‘Femininity’ and the History of Women's Education: Shifting the Frame [1 ed.] 9783030542320, 9783030542337

Table of contents :
About This Book
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Shifting ‘Femininities’: Multifaceted Realms of Historical Educational Inquiry
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
Chapter 2: ‘Unnatural’ Women and Natural Science: Changing Femininity and Expanding Educational Sites Through Women’s Pursuit of Natural Science
Conclusion
References
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Chapter 3: African American Women, Femininity and Their History in Physical Education and Sports in American Higher Education: From World War I Through the Mid-century
Pre-Civil War
Post Emancipation
The Dawn of the Twentieth Century
Post-World War I
References
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Chapter 4: Suzanne Karpelès’ Encounters in Indochina and Europe in 1931: Multiple Femininities, Colonial Relations and Educative Sites
Femininities, Colonialism and Religion
Femininities, Networks and Expertise
Femininities and the Estates General of Feminism
Femininities and Fascism
Conclusion
References
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Chapter 5: Troubling Gender Relations with the Appointment of ‘That Lady Inspector’ in Post-suffrage South Australia
Constructing ‘Divided Responsibility’ in School Leadership
‘Women Need the Suffrage’
‘That Lady Inspector’
‘Practically, She Stepped Over the Heads of Other Staff’
Conclusion
References
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Chapter 6: Shifting Spaces of Femininity: Everyday Life of Girl Guides in Hong Kong 1921–1941
Theorising Femininity
The Invention of English Girls’ Schools for Urban Middle-Class Chinese Girls 1890–1921: A Background
State and Voluntary Efforts
The Multiracial Makeup of Urban English Girls’ Schools
The Origin and Growth of Guiding in Hong Kong: The Changing Geography and Membership Structure 1921–1941
An Urban Middle-Class Phenomenon in the 1920s
Expanding Geography and Membership to Rural and Working-Class Children in the 1930s
Usefulness in the Domestic and Public Sphere: A New Spatiality for the ‘Feminine Instinct of Service’
The Shifting Frame of Femininity and Schooling Practices in Hong Kong 1921–1941
Usefulness and the Affective Interior of Guides: Social Work in the Public Sphere
Feminine Physique in the Sporting and Outdoor Scene
Feminine Physique and the Sporting Scene in English Girls’ Schools 1901–1941
Fit Feminine Physique as an Imperial Spectacle 1921–1941
Conclusion
References
Primary Sources
I. Hong Kong Government Reports
II. Life Histories
III. Newspapers
IV. School Publications
Secondary Sources
Chapter 7: ‘I turned into the boorish, stiff, unpleasant teenager… That was what he expected, and that was what I immediately therefore became’: Negotiating the ‘Risk’ of Femininity in Teenage Girls’ Reading in 1960s’ Britain
Introduction
Stories, Stages, and Theories of Ageing
Negotiating the Frames of Femininity
Honey
The Chalet School Series
Diana
Conclusion
References
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Chapter 8: ‘A Great Builder’: Female Enterprise, Architectural Ambition and the Construction of Convents
Introduction
Nuns and the ‘Female Space’ of the Convent
Convent Expansion in the Nineteenth Century
Founders and Funders: The Case of Nano Nagle
Managing Bishops and Builders: A Question of Control
References
(I) Archives
(II) Publications
Chapter 9: Reconfiguring Women and Empire: Sex, Race and Femininity in British India, 1785–1922
Indian Femininity
British India
Domestic Femininity, 1780–1810
Eurasian Domestic Intervention, 1790–1830
Different Marginalities: Eurasian and Indian Deficit Femininities, 1810–1840
Colonial Constructions of Indian Femininity and the Entry of the Missions, 1813
The New Eurasian Feminine Body, 1850–1870
The Army and New Eurasian Femininity, 1847–1871
Mary Carpenter and Teacher Training, 1866–1882
Medicine
Science and Medical Outreach
Conclusion
References
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Chapter 10: Histories of Women’s Education and Shifting Frames of ‘Femininity’
Index

Citation preview

‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education Shifting the Frame

Edited by Tim Allender · Stephanie Spencer

‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education

Tim Allender  •  Stephanie Spencer Editors

‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education Shifting the Frame

Editors Tim Allender University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia

Stephanie Spencer University of Winchester Winchester, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-54232-0    ISBN 978-3-030-54233-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Westend61 / GettyImages Cover Caption: The image on the cover of the book is used as a visual metaphor. It shows three young scholarly women of different cultural backgrounds. They have walked through a non-Western historical gateway. We hope our book will be read in this way, where the respective contributions, drawing on various cultural histories and other analytical frames, help build a deeper understanding of women’s education today. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

About This Book

This book explores the different theoretical and epistemological constituencies that are engaged in the field of women’s history as these relate to aspects of education within broader social settings. As our theme, shifting conceptions of femininity are interrogated in a range of historical sites in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 1, written by Tim Allender and Stephanie Spencer, is divided into three parts. Firstly, it briefly sets out the conceptual and theoretical framework regarding femininity and women’s history as we see it, especially as these relate to education and the chapters in the book. It then considers the necessary engagement any study of femininity needs to have with the usually more dominant and distinctive boundaries created by different academic traditions of historical investigation, including transnational approaches. And lastly there is a discussion of how shifting frames of femininity take the researcher into more intimate domains of personal experience, where studies about feminine bodies, their educative surroundings, their ageing, their aesthetic and their religiosity provide fascinating sites of study for scholars of women’s history. Then follows eight chapters, each analysing shifting frames of femininity in some of the sub-fields, it might be argued, of histories of women’s history. Chapter 2, by Ruth Watts, examines the positionality of women who engaged with the emerging discipline of science in the nineteenth century. She argues that by their very participation, these women were subversive in pressing against broader assumptions about their feminine psychology and even rationality. Critically, though usually excluded from being v

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scientists, this feminine agency led these women (including illustrator and painter Marianne North, whose work this chapter focuses upon) to use permitted feminine skills and occupations in new and shifting intellectual fields of imaginative endeavour that had connection especially with botany. It was permissible for them to be teachers, but in creating these rich connections with other fields, they also established new ways to think about science: including later scholarship that has revealed the limiting gendered associations and language embedded in the discipline itself. In Chap. 3, Linda M. Perkins takes the reader to the United States of America and explores the shifting juxtapositions of race and femininity in women’s physical education and sport in the early to mid-twentieth century. The chapter sees strong precursors that relate to the emancipation of slaves in the previous century where former female slaves were forced to conform to White notions of morality and beauty. Sexual assaults by slave owners against female slaves fed into widely held narratives that Black women were promiscuous. Some are enduring constraints for many Black sportswomen to this day. However, in the 1920s, when college-level physical education and sport began to see Black female participants participating with White women, some of these constraints were reconfigured, revealing differing White attitudes on the issue of race, femininity and sport. Key institutions in this period such as the YWCA, though encouraging Black participation, reinforced racial segregation in sport. Yet, sport also led to new marginalities around their putative femininity. Drawing on the life stories of several key athletes and administrators, this chapter explores an emerging distinction within sports, where basketball, in particular, was identified in US colleges as a masculine pursuit or one only for the working-class and Black women. This stereotype was then replaced by a stronger sporting relegation for them which was track and field. This sport eroticised Black women athletes and conveyed new anxieties about their possible homosexuality. Chapter 4, by Joyce Goodman, focuses predominantly on the year 1931 in the life and career of feminist Suzanne Karpelès. From a wealthy Hungarian Jewish family, and educated in Paris, Karpelès was an outstanding linguist of Eastern languages. She was appointed the founding director of the Royal Library and later also of the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which was part of Indochina, then under French colonial rule. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, including photographs, personal letters, journal and newspaper articles, this chapter uses Karpelès’ fascinating travels to illustrate the fluidity of femininities within spaces of

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circulation: embracing the intimacies of empire and shifting international mentalities of the era, including fascism. There are four levels of inquiry that engage femininities as they related to Karpelès in her colonial locale and in spaces of circulation in Europe: religion and colonialism; internationalism and emerging feminine expertise within international organisations; Karpelès’ countervailing configurations of the “native woman” which were in tension with her views on indigenous schooling in empire; and, finally, where Karpelès encountered new educational cinematography in the context of fascism that re-shaped ascriptions of femininity in respect of women. This chapter’s approach to the dynamic frames of femininity in which both Karpelès and her world are engaged is brought together by articulating processes of encounter and negotiation, underpinned by Judith Butler’s performative account of gender and Karen Barad’s posthumanist extension of Butler’s performativity. In Chap. 5, Kay Whitehead traces gender relations around the appointment of women in authority, most notably as female school inspectors in post-suffrage South Australia in the 1890s. She analyses the career trajectories of seven white-­settler women teachers where their professional identity, authorised by men, entangled their femininity and relegated their authority by gender-specific assignations around their ‘modest’ and ‘kind’ natures. Broader and rapid shifts in educational policy and offerings moved women teachers into secular classrooms as the state tookover responsibility for educating many school children in the 1870s. The appointment of Blanche McNamara as the first Lady Inspector two decades later in 1897 resulted in a new level of male anxiety about “petticoat government”, prompting satirical cartoons that stereotyped women as inadequate disciplinarians, mannish and not worthy to hold authority over the teachers of boys. However, upon McNamara’s premature death, her portrait in the local press conveyed conventional white-settler femininity, yet also a woman of intensity and intellect. Chapter 6, by Stella Meng Wang, explores the dynamic that the Girl Guide Movement created within both colonial and public spaces in interwar Hong Kong. The shifting frame of feminine identity, particularly in urban English medium schools for middle-class girls (most of whom were at least part-Chinese descent), revolved around the transformative agency of Girl Guiding that directed these girls into sporting and philanthropic spaces as they moved into higher education. Guiding promoted work in prisons, teaching female inmates needlework and raffia work as well as gardening and basic literacy. Guiding also engaged the feminine physique,

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encouraging drills, marching and sport while simultaneously emphasising a cultured and theatre-going school girl. On both levels, Guiding provided an entrée into the upper echelons of Hong Kong colonial society. Yet, the sponsors of this movement, to keep it strong, also provided bridges into rural and working-class domains that embraced social service but cut across the colonial class agendas of the British. In Chap. 7, Stephanie Spencer reflects upon shifting frames of femininity created by the ageing process in mid-twentieth-century Britain, specifically in the 1960s, typically considered to be a decade when the old social order relaxed. An analysis of fiction in three publications aimed at a teenage audience is informed by a symbolic interactionist approach that explores the role that leisure reading played in the informal education of girls into an age-appropriate performance of femininity. The closer the reader came to adulthood, the more clearly the advantages of youth and the problems of old age were articulated. In Honey, marriage, presented as the ultimate goal in the numerous romance narratives, also heralded a seismic shift of femininity towards the invisibility of middle and old ages. Early teen readers of Diana, however, encountered a greater variety of older role models, and the emphasis in the fiction for a younger audience was not on the older girls’ teleological search for Mr Right but on a performance of prepubescent femininity that was fearless, independent, and girl centred. Chapter 8, by Deirdre Raftery and Deirdre Bennett, frames femininity within the habitus of religious life. Though dressed in habit and veil, there was an underlying and distinctive professional feminine characteristic of women religious (nuns), where they negotiated the traditional male spaces of architecture and engineering. The chapter concerns the nineteenth century, where Church femininity, as enshrined by nuns, could also be shifted by them in practical and professional pursuits that encompassed both male and female agency. Focusing mostly on one such sister, Honora (Nano) Nagle, Foundress of the Presentation Sisters, the chapter analyses her building of two convent houses with ambitions for further expansion. This work reflected the expansion ambitions of several other orders, also based in Ireland at this time. Though there is little evidence that any nuns were trained in engineering and design, foundresses of nineteenth-­century convents were deeply concerned with the actual building of them. Sometimes as wealthy women with the power of the purse, their views influenced leading architects such as Augustus Welby Pugin and George Ashlin. This chapter considers the shifts in the femininity of these women religious as

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they embraced these male domains to achieve their religious-building programs. And it reveals the critical place such women have in the fields of women’s history and history of education. In Chap. 9, Tim Allender examines shifting frames of femininity in colonial India between 1785 and 1922. While making brief contrasts with traditional Indian constructions of femininity and their intersection with household and nationalist politics, the chapter’s main concern is the colonial side of the ledger and those Indian females who interacted with it. Passing through several key periods of variable interaction with colonial state constructions of preferred feminine outcomes, the chapter looks at the European female body in India. In the early British colonial era, femininity was connected to sex, emotional realms of domesticity and masculine decrepitude. As the nineteenth century progressed and Western demographers took hold, it was the femininity of mix-race females (Eurasians) who became more formally the focus of emerging state agendas. In the 1870s feminine professional codas emerged for this same racial grouping (and for some expatriate European females) in teaching and nursing that, in turn, connected with transnational currents regarding pedagogical innovation and tropical medicine protocols. In the early twentieth century new geographies of female medical missionary interaction with some Indian females (with publicly accountable statistical reportage around treatment and cure) began contributing to the breakdown of the rigid racial barriers of colonial India. This was well before the fierce Nationalist struggles for Independence from the British of the later 1920s and the1930s. Chapter 10 explores the theoretical implications of the preceding chapters in the book and interprets these implications through an established academic approach of frame analysis. The chapter sees two dimensions that are apparent across the book’s chapters: an analytical frame and a metaphorical frame. Shifting femininities reveal new conceptual interactions as well as newly identified, yet often unconscious, metaphorical identity formation. The book is the product of a rich collaboration between chapter authors. The project began its life as an all-day workshop where all chapter authors and other scholar specialists participated. It was hosted by Humboldt University, Berlin, and the International Standing Committee of History of Education (ISCHE) in September 2018.

Contents

1 Shifting ‘Femininities’: Multifaceted Realms of Historical Educational Inquiry  1 Tim Allender and Stephanie Spencer 2 ‘Unnatural’ Women and Natural Science: Changing Femininity and Expanding Educational Sites Through Women’s Pursuit of Natural Science 11 Ruth Watts 3 African American Women, Femininity and Their History in Physical Education and Sports in American Higher Education: From World War I Through the Mid-century 37 Linda M. Perkins 4 Suzanne Karpelès’ Encounters in Indochina and Europe in 1931: Multiple Femininities, Colonial Relations and Educative Sites 63 Joyce Goodman 5 Troubling Gender Relations with the Appointment of ‘That Lady Inspector’ in Post-suffrage South Australia 89 Kay Whitehead

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6 Shifting Spaces of Femininity: Everyday Life of Girl Guides in Hong Kong 1921–1941119 Stella Meng Wang 7 ‘I turned into the boorish, stiff, unpleasant teenager… That was what he expected, and that was what I immediately therefore became’: Negotiating the ‘Risk’ of Femininity in Teenage Girls’ Reading in 1960s’ Britain149 Stephanie Spencer 8 ‘A Great Builder’: Female Enterprise, Architectural Ambition and the Construction of Convents175 Deirdre Raftery and Deirdre Bennett 9 Reconfiguring Women and Empire: Sex, Race and Femininity in British India, 1785–1922201 Tim Allender 10 Histories of Women’s Education and Shifting Frames of ‘Femininity’231 Stephanie Spencer and Tim Allender Index237

Notes on Contributors

Tim Allender  is Professor and Chair of History and Curriculum at the University of Sydney. He has published extensively on colonial India over the past 20  years. His most recent monograph Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932, is part of ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series published with Manchester University Press. This book won the Anne Bloomfield Book Prize, awarded by the HES (UK), for the best history of education book written in English and published between 2014 and 2017. Allender has also since published edited works on History Didactics, and he is co-editor of two book series specialising in transnational history and in visual educational history. He is working on projects including Roman Catholic religiosity in colonial and independent India, as well as studies into the use of visual imagery in colonial settings. Allender has recently held visiting professorships at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India; at Birmingham University, UK; and at the Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. Deirdre  Bennett  is a PhD scholar at University College Dublin and a second-level school teacher. Her doctoral work examines the economics of convents in nineteenth-century Ireland, and she has carried out research at convent archives all over the country. Her work has been published in History of Education, and she has been awarded bursaries from the International Standing Conference for the History of Education and the History of Education Society (UK). Bennett has presented her work in Germany, Portugal and the UK, and she has twice been the recipient of a graduate research award from University College Dublin. xiii

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Joyce Goodman  is Professor of History of Education at the University of Winchester and chercheure associée at CERLIS.eu. Her research explores women’s work in and for education during the interwar period in relation to internationalism, empire and comparative methodologies. Goodman is an honorary member of ISCHE and of Network 17 of EERA.  Her books include Girls’ Secondary Education in the Western World (Palgrave, 2014 pbk), with James Albisetti and Rebecca Rogers, and Women and Education: Major Themes in Education (2011, 4 volumes), with Jane Martin. Linda  M.  Perkins is Associate University Professor and Director of Applied Gender Studies at Claremont Graduate University, California (USA). She holds an interdisciplinary university appointment in the departments of Applied Gender Studies and Educational Studies. Her primary areas of research are on the history of African-American women’s higher education, the education of African Americans in elite institutions, and the history of talent identification programs for African-­American students. She has served as vice president of Division F (History and Historiography) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and has served as a member of the Executive Council of AERA. Deirdre Raftery  is a historian of education at University College Dublin. She has thirteen book publications and most recently co-authored three books on aspects of the history of nuns and education, published by Routledge and Irish Academic Press. She is completing a book entitled Irish Nuns and Transnational Education, 1800–1900 (Palgrave Macmillan), and her new book of Teresa Ball and Loreto Education (Four Courts Press) is to be published in 2021. Stephanie Spencer  is a professor of History of Women’s Education and convenor of the Centre for the History of Women’s Education at the University of Winchester. Her research focuses on the development of both formal and informal education for girls in the twentieth century. She has a particular interest in adolescent leisure reading, and her most recent publication is co-authored with Nancy G. Rosoff, British and American School Stories, 1910–1960: Fiction, Femininity, and Friendship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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Stella  Meng  Wang  is a PhD candidate at Sydney School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney. Her research explores the everyday life of children in colonial Hong Kong. Meng’s research interests include the architecture of childhood, gender and youth movements, and women’s education. Ruth  Watts is Emeritus Professor of History of Education at the University of Birmingham. She has published much on the history of education and gender, her books including Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760–1860 (1997), and Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History (2007) for which she won the History of Education Society Book Prize in 2010. She is ex-president of the British History of Education Society and an honorary life member of both the latter and the International Standing Conference for the History of Education. Recent publications include historical work on women and environmental sciences. Kay  Whitehead  is Adjunct Professor of History of Education at the University of South Australia and a co-convenor of the Gender Standing Working Group for the International Standing Conference in the History of Education. She has published widely on the lives, work and transnational travel of Australian, Canadian and British women educators from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Her publications include Lillian de Lissa, Women Teachers and Teacher Education in the Twentieth Century: A Transnational History (2016).

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Nepenthes northiana (Sarawak) plant collected by, painted by, and named after Marianne North. Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reproduced with permission 21 Marianne North Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reproduced with permission23 Interdependence of plants, insects and animal life, ‘tangled’ and carnivorous plants. Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reproduced with permission 26 Alice Coachman 57 That Lady Inspector, Quiz and the Lantern, January 28 1897, 9 107 The late Miss Blanche McNamara: First Lady Inspector of State Schools, Herald, April 28, 1900, 3 113 Mother John Byrne PBVM, Australia (By kind permission of the Presentation Archives, George’s Hill, Dublin, Ireland) 178 Floor plan by the nuns of the Benedictine Monastery, Ypres (By kind permission of the Kylemore Abbey Archives, Ireland) 186

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CHAPTER 1

Shifting ‘Femininities’: Multifaceted Realms of Historical Educational Inquiry Tim Allender and Stephanie Spencer

(i) Recently, deconstructions around the notion of femininity have been revealing in determining the diversity of educational spaces. These spaces range from institutional contexts to family, to professional outlooks, to racial identity, to defining community and religious groupings. For the historian, each of these avenues opens up considerable scope for new academic research. This new research could explore some of the associated historical contexts to examine the deeper question of the variable and shifting interplay of feminine identity and its challenges within different socio-cultural settings: particularly those occupied by educators and their students. Driven by systematic archival research, this approach can give rich and vivid insights about femininity. The approach can also provide

T. Allender (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] S. Spencer University of Winchester, Winchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_1

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the reader with interesting accounts of how these historical contexts shaped the agency of females and their identity. In doing this, new directions in feminist and gender history emerge that interrogate the dynamic nature of femininity. This is ‘femininity’ as both a conceptual tool and as part of the personal projects of actors immersed in their respective historical contexts. New research suggests ‘femininity’ should not be seen as an analytical category by itself, but rather being mostly determined within the academic spaces created by the paradigms of race, feminism, gender and class. Much academic travel about femininity is authorised by this phenomenon. And, tantalisingly, the entanglement of feminine identity formation within these broader paradigmatic categories creates a fluidity that reveals different educational outcomes for those females who shared their respective learning spaces. Furthermore, there is also some perversity to notice as authors seek to engage with this shifting frame to better understand how the ideal of femininity was referenced by the practicalities of female agency. One such circumstance was when women negotiated rather than disregarded the constraints of their historical context by paradoxically continuing to enshrine a time-specific ideal of femininity, even when their later circumstances demanded that they move away from it. Additionally, there are new academic horizons to consider. Historians of gender and feminism, in particular, are seeking alternatives to linear analysis and they are resisting disciplinary boundaries around their research. For example, Kathryn Gleadle, in her influential The Imagined Communities of Women’s History, is responsive to the seeming slowing in progress of women’s history in the last 15 years or so. She disagrees with this view. Instead she sees an active field, still, but one that now cuts across many traditional binaries of inquiry and occupies, rhizome-like, imaginative intellectual alliances with other disciplinary fields. These create unexpected theoretical juxtapositions and complicated chronologies, while maintaining women’s history’s edge in broader feminist politics.1 In another direction, Mia Liinason and Claire Meijer argue that the mythology of homogeneous societies obscures the marginalisation of women of colour, as well as migrants and other ethnic minorities of women, where the historicity of their femininity reveals deep roots of gender-based 1  Kathryn Gleadle. 2013. ‘The Imagined Communities of Women’s History: current debates and emerging themes, a rhizomatic approach’ in Women’s History Review. 22: 4, 524–540.

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oppression.2 It is within these shifting intellectual frames, and others like them, that new research locates its analysis around femininity using a diverse range of historical contexts through which interesting individual and collective personal stories are told.

