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New Woman, New World: Maternal Feminism and the New Imperialism in the White Settler Colonies

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New Woman, New World: Maternal Feminism and the New Imperialism in the White Settler Colonies Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 175–184, 1999 Copyright © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd Pergamon Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0277-5395/99 $–see front matter PII S0277-5395(99)00005-9 NEW WOMAN, NEW WORLD: MATERNAL FEMINISM AND THE NEW IMPERIALISM IN THE WHITE SETTLER COLONIES Cecily Devereux Department of English, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5 Canada Synopsis — The New Woman, the figure of feminist rebellion who emerged in 1880s and 1890s in En- glish fiction and social commentary, became the focus of a good deal of anxious polemic. In the context of the massive wave of expansionism during these years of the Second British Empire, the New Woman—and feminism, as it appeared to undermine woman’s reproductive “duty”—came to be seen as a sign of imperial decline. It was in response to this view that suffragism undertook to transform the New Woman into the feminist image of the woman as “mother of the race.” In the white settler colo- nies, this image held a particular iconic value, since both the imperial mother and the “virgin” territories of the New World were configured as the last hope for the Empire. This article traces the analogy of New Woman and New World, and discusses how Anglo-colonial fictions of woman suffrage re-pre- sented the question of white women’s role in the progress of nation and Empire. © 1999 Elsevier Sci- ence Ltd. All rights reserved. The New Woman, the figure of feminist rebel- British Empire rode in the final decades of the lion who emerged in the 1880s and 1890s in 19th century. The New Woman began to ap- English fiction and social commentary, bore pear in literature at exactly the same time that the brunt of a good deal of animosity. As Ann British immigrationist propaganda was busily Ardis points out in her recent study of the New re-presenting the freshly opened portions of Woman novel, the two biggest white settler colonies, Canada and Australia, as the “New World.” A tremendous amount of polemic was Although what was called the New World wielded against her for choosing not to pur- had been imagined for some four centuries sue the conventional bourgeois woman’s ca- prior to the 20th, the image was revived and reer of marriage and motherhood. Indeed, reconfigured for the purposes of pro-British for her transgressions against the sex, gen- expansionist propaganda in the 19th century. der, and class distinctions of Victorian En- Immigrationist prose of the period promoted gland, she was accused of instigating the sec- these colonial territories as the Empire’s final ond fall of man. (Ardis, 1990, p. 1) frontiers; in the case of the newest provinces in western Canada, as “The Last Best West,” Ardis’s suggestion that the New Woman was or, more pointedly, “The White Man’s Last seen to herald a modern fall is particularly Opportunity” (Seton, 1908, pp. 525–532). An- compelling when we consider the cultural con- nette Kolodny (1975) has shown, through her text within which the New Woman was consti- analysis of colonial representations of the tuted, for “she” appeared with the massive United States, that the idea of the New World wave of expansionism upon which the Second as new always required that it be a “virgin” land, an empty and unspoiled body, bearing, as Doug Owram (1980) has suggested of the The author wishes to acknowledge the generous support of Canadian west during the expansionist years, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of “the promise of Eden.” The New World has Canada. always served as a site for the potential real- 175 176 Cecily Devereux ization of a fantasy of pastoral recovery for When feminism was defined only in relation the Old. The late Victorian version of this to the New Woman, as it so often was, it ap- fantasy differed from earlier Old World vi- peared to be anti-imperial. Although it would sions of the New only in being couched within be oversimplifying the case to position the the period’s imperialist discourses of race re- New Woman as the epitome of fin de siècle generation, social purity, and imperial re- feminism, it is clear that she did serve as a newal—what Bernard Semmel has called “im- focus for antifeminist sentiment precisely be- perial social reform” (Semmel, 1960), and cause, like the prostitute, she appeared to endan- what is often identified as the “New Imperi- ger the strength and security of the Anglo-Saxon alism.” race. The condition of “the race” was becom- It is because the New Woman and this New ing an article of