to him: ‘and the beauty of the people, such lovely saris and jewels, such lovely faces . . .’19

  For empire women in general, however, life was no party, and nostalgia for its vanished glory denies the reality of the often appalling trials women had to face. The missionary wife Mary Edwards had not found Dr Livingstone an easy guest when he inflicted himself on the couple for many months; but when he rashly provoked a lion to attack him, and Mrs Edwards had to tend the suppurating wound crawling with maggots, nursing the gruff, arrogant, messianic Livingstone must have been the last straw.20 The good doctor at least recovered. A far worse grief befell those who had to nurse their own dearly beloved and lost the struggle, like the wife of Sir Thomas Metcalfe. This British resident of Delhi had the evil fortune to be the instrument of an administrative decision to terminate the tide and privilege of its king. The queen invoked an ancient Mogul revenge, and had him poisoned. The empire claimed many less famous lives, too, like that of seventeen-year-old Jeanie Goldie who married into the Indian Service, bore and lost a baby, and died of puerperal infection, all within eighteen months, ‘I felt,’ wrote her desolate husband, ‘like a murderer.’21

  These individual tragedies are merely representative of thousands upon thousands more. Indeed, from the first imperial settlements in America, when entire colonies were wiped out in hideous storms of terror of attack from the enemy without and disease within, and corn had to be sown across the graves so that none could number the dead, the saga of empire has included a running threnody of loss, defeat and death. Often this was of a most painful kind; the matron of the mission hospital at Peshawar had to see her husband, the doctor there, shot down by a man whose son he had failed to cure. Undeterred, Mrs Starr returned to the hospital where he was murdered to work among his enemies and devoted her life to the people who had taken his. Later she was to perform another supremely courageous act when tribesmen of the same tribe as her husband’s killer murdered the wife of a British army officer and abducted his daughter. Mrs Starr, a fluent Pushtu speaker, volunteered to go alone into the enemy territory to try to secure the life of the girl. She succeeded in bringing the hostage back unharmed, without making any concessions in return.

  For many women, though, there was no happy ending. Some went down in a last red cloud of blood, fighting to the death like Mrs Beresford, only one of the heroine-victims of the terrible massacres of the Indian Mutiny in 1857. When the Bank of Delhi was attacked, of which her husband was the manager, an eyewitness recorded her unshrinking stand in defence of all she held dear:

  Mr Beresford . . . took refuge with his wife and family on the roof of one of the outbuildings. And there, for some time they stood at bay, he with a sword in his hand, while his courageous helpmate was armed with a spear. Thus with resolute bravery they defended the gorge of the staircase [and] made a gallant resistance . . . one man fell dead beneath the lady’s spear . . .22

  But the defenders were hopelessly outnumbered, and ‘to resist was but to protract the pains of death’. Overpowered and hacked to pieces, Mrs Beresford became just another example of the highest imperial type, ‘the love that never falters, the love that pays the price, / The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.’23

  ‘The final sacrifice’, pro patria mori at the hands of the enemy in the heat of battle, was of course far more commonly the lot of men. But the risks faced by the soldiers in the front lines were scarcely greater than the routine hazard of the empire wife, the inevitability of childbirth under almost any circumstances. Even as the Beresfords were fighting for their lives, one officer’s wife, Harriet Tytler, was giving birth alone and unaided in the back of a munitions waggon rattling her out of Delhi to safety. Against this, Mary Livingstone, dragged around Africa by the restless David, was lucky to be ‘confined in a field’. Her mother, however, did not see it that way, as her powerful but unavailing reproach to Livingstone makes clear:

  Was it not enough that you lost one lovely babe and scarcely saved the others? . . . a pregnant woman with three little children trailing about . . . through the wilds of Africa, among savage men and beasts! Had you found a place to which you wished to go and commence missionary operations, the case would be altered. Not one word would I say, were it to the mountains of the moon. But to go with an exploring party; the thing is ridiculous . . .24

  Ridiculous or not, it happened. Mary gave birth on the banks of the River Zouga with no shelter but a thorn tree. ‘Never had an easier or better time of it,’ was Livingstone’s verdict on his fifth experience of fatherhood.

  At least Mary Livingstone knew what to expect. When girls were married young and shipped off to imperial outposts with no mother or female relative to guide them through the mysteries of married life, the result could be staggering. One young bride, Emily Bayley, married at Delhi in March, had not completed her extended honeymoon trip to Simla when in October she felt ‘so very ill’ that the doctor ordered her to return to England. All her luggage and possessions had been packed and sent on ahead when on the night before sailing, as she recalled, ‘we were startled by the birth of our first child.’25 To the mother and baby, the doctor soon added another patient, for the new father fainted dead away when informed of the event. When he recovered he rushed out to buy some clothes for the unexpected arrival, coming back in triumph with ‘an exquisitely embroidered French cambric robe and a pink plush cloak’ – not exactly the regulation wear for a newborn child. But clearly a man who did not know that intercourse makes babies, and that his wife was advancing in pregnancy, could not be expected to realize that
babies need nappies.

  But even with experience, the life of an empire wife was not easy. One of its greatest distresses was the enforced separation from those very children they had borne with such resolution in huts and on highways, under gun-carriages and beside unknown waters. It was holy writ throughout the British Empire that children must not, could not be brought up in a hot climate. Yet a wife’s duty was always to remain at her husband’s side. As a result, recalled the Anglo-Indian novelist M. M. Kaye, ‘year after year weeping mothers took their children down to the great trading ports . . . and handed them over to the care of friends or nurses to be taken “Home” and brought up by relatives, or in many cases (Rudyard Kipling and his sister Trix are among them) by strangers.’ The memsahib who had been so nonchalant about leech bites permitted herself this lament for her absent children: ‘I felt like Mahomet’s coffin, suspended between my broken family.’ But if they did not lose their children one way, Kaye recorded, they lost them in another: ‘India was littered with the graves of dead children [and] every mother expected to lose at least three out of every five she bore.’26

  With these physical and emotional burdens on married women, it is hardly surprising that those poised to take advantage of the moment of empire were usually single. For the chances were there, openings and possibilities almost unprecedented in the previous history of women’s restricted lives. It took the factory-girl Mary Slessor a decade or more of saving and studying to realize her ambition of going out to Africa as a missionary. But when she arrived, she tackled tribal abuses like human sacrifice and twin-murder with such vigour and success that the government made her a ruling magistrate. Though single, she also became the mother of no less than twelve pairs of the twins she had saved from ritual sacrifice. Back in Scotland, she would have been still at her loom in the mill.