(ii) The book is also sensitive to the important relational aspects of key areas of research that distinctively associate broader academic traditions with the dominant paradigms of feminism, gender, race and class. This sensitivity is important because these traditions have a direct impact on academic constructions of femininity within educational settings and contextualise femininity in quite different ways. For example, in the colonial world, feminism was generally internal to the colonial project, as shown by Antoinette Burton. She asserts that feminist writers, in fact, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, created images of needy women in the non-white empire mostly only to project their part in an imperial mission to their audiences ‘at home’ in England.3 There is also a cross over between gender and feminism, peculiar to empire. For example, Claire Midgely argues, women involved in the anti-slavery movement not only located feminism within prevailing imperial ideologies but also gendered these ideologies.4 While Raewyn Connell, (largely taking the discussion outside the feminist discourse) sees colonial masculinity and femininity in highly relational sociological terms.5 Central to understanding the construction of femininity is the significance of its relation to the construction of masculinity and the consequent ­recognition of how power is dispersed, and gendered ideas disseminated, in formal and informal education settings within any society.6 How then do European hegemonic mentalities around femininity in the non-white colonial world 2  Mia Liinason and Clara Meijer. 2017. ‘Challenging constructions of nationhood and nostalgia: exploring the role of gender, race and age in struggles for women’s rights in Scandinavia’ in Women’s History Review. 27:5, 729–753. 3  Antoinette Burton. 1994. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: North Carolina, 8, 82–3. 4  Claire Midgely. 1998. ‘Anti-slavery ang the Roots of “Imperial Feminism”’ in Claire Midgely, (ed.), Gender and Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 161–9. 5  Raewyn Connell. 2009. Gender in World Perspective, Cambridge: Polity. 6  Joan Scott. 1986. ‘Gender a Useful Category of Historical Analysis’ American Historical Review, 91: 5, 1053–1075.

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play out, notwithstanding the more visible clash of cultures that is usually the dominant topic of postcolonial scrutiny? On the other hand, in mostly white European contexts, the overarching category of feminism is dominant in the analysis in another way, where other national and cultural determinants are in play. For example, Rebecca Rodgers, drawing on the work of Jo Burr Margadant as well as that of Isabelle Ernot, makes the case for strongly contrasting academic traditions in the English-speaking world compared to those to be found in France. In the former domain, feminist biographies have flourished and been given new robustness by postmodern scholarship, while in France there has been less of a commitment to creating a ‘pantheon of foremothers’.7 These variable legacies in feminist scholarship, then, naturally create a different set of academic lenses, within which ‘femininity’ can be scrutinised. In the USA the interplay of race and gender has a different historicity. Angel David Nieves’ work examines African American women educators in the nineteenth century who helped to memorialise the struggle of Black Americans. Using biography, Nieves examines how these educators contributed by combining social and political ideology as these related to racial uplift and gendered agency.8 Yet, mostly male-constructed paradigms of racial separateness and female respectability could also intervene to create newly marginalised and shifting spaces of feminine educational interaction. Transnational enquiry is also significant in the pursuit of new research on this theme. This is where the likes of Joan Scott’s well-established framework of gender as a useful category of historical analysis is extended to embrace new theorisations that encapsulate the global transferral of some feminine mentalities.9 More deeply, opportunities arise where transnational perspectives bring to history of education, research that

7  Jo Burr Margadant. 2000. ‘The New Biography: Performing Femininity in NineteenthCentury France’. Berkeley: University of California Press; Isabelle Ernot. 2007. ‘L’histoire des femmes et ses premières historiennes (XIXe-debut XXe siècle)’, Revue D’Histoire de Sciences Humanities 16: 1: 165–94 cited in Rebecca Rodgers. 2013. A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria, 11–12. 8  Angel David Nieves. 2018. An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South, New York: University of Rochester Press. 9  Joan Scott. 1986. ‘Gender a Useful Category of Historical Analysis’ American Historical Review… op cit., 1053–1075.

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highlights analysis of connecting spatial and temporal educational frameworks.10 And as interest in transnational frameworks has also grown to include cultural and social histories, so the history of women’s education has enriched the discussion and extended it to include changing conceptions of femininity. In this way Kay Whitehead has tracked the flow of ideas and individuals as women educators crossed and re-crossed borders between what was once seen as merely one-way travel between a putative centre and its peripheries.11 Furthermore, women, and their performance of femininity, becomes central to what Chris Bayly has identified as the production of nation as a result of transnational flows.12 At this macro history level, women’s experience has frequently been seen as a marginal enterprise, and to counter this predilection, work such as that of Pierre Yves Saunier has identified the need to “recover individuals, groups, concepts … that have often been invisible or at best peripheral to historians because [these historians] have thrived in between, across and through polities and societies”.13 More sophisticated research into the changing nature of femininity within transnational flows of both formal and informal educational ideas is now possible.

(iii) There are more intimate spaces of inquiry that take the discussion into the personal domain of historical actors where their femininity is discernible by objects, visual representations and their surroundings: research that invites a different kind of abstraction and theorisation. For example, there are studies to consider around sensory perceptions in the classroom that define feminine sensibilities and form. Additionally, visual representations of school settings that assume feminine identity, engage scholarship that 10  Barnita Bagchi. 2014. Eckhardt Fuchs & Kate Rousmaiere, (eds.) Connecting Histories’ of Education: transnational and cross-cultural exchanges in (post) colonial education. New York, Oxford: Berghan. 11  Kay Whitehead. 2014. ‘Mary Gutteridge (1887–1962): Transnational careering in the field of early childhood education’ in Tanya Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Smyth, eds. Women Educators, Leaders and Activists 1900–1960, New York: Palgrave Macmillan; Kay Whitehead. 2017. British teachers’ transnational work within and beyond the British Empire after the Second World War, History of Education, 46:3, 324–342. 12  C.A.Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed. 2006. ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review 111: 1441. 13  Pierre Yves Saunier. 2013. Transnational History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 3.

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focusses upon who controls forums of image making and why such studies need to relate strongly to cultural history.14 Again, gendered spaces are in play here and the work of Ian Grosvenor and Catherine Burke feature prominently.15 This field has yielded rich and revelationary perspectives in the past 15 years about child learning in non-verbal and non-textual ways despite Karl Catteeuw et al.’s claim that the pictorial turn, given its limited scope, can only really complement textual sources.16 Furthermore, there is the much less studied, but equally defining, sensory dimensions of the classroom concerning olfaction and noise. Here Gary McCulloch, drawing on the work of Alain Corbin, as well as that of Jill Steward and Alexander Cowan, imaginatively uses contemporary literary texts, which stills the hand of the historian and takes it into other disciplinary fields. Such historical analysis remains largely ungendered and is worthy of further research.17 Research into teaching spaces, as well as the shifting feminine aesthetic, is productive in understanding historical constructions of femininity. This is partly because history, as the study of the artefact, offers a more tangible source base. For example, Kellee Frith and Denise Whitehouse see the classroom as a spatial environment with social, cultural and psychological dynamics which can be explored through the selection of colour, texture, furnishings and lighting. Here there is room for exploring material feminine spaces. This is where at least some female school classrooms and  Antónia Nóvoa. 2000. Ways of Knowing, Ways of Seeing Public Images of Teachers (19th  – 20th Centuries), Paedagogica Historica, 36:1, 20–52; Mark Depaepe & Brett Henkens. 2000. ‘The History of Education and the Challenge of the Visual’ in Paedagogica Historica, 36:1, 11–17. 15  See, for example, Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor. 2007. ‘The progressive image in the history of education: stories of two schools’ in Visual Studies, 22:2, 155–168, on the typology of photographic images of school and schooling and the visual methodologies of historical research into the classroom. 16  Karl Catteeuw, Kristof Dams, Marc Depaepe & Frank Simon. 2005. ‘Filming the Black Box: Primary Schools on Film in Belgium, 1880–1960: A First Assessment of Unused Sources’ in Ulrich Mietzner, Kevin Myers & Nick Peim (eds.), Visual History. Images of Education, Bern, Peter Lang, 203–232; I.  Grosvenor, M.  Lawn, K.  Rousmaniere (eds). 1999. Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom, New York: Peter Lang. 17  Gary McCulloch. 2011. ‘Sensing the realities of English middle-class education: James Bryce and the Schools Inquiry Commission, 1865–1868’ in History of Education, 40:5, 601–2, citing Alain Corbin, ‘A History and Anthropology of the Senses’ in Alain Corbin. 1995. Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses, Cambridge: Polity Press, 191; and Jill Steward and Alexander Cowan, ‘Introduction’, in A. Cowan and J. Steward (eds.) 2007. The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1800, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1–2. 14

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other educational spaces deployed “the language of home, [with] comfort and security [and] … through the choice of paint colours and the use of fashionable wallpaper and floor rugs”.18 While on the question of feminine aesthetics, like those scrutinised in Marjorie Theobald’s Knowing Women, gender and class-based readings of the documentary records are brought into play to produce other internal tensions regarding femininity. With a good dose of imaginative positioning, Theobald sets up femininity as the middle-class female learning aesthetic “at the piano, in the parlour rather than the classroom … unequivocally belonging to the realm of culture”. This ‘accomplishments’ learning (poetry, needlework, deportment and the like) is threatened only by the unfeminine blue stocking teacher in the classroom, urging the study of masculine academic subjects instead.19 Additionally, the work of Ruth Watts, as well as that of Claire Jones, posits in different ways other normalised and shifting feminine constituencies. Were the ‘unnatural’ acts of women pursuing careers in the masculine domains of science and mathematics (in the early to mid-twentieth century) encouraging other females to move away from the Arts, a domain more aligned to feminine learning in the past?20 And what then were the domestic and/or professional futures of those women educators of a generation earlier (who had imbibed an education of ‘accomplishments’), as their bodies, in middle age, lost their capacity to conform to nineteenth-century feminine physical sensibilities and aesthetics, so attached to this earlier form of learning? The response here concerns the gendered nature of the life cycle where women’s changing feminine experience is categorised according to their role as ‘virgin, wife or widow’. Research in this dimension concerns the effect that the ageing body has on women’s perceptions of self and their shifting femininity.21 Associated with this sub-topic of age-framing is the role that both formal and informal education has played for girls on the cusp of adulthood and 18  Kellee Frith and Denise Whitehouse. 2009. ‘Designing Learning Spaces That Work; A Case for the Importance of History’ in History of Education Review, 38:2, 106. 19  Marjorie Theobald. 1996. Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in NineteenthCentury Australia, Melbourne: CUP, 27. 20  Ruth Watts. 2007. Women in Science: a Social and Cultural History, Abingdon: Routledge; Claire Jones. 2017. “All your dreadful scientific things’: women, science and education in the years around 1900’, History of Education, 46:2, 162–175. 21  Katie Barclay, Rosalind Carr, Rose Elliot and Annmarie Hughes. 2001. Introduction: Gender and Generations: women and life cycles. Women’s History Review 20:2, 175–188.

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this forms part of a fruitful discussion on gendered secondary education.22 Girls’ and women’s individual frames of femininity shift, or are shifted, by their society as they enter adulthood, middle and old ages, yet this phenomenon requires far greater study. Research into changing historical constructions of femininity have benefitted from other interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches that draw on sociological, philosophical and theological writing. More recently interest in the ‘post human’ has entered the field.23 The entanglement of people and things, and material practices with non-human life invites a new direction for shifting the current frame of femininity to include gendered objects and non-human life, both inside and outside the classroom. For example, Karen Barad’s notion of agential realism brings together natural science, social science and the humanities to create new epistemologies that change how we know the world in which we find ourselves.24 This de-centering of the human subject inevitably also changes how we learn about it, how we interact with it, destabilising our assumptions of culturally bounded gender roles, including conceptions of femininity. Finally, religiosity and femininity take the field into realms of male-­ dominated institutions, particularly for the Roman Catholic church. Newly edited collections, like those of Deirdre Raftery and Elizabeth Smyth, explore the work of women religious (nuns) within these institutions where men sometimes took the kudos for the successful labour of women religious in teaching hospitals, schools and colleges.25 Patriarchy built architectures of control within these institutions, partly justified by male readings of biblical text. Yet it was feminine agency that created ways to circumvent the often dull and delaying hand of the episcopate, to bring about productive learning outcomes for females, often preparing them for professional futures that were not culturally cognizant of their gender. 22  Stephanie Spencer. 2005. Gender, Work and Education in 1950s Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 23   Geert Thyssen. 2018. ‘Boundlessly Entangled: Non-/Human Performances of Education for Health through Open-Air Schools’ Paedagogica Historica, 54, 659–676. 24  Karen Barad. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 25  Deirdre Rafferty and Elizabeth M. Smyth, eds. 2015. ‘Introduction’, Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800–1950, Abingdon: Routledge, 1–5.

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Additionally, as Phil Kilroy argues, women religious, until the mid-­ twentieth century, lived their lives parallel to the historical developments of feminism which they distrusted.26 Using another contextual narrative through autobiography, he explores if these women when entering a religious order to educate, really replaced their individual feminine identity in favour of community life and piety, and if so, did this change direct the way convent girls were taught?27 As has been shown by this chapter, the dimensions that are engaged by conceptions of shifting femininity are rich and diverse within the field of women’s history and histories of education in and beyond the classroom. These dimensions are posited here partly for future scholars to work with as the field of women’s history continues to advance. What follows are eight chapters by international scholars which illustrate a cross-section of these academic constellations, created as they are by the entanglement of femininity mentalities and identity formation within broader paradigms of academic inquiry. These chapters are rich in interesting content and have been written in a style that engages the reader with accessible narratives, and in a way that reveals the product of many of these theoretical approaches without being overwhelmed by their complexity.

26  Phil Kilroy. 2015. ‘Coming to an edge in history: writing the history of women religious and the critique of feminism’ ch. 1  in Deirdre Rafferty & Elizabeth M.  Smyth, eds., Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800–1950, Abingdon: Routledge, 6–30. 27  Sister Agatha with Richard Newman. 2017. A Nun’s Story – The Deeply Moving True Story of Giving Up a Life of Love and Luxury in a Single Irresistible Moment, London: John Blake Publishing.

CHAPTER 2

‘Unnatural’ Women and Natural Science: Changing Femininity and Expanding Educational Sites Through Women’s Pursuit of Natural Science Ruth Watts

Science in the sense of ‘the principles governing the material universe and perception of physical phenomena’1 developed hugely in the nineteenth century but, more even than other branches of knowledge, it remained peculiarly ‘masculine’. A woman scientist was seen as ‘unnatural’ in both textual and pictorial imagery. Especially as science professionalised, its various branches became very difficult, if not impossible, for females to study in any depth. Concepts of rational man and irrational woman, promulgated by many male scientists themselves, seriously impeded deeper and higher education for females. Reinforced by the arguments of  ‘[T]hose branches of study that apply objective scientific method to the phenomena of the physical universe (the natural sciences) and the knowledge so gained’ – Shorter Oxford Dictionary (OD). 2007; 1st ed. 1933. 2: 2697. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1

R. Watts (*) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_2

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philosophers and theologians, they added to long-held popular beliefs of profound differences between ‘masculinity’—brave, active, inventive, original—and ‘femininity’—timid, passive, nurturing. Admittedly, there were many nuances in this, the reality of men and women’s lives often being quite different, while, from the late eighteenth century, there were fierce debates over femininity and women’s education.2 Since the 1960s when Thomas Kuhn challenged the dominant view that science is a purely cognitive or impersonal undertaking,3 feminist historians, scientists, philosophers and educationalists have investigated why serious pursuit of physical or natural science was thought ‘unnatural’ for females. They have challenged the stereotypical views and network of deeply embedded gendered associations in the very language of science that pervaded it even through developments from the seventeenth century onwards,4 demonstrating that such views still impact profoundly on practice and scientific explanation, thus undermining objective science.5 Those who accepted the historical construction of theories of knowledge and desired to uncover and legitimise ‘subjugated knowledges’, as Michel Foucault called them,6 produced a wealth of social and cultural historical studies which have helped form greater understanding of both gendered ‘scientific’ thinking and of fuller, more nuanced versions of scientific history.7 Feminist historians of science, already working in two disciplines, have sometimes formulated new interpretations from fresh sources in art and literature. Using chiefly British examples, although hopefully not exclusive of experience elsewhere, this chapter will focus on botany, the study and 2  Ruth Watts. 2007.Women in science: a social and cultural history. London and New York: Routledge. 3  Thomas Kuhn. 1970; 1st ed. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 4  Margaret Rossiter. 1984, 1st ed., 1982. Women scientists in America. Struggles and strategies to 1940, xv-xviii. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press. See also vols 2 and 3 of this trilogy—1995. Before affirmative action and 2012. Forging a new world since 1972. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press; Hilary Rose. 1994. Love, power and knowledge, 235–36. Oxford: Polity Press. 5  E.g. Evelyn Fox Keller. 1985. Reflections on gender and science, 3–12, passim. Yale: Yale UP; Sandra Harding. 1991. Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives, 119–63, 285–95. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. 6   Michel Foucault. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, 83. Edited by Colin Gordon. Brighton: The Harvester Press. 7  For an overall view of these debates see Watts, Women in science, 1–14.

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collection of plants, an aspect of biology/natural history8 in the nineteenth century, then seen as the most ‘feminine’ science, albeit still beset by metaphors and actual barriers that prevented most females from being accepted as scientists. By examining how some women stretched traditional feminine learning to enter the margins of what became professional science, light should be shown both on prevailing, yet changing, notions of femininity, female learning and masculine science, and on the nature of educational sites.9 From the late eighteenth century in Britain, the growth of public science—lectures, museums, magazines, botanical gardens—was open to amateurs of both sexes, yet professional scientific studies were for men only. Botany was mostly accepted as suitable for literate females (despite some agitation over Linnaean botany with its sexual connotations), partially because it was not the classics largely preserved for educated gentlemen. Botany was also thought to promote self-improvement, accomplishment, morality and even religious contemplation—‘part of the social construction of femininity’.10 Indeed D.E. Allen reflected that botany could break the rules because seemingly it resonated with both of the contemporary alternative ideals of femininity: an elegant upper-class accomplishment and an acceptable middle-class aspect of ‘sentimentalised womanhood: the “perfect lady” of a repressive Evangelicalism’.11 Botanical study often became a familial project with females learning from and assisting male relatives—illustrating their work, collecting and collating plants, although sometimes working for themselves.12 Some women utilised the arts and skills that were permitted in their education, 8  Originally ‘the branch of science dealing with all natural objects, animal, vegetable and mineral’, OD, 2:1895. 9  Kathryn Gleadle. 2013. The imagined communities of women’s history: Current debates and emerging themes, a rhizomatic approach. Women’s History Review, 22 4: 1–34. 10  Patricia Phillips. 1990. The scientific lady. A social history of women’s scientific interests 1520–1918. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson; Ann B.  Shteir. 1996. Cultivating women, cultivating science. Flora’s daughters and botany in England 1760–1880, 17–36. London & Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 11  D.E. Allen. 1980. The woman members of the Botanical Society of London, 1836–1856. British Journal for the History of Science 13: 240–54 – quoted in Stephen Jay Gould. 1997. Dinosaur in a haystack: Reflections in natural history, 188. London: Penguin Books. 12  Ann Shteir. 1989. Botany in the breakfast room: women and early nineteenth century British plant study. In Uneasy careers and intimate lives. Women in science 1789–1979, ed. Pnina G.  Abir-am and Dorinda Outram, 31–43. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.

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to enter the margins of science. Mary Delany (1700–1788), for example, merged her skills as an embroiderer and in decorative shell work with her love and knowledge of plants, to make beautiful paper mosaics of flowers that were botanically correct. Her considerable sewing and painting skills were all used to illustrate plants while many of her collages were based on plants grown at Bulstrode, the home of her friend the Dowager Duchess of Portland; and then, from 1776, from the Queen’s Garden at Kew and from the Chelsea Physic garden.13 Other examples include Priscilla Wakefield who wrote familial books for girls to educate them in botany as did Jane Marcet.14 Ann Shteir saw such practices as part of an educative enterprise with women’s popular science books—progressive pedagogically—becoming part of the ‘largely undocumented history of women’s science writing’.15 Yet for women to be accepted as serious scientists became increasingly problematic as botanical culture changed, keeping, according to John Lindley, the first professor of botany at the new University of London, polite botany for the amusement of ladies, while science and scientific societies were for the ‘serious thoughts of men’.16 For instance, even the London Botanical Society of 1836–1856, a rare example of a scientific society being open to women, never allowed them more than a subsidiary role.17 As science professionalised, male scientists were eager to prove their respectability and intellectual worth, which appeared to contrast with ideals of femininity: for example, a portrait of Mary Somerville—an internationally acclaimed science writer—painted when she was fifty-four, was deliberately made as feminine and youthful as possible, to show she was no real threat to the males.18 Such attitudes persisted throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. In the 1890s, for instance, Beatrix Potter, after researching privately for many years at the Natural History Museum still only managed to obtain a student ticket to examine materials in the 13  Ruth Hayden. 2000; 1st ed. 1980. Mrs Delany: her life and flowers, 12–13, 48–49, 87–94, 96–101, 106, 131–58. London: The British Museum Press. 14  Priscilla Wakefield. 1796. Introduction to botany. London: Harvey and Darton; Jane Marcet. 1829. Conversations on Vegetable Physiology. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green. 15  Shteir, Cultivating Women, 81. 16  Ibid., 156–57. 17  Gould, Dinosaur, 187. 18  Ludmilla Jordanova. 2000. Defining Features. Scientific and medical portraits 1660–2000, 66. London: Reaktion Books in association with The National Portrait Gallery.

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Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew by using the help of her uncle, the eminent scientist Sir Henry Roscoe. Her research into fungi, illustrated by her own accurate microscopic drawings, was not taken seriously at Kew, nor was her paper on ‘The germination of the spores of agaricineae’ laid on the table of the Linnaean Society. Both, however, were recognized for their worth in the twentieth century, a public apology being given by the Linnaean society in 1997 for the way she was treated so ‘scurvily’. Potter made a career for herself using her accurate observations of nature to illustrate her highly popular Tale of Peter Rabbit and subsequent children’s books.19 In botany, indeed, many women continued as skilled illustrators, thus proving the worth of girls studying art properly. Their work, becoming devalued because so many females did it, nevertheless increased scientific understanding. For instance, Elizabeth Gould’s exquisite and lively watercolour paintings and lithographs of birds and plants contributed significantly to the renowned series of folios on birds by her husband John, a brilliant taxidermist and ornithologist. In particular, the one on Australian birds based on the English couple’s journeys in Australia in 1838–1839 proved to be ground-breaking. There, Elizabeth, taught lithography by Edward Lear (an early aide to John Gould), produced both a prodigious amount of accurately observed paintings and yet another baby. Many of the birds were previously unknown in Europe and Elizabeth received great acclaim for her work, though less than her husband who claimed artistic credit for the composition of the designs, yet archival research has indicated that he made only minor changes or simply approved Elizabeth’s sketches. After her death following childbirth in 1841, she became largely forgotten in scientific circles outside of Australia. Her husband had to turn to male illustrators to execute his plates but he and Elizabeth were significant pioneers in the nascent field of scientific illustration.20 Other women, both in Britain and its empire, collected plants and specimens and made 19  Linda Lear. 2007. Beatrix Potter. A Life in Nature, 104–29, 152–54 ff, 482 ftn. 58. London: Penguin Books. 20  Janet Bell Garber. 1996. John and Elizabeth Gould. In Creative couples in the sciences, eds. Helena Pycior, Nancy G. Slack and Pnina Abir-Am, 87–97. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press; Alexandra K.  Newman. 2018. Elizabeth Gould: an accomplished woman, 8,9. Smithsonian Libraries/Unbound. https://biog.library.si.edu/ blog/2018/03/29/elizabeth-gould-an-accomplished-woman/hash.W3vRzC2ZOi4 Accessed 30 Sept 2019; Isabella Tree. 2003; 1st ed. 1991. The bird man. The extraordinary story of John Gould 23–26, 29, 32, 43–46, 60, 147–9. London: Ebury Press.

