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Feminist Responses to the Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899–19021

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Feminist Responses to the Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899–19021 ‘the truest form of patriotism’ 10 Feminist responses to the second Anglo-Boer war, 1899–19021 he various pacifist feminist discourses discussed in this book co-existed and to some extent competed with one another, a T phenomenon seen particularly clearly during the final years of the study. An examination of the responses to the second Anglo-Boer war of 1899–1902 illustrates how nationalist and imperialist campaigns could challenge feminist arguments regarding women’s unique role in the nation. The Anglo-Boer war concludes the period under discussion in this book, and is considered at length here because it was as con- troversial within the feminist movement as it was in the wider political landscape. A study of the arguments of Josephine Butler, Emily Hobhouse and Millicent Garrett Fawcett demonstrates that liberal and imperialist discourses strongly influenced the feminist responses to the war, and highlights not only the divisions within feminism at the turn of the twentieth century, but also the problematic impact of the Anglo-Boer war on the peace movement itself. The Anglo-Boer war was distinctive in Victorian Britain as a conflict with a white, Christian and quasi-European population. The war was one-sided, although the Afrikaners’ initial numerical superiority, com- bined with their familiarity with the geography and climate, meant that it was a long drawn-out conflict that concluded with a protracted period of guerrilla warfare. It was the tactics utilised in the final stages of the war, from December 1900, that received the greatest criticism from the British anti-war movement. Kitchener’s policies of farm-burning and internment of Afrikaner women and children in concentration camps were intended to make survival impossible for the guerrillas. In practice, they not only further angered them, but they relieved them of family responsibilities and possibly facilitated the continuation of the resistance. The internment of women and children meant that the war was divisive 164 Heloise Brown - 9781526137890 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/02/2021 07:48:52AM via free access feminist responses to the anglo-boer war for the British feminist movement, and produced a range of responses, both pro- and anti-war, due to Victorian feminism’s complex relation- ship to liberalism and imperialism. The most public feminist involvement in the Anglo-Boer war came from two women who were prominent in nineteenth-century feminism, and one who was entirely unknown. Josephine Butler, a highly regarded feminist who campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1870s and 1880s, published a long essay on the conflict, The Native Races and the War, in which she sympathised with the Afrikaners’ situation but ultimately supported the British war effort on the grounds that it was undertaken for the protection and liberation of native South Africans. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, then de facto leader of the women’s suffrage movement and a supporter of the use of physical force in the British empire, was selected by the War Office in 1901 to lead the government enquiry into conditions in the concentration camps. Emily Hobhouse, who had been active in the women’s movement only briefly prior to the war, travelled to South Africa in 1900 to distribute aid in the con- centration camps. Although it was her thorough and public criticism of the camps that led to the establishment of the Commission on which Fawcett served, Hobhouse herself was publicly snubbed and pilloried for her ‘pro-Boer’ stance and criticism of the government. For the peace movement, she quickly became the heroine of the conflict. This chapter examines Butler, Fawcett and Hobhouse’s wider attitudes to war, imper- ialism and race, and considers the contribution each made to debates on the Anglo-Boer war. Josephine Butler (1828–1906) came from a prosperous Liberal back- ground. Her father, John Grey, had been active in the anti-slavery move- ment, the campaign against the Corn Laws and the agitation for the 1832 Reform Bill. His influence on Josephine is confirmed by the fact that she regularly drew upon anti-slavery language in her feminist arguments. In 1852 she married George Butler, and the pair moved in conservative, academic circles, often finding themselves marginalised for their liberal views. In the late 1860s, Butler was drawn into the campaigns for both women’s suffrage and higher education. She was best known, however, for her leadership of the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts. After Butler won repeal of the Acts in the UK, she extended the campaign to India in the 1890s, where governmental and military regulation of prostitution was more acute. The two greatest influences on Butler’s arguments were Liberalism and Evangelical Anglicanism. Although she was perhaps closer in feminist politics to earlier campaigners like Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Jessie Boucherett, whose main concerns were 165 Heloise Brown - 9781526137890 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/02/2021 07:48:52AM via free access ‘the truest form of patriotism’ education and employment policies, her ideas on the sexual double standard shifted the grounds of feminist debate from a strictly liberal analysis towards a more comprehensive view of women’s oppression within economic, political and sexual power structures.2 With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in August 1870, Butler took a public stand against war, collecting an international petition of protest against the conflict and against war in general. It was signed by women only, and Butler argued in a letter to the Peace Society journal, the Herald of Peace, that ‘I have less sympathy with the graceful charities of the scraping of lint and making of bandages than I have in woman’s endeavours to make war hated as a crime.’3 While Butler continued to support anti-war campaigns, she did little in the years after the Franco- Prussian war to draw attention to the peace movement itself. This is possibly because the Peace Society had decided to drop its opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts, arguing that Butler’s campaign was opposed only to the CD legislation, and not to standing armies or the mechanisms of war they enabled. In any case, Butler’s work against the Acts soon took up all of her time. She often compared her mission to end the state’s partial regulation of prostitution to her father John Grey’s work against slavery.4 Abolitionist ideas on slavery also informed her stance on war. For example, during the American Civil War both Butler and her husband supported the war, believing that it was right for the North to fight against slavery, and twenty years later Butler supported Home Rule for Ireland on similar abolitionist grounds. She argued that the British had kept the Irish in a position of subservience that was, particularly during the nineteenth century, ‘a condition of slavery’, and emphasised that she was using the term ‘not sentimentally, but in a strictly legal sense’.5 In the period before the Anglo-Boer war, Butler had been ‘pro-Boer’, viewing the British forces as oppressors of the Afrikaner republics. How- ever, she changed her mind after the outbreak of hostilities, and began to publicly support the government on the grounds that the British forces were fighting for the emancipation of native South Africans. Taking a pro-government stance brought her into conflict with many of her col- leagues, although for the first time it led her into a close and sympathetic relationship with Fawcett. In addition to Butler’s abolitionist principles, she opposed military intervention and upheld what might be termed Evangelical imperialist ideas, as she strongly believed that Britons had a mission to win converts to Christianity across the globe. Butler envisioned a Christian utopia in which ‘race prejudice’ and other social evils, such as war, would be history: 166 Heloise Brown - 9781526137890 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/02/2021 07:48:52AM via free access feminist responses to the anglo-boer war We all wish for peace; every reasonable person desires it . But what Peace? It is the Peace of God . We do not and cannot desire the peace which some of those are calling for who dare not face the open book of present day judgment, or who do not wish to read its lessons! Such a peace would be a mere plastering over of an unhealed wound, which would break out again before many years were over.6 The attainment of a lasting peace was therefore dependent upon the acceptance, on individual and collective levels, of Christianity. This model of Evangelical imperialism was exemplified in the final sentence of Native Races, in which Butler argued that ‘Race prejudice is a poison which will have to be cast out if the world is ever to be Christianized, and if Great Britain is to maintain the high and responsible place among the nations which has been given to her.’7 She envisioned a world in which racial discrimination had no place, but Christianity regulated this utopian vision. The purpose of the empire was to spread Christian reli- gion, and Butler believed – contrary to her own evidence, at times – that if both native races and imperialists were genuinely Christianised, then ‘race prejudice’ would be eradicated. This entailed the conversion of native races, but crucially, it also required a re-education of white Euro- peans with regard to their Christian responsibility. Butler argued that the Anglo-Boer war was ultimately about slavery, attempting in Native Races to trace its origins over the centuries leading up to the conflict. From the British perspective, she held that the govern- ment had been inconsistent and unhelpful in its policies, altering them according to conditions at home and party preferences.
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