Indian Feminists, Suffragettes, and What it Means to Be Empowered:

The Origins of White Feminism

(The ‘India’ referenced in this paper is that of pre-partition)

What does it mean to be empowered? Ever present in today’s social discourse, empowerment has been co-opted by everything from multi-level marketing schemes to Instagram social movements. All supposedly sell self-liberation, but is it empowering to buy into someone else’s idea of freedom? This question has been pertinent since the inception of western feminism and remains a topic of debate. The first wave of modern feminism, the suffragette movement, was an explicitly racist movement. The British Empire sought to westernize their colonies in order to ‘save’ the people, and Suffragettes applied this mentality to their dealings with India, overlooking the pre-existing Indian feminist organizations. As author Rafia Zakaria writes in her book Against White Feminism, “those local women were often othered, objectified, or exoticized and coerced to follow the Western feminism model,” rather than receiving support and recognition. British suffragettes tokenized Indian women to demonstrate their open-mindedness and supposed liberalism, but subsequent feminist victories did not extend to the women of India. Unable to imagine empowerment that dismantled the existing colonial structure, British feminists used Indian feminists to their own ends and then abandoned them, leaving Indian women no better off.

On a sunny day in June 1911, tens of thousands of women of all classes and walks of life gathered at the Women’s Coronation Procession in London to protest for British women’s suffrage. Among them were five Indian women, swathed in saris and hoisting banners adorned with elephants, preserved in a photograph now held by the British Library. They had been invited, along with representatives from the other colonies, by British suffragettes, and encouraged to wear their traditional dress. The Suffragettes used these women of color to project an image of unity and equality in order to accrue political allies, but their movement relied on imperialism and the subjugation of colonies. The Women’s Coronation Procession took place a week after the coronation procession of King George V.  The goal was to demonstrate British women’s dedication as active citizens and legitimize the suffragettes’ claim that a feminine point of view in politics would strengthen the empire (Mapping) . British women were “campaigning for a vote in an imperial parliament that would give them a say over what happened in the Empire” (Mukherjee). Thus, the five Indian women in that photograph were not marching for Indian women’s voting rights, but for the rights of imperial citizens, a recognition they did not receive. The same was true for the protesters from other colonies. As historian Sumita Mukherjee says, “These women were objectified by British women who wanted to throw in a bit of colour to the campaign and draw attention to tokenistic attempts of being diverse.” The suffragettes needed political support, and as anti-imperialistic sentiments were building across the world, the women of color at this march seemed to demonstrate a united front for their cause. Yet, the suffragette’s pledge to uphold the system oppressing their colonized counterparts reveals their demonstration of diversity as a façade.

New feminist thinkers emerged after American and British women gained the vote, but like the movement, their ideas were rooted in imperialism, leaving women of color unrepresented in the colonizer’s discourse. Britain’s view of its colonies centered on a need for re-education in the western tradition in order to save the colonized from their inherent evil. Instead of allying themselves with Indian feminists who were working to gain liberation on their own terms, white feminists insisted that Indian women were victims to the anarchy of their society and needed to be saved. Katherine Mayo was an American writer whose previous writings had been embraced by American liberal feminists. In 1927, she approached British officials with an offer to write an anti-sovereignty piece promoting the colonization and British ‘reform’ of India (Sinha). The British, eager to justify their imperialism on the global stage, agreed. Her book, titled ‘Mother India’ for its description of the conditions Indian Mothers faced (one of many of Mayo’s pieces denouncing colonies’ self-governance) is centered around India’s inability to govern itself. Mayo provides examples of Indians’ ‘ineptitude’, from officials’ attitudes to child marriage, intended to appeal to female activists in India by focusing on women’s mistreatment by Indian men. Instead, it sparked national outrage for its sweeping criticism of Indian culture. Indian feminists often worked in tandem with emerging Indian nationalists, so Mayo’s claim that progress required westernization alienated both groups. The Indian national-feminist reinvention of the ‘Modern Indian Woman’, as neither the impoverished Indian of the past nor the re-educated woman of the British, was pivotal to the development of a uniting Indian National Identity.