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scientific drawings of them but were rarely given public recognition, especially as their offerings usually passed to male relatives or well-known male scientists.21 In this way, as helpmeets to men, they retained their femininity whilst also extending their scientific knowledge and work. One woman’s life and work illustrates these points but indicates too how some individuals could stretch ‘feminine’ learning to become acceptable within larger boundaries of science. Marianne North (1830–1890) travelled extensively both to see nature for herself and to educate others, aware of most people’s ‘ignorance of natural history’.22 A daughter of the Member of Parliament for Hastings (1830–1835, 54–65, 68–69),23 she shared her father’s love of botany, natural history and gardening. At their home in Hastings, for example, where her father built three glasshouses for different types of plants, she said she and her father worked in the garden ‘like slaves’. When living in London, she learnt much from regular visits to the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chiswick Gardens and to the Royal Botanical Kew Gardens where, through her father, she knew the successive directors, Sir William and Sir Joseph Hooker. This was significant since Kew had become the prime British institution for official botany and the information, collecting and distributing centre of its empire. Strongly affected by the imperial mission, British botany was chiefly interested in plant classification, sustained by the economic possibilities of a constant accession of new plants through increasing exploration. This was unlike France’s former leadership in theoretical and practical botany or Germany’s contemporary dominance in quantitative research, sustained by polytechnics and strong science faculties, including botany, in universities.24 North had little formal education, hating the short period she spent at school, but she read much as her Recollections, written in her last years and published posthumously, show. She learnt history from Walter Scott and  Shteir, Cultivating women, passim; Watts, Women in science, 90–98; 103–06.  Marianne North. 1980. A vision of Eden. The life and work of Marianne North (hereafter referred to as Eden), 121. Exeter: Webb & Bower in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. NB The two volumes of North’s Recollections of a happy life 1893 were abridged into this one volume by Graham Bateman for Kew in 1980. 23  Frederick North, MP for Hastings 1830–65. 24  Susan Morgan.1996. Place matters. Gendered geography in Victorian women’s travel books about Southeast Asia, 108. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press; A. G. Morton. 1981. History of botanical science: an account of the development of botany from ancient times to the present day, 362–76. London: Academic Press. 21 22

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Shakespeare and geography from books like Robinson Crusoe.25 Later her visit to Jamaica was prompted by reading Charles Kingsley’s At Last.26 She did have music lessons (excelling in singing), and some specialized lessons in flower painting in both 1850 and 1851 from Magdalen von Fowinkel, a Dutch flower artist and Valentine Bartholomew, flower painter in ordinary to Queen Victoria, although the teacher she really desired, William Holman Hunt, refused to teach her. It was in 1865, however, when she met the Australian artist Dowling that, unusually for a woman, she had some lessons in oil-painting and this became ‘a vice like dram drinking, almost impossible to leave off once it gets possession of one’.27 North was also educated by extensive travel. She and her family travelled constantly, their annual journeying between Hastings, London, Norfolk and Lancashire (where her half-sister, Janet Shuttleworth, married to the educationalist James Kay, lived), supplemented by an adventurous two to three years in Europe from 1847. She met many famous people, such as the artist, musician and humourist Edward Lear who became a lifelong friend. After her mother died in 1855, North, her father and her sister took annual journeys to Europe, delighting in mountain walks, until 1865 when Marianne—now the only unmarried child—and her father spent a year travelling to and around the Middle East. Throughout, North painted assiduously, the earlier paintings being watercolours. Shorter European holidays followed in subsequent years but in 1869 her father fell ill while in Switzerland and died on return. Devastated, North decided to devote herself to painting and travel to survive.28 In particular, from her visit to Jamaica in 1871–1872, it was her growing wish to find and paint multifarious types of vegetation in their natural state, especially in tropical countries, which took her travelling widely then until 1884—to North America and the West Indies, Brazil, Japan, Borneo and India and other

25  Marianne North. 1892. Recollections of a happy life, being the autobiography of Marianne North, 5–26. Edited by her sister Mrs John Addington Symonds. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co.; North, Eden, Biographical Note by Brenda E. Moon, 235; Barbara T. Gates. 1998. Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women embrace the Living World, 96. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 26  Philip Kerrigan. 2010. Marianne North: painting a Darwinian vision. Visual Culture in Britain 11:1, 3. https://doi.org/10.1080/14714780903509870 27  North, Recollections I: 26–27; Moon in North Eden, 235. 28  North, Recollections I: 5–38; W.  Botting-Hemsley. 1893. Earlier Recollections of Marianne North. Nature 48: 291–92.

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places in the Far East, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, the Seychelles and Chile.29 It was certainly unusual for women of her class to travel independently, such journeys as hers generally being deemed unfeminine, especially as North usually travelled without even a servant and often with just a hired guide as, for example, in the mountains outside Apoquindo in Chile.30 North, however, inherited sufficient wealth and useful connections to enable her journeys. She used relatives and friends to make introductions to scientists and collectors abroad and found she easily received invitations from other notables and artists.31 Her father’s name and her association with Kew gave her introductions to government officials, rulers and leading naturalists in many places, including many interesting, well-informed botanists such as the director of the Natural History Museum and the president of Columbia College and other academics in New  York who went out of their way to help her and her cousin John Enys, an official and enthusiastic collector of flora and fauna in New Zealand. She was pleased to meet important people only if they could aid her scientific quests: for example, she delighted in visiting the Brazilian Emperor in Rio in 1873 since he was a knowledgeable naturalist (he later visited her in London). Similarly, she appreciated evening walks in Simla with the Viceroy of India, who knew more about the plants and trees than anyone else she met there. She also gained some rail privileges: for instance, in the 1880s she received free government railway passes in Australia, South Africa and Chile. All this made her part of Kew’s imperialist mission, an implicit dictum which generally she accepted.32 North’s tone when writing about other ethnicities often belied an implicit condescension, such as when she was irritated by the ‘priggishness of the educative native’ in India who would not accept stamps as payment for paints!33; she passed on racist comments expressed to her without comment, sometimes, as in Brazil, California and South Africa, seeming to

 North, Recollections I: 39 ff.  Ibid., II:316. 31  Ibid., I: 39, 48–49, 55, 66–7, 71, 73–76, 90–91, 94, 96, 98, 106, 111–12. 32  Ibid., I: 184, 194, 221–22, 236–38, 239, 304, 310, 321; II: 7, 68, 71, 74, 76–81, 89, 105, 109, 140, 149, 164–65, 171, 177, 184–86, 208, 219–20, 229–35, 239, 245–6, 253, 285, 299, 314, 325; Morgan, Place Matters, 108. 33  Ibid., II: 46, 48, 57, 59, 116, 117, 151, 263–4, 272. 29 30

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concur in some dubious racist opinions.34 Yet equally often (and even in the same locations), she was appreciative of the behaviour, care and skills of those from other ethnicities, happy to be living among them, sometimes being the only white person there. Generally, she mixed freely with and was interested in ordinary (and some rich) people of whatever colour, valued indigenous knowledge and indigenous names of places.35 Excited by the amazing plants, beautiful views and wonders she found everywhere, North was always eager to extend her scientific knowledge. Wherever she went, ever willing to learn and observe, she sought out naturalists, gardeners, local people with local knowledge, botanic collectors and illustrators,36 included numbers of women.37 For instance, in Australia she stayed with ‘Mrs R., the flower painter’ who immediately introduced her to ‘quantities of the most lovely flowers—flowers such as I had never seen or even dreamed of before’.38 Many such people were so impressed they went to great lengths to help her, such as the German director of the wonderful Botanic Gardens in Calcutta and the learned Hindu who looked after her there who told her that it ‘pleased him much’; that she ‘should take so much trouble about the flowers that Siva [sic] loved’. He told her much about the plants, including one, the ‘Bah’, which was a famous cure for dysentery.39 In Port Elizabeth, South Africa, she was visited by Mr H. ‘a most interesting man, and a great botanist’. He had greatly helped make the Botanic Gardens and knew all about South African flowers, although he was a shopkeeper by day. On his advice she journeyed to Cadles, where she found, or was given, many ‘beautiful things’ and marvellous flowers, including a giant protea by a friend who knew she was looking for one. She ‘almost cried with joy at getting it at last, I had missed it so often’.40 North was equally eager to share 34  Ibid., I: 66, 73, 120–21, 146, 147–48, 210, 224–25; II 113, 124, 192, 204,221,227, 245, 265. 35  Ibid., I: 52, 55, 64–65, 77, 79, 80–84, 86,90, 100, 105, 117, 221–22, 234–45, 255, 309–10, 230–31; II: 27, 29, 31, 34–40, 47, 53–54, 93, 97, 100, 146–7, 163, 222, 224, 242, 248–49, 255, 269–70, 274–77, 287, 288, 295, 296–97, 300–04, 321. 36  North, Recollections, I: 64–5, 72, 167–68, 194, 232–34, 249–51, 258; II:27, 40, 89–90, 97–98, 101–02, 106, 120, 134–35, 139, 141–3, 147, 155, 171, 205, 207, 208, 220, 229–30, 239, 244–49, 252, 273–74, 294, 315, 317–18, 327. 37  Ibid., I: 48–49, 234; II: 138–39, 155–58, 166, 171–72, 218, 221–26, 247, 275, 277, 320. 38  North, Recollections II: 148–50. 39  North, Recollections II: 27. 40  Ibid., II: 239–42.

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knowledge, as when she revisited the museum in Cape Town after a trip around and up Table Mountain to take some ‘gorgeous’ multi-coloured caterpillars that she had collected to the delighted curator (they eventually became large Atlas moths).41 Baron von M. whom she made friends with in Melbourne was very excited on her second visit there to see her paintings of the nuytsia and Eucalyptus macroparca which he had named but never seen in flower. He appropriated for himself her bud which she had been saving for Kew.42 The learned Dr Arthur Burnell, Judge of Tanjore, whom she first met on a steamer to Java, corrected her when she repeated something that Sir William Hooker had told her about a sacred plant of the Hindus. They became friends, and when she visited Tanjore, she stayed with him as he had all sorts of sacred Hindu plants ready for her to paint, wanting to write a history of such plants using her illustrations. Unfortunately, however, he died before this could be completed.43 North worked to be accepted as part of the scientific botanic community in several ways: she took thousands of specimens back to Kew—some new to Europeans, four of them being named after her: her painting of the pitcher plant from Sarawak caused such botanical excitement that a nursery firm sent out a collector to bring back a specimen (now its over-­ collection is threatening extinction); Crinum Northianum from Sarawak, although common in Borneo, was previously unknown to Western science as was Kniphofia Northiae from South Africa (North also provided a specimen); Kew already had a seed of Northia Seychelliana but could not establish its genus or species until North brought back both her paintings and a living specimen (Fig. 2.1).44 North’s accurate paintings, executed before the days of exact photography in botany, proved to be very useful, not least because other botanists could then follow up her work and discover more about the plants. In 1877, at the request of Kensington museum, North lent them 500 studies, for which she made a catalogue for a successful exhibition. On her return from India in 1879, so many people visited her to see her paintings, that North hired a room in Conduit Street for two months to set up an exhibition of them which not only mostly paid for itself but saved her from  Ibid., II: 229–30.  Ibid., II: 168. 43  North, Recollections I: 252–3, 327–28. 44  Michelle Payne. 2011. Marianne North: a Very Intrepid Painter, 16–17. Royal Botanic Gardens, London: Kew Publishing; North, Recollections II: 305. 41 42

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Fig. 2.1  Nepenthes northiana (Sarawak) plant collected by, painted by, and named after Marianne North. Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reproduced with permission

‘fatigue and boredom’ at home. The great success of this persuaded her to offer them to Kew Gardens. At the same time she offered to pay for a gallery to house them, an offer accepted with alacrity by Sir Joseph Hooker, although her further offer of having refreshments provided was declined as he thought it would be impossible to keep the ‘British public in order’.45 North chose both the architect, James Fergusson, a highly respected architectural writer, whose particular interests in ancient Indian and classical architecture can be seen in his works, and the somewhat secluded site at Kew and approved the design—a mixture of classical and colonial styles. She painted the two golden circles above the entrance representing the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, which were connected by her own monogram, and spent a year fitting, framing, patching and sorting the pictures, grouping them in the gallery closely by geographical location.  North, Recollections I: 321; II: 82, 86–87; Payne, North, 87.

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She was also responsible for the gallery’s finishing touches and interior decoration, including a dado of 246 wood samples she had collected, arranged beneath the paintings, and the establishment of an artists’ studio, allowing visiting artists to copy and paint specimens away from other visitors. The Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens was opened to great acclaim in June 1882, The Times lauding it as ‘unquestionably the most brilliant and accurate series of illustrations of the flora of the globe that has ever been brought together’, while the Daily News praised North’s generosity to the nation, saying that ‘few women, and not a great many men have raised [such] monuments to art by their own unaided initiative, energy and industry’.46 Subsequently, once an extension had been added in 1885, North included new paintings from her final journeys to South Africa, the Seychelles and Chile which she had undertaken partly to fill gaps she had perceived in her collection. Still supervising minutely the whole building and arrangement of her scientific collection,47 and aiming at keeping ‘the countries together as much as possible, the geographical distribution of the plants being the chief object [she] had in view’, she reordered and renumbered the whole collection (848 paintings and 246 species of wood). All this was carefully described in an informative catalogue (Fig. 2.2).48 In her last years, North, wanting (as with her gallery) to leave some permanent testimony of her work, wrote two volumes of recollections of her travels and findings. These, published posthumously since she was unable to find a publisher in her lifetime, and edited by her sister, were primarily an account of her botanical adventures, helping further popularise and contextualise her work in natural history.49 This was deliberate public education. For her Kensington exhibition, she had made a ­catalogue as best she could of the 500 studies she lent, saying that she was ‘putting in as much general information about the plants as I had time to collect,

 North, Recollections, II: 210–11; Payne, North, 87–89.  Moon in North, Eden, 234. 48  North, Recollections II: 330; Royal Gardens Kew [No author given]. 2009, copy of sixth edition of 1914; 1st ed. 1882. Official Guide to the North Gallery. London: HMSO. 49  Eden, Preface by Professor J.P.M. Brenan, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1980, 7–8, Introduction by Anthony Huxley 9–13. Payne, North, 87–89. Today, thanks to a very generous Heritage Lottery Fund grant, Kew has been able to restore the Gallery and paintings using modern technology to enable conservation. Ibid., 90–95. 46 47

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Fig. 2.2  Marianne North Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reproduced with permission

as I found people in general woefully ignorant of natural history’.50 Her Kew catalogue, of which she wrote the first draft, contained not only the titles of the pictures, but also short notes of the life history of the plants painted and their products and the geography of where they were found, how they were used locally and what was already known about them. Coloured maps on the inside covers showed where North had travelled. Many of the plants she described were, or were to become, useful in medicine or other ways, like the cinchona from whose bark quinine was now mass produced, enabling travellers like North to proceed safely; the Madagascar periwinkle which now is widely used in treatment of bone marrow cancers; the African baobab tree she painted in Tanjore, India, whose bark can be used for paper, basketry and rope, timber for fuel, insulation material and canoes. It is now also seen as providing a highly nutritious ‘superfood’. William Botting Hemsley of Kew’s Herbarium,  North, Recollections I: 321.

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corrected and added to the catalogue so she asked him to complete it and put his name to it.51 As Botting Hemsley said, North exhibited her paintings free to the public not only because she wanted ‘less fortunate persons to see and enjoy what she herself had seen and enjoyed so much’ but because she also wished to make the gallery ‘as instructive as possible to those who know least of such things’.52 North was rich but to win approval to build a dedicated gallery at Kew was a huge signal of official scientific approval. The director Sir Joseph Hooker, passionate about the scientific value and reputation of the gardens, could not praise the collection enough, saying that it was ‘not possible to overrate its interest and instructiveness’ in connection to the treasures already at Kew and acknowledging it recorded ‘vividly and truthfully’ natural wonders and scenes fast disappearing forever as lands were colonised and settled.53 This sentiment echoed North who bemoaned the modern destruction of ancient forests and woodland. For example, she was heart-broken to see the giant redwood forests of California destroyed: ‘It is invaluable for many purposes and it broke one’s heart to think of man, the civiliser, wasting treasures in a few years to which savages and animals had done no harm for centuries.’54 In Tenerife she lamented that the famous view of the Peak ‘described so exquisitely by Humboldt’ had been spoilt by a mistaken and ugly attempt to grow cochineal cacti which had resulted in the palms and other trees being cleared away.55 Similarly in Australia, when she saw huge trees being destroyed, she commented: ‘civilised men would soon drive out not only the aborigines but their food and shelter’.56 She saw the irony when a local botanist at Verulam in South Africa reported to her that when he had written to Kew about the noble aloe trees fast being cut down there, ‘they had coolly asked him to cut one down and send them a “section” for the Museum!’57

 Payne, North, 59, 68.  W.  Botting Hemsley. June 15, 1882. The Marianne North Gallery of Paintings of “Plants and their Homes”, Royal Gardens, Kew. Nature 26: 155. NB A successful major restoration and conservation project of 2008–11, much based on interdisciplinary work, has enabled such education to be enhanced and continued. Payne, North, 90–95. 53  J.D. Hooker. 2009. Preface to the First Edition of the Official Guide, iii–iv. 54  North, Recollections I: 211–12. 55  North, Recollections I: 192–93. 56  Ibid., II: 116. 57  North, Recollections, I: 278. 51 52

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Hooker’s friend, Charles Darwin, the foremost biologist of the age, was also enthusiastic and wanted to meet North, the subsequent meeting arranged by his daughter, Mrs Lichfield. It was his prompting in 1880 that led North to visit Australia since she believed Darwin to be: the greatest man living, the most truthful, as well as the most unselfish and modest, always trying to give others rather than himself the credit of his own great thought and work. He seemed to have the power of bringing out other people’s best points by mere contact with his own superiority.58

Darwin suggested she should not try any representation of the world’s vegetation until she had seen and painted that of Australia because it was unique. Taking this as ‘a royal command’, North set off immediately.59 On her return a year later she took her collection of Australian paintings to Down House to show them to Darwin in his ‘perfect home’. Frail physically, but ‘full of fun and freshness’, he ‘talked deliciously on every subject to us all for hours together’. Looking at her collection of Australian paintings, he showed ‘in a few words how much more he knew about the subjects than anyone else, myself included, though I had seen them and he had not.’ He died less than eight months later ‘living always the same peaceful life in that quiet house, away from all the petty jealousies and disputes of lesser scientific men.’ He had written to her thanking her for taking her pictures, vivid reminders of scenes he still recalled with great pleasure, modestly reflecting that his ‘mind in this respect must be a mere barren waste compared with your mind’, praise which was treasured by her.60 As Philip Kerrigan has convincingly argued, North’s paintings, indeed, engaged with Darwin’s theories of conflict and the survival of the fittest, depicting the natural environment of plants, the ways in which ‘tangled banks’ of plants both interconnected with each other and with the insect and animal life around them and struggled for existence, some, especially parasitic and carnivorous plants, living at the expense of others.61 For instance she produced many examples on insectivorous plants, illustrating how some plants sensed, trapped and digested prey as animals do, in  Ibid., II: 87.  Ibid., II: 87. 60  Ibid. II 215–16. 61  Kerrigan, North; Anka Ryall. 2008. The world according to Marianne North, a nineteenth-century female Linnaean. TïjdSchrift voor Skandinavistick 29 1 & 2: 212–15. 58 59

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keeping with Darwin’s arguments on the ‘fundamental kinship between all living things.’ This subverted the usual scientific assumptions of the distinctiveness and superiority of animals to plants (Fig. 2.3).62 Kerrigan argues that it was North’s desire to illustrate Darwin’s arguments, seen in his books on plants, which led her to represent each plant as an individual shaped by and struggling with its particular environment rather than any idealized or generalised portrait of an isolated plant. Reviews recognised and often were enthusiastic about her ‘life-like representations of plantlife, habit and natural surroundings’, a rare phenomenon in botanical art.63 Botanical artists, however, were restrained in their praise as North’s method of rapid nature painting in oils, started if not

Fig. 2.3  Interdependence of plants, insects and animal life, ‘tangled’ and carnivorous plants. Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reproduced with permission  Kerrigan, North, 17–19.  Kerrigan, North, 5.