considerable anxiety for Brit- World both, simultaneously, took shape within ons throughout the Empire. The birthrate re- the expansionist discourses of the New Imperi- corded amongst Anglo-Saxons, Anna Davin alism in the last two decades of the 19th cen- (1978) notes, had dropped significantly in ev- tury that Ardis’s (1990) comment is so signifi- ery census since 1881 (p. 10). Seeming epidem- cant. To configure the New Woman as a ics of tuberculosis and venereal disease, and harbinger of “the second fall of man” in the the related “racial poison” of alcohol, formed context of the construction of the New World an index of imperial decline. By the end of the as the Empire’s new Eden is to invoke what century, moreover, the concerns raised by the was by the 1880s a familiar rhetoric of imperial failure of so many young British recruits to degeneration seen to be caused by women. meet the standards necessary for enlistment in Since, as Lynda Nead (1988) has observed, the armed forces, and the subsequent loss of “[t]he moral condition of the nation . was the Boer War in 1902, fostered a climate of in- believed to derive from the moral standards of tense alarm throughout the Empire. Not only women” (p. 92), when women “fell,” they was “the race” apparently weakening, it was would take the nation with them. The fallen threatening to die out altogether. As Davin woman thus carried the possibility of the points out, feminism—or, to be exact, New moral collapse of the nation, and, in conse- Womanhood—exacerbated these fears of ra- quence, of the Empire that made up the cial degeneration, since it appeared to repre- “Greater Britain.” “It is surely significant,” sent a widespread desire on the part of women Nead observes, “that the language of moral to forgo childbearing for careers and indepen- and dynastic degeneration is the same: decline dence, and the New Woman seemed set to and fall; the terms plot both a moral and an rend the social fabric from end to end by abdi- imperial narrative and a fall from virtue can cating her household cares and entering the symbolize the end of an empire” (Nead, 1988, workforce (Davin, 1978, pp. 20–21). p. 94). Although Nead is talking primarily Such a view is implicit in the arguments of about the prostitute as “fallen” woman, this one virulent antisuffragist, Sir Almroth Wright, paradigm for plotting decline through women who maintained in his polemical work, The can also be used to define the “problem” of Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage the New Woman, who likewise, by her sexual (Wright, 1913), that the stability of the Empire “transgressions,” appeared to threaten the sta- could only be ensured through the proper or- bility of the Empire. What Ardis (1990) fore- dering of the domestic microcosm. Implicit in grounds when she links the New Woman to Wright’s configuration is the model that John late Victorian rhetoric of the fall is the perva- Ruskin had articulated in the 1865 lecture “Of sive imperialist ideology of gender, which in- Queens’ Gardens.” “Now the man’s work for sisted that insubordinate “woman” would, his own home,” Ruskin asserted, “is . to se- once again, bear the blame for social ruin. cure its maintenance, progress, and defence; Only this time, she would take the British Em- the woman’s is to secure its order, comfort, pire with her, and in consequence would bring and loveliness.” He continued: down what was seen to be the apex of civiliza- tion, a Darwinian culmination of humanity’s Expand both these functions. The man’s natural selection, and what was touted as the duty, as a member of the commonwealth, is most righteous, benign, and moral empire ever to assist in the maintenance, in the advance, to dominate so much earthly territory. in the defence of the state. The woman’s New Woman, New World 177 duty, as a member of the commonwealth, is Thus, a writer like Nellie McClung (1873–1951), to assist in the ordering, in the comforting, the best-known of the English-Canadian suf- and in the beautiful adornment of the state. fragists, struggled to assure male readers of (Ruskin, 1900, p. 130) feminism’s commitment to empire. In her 1915 feminist manifesto, In Times Like These, Mc- Ruskin followed this summary of gendered du- Clung made this claim: ties in “the state” by admonishing women that “. [what] is true of the lower or household The woman movement, which has been dominion is equally true of the queenly domin- scoffed and jeered at and misunderstood ion [and] that highest dignity is open to [them], most of all by the people whom it is destined if [they] will also accept that highest duty” to help, is a spiritual revival of the best in- (Ruskin, 1900 p. 134). stincts of womanhood—the instinct to serve Ruskin may not have anticipated in 1865 and save the race.
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