              Despite the feminists’ proclaimed dedication to liberation for all women, Indian women did not gain the universal right to vote under British rule, and the portion of the population permitted a vote was limited by property ownership requirements and literacy tests. Under the Government of India Act of 1935, lobbied heavily by the wave of women elected to British office, votes were extended to the wives of existing male voters and a literacy test was presented as an alternate way to qualify female voters. Yet, the question of who was apt to vote in India was still largely decided by the local bureaucracies who created convoluted layers of requirements. The province of Bihar and Orissa, seeking to restrict women’s voting, argued that a woman’s name should be removed from the voting roll if she was divorced or widowed. When they encountered a matriarchal community in the hills of Khasi, however, they decided to make an exception because land was held in the woman’s name (Crawford). As historian Dr. Shani writes, "The notion of conferring the right to vote and bringing women genuinely into the electoral roll was beyond the purview of the bureaucratic colonial imagination". Although the 1935 Government of India Act, the last piece of British legislation in India before independence, broadened voting rights, it only allowed about a fifth of the adult population to vote, few of whom were women. Women’s right to vote relied heavily on their husband’s status, instead of their own abilities. The introduction of the literacy test "was also consistent with the colonial government's lack of faith in India's illiterate masses and their negative attitudes towards enfranchisement of people at the margins of the franchise, such as the poor and rural, illiterate people" (Shani). The British believed that Indians needed a European education to be informed enough to vote, and be legally incorporated into the Empire as equals. Although the first wave of women to join the British government campaigned for Indian Suffrage, they failed to recognize the existing layered barriers of misogyny and racism Indian women faced.

The question that thus arises is whether a vote under an Empire who is trying to reform you and erase your heritage is even valuable. The goal in extending the restrictive voting requirements was to quell revolutionary tensions and retain India as a British colony, not to empower the people, which would have seen universal suffrage for the colonies. Britain still had ultimate power, as “the legislature of India could not change or reverse any law passed by the British Parliament in relation to India” (dhristiias), so what power did a vote impart? In 1935, Nancy Astor, the first female British MP, wrote to Samuel Hoare, Secretary of State of India, arguing for more inclusive voting criteria: “We must have a proportion of one to five [women to men voters] by some means or other. Unless that is secured you will have a suffragette agitation in India in a very short time- and you will deserve it. Surely you know that the Indian women can make themselves troublesome? If they are left out of the new constitution instead of getting their help you will get their hostility, and of course all the more active of them will become wreckers.” Through propaganda like Mother India, the British were trying to ally themselves with the oppressed Indian feminists. Yet, rather than amplifying the specified demands of Indian Feminists, they pushed the doctrine of Indian miseducation, inhibiting Indian feminists along with Indian nationalist revolutionaries. Astor writes, “instead of getting their help you will get their hostility”. Sating the Indian feminists with a performative voting reform was a tactic to avoid their alliance with the Nationalists, many of whom did not support the feminist agenda. The British did not anticipate that the greater shared conflict of their refusal to comply with either revolutionary group pushed the two together. With the growing wave of nationalism, a unifying Indian identity was building. Ultimately, the Indian Feminists made a strategic alliance with Indian nationalists, becoming a catalyst for Indian Independence. Indian women finally gained constitutionally protected voting rights in 1949 under the Constitution of India.

And so we return to the question: What does it mean to be empowered? The first wave of western feminism was imbued with willful blindness to the realities of intersectionality for women of color under imperial power. Yet, as this White-centered form of ‘empowerment’ spread across the globe, its charged origins were never recognized and corrected. As NPR puts it, “Regardless of their relative disadvantages, cultural differences, and lived experiences, women of color — especially in non-western countries — are only included in this feminist movement when they conform to its particular values”. What has resulted are deeply buried undercurrents and a denial of their existence. The erasure of diverse voices continues, and to combat it, we must recognize the historical damage of exclusionary white feminism.

2 February, 2023