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finished out-of-doors and necessarily including imperfect, sometimes decomposing specimens, was innovative and opposed to the accepted norms of botanic art where representative, exemplary specimens were painted in exact detail on a white background to highlight their features and executed in line and watercolour. This contravening of the exacting demands of botanical illustration made North’s paintings seem unscientific in standard Linnaean botanical terms but North was supremely scientific in the way she implicitly illustrated Darwin’s theories. This also saved her from competing with existing professional illustrators yet established her alongside explorers and objective commentators. Anka Ryall has commented that by focussing on the connection between individual plants and flowers and their environments, North showed herself to be a field botanist ‘continually testing her own observations against received knowledge’. Her purpose was botanical but she had the perspective of an artist.64 Botanists were certainly enthusiastic—many were inspired to seek for themselves the new plants depicted—while reviews of her paintings stressed their uniqueness and truthfulness, the Daily News, for instance, believing that such ‘a record of research into natural history’ had ‘never before been made by a single hand, and the like of which … exists nowhere else’.65 This praise was somewhat gendered, however: for example, The Athenaeum, while lauding North’s great conversational powers, incisive intellect and ‘rugged shrewdness’, together with her ‘astonishing physique … absolute fearlessness, and … majestic and commanding beauty’, also added that her masculine side was always checked by her feminine tenderness and ‘delicacy of feeling’66; The Times, having quoted Hooker’s praise of the ‘interest and instructiveness’ of North’s gallery, asserted that she had flair but was not a real botanist; the Daily News praised her taste and ‘charming gallery’. Into the early twentieth century, North became seen primarily as a woman traveller and ‘great benefactress’ and remained excluded from or subordinated in scientific societies, although popular with a wide, general audience of those interested in natural science of the world that included women and working people. This, says Barbara Gates, made her like other women on the margins of science, a valuable science  Ibid., 6–7; Ryall. North, 211–14.  Kerrigan, North, 7; Morgan, Place Matters, 100–01. 66  Obituary. September 6, 1890. Miss Marianne North. The Athenaeum 3280: 319. Accessed 25 Oct 2015. 64 65

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educator, making inaccessible knowledge public and reaching wide audiences in a way generally underestimated by historians. But such women were ‘colonials in the land of science, entering the masculine, politicized space by their scientific contacts, by ‘subversive bravado narratives,’ through new technologies and ‘drawing nature differently and correcting others’ misrepresentations’.67 North undoubtedly was neither a timid nor a helpless female and in her intrepid travels and actions pushed at the boundaries of Victorian femininity. She wryly recalled one man who told her she was lucky not to have lived 200 years earlier or she would have been burnt as a witch.68 She did not mind travelling in wild places with just local guides, often natives of the place, with no other women present. She made little of the difficulties of the planning and managing of all her trips, the hazards of weather and the problems of transporting oil paintings, often not yet dry, over inhospitable territory, although her dislike of the cold and her increasing rheumatism forced her to leave some places such as Japan and north India. She made light of seeming insurmountable difficulties as when, for example, in Chile, where she had already ridden into the mountains alone, scrambling about after flowers, people warned her of the problems, even dangers, of going off into the forests to paint the monkey tree, she found ‘as usual … when I got nearer the spot that all difficulties vanished’.69 She delighted rather than feared the sight of strange, possibly dangerous, insects and animals. For instance in Brazil, in 1872, she once ‘saw a spider as big as a small sparrow with velvety paws; and everywhere were marvellous webs and nests’ adding, ‘[H]ow could such a land be dull?’, for friends in Rio had warned her she would only find ‘dreary monotony’, a sentiment she often faced from the ruling colonials.70 North was no typical Victorian lady. She never let difficulties of accessibility of the plants she wanted to paint stop her and brushed aside objections that travel was impossible, for example in India scornfully saying people ‘were so accustomed to feminine helplessness’.71 There, again amazed at the lack of interest of many colonial residents in their beautiful surroundings, she found it difficult to be civil to the ignorant women who  Gates, Kindred Nature, 100–05.  North, Recollections II: 211–12. 69  Ibid., I: 228–29, II:320; North, Eden, Introduction by Anthony Huxley, 10. 70  North, Recollections I 136–37. 71  Ryall, World ---North’, 206; North Recollections II:11. 67 68

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visited her—‘Those unthinking, croqueting-badminton young ladies always aggravated me’.72 At the same time she delighted in meeting many intelligent, helpful women wherever she went and met some very distinguished ones.73 She was also introduced to some well-known ones such as the adventure traveller and writer Isabella Bird and, especially, Constance Gordon Cumming, another global traveller and largely self-taught artist.74 North saw herself as a professional, disliking, for example, Julia Cameron’s theatrical portrait of her, commenting that when she stayed with her in Kalutara in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Cameron had failed to make an interesting photo of her. Similarly, she probably would have abhorred her sister’s portrayal of her having almost psychic connection with plants.75 North’s very rhetoric of professionalism, according to Antonia Losano, meant she enlarged women’s role in botanical science, while she emphasised most her production of scientific illustrations to educate her viewers and further scientific knowledge. She admired those who worked tirelessly as she did and valued the praise of those who recognised her ‘applied art labour’, although many commentators, as we have seen, preferred to set her in a more acceptable feminine frame.76 North pitied intelligent women having to live in seclusion from men, such as the Princess of Tanjore who could only talk to Dr Burnell through a curtain. Yet she was no obvious feminist, believing from examples she had known like the sister of the attorney-general of Kingston, Jamaica, a ‘perfect gentle woman’, ‘that a really distinguished woman’, ‘needs no college or “higher education” lectures’.77 North herself had had no higher education. Admittedly, women in Britain were only just beginning to win some opportunities for such in North’s latter years, yet some of those with sufficient support were enthusiastically taking advantage of the new ­opportunities. Henry Sidgwick, in his desire to promote both scientific studies at Cambridge and the entry of women undergraduates there, even urged, with some success, women to enrol for the new Natural Science Tripos. This was a paradoxical pairing, however, since the fact that women

 Ibid., II:31.  North, Recollections I: 48–49, 76, 328–29 and throughout. 74  Ibid., II: 212–13. 75  North, Recollections II: 314–15. Antonia Losano. 1997. A preference for vegetables: The travel writings and botanical art of Marianne North. Women’s Studies 26:5, 423–43. 76  Losano, A preference for vegetables, 428–31. 77  North, Recollections I: 91, 328. 72 73

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took the subject was hardly likely to make it more palatable to men in the fevered gendered climate of Cambridge academia.78 North wanted to be recognised as a professional seeker after scientific fact and realism. Her own deep and extensive understanding of plants, culled from experience, much reading and wide, useful contacts in botany, art and officialdom, was evidenced in her lively, very readable but knowledgeable accounts of her travels. Extending her knowledge further through travel, she could make comparisons, as, for instance, when she compared the monkey puzzle trees she found in Chile with those she had seen in England, Brazil and Queensland.79 She was an amateur botanist, but so, in the modern sense, were many leading botanists of the age in England, not least Darwin himself who made such huge contributions to botany in his last twenty years, working at home in Down House.80 Upper class, with privileged access to governing and scientific society, it was those who could help her scientific, artistic and educational aims whom North sought rather than the niceties of polite society. Feminist or not, as a woman, her pleasure in associating with such people, together with her activities and lifestyle, challenged the boundaries of Victorian femininity just as her findings and paintings challenged science and art. Her funding of her gallery, its catalogue and her Recollections, demonstrated her wish for her work to be publicly known. Thus, not least at Kew, she deliberately engaged with the public sphere in a way that challenges the gendered theories of the influential philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who promoted the idea of public education in the twentieth century.81 The art historian, Kimberley Rhodes, has inferred that public spaces like publishing, history and museums should undergo scholarly examination to reveal how women used them at the margins of different disciplines, using Hilary Fraser’s work on women art historians as a prime example.82 Fraser herself wished to correct the ‘partial and distorting view 78  Watts, Women in science, 103–12; Janet Howarth and Mark Curthoys. 1987. Gender, curriculum and career: a case study of women university students in England before 1914. History of Education Occasional Publication 8 Women and the Professions, 4–20. 79  North, Recollections II:323. 80  Morgan, Place Matters, 110–17; Morton Botanical Science, 363–71; 412–18. 81  Luke Goode. 2005. Jürgen Habermas. Democracy and the Public Sphere, 31–33, 38–47. London, Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press. 82  Kimberley Rhodes. 2015. Review  – Finding feminist art in history in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-Century Gender studies 11.2. http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue112/ rhodes.htm; Gates, Kindred Nature, 100.

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of the emergent discipline of art history’ that it was ‘a masculine intellectual field in which a handful of women played a merely secondary role’.83 Her analysis demonstrates many parallels with histories of women in both science and art. It shows that, from the mid-nineteenth century, art history was professionalizing while opportunities to view art were increasing dramatically but women were kept out by legal constraints and social taboos plus lack of higher education and professional memberships. Nevertheless, there were some well-informed (often self-educated) female art historians who used a variety of ways to reach the public. Such women read widely in most current European critical literature and thence mediated it to the British public: they researched using original archives and criticized even well-known male art historians who did not; they used fiction and other genres, including travel writing and poetry, to write on art and women’s place in it; they translated important European art history texts and practised ekphrasis (a literary description of, or commentary on, a visual work of art); they modified historical periods to examine the role of women in the arts. Thus, understanding that art was influenced by social, political and economic considerations, they began the work of demonstrating that dominant representations and ideologies were neither monolithic nor anonymous but multi-voiced and faceted and ‘unstable’. Thence, realizing the relativity of cultural significance, they included popular, democratic and ephemeral art forms like the decorative and domestic arts. Interestingly their praise of crafts in art included the new art of photography which, as yet largely amateur and seen as a handmaid to art, was much associated with women. Fraser believes examining female art critics in this way enabled her to identify patterns in women’s art writing not necessarily visible otherwise and usually ignored.84 In similar fashion, Marianne North’s career was paralleled by other women who carved new niches for themselves in the masculine world of science yet remained on the margins of contemporary mainstream science, ‘deferring’ to ‘real’ and, therefore, male scientists. For instance, Eleanor Omerod, allowed in her wealthy home to follow natural history as a private hobby and learn from her professionally qualified younger brothers, was able to study more seriously after her father’s death when she was 83  Hilary Fraser. 2014. Women writing art history in the nineteenth century: Looking like a woman 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 84  Ibid. passim; see Morgan, Place Matters, 10–13, 19, 27 on Victorian women, gender and travel.

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forty-five. Becoming an expert in entomology, among her writings she produced twenty-two annual Reports of Observations of Injurious Insects between 1877 and 1901, quickly developing them into interactive reports, incorporating not only the findings of herself and other entomologists but also agricultural laypeople’s correspondence, including their practical experience, advice, criticisms and complaints. She was convinced that education and authority should be shared between recognized scientists and all those who worked in agriculture—men and women from an extensive range of social classes. Becoming, ostensibly reluctantly, a public lecturer and Honorary Consulting Entomologist to the Royal Agricultural Society she was awarded an honorary law degree from Edinburgh University where she had been allowed to co-examine but not teach. Like others who had used areas acceptable for even ‘feminine’ women to engage in, such as art, books and poems, to promote public understanding of science, she challenged expectations of female learning and masculine constructions of science and femininity alike in the nineteenth century. Even so, she characterized herself as being ‘a domestic help-meet to the agricultural and entomological communities’, thus remaining within the domestic ideal of Victorian femininity.85 Thus the debates about how feminine or ‘masculine’ such women could be were never absent, as Suzanne Le-May Sheffield’s interesting deconstruction, using photographic and other images of such women, illustrates.86

Conclusion This analysis of ‘unnatural women’ in natural science, therefore, shows how, despite the pervading assumption in the nineteenth century that ‘feminine’ women could not be scientists, a number of women subverted this by using their position on the margins of science to make imaginative intellectual alliances with other disciplinary fields. The principal instances shown here were by women using skills permitted to them in art and crafts to illustrate botany and plant life. Through this, some women opened up fresh ways to illustrate and think about science, Marianne North being a prime example. North was rich with connections in both governing and scientific circles and so had opportunities beyond most women which, 85  Suzanne Le-May Sheffield. 2001. Revealing New Worlds: Three Victorian Women Naturalists, 146,139–94. London: Routledge. 86  Ibid., 13–74,195–219.

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without losing her femininity, she utilised fully to challenge through her travels, art and science, existing preconceptions of the capabilities of women. Remaining on the margins of science, she nevertheless educated the public, an accepted feminine role. By the twenty-first century women have entered professional and academic science, in increasing numbers, especially natural sciences, yet in all areas of science the concept that science is really masculine has long endured and still often needs special measures to overcome it. Public education in science has now become an accepted scientific discipline in higher education, although its practitioners sometimes find this obviates their serious scientific credentials as, for example, has been found by Alice Roberts, a specialist in paleopathology and evolutionary biology, who is a science presenter on British television and professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham, UK. In these posts she seeks both to overcome what she sees as a silly, if enduring, cultural gender divide on subjects and also to bring academics from arts and sciences together—a modern, if differently angled, seal of approval on the early efforts of women in science.87

References Primary Sources Botting Hemsley, W. (1882, June 15). The Marianne North Gallery of Paintings of “Plants and Their Homes”, Royal Gardens, Kew. Nature, 26, 155. Botting-Hemsley, W. (1893). Earlier Recollections of Marianne North. Nature, 48, 291–292. Hooker. (1914; 6th edition, reprinted 2009). Preface to the first edition, iii–iv. Royal Gardens Kew, Official Guide to the North Gallery. London: HMSO. Marcet, J. (1829). Conversations on Vegetable Physiology. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green. North, M. (1892). Recollections of a Happy Life, Being the Autobiography of Marianne North edited by her sister Mrs John Addington Symonds, 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. North, M. (1980). A Vision of Eden. The Life and Work of Marianne North. Abridged Graham Bateman, 121. Exeter: Webb & Bower in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. (With Preface by Professor J.P.M.  Brenan, 87  Watts, Women in science, 122–31, 135–49, 200–1; Katy Guest. 28.10.2017. Interview, ‘You are allowed to be emotional about the way you engage with science’ Alice Roberts. The Guardian, Review: 7, 11.

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Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1980, 7–8, Introduction by Anthony Huxley, 9–25 and Biographical note by Brenda E. Moon, 234–39.) Obituary. (1890, September 6). Miss Marianne North. The Athenaeum, 3280, 319. Accessed 25 Oct 2015. Royal Gardens Kew, Official Guide to the North Gallery. (1914; 6th edition, reprinted 2009). London: HMSO. Wakefield, P. (1796). Introduction to Botany. London: Harvey and Darton.

Secondary Sources Allen, D. E. (1980). The Woman Members of the Botanical Society of London, 1836–1856. British Journal for the History of Science, 13, 240–254. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, 83 (Colin Gordon, Ed.). Brighton: The Harvester Press. Fraser, H. (2014). Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking like a Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garber, J.  B. (1996). John and Elizabeth Gould. In H.  Pycior, N.  G. Slack, & P. Abir-Am (Eds.), Creative Couples in the Sciences. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Gates, B. T. (1998). Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Gleadle, K. (2013). The Imagined Communities of Women’s History: Current Debates and Emerging Themes, a Rhizomatic Approach. Women’s History Review, 22(4), 524–540. Goode, L. (2005). Jürgen Habermas. Democracy and the Public Sphere. London/ Ann Arbor: Pluto Press. Gould, S. J. (1997). Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History 188. London: Penguin Books. Guest, K. (2017, October 28). Interview—‘You Are Allowed to Be Emotional About the Way You Engage with Science: Alice Roberts’. The Guardian, Review: 7, 11. Harding, S. (1991). Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hayden, R. (2000; 1st ed. 1980). Mrs Delany: Her Life and Flowers. London: The British Museum Press. Howarth, J., & Curthoys, M. (1987). Gender, Curriculum and Career: A Case Study of Women University Students in England Before 1914. In Women and the Professions, History of Education Occasional Publication 8 (pp. 4–20). Jordanova, L. (2000). Defining Features. Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660–2000 66. London: Reaktion Books in association with The National Portrait Gallery.

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Keller, E. F. (1985). Reflections on Gender and Science. Yale: Yale University Press. Kerrigan, P. (2010). Marianne North: Painting a Darwinian vision. Visual Culture in Britain, 11(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/14714780903509870. Kuhn, T. (1970; 1st ed. 1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press. Lear, L. (2007). Beatrix Potter. A Life in Nature. London: Penguin Books. Losasno, A. (1997). A Preference for Vegetables: The Travel Writings and Botanical Art of Marianne North. Women’s Studies, 26(5), 423–443. Morgan, S. (1996). Place Matters. Gendered Geography in Victorian Women’s Travel Books About Southeast Asia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Morton, A. G. (1981). History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day (pp.  362–376). London: Academic Press. Newman, A.  K. (2018). Elizabeth Gould: An Accomplished Woman, 8–9. Smithsonian Libraries Unbound. https://biog.library.si.edu/ blog/2018/03/29/elizabeth-gould-an-accomplished-woman/hash. W3vRzC2ZOi4 Payne, M. (2011). Marianne North: A Very Intrepid Painter. London: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Publishing. Phillips, P. (1990). The Scientific Lady. A Social History of Women’s Scientific Interests 1520–1918. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Rhodes. (2015). Review  – Finding Feminist Art in History in the Nineteenth Century. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 11(2). http://www.ncgsjournal. com/issue112/rhodes.htm Rose, H. (1994). Love, Power and Knowledge. Oxford: Polity Press. Rossiter, M. 3 vols. (1984, 1st ed., 1982). Women Scientists in America. 1995. Before Affirmative Action. 2012. Forging a New World Since 1972. Ryall, A. (2008). The World According to Marianne North, a Nineteenth-Century Female Linnaean. TijdSdhrift voor Skandinvristiek, 29(1& 2), 195–218. Schiebinger, L. (1989, 1989). The Mind Has No Sex. Women in the Origins of Modern Science (pp.  68–79). Cambridge, MA/London, Harvard University Press. Sheffield, S.  L.-M. (2001). Revealing New Worlds: Three Victorian Women Naturalists. London: Routledge. Shorter Oxford Dictionary (OD). (2007; 1st ed. 1933). 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shteir, A. (1989). Botany in the Breakfast Room: Women and Early Nineteenth Century British Plant Study. In P.  G. Abir-am & D.  Outram (Eds.), Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives. Women in Science 1789–1979 (pp.  31–43). New Brunswick/London: Rutgers University Press.

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Shteir, A. B. (1996). Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science. Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England 1760–1880. London/Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Tree, I. (2003; 1st ed. 1991). The Bird Man. The Extraordinary Story of John Gould. London: Ebury Press. Watts, R. (2007). Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History. London/New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

African American Women, Femininity and Their History in Physical Education and Sports in American Higher Education: From World War I Through the Mid-century Linda M. Perkins

This chapter will discuss the issue of femininity and African American women and their participation in physical education and sports in both predominantly White and historically Black colleges from the period from World War I through the first half of the twentieth century. While this chapter will focus primarily on the rise in physical education and college sports for women and the notion of femininity doing this time period, the issues of femininity and beauty can be traced back to slavery. Images and views of womanhood and femininity have always been impacted by race in the United States and a brief review of this history will provide context for what happened decades later. This chapter will discuss how Black women in the United States after Emancipation were forced to respond and conform to White society’s issues of morality initially and later issues of beauty

L. M. Perkins (*) Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_3

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and femininity. Notions of humanity, intellect and later feminine beauty were ingrained in the American fabric since the writing of the constitution. Black women were trapped in both worlds of racism and sexism. The feminist concept of intersectionality, which embraces the multiple systems of oppressions, addresses this dilemma.1 While all “men” were declared to be considered equal under the law and the American Constitution, this did not include women or Black people who were enslaved. Indeed, in 1787 at the United States Constitutional Convention, it was voted to consider enslaved Blacks only 3/5th of a person to determine how many congressional representatives each state would have. Hence, enslaved Blacks were never viewed as fully human and because of their slave status had to fight for centuries to accomplish human and equal rights in the United States. From the beginning of higher education in the United States, Black people had to contend with academic racism. Studies were published that “proved” the inferiority of Black people proliferated.2

Pre-Civil War Prior to the Civil War (1860–1865) and the Emancipation, most Black women were enslaved. During this period the notion of “true womanhood” was prevalent. This view of White womanhood was one of innocence, fragility, modesty, submissive and purity. These traits epitomized femininity and womanhood. The education available to these women reinforced these traits with the offering of needlepoint, painting, music, art, and French. Of course, these models of “femininity and womanhood” were based on upper- and middle-class White women.3 As early as the 1840s and 1850s, the renowned Black feminist abolitionist Sojourner Truth stood at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851 and responded to the sexist comments of a male minister. Stating his opposition to women’s rights, the minister noted that Jesus 1  See Kimberle Crenshaw and Sheila Thomas. 2004. Intersectionality: the double bind of race and gender. Perspectives Magazine; Patricia Hill Collins. 2002. Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York and London; Routledge. 2  See Charles Darwin. 1859. On the origin of species of natural selection: or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London: Oxford University Press. 3  For more on this concept of race and femininity see Barbara Welter. 1966. The cult of true womanhood: 1820–1860. American Quarterly 18, no. 2: 151–174; Linda M Perkins. 1983. The impact of the cult of true womanhood on the education of Black women. Journal of Social Issues 39, no. 1: 17–28.

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Christ was a man, and spoke of women’s delicateness and how they had to be helped into carriages and carried over puddles of mud. Sojourner Truth gave her famous speech that cuts to the heart of notions of femininity and race. Truth noted that no one had ever helped her into a carriage or carried her over any mud-puddles but asked him the question: “aren’t I a woman???” She continued saying that she had worked as a slave like a man and had been beaten by her slave master but asked again: “aren’t I a woman”?4 Most White women during this period lived primarily in what feminist historians called a “separate sphere” from men. Black women did not. As Sojourner Truth noted, enslaved Black women worked side by side with enslaved Black men and endured hardship and abuse. Hence, Black women, because of their enslaved past, were not afforded the opportunity to possess traits of innocence, fragility, purity, and modesty.5 As female seminaries for White women were established in New England and northern cities prior to Emancipation, free Black women in these areas who sought an education were barred from attending these schools with rare exceptions.6 One rare example was the attempt in 1832 by Prudence Crandall, a White Quaker to open a boarding and day school in Canterbury, Connecticut, for the “higher branches” of education that went beyond the rudimentary classes in public district schools. Black families were anxious for their daughters as well as their sons to get the best education available. As would be the case for many other Black families during this period, a Black farmer whose family name was Harris was enthusiastic for his seventeen-year-old daughter Sarah to enroll in the Canterbury School. According to abolitionist Samuel J. May, Sarah had excelled at the district school but was: hungering and thirsting for more education. This she desired not only for her sake, but that she might go forth (sic) qualified to be a teacher of the colored people of our country, to whose wrongs and oppression she had become very sensitive. Her father encouraged her, and gladly offered to 4  Nell Irvin Painter. 1997. Sojourner Truth: A life, a Symbol. New York: W.W. Norton and Company; Margaret Washington. 2009. Sojourner Truth’s America. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois. 5  Linda M. Perkins, 1983. The impact of the ‘cult of true womanhood’ on the education of Black women. Journal of Social Issues 39, no. 3: 17–28. 6  Kabria Baumgartner. 2019. In pursuit of knowledge: Black women and educational activism in antebellum America. New York: New York University Press.

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defray the expense of the advantages she might be able to obtain [by attending the Canterbury School].7

Black women and girls were viewed and discussed in a degrading manner throughout the nineteenth century. References to Black women as “nigger wenches” were commonplace.8 A case always had to be made that the Black woman or girl was “ladylike” and unlike the stereotypical assumption about her character. May noted of Sarah: She was a young lady of pleasing appearance and manners, well known to many of Miss Crandall’s pupils, having been their classmate in the district school. Moreover, she was accounted a virtuous, pious girl, and had been for some time a member of the church of Canterbury.9

Despite Sarah’s “excellent character and lady-like deportment” and the fact that she attended the same church as the White students, there was overwhelming opposition to Sarah Harris attending the school. May noted that the townspeople viewed Harris as a member of a “proscribed, despised class” and should not be admitted into this elite private school with their daughters. They would not have their daughters attend a school with a “nigger girl.” But May noted, “no objection could be made of her admission to the school, excepting only her dark (and not very dark) complexion.”10 Crandall was given the ultimatum that if she did not dismiss Sarah, the parents of the White students would withdraw their daughters. The recognition of Black women as “ladies” and women who sought advanced learning was offensive to many Whites. The struggle for Black girls and women to attend White female institutions was as difficult as it was for

7  See p.  40  in Samuel May.1869. Some recollections of our antislavery conflict. Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Company. 8  Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Righteous discontent: the women’s movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 9  See p. 40 in May, Samuel J. 1869. Some recollections of our antislavery conflict. Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Company. 10  Ibid.

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Black men to enter all-male schools. The issue was White supremacy and refusal to acknowledge Blacks as humans.11 Crandall closed her school in February 1833 and reopened it two months later as a school exclusively for “for young ladies and little misses of color.” Her subsequent posting of an advertisement for the school in the abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, was a bold and radical act, and the reference to Black girls as “ladies and little misses” was highly inflammatory because the references were reserved for White women and girls only. Despite the opposition of the townspeople, Crandall opened her school to an initial cohort of between fifteen and twenty young Black women from Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Providence.12 Within a month, an obsolete vagrant law, which allowed the local councilman to order an inhabitant not of the State to leave, was executed on one of the students. The number of young women from these cities speaks to the importance Black parents placed on the advanced education of their daughters. By July, Crandall was arrested and placed in jail. Her trial in August 1833 resulted in a hung jury and was scheduled for a retrial months later. In the interim, vandalism to the school, the refusal of the townspeople to support Crandall, and violent threats to her and the students resulted in her abandoning the school with the girls leaving as well. While the names of the Black girls and the professions of their parents are not known, these young women braved the hostility of the protesters and showed up for the opportunity to advance their knowledge. Samuel J. May, who served as Crandall’s attorney lamented: Twenty harmless, well-behaved girls, whose only offense against the peace of the Community was that they had come together there to obtain useful knowledge and moral culture, were to be told that they better go away, because forsooth, the house in which they dwelt would not be protected by the guardians of the town, the conservators of the peace, the officers of the justice, the men of influence in the village where it was situated. The words almost blistered my lips. My bosom glowed with indignation. I felt ashamed

11  Again, this issue reflected the notion of “true womanhood” a concept that was not afforded to Black and enslaved women. See Linda M Perkins. The impact of “the cult of true womanhood” 1983. 12  Ibid.

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for Canterbury, ashamed for Connecticut, ashamed of my country, ashamed of my color.13

This one example of the extreme opposition to educating Black girls in the same school as White girls reinforces how impossible it was for society to accept Black women and girls as being the same as White women and girls. Again, the prevailing notion of White supremacy would not allow the American society to accept the notion that Black women and girls could be considered intelligent, feminine and “ladies.” Because of the constant rejection of Black women and girls from female seminaries, free Black women organized for self-education through literary and educational societies. Free Black women in Philadelphia spearheaded such organizations. In 1831, a group of Black women organized the Female Literary Association of Philadelphia. The group viewed its efforts not only for self-improvement but also as race improvement. In the Preamble of the group’s constitution, the women stated that they believed it was their: duty … as daughters of a despised race, to use our utmost endeavors to enlighten the understanding, to cultivate the talents entrusted to our keeping, that by so doing, we may in a great measure, break down the strong barrier of prejudice, and raise ourselves to an equality with those of our fellow beings, who differ from us in complexion.14

Poems, essays, and short stories were submitted unsigned for members of the group to critique. The abolitionist newspaper the Liberator often published samples of these literary works to demonstrate the artistic and literary capabilities of Black women to the larger society. The women also noted in their statement their desire to prove that they were no different from women of the majority society. So, despite the views of the larger society towards the education of Black women, the women themselves took their development into their own hands. William Lloyd Garrison, the White editor of the Liberator commented on the high quality of the work of these women stating, “If the traducers of the colored race could be acquainted with the moral worth, just refinement and large intelligence of 13  Samuel J May. 1869. Some recollections of our antislavery conflict. Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Company, 72. 14  Female Literary Association. 1831. Preamble. Liberator (1831–1865), December 03.

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this association, their mouths would hereafter be dumb.”15 However, the education that these Black women advocated and proposed was in keeping with that which did not challenge notions of femininity—they were advocating literary studies and courses in the fine arts. Views of appropriate decorum, “lady-like” and feminine behavior were constantly instilled in Black girls. After the Civil War, most Blacks regardless of whether they lived in the North or South experienced segregation and limited educational and professional opportunities. In 1835, Oberlin College in Ohio opened its doors to Black women and men students on an equal basis as White men and women. Although Black students were segregated in housing, they were able to obtain the same education as Whites. This provided Black women the opportunity to also advance their education. They began attending in the 1840s, the majority matriculated in the Ladies’ Department, also referred to as the Literary Department, because the curriculum was more in keeping with society’s notion of appropriate education for women and girls—literature and the fine arts and did not include advanced mathematics, Greek, and Latin which was thought to be the purview of men and beyond the grasp or utility for women. Furthermore, most Black females would not have access to such subjects. The Black women who matriculated and graduated from the Literary Department are important figures and should not be thought of as accomplishing less than those few who decided to pursue the “gentlemen’s” collegiate degree. According to the catalog of 1835, the literary department was the equivalent of the leading female seminaries of the period. Women in this department were also allowed to take courses in the collegiate department. The requirements as stated in the catalogue were: Young ladies of good minds, unblemished morals, and respectable attainments, are received into this department, and placed under the ­superintendence of a judicious lady, whose duty it is to correct their habits and mold female character.16

Acknowledging that Black women and girls could have “unblemished morals and be respectable” shaped the behavior and became a guiding 15  William Garrison. 1832. Ladies Department: Female Literary Association. Liberator (1831–1865), June 1903. 16  Bulletin of Oberlin College. 1834, 4.

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principle of virtually all their life’s work. The “respectability” curse that always plagued Black women throughout their lives was one that resulted in their socialization throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to ensure that Black girls learn the necessity of how they should present and comport themselves in society.

Post Emancipation Missionary organizations and religious denominations both Black and White began the massive task of educating the recently enslaved Africans after Emancipation. W.E.B. Dubois noted in his 1901 study of the Negro Common School, that two years after Emancipation, nearly 100,000 Black students were in schools in the South.17 The American Missionary Association (AMA) was the largest group along with others who sent teachers by the thousands to the South. By 1870 they had 130 common schools in the South. Throughout slavery, enslaved Black women had been forced to serve as breeders to produce babies. Their slave-owners frequently sexually assaulted them. As a result, there was this widespread belief in society that Black women were sexually promiscuous.18 By the mid-1890s, charges of Black women’s immorality escalated in society. A letter from a White male editor of a Missouri newspaper from an article in 1895 stating that all Black women were “precocious” and had low morals ignited Black women to action. The highly educated Black women of the race, organized and established a national organization in 1896—the National Association of Colored Women to defend the women of their race and to prove and improve the morality of Black women. Through local clubs and schools, the women sought to assist young Black girls fit into the image of White femininity and respectability. The schools had stringent rules and emphasized religious tenets.19 An example of such a school is Hartshorn Memorial College, chartered in 1883, in Richmond, Virginia. It was a single sex school that stressed moral and religious development. It was founded with full collegiate status 17  William Edward Burghardt Dubois. 1901. The Negro Common School. Atlanta University Publications, 6. Atlanta: Atlanta Univ. Press, Georgia. 18  Deborah G.  White. 1999. Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994. First ed. New York, New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 19  Ibid.

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“for the instruction of young women in science, literature and art in the normal, industrial and professional branches and especially in Biblical and Christian learning.” Founded by the White American Baptist Home Mission Society, the school had 185 students in 1908 with 12 teachers. In addition, these graduates were described as “educated, refined and Christian models for their husbands and children.”20 More than anything else, educated Black women were expected to be moral examples and saviors of their families and communities. These beliefs coupled with the stringent rules and regulations Black women had to endure to obtain an education spilled over into the “respectability” emphasis as well as an overemphasis on femininity within the Black community. As noted earlier, White missionaries believed that slavery had debased Black women. Daily chapel was the norm at virtually all Black schools (even decades after they had been abolished or made optional at other colleges). Hartshorne established an organization for their students called the White Shield League. Members were to wear identical white dresses and pledged themselves to chastity and to abstain from sex until marriage. All students had to obey strict dress codes and were taught to dress for health and not for “show.”21 They were forbidden to wear “expensive” clothing and they could not wear “corsets” because these items were thought to result in ill health and were evil. The women were not allowed to take the streetcars or date. These rules reinforced the prevailing view of ladylike and feminine attributes of a “true woman.”22

The Dawn of the Twentieth Century Because of racial biases and violence of Blacks in the Deep South, many began to migrate to the north, the mid-west and west beginning in 1910. This migration afforded Blacks, including women, to attend some predominantly White coeducational state universities, primarily in the mid and far west. By 1915, 75 percent of all women in coeducational colleges in the United States were in the mid-west and west. Black women were a part of that number. This migration overlapped with the rise in the field of

20  Raymond Pierre Hylton. 2014. Virginia Union University. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 37. 21  Ibid., 47. 22  Ibid.

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physical education.23 This field of physical education began in the late nineteenth century in New England at the Sargent School of Physical Education for women at Boston University. It was the first institution to specialize in physical education.24 These years, beginning in 1915, were viewed as the golden age of sports for college women. As both physical education and women’s sports grew during the period being discussed, by the 1940s certain competitive sports for women were being questioned as diminishing women’s femininity.25 This was true for women across racial backgrounds, however, for African American women, they had the additional burden of race of not being allowed to join a sports team on most White college campuses. In addition, they were barred from living on campus and participating in many extra-curricular activities.

Post-World War I The period after World War I witnessed the rise in physical education as an academic major. This field arose after it was recognized that a large number of military men were not physically fit. Prior to 1915 only three states required physical education classes in schools. After the war, the number jumped to twenty-eight, and by 1929 forty-six states required such classes in public schools. Black women began to take advantage of this new field as well as participating in collegiate sports.26 However, Martha Verbrugge, the author of Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America noted that while teaching positions emerged in public schools, these positions went to White women; Black women experienced segregation and discrimination in both education and employment. When they were hired, they were restricted to work only with Black youth. They struggled to participate in sports at the major campuses in the mid-west and west where they gained entrance after the turn of the century. Black women began to participate in sports on White campuses in growing numbers during the decade of the 1920s. A study on the Black 23  Martha H.  Verbrugge. 2012. Active Bodies: A history of women’s physical education in twentieth-century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 24  College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College. 2019. Boston University. https://www.bu.edu/sargent/about-us/our-history/. Accessed 23 Feb 2019. 25  Susan K Cahn. 2015. Coming on strong: Gender and sexuality in women’s sport. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Ivora (Ike. King. 1931. Women in sports: Feminine yet athletic. Baltimore Afro-American (1893–1988), September 19. 26  Martha H Verbrugge, Active Bodies. 2012.

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students on the four universities in the “heartland” (University of Kansas, University of Minnesota, University of Iowa and University of Nebraska) noted that the 1920s was the peak of women’s competitive sports. Black women, as did the men, had varying experiences in their attempt to join athletic teams.27 As the number of Black women students in these institutions grew during the mid-teens, so did their presence in various sports. For example, at the University of Iowa, Harriette Alexander made the women’s field hockey team in 1919. Lorraine Crawford, a native of Des Moines, Iowa, played on the women’s volleyball team in 1923. In the same year, her teammate and housemate, Corinne Mathis, of Bailey, Oklahoma, played on the women’s baseball, volleyball, and basketball team while also running track. A superior athlete, Mathis was the leading scorer of the sophomore volleyball team and, along with three other women, broke the University-wide women’s relay record.28 The decade of the teens and early twenties allow for different views of womanhood and femininity for college athletes as competitive sports became popular. However, these views were short-lived. Another Black woman, Sarah McGhee, became a member of the women’s baseball team at the University of Illinois in 1923. Majoring in Physical Education afforded Black women opportunities to be on various sport teams since this was a requirement for the degree. For example, one such person, Alice Sims, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, was on the hockey team and was one of the first Black women to play on a university team. In 1927, Sims received an Emblem from the Women’s Athletic Association for scoring 600 points that year. Another Physical Education major, Gwendolyn Butler from Kansas City made the sophomore baseball and hockey teams at the University of Kansas in 1930 making her the only African American student on any athletic team at the institution.29 Sims continued her work in women’s sports by working in Black communities in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Many other Black women at Kansas followed

27  Richard Melvin Breaux. 2003. We must fight race prejudice even more vigorously in the North: Black higher education in America’s heartland, 1900–1940. PhD diss., University of Iowa. 28  Ibid. 29  Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. 1924 Ivy Leaf, 19; Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. 1925. Ivy Leaf; 1; Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. 1930. Ivy Leaf, 6.

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Sims and Butler as Physical Education majors in subsequent years and served on the hockey teams.30 In addition to serving on various teams as a result of being Physical Education majors, Black women at numerous schools in the heartland and mid-west established their own sports teams. As early as 1922, the Ivy Leaf, the journal of the all-Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA), reported that the group at Kansas was organizing their own basketball team. In an issue in 1925, the publication reported that the AKA basketball team had played in several conference games with high schools and colleges. The magazine also reported that the Topeka, Kansas, chapter of the sorority had organized two basketball teams and had participated in an intramural game with eight sororities. It noted that AKA teams played in three of the games. The Black sorority women played against members of White sororities because the article noted, this was the first time “colored” teams were included in the games. The AKA chapter at the University of Minnesota had established a basketball team and also participated in intramural games. However, various institutions had different attitudes towards the inclusion of Black women teams. For example, the AKA basketball team at the University of Nebraska had to fight for the right to play against the White sororities on campus. In the December 1930 issue of the Ivy Leaf, their chapter reported: “Through persistent efforts of the Intra-­ racial staff of the YWCA, our sorority has at last gained the privilege of taking part in the intramural athletic contest with the White sororities.”31 After these women were allowed to participate in intramural sports—they competed not only in basketball but in bowling, ping pong, and rifling. The Black women students during this decade participated not only in organizations for racial justice such as the NAACP and the Urban League, but they increasingly participated in interracial organizations, particularly the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), which had chapters on college campuses. Although this was an era of extreme and persistent racism on most White college campuses as well as the nation, there were also attempts towards interracial harmony through organizations such as the YWCA and the NAACP. However, even the YWCA had segregated chapters throughout the South. Hence the views of White women in that organization were not monolithic.

 Ibid.  Ibid. 11.

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For example, in 1934, Thelma Mitchell Rambo, the Dean of Women at Fisk University in Nashville, reported to the institution’s president, Thomas Jones, that the National Negro Secretary of the YWCA invited a group of Fisk women students to participate in an interracial seminar on religion that was being held on the campus of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Ten students were selected—they prepared for the event and worked with a Religion professor on contemporary movements in religion. Dean Rambo reported she received a letter from the National YWCA saying that the young students would not be allowed to come to the University of Kentucky but rather could go to the Black YWCA in the city. She said the letter stated that the president of the University had not given permission for the Black women to be on campus. As an alternative, the Black National Secretary of the YWCA stated she would find housing for the Fisk women in the homes of local Fisk alumnae. Dean Rambo noted that after a discussion with the students and the Executive Committee of their group, they decided to decline the invitation. Rambo said the students were disappointed, but it was the right decision.32 President Jones (who was White) responded in a brief statement, “Under the circumstances outlined in your letter, I think you and the Executive Committee made the only decision possible. I do regret that it was not possible to go ahead with the original plan.”33 These indignities were historic and continued a long legacy of White women in many colleges and institutions treating Black women as undesirable human beings. However, the experiences of Black women across the country in White institutions were not monolithic. Many broke barriers playing sports. In 1914, Mary Parker set a school record at Simmons College in Boston in the standing and running broad jumps. Some institutions allowed Black women on their basketball teams, but they were far more welcomed on many baseball teams. In 1917, Phyllis W. Waters became a lettered member of the University of Michigan’s women’s basketball team and played all four years.34 32  Thelma Mitchell Rambo, Dean of Women, Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee. 1934. Letter to President Thomas E. Jones. In Thomas Jones Papers, 06 Nov. Nashville, Tennessee: Fisk University Archives. 33  Jones Thomas.1936. Letter to Mrs. Thelma Mitchell Rambo, Dean of Women, Fisk University. In Thomas Jones Papers, 08 Nov. Nashville, Tennessee: Fisk University Archives. 34  Ibid.

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On the east coast, Black women were on the teams of their institutions and most instances not barred from participating. For example, Inez Robie Patterson at Temple University was considered one of the most renowned and versatile women’s athletes of all times. Patterson was a native of Philadelphia and entered Temple in 1929. She had the highest average of any athlete in her class of sixty-seven women and made the All-­ Collegiate hockey team for four years. In addition, Patterson was in the All-Collegiate teams in tennis, basketball, track, volleyball, and dancing. When she was inducted into the Temple University’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 1987—sports experts noted she was probably the “most versatile woman athlete in the history of Pennsylvania.”35 As noted earlier, Black women college students increasingly involved themselves in interracial groups for racial harmony. The YWCA was an important such organization. Inez Patterson, like many other Black women college graduates, spent her entire career working for various YWCAs. She trained girls in recreation and physical education at YWCAs in Orange, Newark, and Montclair, New Jersey, and in the YWCAs in New  York City.36 YWCA facilities for Black women and girls were segregated from those of the White YWCAs.37 The Black women who were physical education majors as well as members of college sports team took their talents to work with girls in the Black community and Black colleges. While basketball was viewed as the most popular sport for women during the 1920–1940s, physical education classes for women also stressed exercise and physical development and became more concerned with feminine refinement. Questions of femininity resulted in these sports being phased out and restricted only to intramural games. This view was expressed in White colleges and also those of the most elite Black colleges. Institutions such as Howard, Spelman, Fisk and Hampton were very conscious of Black women’s image of not being perceived as feminine and refined. For example, Rosemary Reeves Allen, the head of the Physical Education of the elite Howard University in Washington, DC, from 1925 to 1967, stressed poise, beauty and femininity in Howard women. Allen had an undergraduate and master’s degree 35   Owl Sports. 2019. Temple University. https://owlsports.com/hof.aspx?hof=249. Accessed 22 Feb 2019. 36  Ibid. 37  Helen Laville. 2006. ‘If the time is not ripe, then it is your job to ripen the time!’ The transformation of the YWCA in the USA from segregated association to interracial organization, 1930–1965. Women’s History Review, 15 no. 3: 359–383.

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from the renowned Sergeant School of Physical Education at Boston University. She instilled within her students the notion of dignity, courtesy and refinement. Her goal, she stated, was to make the women at Howard so distinctive that they could go anywhere in the world and someone would say, “I can always tell a Howard woman when I see one because she walks in such beauty.”38 During the period that she taught at Howard, up until the 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision which integrated public education, 80 percent of all Black women who taught physical education were graduates of Howard. Allen instilled within her students that beauty and health were synonymous and that inner beauty would reflect outer beauty. The curriculum that she established focused not only on sports, but on anatomy, beauty, body aesthetics, charm, dance and hygiene. The goal was to produce a sophisticated and feminine woman. One scholar who analyzed Allen’s philosophy of beauty and femininity noted that it was a response to Western culture and the American society that deemed Black women inherently unattractive and not feminine, the history of these views has been discussed earlier in the chapter. Allen epitomized the type of educator of Black women and girls that stressed femininity and virtue. She understood that most Black women held inferiority complexes about the darkness of their skin and their kinky hair—attributes not considered attractive. Appearances also counted with notions of femininity. The rise in basketball coincided with the rise in beauty pageants on college campuses. Beginning in the 1920s, to divert women from competitive sports, May Days, homecoming queens, proms and elections of prom queen and other types of student “queens” emerged on campuses.39 According to Karen Tise’s scholarship on beauty queens on college campuses, such competitions were a “primary source of prestige and ceremonial space afforded women students on college campuses.” She noted that these beauty contests ranked women on the basis of “idealized versions of beauty, femininity, masculinity, desirability, respectability, poise, and aspirations.”40 Rosemary Allen, mentioned earlier, established annual events at Howard University like the Beauty Bazaar, Christmas Program, Folk 38  Quoted in Martha H. Verbrugge,. Active Bodies: Pamela Grundy. 2000. From amazons to glamazons: The rise and fall of North Carolina women’s basketball, 1920–1960. Journal of American History 87: 112–146. 39  Karen W Tice. 2005. Queens of academe: Campus pageantry and student life. Feminist Studies 31, no. 2: 250–283. 40  Tice. 2005, 251.

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Fiesta, May Festival, Water Show and Sports Day. Allen believed that archery, badminton, light sports, volleyball and dance were the most appropriate sports and physical activities. While Allen didn’t specifically name basketball, she commented in 1938, “the heavier sports have no place in a woman’s life, they rob her of her feminine charms and often of her good health.”41 Thelma Bando, who attended Howard during the 1920s and became a Dean of Students at several historically Black colleges, recalled that Howard was a training school for social etiquette for its students. She said the woman students sponsored teas at 4 pm on Sunday and they could invite a guest. They were taught how to serve tea and fancy finger foods. Bando also stated in keeping with the expectation that the women students portrayed themselves as ladylike and feminine, they “were supposed to dress appropriately in pretty afternoon dresses.”42 Lucy Diggs Slowe, who served as Dean of Women at Howard and who was the senior most Black woman Dean—and the first to serve at Howard (1918–1937), responded to an inquiry from a dean of women at another historically Black college about Howard’s program to ‘refine’ its women students. Slowe responded: I should say that the young women could be taught much by frequent participation in activities that call for the social graces and therefore make them conscious of their deficiencies. Teas and receptions to faculty members, administrators and visitors, to whom women students always like to make a good showing, are valuable. We have used etiquette reading and discussion groups to great advantage; particularly effective were their demonstrations before the whole group. It must not be overlooked that idleness is ­conducive to disorder and general roughness of manner. The social program for the dormitory should be designed to fill all the time which the director of the dormitory finds unused for business. Sundays and holidays need special attention. Leisure reading groups, hikes, excursions to places of interest, and some group participation in community uplift work will serve to educate people as well as fill their vacant hours. The time is also important; people do not develop in one school year.43

41  Rita Liberti. 1999. We were ladies, we just played basketball like boys: African American womanhood and competitive basketball at Bennett College, 1928–1942. Journal of Sport History 26: 567–584. 42  Perkins. The impact of the ‘cult of true womanhood’. 43  Lucy Diggs Slowe.1931. Lucy Diggs Slowe papers.

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Slowe was the Black woman dean that others consulted on such matters. As more and more Black women attended residential colleges, the deans of women were concerned about developing them into poised and feminine women. By the 1940s, middle-class society and colleges determined that competitive sports were masculine endeavors.44 Verbrugge’s study on college women, physical education and sports noted that elite White women’s colleges viewed team sports like basketball as masculine and appealing to working-class women (and obviously Black women). Top women’s colleges preferred individual exclusive country club sports such a golf, tennis, badminton, archery, bowling and swimming.45 In the meantime, women’s basketball teams, in an attempt to distinguish their movements from the men’s teams were given “girl’s rules,” which confined them one part of the court and restricted them a minimum number of dribbles, and women had to avoid physical contact with other players. To have women students avoid competition and tournaments and awards, games were overwhelmingly intramural so that a large number of women could participate and not a select few. As noted by the courses offered at Howard University, physical education courses began to require women students to stress good posture, class attendance and homework in addition to athletic activity. Varsity matches were replaced with “play days” and “sports days” in which the students combined games and various social activities.46 The Black press of the era also commented on the inappropriateness of women in sports: The girl who is too athletic is on the wrong track to becoming a a wife. Men want feminine women, not creatures who are half like themselves and the other half resembling something else. It is only natural and logical because we loathe men who act effeminate and desire a man, all man. Men want women all women … being too athletic and consequently too mannish prevents her from being.47

 Ibid.  Martha H Verbrugge, Active Bodies 115. 46  Ibid. 47  Ivora (Ike King,). 1931. Women in sports: Feminine yet athletic. Baltimore AfroAmerican (1893–1988), September 19, 13. 44 45

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This obvious sexist and homophobic statement reflected the thinking of the era. The one exception to an elite school continuing basketball for Black college women was Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Bennett was an all-women’s private college, and they had one of the top women’s basketball teams in the nation in the 1930s. Despite the renown of this team, by the 1940s, the institution also succumbed to the belief that competitive basketball was inappropriate for women. Like Howard and other institutions, Bennett switched to intramural games and play day activities. An insightful article with a defensive title on the basketball team at Bennett entitled “We Were Ladies, We Just Played Basketball Like Boys: African American Womanhood and Competitive Basketball at Bennett College, 1928–1942” reflected the players’ plea for the public to understand that although they played the game “like men”—they did not play by “girl” rules. The team practiced against the local Black high school boys’ basketball team. One of the team’s members said, “being a lady does not mean being prissy, it’s just an inward culture … always being polite and not saying things to hurt people’s feelings. You could be tough as I don’t know what on that basketball court, but you still have those same principles.”48 In the minds of these women, there was no contradiction in being a star basketball player and being a “lady.” A former women player who was then a coach wrote in support of women playing competitive basketball with “men’s rules” versus the “girl’s rules”: Girls of today are red-blooded, virile young creatures, and are no longer content to conform to the masculine ideal of feminine inferiority and frailty. The clinging vine has given way to the freely moving, sensibly clad young Amazon of today. Such fineness of physique cannot be maintained or secured through the inadequacies of girls’ rules in basketball.49

Despite this plea for Black women and girls to reject this notion of “femininity,” this became a minority opinion. As Black women educated in White physical education programs went south to teach in Black colleges and high schools, they absorbed the view that competitive sports were not ladylike or feminine. 48  Quoted in Rita. Liberti. 1999. We were ladies, we just played basketball like boys: African American womanhood and competitive basketball at Bennett College, 1928–1942. Journal of Sport History 26: 567–584. 49  Ibid.

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Basketball was a popular sport for Black college women in North Carolina beginning in the 1920s. Shaw University, Livingston College, Barber Scotia, North Carolina A and T, and Bennett all had basketball programs. However, the quest to make Black college women “soft” and more “feminine” took place by the 1930s. For example, in 1937 North Carolina A and T University, a Black public institution, hired Ordie Roberts from the University of Illinois. She established a physical education program for women students that included her interest in dance and tennis. She established modern and folk dance, and a “correctives” class for students who couldn’t keep up with regular instruction. Roberts quickly advocated ending competitive women’s sports—particularly basketball. She repeated the view that such activities were harmful to the physical health of the women. And, she noted all of the leading colleges in the country agreed and had eliminated such sports. As a result, the athletic committee voted to terminate intercollegiate competitive sports.50 Within a few years, Bennett College with the most winning and distinguished basketball team also succumbed to pressure and also discontinued its basketball team as well. In a front-page article in 1939 in the college newspaper, The Bennett Banner, reported that twenty-­ five Bennett Belles (the term the institution called its students) participated in a Sports Day at Hampton Institute, another Black college. The article noted that the sports and activities that the women participated in were hockey, volleyball, badminton, soccer, and relays.51 It was clear that the move towards non-competitive sports had been accomplished. By the 1950s, all of the colleges had replaced their teams with sports days, gymnastic exhibitions, May Days and intramural games. There was no mention of basketball and the article made clear the aim of sports for Black college women: It is hoped that such events will bring about a closer Relationship between the schools; that the participants will feel a part of the group with regards to working towards the best of her ability for the good of the group; taking part for the self-satisfaction and not trying to be outstanding as such for prizes of praise.52

 Pamela Grundy. 2000. Amazons to glamazons, 130.  ____. 1939. Bennett Joins in Fall Sports Day. The Bennett Banner, vol. X, no. 2. December. 52  Ibid., 2. 50 51

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As basketball was phased out in Black colleges for the women students, the sport of track and field was viewed as worst for women students (Fig. 3.1). Like basketball, the sport conveyed the belief that the women athletes were not feminine. From 1937 to 1948 the women’s track and field team at Tuskegee Institute dominated the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). They won every year except in 1943 when they placed second to the Cleveland Olympic Club. While there were many outstanding women on the track team, Alice Coachman was considered the unrivaled star. She was an outstanding high jump and track star, winning twenty-six national championships, more than any American women with the exception of her Polish-American rival, Stella Walsh.53 In 1938, Coachman won the Olympic gold medal in track, the first African American woman to do so. Nicknamed Tuskegee Flash because of her speed, Coachman, despite her record-breaking achievement as a sprinter and high jumper, received little press coverage because she was a woman in a “man’s sport.”54 The New York Times gave her only one sentence of coverage when she won the gold medal. One observer of the press treatment of Coachman noted this comment when Coachman won the gold medal in the Atlanta Constitution: An all-around athlete, Alice is an outstanding forward on the basketball team in her college, but her instructors say confidentially that she’s just a “fair” student in her home economics classes.55

In other words, Coachman excelled in male sports but was not competent in the stereotypical women’s area of home economics. And, of course, no other classes were mentioned. The Black press coverage was different with headlines entitled “Tuskegee Star,” “the Flying Miss Coachman,” “Tuskegee’s 21 year old Speed Queen,” “America’s Number One Woman Track Athlete,” “Alice Coachman Crowned National Sprint Queen.”56 While the larger society viewed track as a masculine sport, the Black press attempted to portray Coachman in a feminine vein. In a 1941 feature article on the Tuskegee track team in the Baltimore Afro-American, the paper described the women in a manner that reflected their femininity—it said, “these young women, while mixing athletics with studies, enjoy all 53  Jennifer H. Lansbury. 2001. The ‘Tuskegee Flash’ and the ‘Slender Harlem Stroker’: Black women athletes on the margin. Journal of Sports History, 28: 233–252. 54  Ibid. 55  ____. 1948. Atlanta Constitution. August 8, section B:11. 56  Jennifer H Lansbury. ‘The Tuskegee Flash’. 2001, 239.

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Fig. 3.1  Alice Coachman

the pleasures and indicated desires to become a nurse … teachers, social workers.” Of Alice they specifically emphasized her heterosexuality by saying Coachman was interested in being either a teacher or a social worker— but also the author noted “being a good wife when she married will probably be the fulfillment of her secret ambitions.”57 Observers of Black women’s teams noted that their coaches stressed “athletic femininity.”58 While the Black press provided attention to the Black women in track, critics note that the Black male sports writers attempt to feminize the women athletes and diminished their athletic talents.59 The Black press also eroticized female track athletes by writing stories about their use of a peanut oil that was created by the famous chemist at Tuskegee, Dr. George Washington Carver. One article entitled “Tigerettes Owe Success to Dr.  See p. 19 in ____. 1940. Baltimore Afro-American.  Martha H. Verbrugge. Active Bodies. 50. 59  Jennifer, H. Lansbury.’ The Tuskegee Flash’, 245, 57 58

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Carver’s Peanut Oil,” which suggested that the women’s success on the field was due to this oil, which gave their bodies “the smooth velvet appearance” resulting in their “rhythm in motion.” The oil that Dr. Carver developed for the women’s team was one that was used for the entire athletic department at Tuskegee to help relieve strained muscles and Charley horses, muscle spasms that were common in runners or people who did strenuous leg exercises.60 Another Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, trivialized the Tuskegee women by referring to them as “gals.” In a story discussing how the team forgot to pack the peanut oil in their luggage for a track meet in New York and London, the article entitled “Rush Carver Peanut Oil to Olympic Team Gals” reported, “A day out of New York, Miss Coachman discovered that the peanut rubbing oil was not in the luggage, although Coach Cleve Abbott of Tuskegee had promised to have some in New York for the gals to take to London.”61 However, to their credit, the newspaper did refer to Coachman as “Miss” Coachman—a title society never gave to Black women. A decade later, one final example of the dilemma of femininity and the Black women athlete was the portrayal of the award-winning tennis player, Althea Gibson. Gibson was a contemporary of Alice Coachman, and the same summer that Coachman won the Olympic gold, Gibson won the American Tennis Association championship for the second year in a row. Gibson grew up as a tomboy in Harlem, New  York. At age twelve, she won the women’s table paddle championship in New York. While track was associated with working-class and rural young women, tennis was viewed as an elite middle-class sport.62 In 1951, Gibson became the first African American to play at Wimbledon. Despite tennis being a “female” sport—Gibson had a big serve and a powerful delivery and was repeatedly characterized in the White press as having a “masculine” manner of how she played the game. She was described as having an “aggressive” style of playing the sport. In 1957 she won Wimbledon—both singles and doubles—and won the United States National Championship and made the finals of eight Grand Slam events. As a result of these outstanding accomplishments, Gibson was named the Female Athlete of the Year and became  Ibid., 233.  See p.  11  in ____. 1948. The Chicago Defender 1948; Lansbury, ‘Tuskegee Flash’, 233, 240. 62  See the discussion Active Bodies of class-based notions of women’s sports in Verburgge’s Active Bodies. She makes the distinction between bourgeois versus working class women’s sports. 60 61

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the first Black woman to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated and Time magazines. The Black press praised her and noted: “there was never any doubts that mannish playing Miss Gibson would emerge victorious.”63 On the one hand, the White and Black press noted Gibson’s success although they both suggested that Gibson wasn’t feminine by referring to her “masculine style” and “mannish” behavior. Gibson had broken what were once impenetrable racial barriers during a period when the Civil Rights Movement in the United States was in full force, yet the press she received focused on their perceived lack of femininity. As noted above, Black women have historically been perceived as not possessing “true womanhood” and were not thought of as attractive or feminine. Throughout the period of the discussion of Black college women in sports, these women had to fight to dispel the stereotype that they did not meet the Eurocentric notion of femininity. Society’s changing notions of femininity, and probable fear of homosexuality, fuel both White and Black institutions in terminating competitive sports in the name of femininity. Coach Abbott of Tuskegee was very conscious of the view that Black women were perceived as lacking femininity; hence she overemphasized the Tuskegee’s female athletes modeling White middle-class femininity as well as portraying their heterosexuality.64 These issues are not just historical. Currently, renowned tennis champion Serena Williams has endured continuous insults from sports commentators, the press, and tennis spectators. Her body has been described as “masculine” and her femininity has been constantly commented upon. She has been described like Gibson as “playing like a man,” and she and her sister Venus have been referred to as the “Williams Brothers.”65 While much has improved for Black women in sports in the United States in terms of access and participation, this chapter has sought to demonstrate that they are still challenged by the historical belief that they do not reflect the Eurocentric notion of beauty, femininity, and womanhood. Because they are descendants of slaves and historically worked side by side with slave men, the view that Black women are less feminine than other women remains a reality.

 See p. 1 in ____. 1958. Chicago Defender.  Martha H. Verbrugge, 2012. Active Bodies. 65  Erika Nicole Kendall. 2015. Female Athletes Often Face the Femininity Police- Especially Serena Williams. The Guardian, July 14. 63 64

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References Primary Sources Breaux, R. M. (2003). We Must Fight Race Prejudice Even More Vigorously in the North: Black Higher Education in America’s Heartland, 1900–1940. PhD dissertation, University of Iowa. Bulletin of Oberlin College, New Series 345, November, 1834:4. Female Literary Association. (1831). Preamble. Liberator (1831–1865), December 1903. Garrison, W. (1832). Ladies Department: Female Literary Association. Liberator (1831–1865), June 1903. Ivy Leaf Magazine, May 1924, Vol. 3, No. 1 edition. Ivy Leaf Magazine, 1925, Vol. 4, No. 1 edition. Ivy Leaf Magazine, December 1930a, Vol. 8, No. 4 edition. Ivy Leaf Magazine, September 1930b, Vol. 8, No. 3 edition. Jones, T. (1936). Letter to Mrs. Thelma Mitchell Rambo, Dean of Women, Fisk University. In Thomas Jones Papers, 08 November. Nashville: Fisk University Archives. Kendall, E. N. (2015, July 14). Female Athletes Often Face the Femininity Police – Especially Serena Williams. The Guardian. King, I. (Ike). (1931, September 19). Women in Sports: Feminine Yet Athletic. Baltimore Afro-American (1893–1988). Perkins, L. M. (1986). Interview with Thelma Bando. Baltimore, Maryland, Nov 4.Rambo, Thelma Mitchell, Dean of Women, Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee. 1934. Letter to President Thomas E.  Jones. In Thomas Jones Papers, 06 Nov. Nashville: Fisk University Archives. Slowe, Lucy Diggs. (1931). Letter to Miss Tossie P. F. Whiting, Dean of Women, January 27, 1931. Virginia State College. Lucy Diggs Slowe Papers. Moorland-­ Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC Slowe, L.  D. (1939, December). Bennett Joins in Fall Sports Day. The Bennett Banner, X(2). Slowe, L. D. (1940). Baltimore Afro-American. Slowe, L. D. (1948a). Atlanta Constitution. August 8, section B:11. Slowe, L. D. (1948b). The Chicago Defender 1948. Quoted p. 233 and 240 in Lansbury, Jennifer. 2001. Slowe, L.  D. (1957, August 3). Pittsburgh Tennis Fans to See Althea Gibson. Pittsburgh Courier. Slowe, L. D. (1958). Chicago Defender.

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Secondary Sources Baumgartner, K. (2019). In pursuit of knowledge: Black women and educational activism in antebellum America. New York: New York University Press. Cahn, S. K. (2015). Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Sport. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Captain, G. (1991). Enter Ladies and Gentlemen of Color: Gender, Sport, and the Ideal of African American Manhood and Womanhood During the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Journal of Sport History, 18(1, Special Issue: Sport and Gender), 81–102. College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College. (2019). Our History. Boston University. https://www.bu.edu/sargent/about-us/our-history/. Accessed 20 Dec 2019. Collins, P. H. (2002). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York/London: Routledge. Crenshaw, K., & Thomas, S. (2004). Intersectionality: The Double Bind of Race and Gender. Perspectives Magazine. Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: Oxford University Press. Dubois, W.  E. B. (1901). The Negro Common School, Atlanta University Publications, 6. Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, Georgia. Grundy, P. (2000). From Amazons to Glamazons: The Rise and Fall of North Carolina’s Women’s Basketball, 1920–1960. The Journal of American History, 87(1), 112–146. Higginbotham, E. B. (1993). Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hylton, R. P. (2014). Virginia Union University. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing. Jewell, K.  S. (1993). From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond. New  York: Routledge Publishing. Lansbury, J. H. (2001). The ‘Tuskegee Flash’ and the ‘Slender Harlem Stroker’: Black Women Athletes on the Margin. Journal of Sports History, 28, 233–252. Laville, H. (2006). ‘If the Time Is Not Ripe, Then It Is Your Job to Ripen the Time!’ The Transformation of the YWCA in the USA from Segregated Association to Interracial Organization, 1930–1965. Women’s History Review, 15(3), 359–383. Liberti, R. (1999). We Were Ladies, We Just Played Basketball like Boys: African American Womanhood and Competitive Basketball at Bennett College, 1928–1942. Journal of Sport History, 26, 567–584. May, S. J. (1869). Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict. Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Company. Owl Sports. (2019). Temple University. https://owlsports.com/hof. aspx?hof=249. Accessed 22 Feb 2019.

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Painter, N. I. (1997). Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Perkins, L.  M. (1983). The Impact of the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ on the Education of Black Women. Journal of Social Issues, 39, 17–28. Tice, K.  W. (2005). Queens of Academe: Campus Pageantry and Student Life. Feminist Studies, 31(2), 250–283. Tice, K.  W. (2012). Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageantry, Student Bodies, and College Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Verbrugge, M. H. (2012). Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Washington, M. (2009). Sojourner Truth’s America. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois. Welter, B. (1966). The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860. American Quarterly, 18(2), 151–174. White, D.  G. (1999). Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (1st ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

CHAPTER 4

Suzanne Karpelès’ Encounters in Indochina and Europe in 1931: Multiple Femininities, Colonial Relations and Educative Sites Joyce Goodman

This chapter explores articulations and ascriptions of femininities in Suzanne Karpelès’ encounters in Indochina and Europe in 1931. Karpelès (1890–1969) was the founding director of the Royal Library in Phomn Penh (1925–41) and of the Buddhist Institute (1930–41) and chief publications officer for the École Supérieure de Pāli (1925–41). Born in Paris into a wealthy Hungarian-Jewish family, she became the first woman to graduate from the École orientales of the École pratique des Haute Études (Oriental School of the EPHE) in Paris, where she studied Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, Nepalese and Tibetan religion. She became the first female member of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (French School of Asian Studies—EFEO),1 with a posting to the French protectorate of Indochina 1  The headquarters of the EFEO was Hanoi. Its mission was archaeological exploration, collection of manuscripts, preservation of monuments, inventorying of ethnic groups, lin-

J. Goodman (*) Centre for the History of Women’s Education, The University of Winchester, Winchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_4

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(1922) and an appointment to Phnom Penh (1925).2 The chapter highlights the fluidity of femininities in Karpelès’ 1931 encounters in spaces of circulation3 variously configured through the intimacies of empire, inter-­ imperial relations, internationalism, supra-internationalism and the internationalisation of fascism. It focusses on “portraits of moments”4 drawn from letters, reports, photographs, journal and newspaper articles that circulated between Karpelès, her mother Sophie (b. 1858) and Laura Dreyfus-Barney (1897–1974),5 a wealthy American domiciled in Paris, which are brought together with material from the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises (The French National Council of Women—CNFF), guistic studies, and the study of the history of Asian civilizations. https://www.efeo.fr/base. php?code=200 2  For Karpelès see Penny Edwards. 2007. Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945. Hawaiʻi: University of Hawaiʻi Press; Marie-Paule Ha. 2014. French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochina. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Ann Hansen. 2007. How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 1860–1930. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press; Joyce Goodman. 2018. The Buddhist Institute at Phnom Penh, the International Council of Women and the Rome International Institute for Educational Cinematography: Intersections of Internationalism and Imperialism, 1931–34. History of Education 47, no. 3: 415–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2018.1425740. For the emergence of Indochina as Indo-Chine (between India and China) as a new physiognomic political geography of the region see Panivong Norindr. 1996. Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. 3  Kapil Raj. 2018. Spaces of Circulation and Empires of Knowledge: Ethnolinguistics and Cartography in Early Colonial India. In Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World, edited by Paula Findlen, 269–93. London and New York: Routledge, 275. 4  Maria Tamboukou. 2011. “Portraits of Moments”: Visual and Textual Entanglements in Narrative Research. Current Narratives 1, no. 3: 3–13. https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss3/3 5  For Dreyfus-Barney see Joyce Goodman. 2018. Becoming, Being and Kaleidoscopic Configurations: Laura Dreyfus-Barney, the Bahá’í Faith and Educative Work for Peace. IJHE 8, no. 1: 123–34. https://www.klinkhardt.de/verlagsprogramm/2233.html; Joyce Goodman. 2018. “Shaping the Mentality of Races and Especially of Young People”: The League of Nations and the Educational Cinematography Congress, 1934. In League of Nations: Histories, Legacies and Impact, ed. Joy Damousi and Patricia O’Brien, 197–213. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press; Mona Khademi. 2013. Laura Dreyfus-Barney and Abdu’l-Bahá’s Visit to the West. In ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Journey West: The Course of Human Solidarity, ed. Negar Mottahedeh, 15–38. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan; Karen Garner. 2016. Global Visions: The Women’s Disarmament Committee (1931–39) and the International Politics of Disarmament in the 1930s. In Rosa Manus (1881–1942): The International Life and Legacy of a Jewish Dutch Feminist, ed. Myriam Everard and Francesca de Haan, 128–59. Leiden: Brill.

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the International Congress of Orientalists, the League of Nations and the International Council of Women ICW). The first section of the chapter examines intersections of religion, colonialism and femininities at the Buddhist Institute and in newspaper reporting in France. It traces how Karpelès’ male compatriots ascribed an aberrant femininity to Karpelès that rendered her a “woman out of place” as the head of the Buddhist Institute and it traces choreographies at the Buddhist Institute performed by Karpelès and the monks to accommodate the monks’ view that women were impure. The second section examines intersections of femininities, internationalism, colonialism and expertise. It looks how Karpelès’ expertise was configured along feminine lines as “experience” in encounters at the League of Nations’ Comité d’Entente des Grandes Associations (hereafter League Liaison Committee) meeting in Paris in June 1931, where Karpelès reconfigured this ascription by plugging more explicitly into discourses of international relations. It also explores the relation of femininities and expertise at the International Congress of Orientalists in Leiden,6 where Karpelès presented a paper in September 1931 on the development of Buddhist Studies in Indochina. The next section moves to the third Estates General of Feminism (EGF) convened by the CNFF, the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes (French Women’s Suffrage Union—UFSF)7 and the Musée Social8 and organised at the end of May 1931 around women’s activities in the colonies to mark the colonial exhibition at Vincennes. Here Karpelès provided a counterpoint to the prevailing configuration of the “native woman” but referred to “native mentalities” when discussing indigenous schooling in ways that resonated with the dividing practices of colonialism. The final section considers the conference on educational cinematography 6  For Congresses of Orientalists see Eckhardt Fuchs. 2002. The Politics of the Republic of Learning: International Scientific Congresses in Europe, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America. In Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective, ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey, 205–44. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 7  For the CNFF and the UFSF see Jennifer Boittin. 2010. Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press; for the EGF see Régine Goutalier. 1989. Les États généraux du féminisme a l’Exposition coloniale 30–31 mai 1931. Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 36, no. 2: 266–86. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20529586 8  For the Musée Social see Janet R. Horne. 1998. In Pursuit of Greater France: Visions of Empire among Musée Social Reformers, 1894–1931. In Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, 21–42. Virginia: University Press of Virginia.

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organised by the ICW at the League of Nations’ Institute for Educational Cinematography (IIEC) in Rome in October 1931.9 Here Karpelès encountered an institutional context configured through fascism that shaped how particular forms of femininity were ascribed to women. The chapter concludes that processes of encounter, negotiation and reconfiguration in the spaces of circulation through which Karpelès moved highlight the dynamic nature of femininity as action and speech, and matter and meaning, met together. Analysis in the chapter is underpinned by Judith Butler’s performative account of gender. For Butler gender is neither an attribute of individuals nor a core essence but a “doing”: “a kind of becoming or activity … an incessant and repeated action of some sort”.10 Here the “I” emerges through a process in which performativity constitutes but does not fully determine the gendered subject. From Butler’s perspective there is no prior ontological, “genuine” or “authentic” femininity. Rather, the naming of the “girl” initiates the process by which a certain “girling” is compelled in which the symbolic power of the term “girl” governs the formation of a corporally enacted femininity that is not fully determinate.11 As Butler argues, there is no one femininity with which to identify: “which is to say that femininity might itself offer an array of identificatory sites”.12 Following Karen Barad, the chapter extends Butler’s notion of performativity by including organisms (human and non-human) and matter as performative agents. It conceptualises variable femininities emerging through the ongoing interweaving and entangling of elements13 that link and 9  For the IIEC see Christel Taillibert. 1999. L’institut International du Cinématographe Éducatif. Regards sur le rôle du cinéma éducatif dans la politique internationale du fascism italien. Paris: L’Harmattan; Zoe Druick. 2007. The International Educational Cinematograph Institute, Reactionary Modernism and the Formation of Film Studies. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16, no. 1: 80–97. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs.16.1.80; Maltby, Richard. 1999. The Cinema and the League of Nations. In “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920–1939, ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, 82–116. Exeter: University of Exeter Press; Benjamin G. Martin. 2016. The NaziFascist New Order for European Culture. Cambridge Mass:: Harvard University Press. 10  Judith Butler. 1989. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 112. 11  Judith Butler. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge, 232. 12  Ibid., 239. 13   Karen Barad. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 33.

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connect to produce subjectivities and performative enactments of femininity in a process of intra-action that Barad counterposes to the interaction of already-existing entities.14

Femininities, Colonialism and Religion At the Buddhist Institute Karpelès’ educational role fell within one of the pillars of the French civilising mission seen as ideally suited to the humanitarian interventions of colonial women. But her commitment to her career, her independent existence as a woman without husband or children,15 and her position as head of the Buddhist Institute and as the sole female among the monks rendered her a “woman out of place” for a number of her male compatriots, who viewed Karpelès through an aberrant femininity. She wrote to Dreyfus-Barney that “an intelligent man” had told her that it was an anomaly for a woman to work and that it should not be admitted in the colonial administration. When she had asked if he wanted her to retire to allow herself to dedicate herself entirely to housework, he had responded that this would turn her into a “real” woman.16 In letters to the EGF organising committee, Karpelès positioned herself as an exhausted, oppressed feminist battling with an Indochina service where, she contends, the majority of men thought of feminism as the equivalent of communism. She wrote to the EGF organisers that the foundation of the Buddhist Institute was a great victory from a feminist point of view because apart from Governor General Pasquier (governor general 1928–34) none of her French colleagues had helped her deliver the Buddhist Institute project, although it had been welcomed in Cambodia. Her letters depict the French administration being against her solely because she is a woman, and refer to struggles and rudeness she has to put up with and the bad faith of high-ranking French functionaries, whom she portrays as three centuries behind that of France in their ideas about women. She describes her male compatriots as jealous of a woman at the head of a service, jealous that Pasquier wished her to fulfil a post comparable to that of a man and jealous of her good relations with Cambodians; and she complains that they had tried to interfere with her work by  Ibid., 33.  Edwards, Cambodge, 187. 16  Suzanne Karpelès to Laura Dreyfus-Barney, December 1932, AVG-CARHIF/ICWLDB 1.11, AVG-CARHIF archive Brussels. 14 15

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threatening a campaign in the press.17 Matters had become so bad, she notes, that she had packed her cases but had decided to hang on because she had worked herself to death for five years.18 During various periods of leave from Cambodia, Karpelès became a figure of fascination for French journalists, who portrayed her position as the head of the Buddhist Institute through notions of femininity. French newspaper cuttings and the cover of a Swedish magazine19 portray Karpelès visually surrounded by Buddhist monks. The reproduction in newspaper reporting of original photos annotated by Karpelès and conserved by Dreyfus-Barney suggests that images of Karpelès surrounded by monks constituted a form of self-presentation to the wider French public that invoked a spiritual notion of femininity in encounters with French journalists. The headline title of Une Française abbesse (A French abbess) invokes an ancient tradition of Buddhist nuns.20 In an article Karpelès contributed to the Journal of the American Association of University Women, she fashions her image along the lines of a consecrated Buddhist priest and states that she was able to consecrate herself wholeheartedly to the revitalisation of the intellectual atmosphere of Cambodia and to the renascence of the Buddhist religion.21 Une Française abbesse purports to record Karpelès’ words and the narrative that emerges from Karpelès’ encounter with the journalist deploys a Buddhist frame when writing that Karpelès must have been a Buddhist priest in a previous life. In Au coeur du Cambodge (At the Heart of Cambodia), journalist René Barotte notes that while Karpelès did not wear the yellow tunic of a Buddhist monk and had not shaved her head, her devotion to the service of God gives her an almost sacred character.22 While a religious language of consecration can be deployed to mask female ambition, these narratives position Karpelès through a 17  Suzanne Karpelès to EGF 20 April 1930, CAF1 AF313, Centre des Archives du féminisme, Université Angers. 18  Suzanne Karpelès, to EGF, 14 July 1930 CAF1 AF313, Centre des Archives du féminisme, Université Angers. 19  It is unclear whether these were collected by Dreyfus-Barney or whether Karpelès sent them to Dreyfus-Barney. 20  For the tradition of Buddhist nuns see Susan Murcott. 2002. First Buddhist Women: Poems and Stories of Awakening. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 4. 21  Suzanne Karpelès. 1933. Renascence in Cambodia. Journal of the American Association of University Women (June): 71–74, AVG-CARHIF/ICW-LDB 1.11, AVG-CARHIF archive Brussels. 22  René Barotte. 1933. Au coeur du Cambodge une jeune femme française est devenue prêtresse de Bouddha, AVG-CARHIF/ICW-LDB 1.11, AVG-CARHIF archive Brussels.

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Buddhist cosmology that Hansen illustrates frames the identity of individuals through their karmic status as they move through a hierarchically ordered cosmos that depends on their accumulated stores of merit derived from good or beneficial actions in the past.23 Invoking the spiritual notion of nirvana, Barotte writes that Karpelès had sensed the grandeur of Buddhism and aspired to “the eternal Euphoria” promised to those who had rid themselves of impurity on earth.24 Karpelès was in her 40s when both newspaper articles were written, but both journalists use the body to construct a textual portrait of a youthful and feminine Karpelès at variance with the exhausted, oppressed and embattled feminist of Karpelès’ letters to EGF organisers. Une Française abbesse notes that Karpelès was “certainly not a European conception” and Barotte records that she spoke with a smile in her eyes and a soft voice, which suggests a vulnerability associated with European conceptions of femininity. Both articles comment on Karpelès’ beauty through gendered scripts that the French would recognise. Une Française abbesse describes Karpelès as a young woman in all the radiance of her beauty, while Barotte includes a description from a French woman doctor who had travelled with Karpelès the previous year to comment on Karpelès’ skin, her deep eyes and her black hair. Both newspaper articles remark that the monks were insensible to Karpelès’ beauty, a construct that imagines certain groups to have more limited emotive capacities than others.25 In a French metropolitan context a narrative of male insensibility might also have been intended to imply a chaste femininity and counter potential sexual imputations from Karpelès’ image as the sole women at the Buddhist Institute. Both articles entangle femininities, colonialism and religion when discussing the management of Karpelès’ body in relation to the monks for whom the female body was impure. Etiquette-governing interaction between laity and Buddhist monks included the prohibition of physical contact with women.26 Both newspaper accounts stress physical distance when discussing patterns of bodily comportment. Barotte records that no monk might ever be alone in Karpelès’ office, so the monks always came in twos and threes, and no monk might even touch her hand and that even  Hansen. 2007, How to Behave, 20.  Nirvana fuses virtue and wisdom and Damien Keown. 2013 Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 36, 56 describes it as a quenching or blowing out. 25  For the notion of emotive capacities see Ann Laura Stoler. 2006. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2. 26  Edwards, Cambodge, 168. 23

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the chair in which she sat was considered impure.27 Une Française abbesse records that Buddhist monks had to avoid all direct contact with a woman under pain of needing a special purification,28 so monks were not permitted to hand documents to Karpelès directly but put them on the corner of her desk with a respectful bow. Une Française abbesse refers to these gendered negotiations around the female body as the amusing complications of Karpelès’ active life amidst the monks, and both articles relate this choreography of gendered comportment to Buddhist views that the female body was regarded as impure in the Buddhist rite. While these gendered choreographies created distance from the female body, they also fostered a form of nearness that enhanced Karpelès’ expertise. Barotte’s report of the monks’ use of the diminutive in referring to Karpelès as “la petite demoiselle” speaks to a nearness in the Heideggerian sense of degrees of involvement, engagement, concern and attention29 that facilitated a shared knowledge of Khmer literature and culture between Karpelès and the monks built on structures of feeling around respect.30 Through her textual research and work as a librarian, Karpelès was immersed in the Siamese and Khmer Buddhist intellectual and literature cultures of the day; and she had regular daily involvement with Buddhist colleagues. When monks came to the Buddhist Institute each Sunday to consult ancient texts, Karpelès would interpret and discuss texts with Buddhist theologians. She also had access to texts that monks were reluctant to let male French EFEO members see.31 Despite recognising the monks’ prejudice against women and despite the monks considering the female body an impure object from which they needed to create a distance, Karpelès wrote to the EGF organisers that it was possible to put oneself in the monks’ place and understand them.32 The monks were, she added, her best collaborators33 and behaved towards her with more tact and were very much more feminist than her male colonial colleagues.34

 Barotte, Au coeur du Cambodge.  Une française abbesse dans un couvent de moines bouddhistes en Indochine, 1935, AVG-CARHIF/ICW-LDB 1.11, AVG-CARHIF archive Brussels. 29  For this Heideggeerian sense see Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 14–15. 30  For structures of feeing around respect see Ibid., xiii. 31  Hansen, How to Behave, 125, 128, 215 n114. 32  Karpelès to EGF, 20 April 1930, Centre des Archives du féminisme, Université Angers. 33  Karpelès to EGF, 14 July 1930, Centre des Archives du féminisme, Université Angers. 34  Karpelès to EGF, 20 April 1930, Centre des Archives du féminisme, Université Angers. 27 28

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In the intra-actions of matter and meaning at the Buddhist Institute, the desk complicates strictures of imperial governance and categories of colonial rule. In a context where the French saw the preservation of Khmer culture as an aspect of a French “civilising mission” and depicted Khmer culture in need of “regeneration” and liable to die out without the protectionist intervention of the French,35 intra-actions of matter and meaning choreographed together with the desk worked to accommodate the “impurity” of the female body. As a key element in Karpelès’ access to sacred manuscripts and relics, the desk played into the enhancement of her expertise.

Femininities, Networks and Expertise At the League Liaison Committee, Karpelès moved through a space of circulation where aspects of imperialism were internationalised as they were displaced from the national or imperial into the international realm36 via organisations and networks through which knowledge and ideas were collected and transferred. Located at the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) in Paris, the Liaison Committee acted as the umbrella organisation for the educational and humanitarian networks within the League’s organisational structure of intellectual co-operation.37 Intellectual co-operation aimed to “spread … the international spirit and the consciousness of human brotherhood”38 in order to create a new world order and preserve peace.39 The international organisations coordinated by the League Liaison Committee in their turn coordinated affiliated national voluntary associations grounded in the philanthropic activity that had long constituted an arena for the professionalisation and exercise of female authority and expertise;40 and at the supra-international level,  Edwards, Cambodge, 14.  For this form of displacement see Susan Pedersen. 2015. The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4. 37  Eckhardt Fuchs. 2007. The Creation of New International Networks in Education: The League of Nations and Educational Organisations in the 1920s. Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 2: 199–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230701248305 38  Gilbert Murray, 1921, quoted in Pedro Rossello. 1944. Forerunners of the International Bureau of Education … Abridged and Translated by Marie Butts. London: Evans Bros., 58. 39   League of Nations. 1933. Intellectual Cooperation in 1933. Geneva: League of Nations, 3–5. 40  For philanthropy and female expertise see Eileen Yeo. 1996. The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Gender and Class. London: Rivers Oram. 35 36

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the Liaison Committee’s voluntary organisation membership created a route for women to input into intellectual co-operation at the League. In his introduction to Liaison Committee members, the committee president referred to Karpelès’ on-the-ground practical activities in Indochina in ways more resonant of a “feminine” tradition of philanthropic activity than of scholarly expertise. He spoke of her organisation of libraries and of printing texts and of her engagement with organisations enabling Eastern countries to receive “serious information” on the West.41 Contrasting with the president’s focus on the transfer of information to the “East”, Karpelès honed in on the need for Westerners to “know better the history of Eastern civilisation” in order to “understand the Orientals and … avoid misunderstandings”.42 She reconfigured the Liaison Committee president’s ascription of femininity by addressing with more specificity League international relations rhetoric on the importance of accurate knowledge and the need for the international exchange of ideas to create peaceful relationships between nations. She referred to the Amis de l’Orient (Friends of the East) at the Musée Guimet, which she had co-­ founded in 1918, and pointed to its aim in “creat[ing] a powerful bond of intellectual sympathies between the West, the East and the Far East”.43 She also situated herself as an expert within scholarly networks by highlighting similar organisations in England, Belgium and Holland and stressing the importance of intellectual exchanges between peoples of the East and the West, which, she noted, were increasing, particularly in those Universities where India, China and other Asian countries were represented. At the Congress of Orientalists at Leiden, Karpelès’ expertise was aligned more overtly with a gendered and colonialist politics of knowledge. She was situated as a scholarly woman via a gendered conference organisation articulated around ascriptions of femininity. An ongoing debate at Orientalist congresses about whether their central purpose lay in their internationalist orientation or in their contribution to the development of Oriental Studies44 had proved important for women’s involvement because the internationalist orientation had allowed for the 41  SDN, Comité d’Entente des Grandes Associations Internationales. 1931. Procès-verbal de la réunion plénière du 4 juin 1931 (XX11 Session) C.E.session PV., 6. 42  Ibid., 6. 43  Ibid. 44  Fuchs, The Politics of the Republic of Learning, 211ff.

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engagement of amateurs and so both women academics and women orientalist scholars outside academia. Opening the 1931 congress, Christian Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936), professor and former rector of Leiden University and colonial advisor to the Dutch government, referred to “the great advancement of feminism” since the 1886 congress, when the first paper had been delivered by a woman. He remarked: “not only did the 1931 Congress include women speakers, delegates and associates, but that no male Bureau could have shown greater competence than Mejuffrow Schippers’ charming group of girls”.45 In reporting on the congress to the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, author and translator Caroline Devonshire (1864–1949) noted: “The Bureau was run on smooth lines by a party of charming young ladies, who, after giving newly arrived delegates every possible kind of information in a variety of languages, helped to entertain them by acting as hostesses at the diverse receptions given in their honour”.46 While Devonshire avoided the infantilising “girling” of Hurgonje’s ascription of an otherwise competent femininity, and despite the importance of facility in languages and sociability to the operation of the congress, devolving such tasks to “charming” female hostesses ran along lines of traditional ascriptions of Western ­femininity, where education in languages and young women’s inculcation into feminine performances of sociability and support had long held sway. Most female congress attendees accompanied male presenters and were classified as associate members for whom a full cultural programme was timed to run at the same time as the academic papers, and differentiated between women versed in consuming “culture” and scholarly women. Karpelès was one of only 5% of women who made up the regular membership, and out of over 200 papers, she was one of only 13 women who presented to the congress, few of whom were recorded as having engaged in discussion.47 While other female presenters spoke about their research, Karpelès focussed on education. She outlined the five-year course of study at the École Supérieure de Pāli in Cambodia, noting that Pāli, Sanskrit and French were taught; that the texts and commentaries of the Tripitaka were 45  Devonshire, R. L. 1932. The Eighteenth International Congress of Orientalists, 1931. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 64, no. 1: 111–13. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/25194425 112. 46  Ibid., 112. 47  Figures compiled from 1932. Actes du XV11e Congres International des Orientalistes, Leiden 7–12 September 1931. Leiden: Brill, 255–71.

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studied, and extra canonical works, Buddhist history and iconography and that the transcription of Pāli texts into Burmese, Laotian, Latin, Siamese and Sinhalese characters formed parts of the syllabus. In focussing on education, Karpelès addressed one of the pillars of the French “civilising mission” seen as ideally suited to the interventions of colonial women. But she also ran against the grain by locating herself as an agent in the formation of the fields of religion and of religious studies. Deploying colonialist tropes that attributed to France the cultural conservation of Cambodia, she argued that the development of Buddhist studies in Laos and Cambodia had been virtually non-existent at the end of the nineteenth century, and she highlighted the work of the École Supérieure de Pāli and of the Royal Library in translating and publishing canonical Buddhist texts in Pāli and Cambodian translations. She noted that this had brought “to the door of the Cambodian and Laotian elite all the scientific works … which concern the history of their civilisation”48 and had impacted the Laotian and Cambodian populations. This focus on deciphering the past and its verification through texts and documents and the preoccupation with early sources in the search for “origins” and “essences” were elements of post-­ Enlightenment thinking that worked to manufacture notions of religion and of religious studies49 but which constituted a reversal of indigenous worldviews.50 This performance of expertise instantiated Karpelès as an agent in the “intercultural mimesis” between Khmer modernists and the French administration that Edwards argues contributed to the construction of a modern and specifically Khmer Buddhist tradition that played into the idea of Cambodia as a nation.51

48  Suzanne Karpelès. 1932. Le développement des études Bouddhiques au Laos et au Cambodge. In Actes du XVIIIe Congres international des orientalistes Leiden 7–12 septembre 1931, 141–42. Leiden: Brill, 142. 49  Richard King. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East”. 2009 ed. New York: Routledge (page references to the 2009 edition), 35–61; Alice Collett. 2006. Buddhism and Gender: Reframing the Debate. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion: 55–84. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20487864, 64; Philip C. Almond. 1988. The British Discovery of Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Charles Hallisey. 1995. Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism. In Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S Lopez, 31–62. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 50  Hansen, How to Behave, 119. 51  For intercultural mimesis see Penny Edwards. 2004. Making a Religion of the Nation and Its Language: The French Protectorate and the Dhammakay, 1890–1945. In History,

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The Congress of Orientalists constituted a space of circulation where inter-imperial relationships were made and remade through scholarly work that fostered grids of intelligibility in the uneven circuits of knowledge production between and within imperial projects. Karpelès was one of three women accredited to the congress as official government representatives,52and she claimed an enormous Indochina-wide strategic importance for the Buddhist Institute. But as Edwards states, the governor general of Indochina did not attach the same strategic importance to the Buddhist Institute, which would have only a small staff, and would be dogged by budgetary restrictions and by the resentment of officials in Cochinchina at the perceived intrusion in non-Cambodian affairs.53 Performances of expertise were an element in what her male compatriots construed as Karpelès’ “masculine” intelligence and part of the “aberrant” femininity flouting Vichy Cambodia’s rigid gender ideology that would underpin her ejection from Cambodia in 1941.54

Femininities and the Estates General of Feminism The colonial exhibition was a moment of government propaganda when the focus was on the legitimacy of France’s notions of its own self-worth as a colonising power.55 It also formed a space of circulation where the colonial order of things was contested and middle-class and upper-class feminists attending the EGF worked to present themselves as deserving of suffrage through a feminine vision of colonialism that aimed to demonstrate women’s dedication to the French imperial “civilising mission”.56 At the EGF the “native woman” was fashioned through a white woman’s crusade57 that operated across a traditional/modernity binary in which tradition was invariably associated with colonised cultures and represented as stagnant, obscurantist and primitive and where the “native woman” was located as the victim of the savagery and inhumanness of indigenous Buddhism and New Religious Movements in Cambodia, ed. John Amos Marston and Elizabeth Guthrie, 63–85. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press; see also Hansen, How to Behave, 119. 52  Actes du XV11e Congres International des Orientalistes, 5, 6. 53  Edwards, Cambodge, 185. 54  Ibid., 236. 55  Nicola Cooper. 2001. France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 66–67. 56  Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 184, 201. 57  Marie-Paule Ha. 2014. French Women and the Empire, 67–79.

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traditional customs.58 This rhetorical construct drew on a long tradition of Orientalist writings on non-European women that circulated in Europe from the eighteenth century and plugged into the long-standing European practice of using women’s condition as an index of civilisation.59 Contributions at the EGF tended to attribute any “improvements” indigenous women had known thus far to the French colonial government, to the work of missionaries and the activities of colonial women in empire.60 Karpelès’ drew on her on-the-ground encounters with indigenous women in Indochina to contest the portrayal of the “native woman” as an undifferentiated group. In speaking of Indochinese women’s generous and welcoming nature and their politeness, she presented them as individuals. She referred to the around 200 women from the interior who had welcomed her at Phnom Penh when she had returned from leave in 1927 and of the older women charged by the Buddhist clergy to keep her company so that she did not feel too isolated in the midst of Buddhist monks.61 She attributed agency to indigenous women when speaking about the creation by a Cochinchinese woman of a women’s periodical, Le journal des femmes (Women’s Journal), which she described as having attracted a large following62; and she went against the grain in discussions around sexuality. When a speaker condemned “male selfishness” in referring to the offspring of “racial mixing”, Karpelès responded that relationships with native women had resulted in French men getting to know the “true native mentality”. Despite various interruptions, she continued by deploring that “man was no longer in direct contact with the heart of the population”.63 These views resonated with those of George Hardy, the director of the École coloniale in Paris, who would point out in 1938 that in the early days of colonization, when concubinage was a widespread practice, Frenchmen could use “native partners” as cultural mediators to gather valuable information about indigenous politics, a direct contact  Ha, French Women and the Empire, 69.  Joyce Goodman. 2020. “The Measure to Rank the Nations in Terms of Wealth and Power?” Transnationalism and the Circulation of the “Idea” of Women’s Education. In Gender, Power Relations and Education in a Transnational World, ed. Christine Mayer and Adelina Arredondo, 17–43. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 60  Ha, French Women and the Empire, 70–71; Goutalier, Les États généraux du féminisme, 278. 61  Goutalier, Les États généraux du féminisme, 276. 62  Ha, French Women and the Empire, 208. 63  Goutalier, Les États généraux du féminisme, 283. 58 59

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with indigenous peoples that he portrayed as greatly reduced with the gradual phasing out of such interracial domestic arrangements.64 While Karpelès’ portrayal of indigenous women as individuals contrasted with the rhetoric of the undifferentiated “native woman” in wider EGF discourse, her reference to “native mentality” in calling for pagoda education for girls as well as boys differentiated between white and indigenous girls. The notion of “native mentalities” aligned with a racialised form of “adapted” education that shaped the curriculum around colonisers’ views of the “needs” of indigenous populations and resulted in differential outcomes for white and indigenous pupils.65 Karpelès’ comment followed the report on the education of the “native child” by Mrs George Hardy, whose husband was the director of the Paris École coloniale, in which Mrs Hardy commented on the existence of dual systems (French and Franco-native) schooling and argued that until very recently colonisers had cared only for the education of boys.66 In Indochina the dual system of French schools and Franco-native schools was central to the dividing practices that provided Cambodian pupils with a type of ­education that did not foster liberal ideas.67 Karpelès expressed regret that parents in Indochina were abandoning pagoda schools for the schools set up by the French protectorate and she noted the concern with this situation on the part of the education service in Cambodia, which she commented was trying to revive an older form of education “more adapted to the mentalities” for girls as well as boys.68 Editorials and articles in Cambodia’s first Khmer language journals pioneered by Karpelès’ Royal Library—Srok Khmer (Khmer Country, founded 1926), and the “highbrow” Buddhist Kampuchea Surya (Cambodian Sun, founded 1927)—exhorted parents from the Cambodian elite to send their daughters to school.69 Karpelès worked to open secondary schooling for girls at Hanoi and Phnom Penh

 Ha, French Women and the Empire, 68.  For adapted education see Peter Kallaway and Rebecca Swartz. 2016. ed. Empire and Education in Africa: The Shaping of a Comparative Perspective, New York: Peter Lang, 1–28. 66  Goutalier, Les États généraux du féminisme, 280. 67  Norindr, Phantasmic Indochina, 44. 68  Les États généraux du féminisme, 280. 69  Penny Edwards. 2002. Propagender: Marianne, Joan of Arc and the Exploration of French Gender Ideology to Cambodia. In Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France, ed. Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, 116–30. London: Palgrave, 123. 64 65

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and higher education for women.70 Correspondence circulated to Dreyfus-­ Barney provides instances of her delight during tours of inspection when she came across “reformed” village pagoda schools educating girls together with boys rather than solely focussing on the education of boys.71 Discussion at the EGF also touched on the need for vigilant monitoring of the films sent to the French colonies and protectorates. The question of films for “asiatic countries” would be taken up at the ICW cinematography conference that Dreyfus-Barney organised at the IIEC in Rome.

Femininities and Fascism The IIEC was founded in Rome in 1928 by Benito Mussolini’s government under mandate from the League of Nations and reported to its International Committee of Intellectual Co-operation. The League saw cinematography as a positive mechanism to foster friendship and peace through accurate portrayals of nations and peoples to counter cultural misrepresentations thought inimical to stability and peace.72 The IIEC’s remit covered technical questions of film production, regulation and exhibition, and the documentation, information, circulation and preservation of film. Papers from the ICW conference were disseminated in the IIEC’s multilingual journal, The International Review of Educational Cinematography. The IIEC was a space of circulation where aspects of empire were internationalised as political issues and functions (and particularly the work of legitimation) were displaced from the national or imperial into the international realm.73 The IIEC promoted fascism on the international scene. It used its location in a structure of international and national organisations around cinematography to blend internationalism within a vision of fascist-driven global governance and a nationalist vision of European culture that hierarchically ordered peoples within specific geographical space in ways that were antithetical to the liberal internationalist spirit promoted by the League.74 70  Groupe “Histoire et Perspectives”. 1997. Soixante-quinze ans d’histoire de l’AFFFDU vus de Paris (1920–1995). Diplômées, no. 180. 71  Joyce Goodman. 2018. Suzanne Karpelès (1890–1969): Thinking with the Width and Thickness of Time. IJHE 8, no. 2: 231–44 https://www.klinkhardt.de/verlagsprogramm/2267.html 72  Goodman, Shaping the Mentality of Races. 73  For this form of displacement see Pedersen, Guardians, 4. 74  Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order, 191–2.

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Countess Daisy di Robilant, shortly to become president of CNDI (Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane—National Council of Italian Women),75 was among CNDI members who received the conference delegates “like sisters”.76 di Robilant convened the ICW’s Child Welfare Committee,77 where concern over children in cinema studios overlapped with the work of the ICW’s Cinematography Committee.78 CNDI’s belief that women could prove their worth and demonstrate their capacity to take a place in the public sphere through welfare activities chimed with the fascist view that women were to demonstrate active support for Fascism through welfare work to forge a harmonious mobilised nation.79 While an interest in maternal and child welfare was shared with non-fascist female activities in other European countries80 the way in which Italian women followed this broader European trend was conditioned by the specific context of the dictatorship and nationalism.81 In addition to chairing the ICW Child Welfare Committee, di Robilant held a senior position in the Opera Nazionale per la Protezione della Maternity e dell’Infanzia—ONMI—the National Organisation for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy created by the fascist government in 1925.82 Her activities around the welfare of children and mothers were in line with how the National Fascist Party’s (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF) configured Italian women’s role around duties to the nation rather than rights.83 For women like de Robilant, a brand of feminism in which issues relating to fertility and reproduction, the future of the nation and the “race”, the family, health and welfare, and women and children that were the focus of their social politics, provided

75  International Council of Women. 1930. Report on the Quinquennial Meeting, Vienna, 1930. London: ICW. 384. 76  International Council of Women, Conference on Cinematograph and Broadcasting by the International Council of Women at the International Educational Cinematographic Institute of the League of Nations Rome, October 5-9 1931, typescript AVG-CARHIF/ ICW/CIF-LDB 1.6. 77  International Council of Women, Report on the Quinquennial Meeting, 682. 78  Ibid., 37, 686. 79   Perry Willson. 2009. Women in Twentieth-Century Italy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 130. 80  Pat Thane. 2013. The Foundations of the Welfare State. London: Routledge, 255. 81  Perry Willson. 2003. Italy. In Women, Gender, and Fascism in Europe, 1919–45, ed. Kevin Passmore, 11–32. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 12. 82  Willson, Women in Twentieth Century Italy, 68. 83  Ibid., 76–77.

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common ground with the PNF’s emphasis on maternity and on women’s role as “exemplary wife and mother”.84 Karpelès moved the first conference resolution,85 which thanked the IIEC and particularly its director Luciano de Feo (1894–1974) for his part in the preparation of the meeting. de Feo was a high-ranking fascist functionary, who had previously served at the Italian para-state agency L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (The Educational Film Union— LUCE), which embodied Mussolini’s belief in cinema as a weapon for fascist propaganda.86 de Feo’s vision of domestic woman ran counter to the performances of femininity around expertise that would lead to Karpelès’ ejection from Cambodia. de Feo differentiated women’s moral role in cinematography from men’s “abstract and scientific point of view” and grounded women’s contribution to film censorship in an essentialist view of femininity. He portrayed women’s ability to take “care of those moral principles upon which social life is based” as a result of their “special qualities as sister, wife and above all mother [which] keep her constantly in closer relation with all the members of the family”.87 He noted that it was woman’s “innate feeling for art and their naturally delicate taste” that enabled women to look after the artistic side of projection and to intervene in matters of public and individual morality. He argued that in countries where no official censorship organ existed, “feminine control” acted as a preventative influence that was additional to the repressive functions of the authorities. This was so, he opined, because of women’s “real and practical knowledge, more appreciable in moral and social domains than scientific research or that spirit of defiance and prejudiced action so often found in censorship”; and because women’s experience in life meant she could understand “those things which constitute real moral and social dangers”.88

84  Maria S. Quine. 2002. Italy’s Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; Willson, Italy, 16; Willson, Women in Twentieth Century Italy, 76–77. 85  International Council of Women, Conference on Cinematograph and Broadcasting. 86  Druick, International Educational Cinematograph Institute; Maltby, Cinema and the League of Nations; Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order. 87   Lucien de Feo. 1931, Director’s Note. International Review of Educational Cinematography 3, no. 12: 1067–70, at 1067, 1068. 88  Ibid., 1068.

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De Feo also grounded a role for women in educational cinema in his essentialist view of femininity. He differentiated women’s “influence” in a “strictly educational cinema … conducive to the friendship of peoples” from “internal political contingencies of State or external diplomatic relations”.89 In making a case for women’s “influence” in educational cinema, he glorified motherhood and attributed male and female characteristics across a gender divide that dovetailed with fascist views of women as mothers of the nation: In every woman there is a mother’s heart. It is then impossible to refuse women their natural function as educators, at least in as much as social life is concerned. Schools, charitable institutions and to a certain extent workshops and factories offer fields of action for women’s power of education. While men’s minds are busy with the constant study and search for technical innovations which may revolutionise or develop labour in all its various forms, and while men destroy and construct to realise an idea, it is the woman’s work to render this continually changing social life as agreeable as possible to all concerned. Left entirely to men’s judgement, life would be a hard and bitter struggle, unending without a moment of peace or rest, lacking the help and comfort so necessary to those who suffer and fight. It is therefore the function of women to smooth and soften this perpetual fight, hard and bitter, to which humanity is pledged. To recognise this quality in the women is to recognise her right to a profoundly human double function, to educate and to assist.90

Under the fascist regime of Vichy, Cambodia femininities and masculinities would be sharply differentiated in similar ways. When Karpelès was ejected from her posts as a “woman out of place”, her gender, her Jewishness and her internationalism were used against her. She was sacked in late 1941 under an article on the employment of female personnel within the administration in the law of 11 October which stipulated early retirement for women. As Edwards writes, Karpelès’ supposedly “masculine” attributes of intelligence, confidence and arrogance, coupled with other aspects of her “non-feminine” behaviour that included her spinster status, her camaraderie with Khmer monks and her “quasi-native” dress, were all thought to flout Vichy’s rigid gender ideology.91 At a time of  Ibid., 1069.  Ibid., 1069. 91  Edwards, Cambodge, 235–6. 89 90

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danger for Jewish people, she was granted passage to France from where she made her way to Pondichéry where she had spent extended periods during her childhood.

Conclusion Processes of encounter, negotiation and reconfiguration in spaces of circulation through which Karpelès moved in 1931 point to the dynamic nature of femininity as action and speech, matter and meaning, met together in the differing articulations and ascriptions of femininities that emerged. Journalists configured Karpelès’ femininity for French audiences through a vulnerability associated with European conceptions of femininity, Western views of beauty and notions of spirituality that ran alongside Karpelès’ project of herself as the embattled exhausted feminist, while at the Buddhist Institute, intra-actions of matter and meaning choreographed together with the desk accommodated the monks’ view of the “impurity” of Karpelès’ female body in ways that contributed to the enhancement of Karpelès’ knowledge and expertise. But knowledge and expertise were doubled-edged in Karpelès’ encounters. At the League Liaison Committee, Karpelès drew on her networks to reconfigure an ascription that was associated more with a feminine tradition of philanthropic activity than one of scholarly expertise; and at the Congress of Orientalists she located herself as an agent in the formation of the fields of religion and of religious studies that played, in turn, into the “intercultural mimesis” between Khmer modernists and the French administration. But such displays of expertise were an element in what her male compatriots would construe as a “masculine” intelligence and part of an “aberrant” femininity that rendered her a “woman out-of-place”, whose return to the home would, in the words of a French compatriot, make her a “real woman”. This was despite the educational role she performed, which in other circumstances was configured as ideally suited to the humanitarian interventions of colonial women. Along with choreographies around corporeality, spatialities and temporalities played a role in the varied performances of femininities that emerged through Karpelès’ encounters. Spatial practices at the Congress of Orientalists differentiated between women versed in consuming “culture” who were provided with a cultural programme that placed them physically outside the conference venue at the time when scholarly women attended and presented there. Here, too, hostessing was devolved to “a

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charming group of girls” along lines of traditional ascriptions of Western femininity around ability in languages and performances of sociability and support. At the EGF the “native woman” was configured as a separate and homogeneous group, while a notion of “native mentalities” grouped together indigenous children whose preferred form of schooling was to be located in pagoda schools. Temporalities emerged through the EGF’s association between the “native woman” and a stagnant culture and in Karpelès’ view of her colonial colleagues having ideas of women that were three centuries behind that of France. But the rigid essentialist views of femininity held by Karpelès’ male colleague were current in the fascism of the IIEC; and they would take on an urgency for Karpelès as they played into the “non-­ feminine” behaviour that would be used against her together with her Jewishness and her internationalism in engineering her ejection from Cambodia in 1941.

References Primary Sources 1932 Actes du XV11e Congrès International des Orientalistes, Leiden 7–12 September 1931. Leiden: Brill, 255–271. Barotte, R. (1933). Au coeur du Cambodge une jeune femme française est devenue prêtresse de Bouddha. newspaper cutting, AVG-CARHIF/ICW-LDB 1.11, AVG-CARHIF archive Brussels. Conference du cinématographe et de la radiodiffusion tenue a l’Institut International du Cinématographe Éducatif, Rome 5–9 October 1931, La Française. de Feo, L. (1931). Director’s Note. International Review of Educational Cinematography, 3(12), 1067–1070. Devonshire, R. L. (1932). The Eighteenth International Congress of Orientalists, 1931. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland, 64(1), 111–113. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25194425 International Council of Women. (1930). Report on the Quinquennial Meeting, Vienna, 1930. London: ICW. International Council of Women, Conference on Cinematograph and Broadcasting by the International Council of Women at the International Educational Cinematographic Institute of the League of Nations Rome, October 5–9 1931, typescript AVG-CARHIF/ICW/CIF-LDB 1.6, AVG-CARHIF archive Brussels.

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Karpelès, S. (1932). Le développement des études Bouddhiques au Laos et au Cambodge. In Actes du XVIIIe Congrès international des orientalistes Leiden 7–12 septembre 1931 (pp. 141–142). Leiden: Brill. Karpelès, S. (1933). Renascence in Cambodia. Journal of the American Association of University Women (June): 71–74, AVG-CARHIF/ICW/CIF-LDB 1.6, AVG-CARHIF archive Brussels. Karpelès, Suzanne to Dreyfus-Barney, Laura, December 1932, AVG-CARHIF/ ICW-LDB 1.11, AVG-CARHIF archive Brussels. Karpelès, Suzanne to EGF, 20 April 1930 and 14 July 1930, CAF1 AF313, Centre des Archives du féminisme, Université Angers. League of Nations. (1933). Intellectual Cooperation in 1933. Geneva: League of Nations. Rossello, P. (1944). Forerunners of the International Bureau of Education … Abridged and Translated by Marie Butts. London: Evans Bros. SDN, Comité d’Entente des Grandes Associations Internationales. (1931). Procès-verbal de la réunion plénière du 4 juin 1931 (XX11 Session) C.E.session PV, 6–7. Une Française abbesse dans un couvent de moines bouddhistes en Indochine, 1935, newspaper cutting AVG-CARHIF/ICW-LDB 1.11, AVG-CARHIF archive Brussels.

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Druick, Z. (2007). The International Educational Cinematograph Institute, Reactionary Modernism and the Formation of Film Studies. Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 16(1), 80–97. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs.16.1.80. Edwards, P. (2002). Propagender: Marianne, Joan of Arc and the Exploration of French Gender Ideology to Cambodia. In T.  Chafer & A.  Sackur (Eds.), Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (pp. 116–130). London: Palgrave. Edwards, P. (2004). Making a Religion of the Nation and Its Language: The French Protectorate and the Dhammakay, 1890–1945. In J.  A. Marston & E.  Guthrie (Eds.), History, Buddhism and New Religious Movements in Cambodia (pp. 63–85). Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Edwards, P. (2007). Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945. Hawaiʻi: University of Hawaiʻi Press. EFEO. https://www.efeo.fr/base.php?code=200. Accessed 14 December 2019. Fuchs, E. (2002). The Politics of the Republic of Learning: International Scientific Congresses in Europe, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America. In E.  Fuchs & B. Stuchtey (Eds.), Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective (pp. 205–244). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Fuchs, E. (2007). The Creation of New International Networks in Education: The League of Nations and Educational Organisations in the 1920s. Paedagogica Historica, 43(2), 199–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230701248305. Garner, K. (2016). Global Visions: The Women’s Disarmament Committee (1931–39) and the International Politics of Disarmament in the 1930s. In M. Everard & F. de Haan (Eds.), Rosa Manus (1881–1942): The International Life and Legacy of a Jewish Dutch Feminist (pp. 128–159). Leiden: Brill. Goodman, J. (2018a). Becoming, Being and Kaleidoscopic Configurations: Laura Dreyfus-Barney, the Bahá’í Faith and Educative Work for Peace. IJHE, 8(1), 123–134. https://www.klinkhardt.de/verlagsprogramm/2233.html Goodman, J. (2018b). “Shaping the Mentality of Races and Especially of Young People”: The League of Nations and the Educational Cinematography Congress, 1934. In J.  Damousi & P.  O’Brien (Eds.), League of Nations: Histories, Legacies and Impact (pp.  197–213). Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Goodman, J. (2018c). The Buddhist Institute at Phnom Penh, the International Council of Women and the Rome International Institute for Educational Cinematography: Intersections of Internationalism and Imperialism, 1931–34. History of Education, 47(3), 415–431. https://doi.org/10.108 0/0046760X.2018.1425740. Goodman, J. (2018d). Suzanne Karpelès (1890–1969): Thinking with the Width and Thickness of Time. IJHE, 8(2): 231–244. https://www.klinkhardt.de/ verlagsprogramm/2267.html

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CHAPTER 5

Troubling Gender Relations with the Appointment of ‘That Lady Inspector’ in Post-suffrage South Australia Kay Whitehead

In January 1897, amidst heated debate regarding the anticipated appointment of white settler Australia’s first woman school inspector, one prominent headmaster ‘protested against petticoat government, and did not want to see the new woman come along’.1 His colleague conceded that ‘the ladies at present enjoyed the franchise and as a natural consequence the lady inspector must come whether she proved a success or not’.2 These discussions took place in the colony of South Australia which had legislated for mass compulsory schooling for white settler children in 1875 and achieved women’s suffrage in 1894, second only to New Zealand in 1893.3 This chapter explores the relations between white settler women  Advertiser, January 21, 1897, 7.  Ibid. 3  Helen Jones. 1994. In her own name: A history of women in South Australia from 1836. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 81–168; Pavla Miller. 1986. Long division: State schooling in South Australian society. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 29–43. 1 2

K. Whitehead (*) University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia © The Author(s) 2021 T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_5

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and men educators in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, highlights the careers of seven potential candidates for the position of inspector, and discusses the appointment process and tenure of inspector Blanche McNamara in the South Australian education department. Using the frame of gender, white women educators’ lives and work in state school systems in the English-speaking world have been the focus of several studies since the 1990s.4 Social class has been a point of discussion in some studies but not the ways in which race also structured white women teachers’ lives. Indeed, their race privilege was accepted as natural during their lives and in subsequent research.5 However, the implications of marital status for women’s work as teachers has been a key consideration with formal and informal marriage bars enacted in most English-­ speaking countries. Likewise, all of these studies outline the asymmetries between men and women teachers in terms of their career paths, salaries and other perquisites. Introduced to serve the requirements of mass ­compulsory schooling, state school systems were constructed so that men managed and women taught. Last but not least, white women educators’ agency in navigating their lives and work underpins these studies. While scholarship typically incorporates women leaders, there is less research that focuses on their leadership as a major theme.6 Notwithstanding 4  Dina Copelman. 1996. London’s women teachers: Gender, class and feminism, 1870–1930. London: Routledge; Alison Oram. 1996. Women teachers and feminist politics, 1900–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press; Marjorie Theobald. 1996. Knowing women: Origins of women’s education in nineteenth-century Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press; Kathleen Weiler. 1998. Country schoolwomen: Teaching in rural California, 1850–1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press; Kay Whitehead. 2003. The new women teachers come along: Transforming teaching in the nineteenth century. ANZHES Monograph Series, No. 2. Sydney: Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society; Jackie M. Blount. 2005. Fit to teach: Same sex desire, gender and school work in the twentieth century. Albany: State University of New York Press; Regina Cortina and Sonsoles San Roman. 2006. Introduction: Women and teaching—global perspectives on the feminisation of a profession. In Women and teaching: Global perspectives on the feminisation of a profession, ed. Regina Cortina and Sonsoles San Roman, 1–20. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 5  Kathleen Weiler. 1999. Reflections on writing a history of women teachers. In Telling Women’s Lives: Narrative Inquiries in the History of Women’s Education, ed. Kathleen Weiler and Sue Middleton, 48. Buckingham: Open University Press, Buckingham. 6  Jill Blackmore. 1999. Troubling women: Feminism, leadership and educational change. Buckingham: Open University Press; Kay Whitehead. 1999. Lavinia Seabrooke, gender and state formation in the late nineteenth century. Women’s History Review 8/11: 7–25; Marjorie Theobald. 2000. Women, leadership and gender politics in the interwar years: The case of Julia Flynn. History of Education 29/1: 63–77; Joyce Goodman and Sylvia Harrop. 2000. ‘Within marked boundaries’: Women and the making of educational policy since 1800. In

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multiple barriers, some white women secured niches as leaders of girls and infant departments/schools and smaller mixed schools, and a handful were chosen as inspectors. Morris Matthews’ survey of women principals in New Zealand state primary, secondary and native schools shows that Maori women were also leading some of the latter by the 1890s, but that is not the case in white settler Australia.7 Neatly encapsulated by Blackmore, ‘women who get into leadership are also trouble’ because they cross the socially created boundaries separating men’s and women’s work in education.8 Using portraiture as a methodology to highlight the lives of married and single headmistresses and women professors, Fitzgerald and May show how these leaders ‘provoked a level of public and private anxiety about the character of educated and economically independent women’.9 With Blount and Blackmore, they note that single women posed a particular threat because they had not embraced conventional heterosexuality as expressed in marriage.10 If women’s leadership in schools was challenging the status quo, women inspectors were seen to pose a greater threat to male leadership even though they were only a tiny minority. First appointed in 1893, British women inspectors ‘were very much entering a men’s world, unwelcome to their male “colleagues” and unrecognised as capable of men’s work’.11 Goodman and Harrop show that women school inspectors were allocated more restricted roles than their male counterparts.12 The appointment of the first woman inspector in South Australia was

Women, educational policy making and administration in England: Authoritative women since 1881, ed. Joyce Goodman and Sylvia Harrop, 1–14. London: Routledge; Kay Morris Matthews. 2009. Degrees of separation? Early women principals in New Zealand state schools, 1876–1926. Journal of Educational Administration and History 41/3: 239–252; Kate Rousmaniere. 2013. The principal’s office: A social history of the American school principal. Albany: State University of New York Press; Tanya Fitzgerald and Josephine May. 2016. Portraying lives: Headmistresses and women professors 1880s–1960s. Charlotte NC: Information Age Publishing. 7  Morris Matthews, Degrees of separation, 239–252. 8  Blackmore, Troubling women, 3. 9  Fitzgerald and May, Portraying lives, 1. 10  Ibid., 9; Blount, Fit to teach, 6; Blackmore, Troubling women, 30. 11  Goodman and Harrop, ‘Within marked boundaries’, 8. 12  Joyce Goodman and Sylvia Harrop. 2000. ‘The peculiar preserve of the male kind’: Women and the educational inspectorate, 1893 to the Second World War. In Women, educational policy making and administration in England: authoritative women since 1881, eds Joyce Goodman and Sylvia Harrop, 137–155. London: Routledge.

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similarly unwelcome, and the absence of a clear delineation of her role added to headmasters’ anxieties. This chapter commences with an outline of the education landscape in white setter South Australia, and addresses the implications of the 1875 Education Act which legislated for mass compulsory schooling and the waged employment of teachers in a highly centralised education bureaucracy. The first part of the chapter also introduces seven women teachers who would become potential candidates for the inspector’s position in 1897, and vignettes of their careers are woven through the chapter. None of these women left personal records and their official career profiles are minimalist. There is little official correspondence by or about them even though they ascended to the most senior positions open to women in the education department: These were headmistresses and infant mistresses of girls’ and infant departments in the largest schools in the capital city of Adelaide. Aside from one newspaper photograph of Blanche McNamara, there are no visual images but individual women are mentioned occasionally in the press. Although ‘women’s experiences are neither detached nor detachable from men’s’, little is known about specific everyday interactions between men and women in schools or the seven potential candidates’ perspectives and networks.13 However, women teachers collectively were the subject of public debate in the late nineteenth century. The second part of the chapter explores the relations between men and women in the education department and South Australian society, and incorporates the suffrage campaign. Following on from suffrage, the third part of the chapter focuses on the proposed appointment of a woman inspector in 1897. Fuelled by the press, there was vigorous resistance from some headmasters and equally assertive advocacy from some headmistresses. These tensions not only manifested in reports of meetings but were also distilled in a cartoon which will be included in the analysis. The chapter culminates with Blanche McNamara’s appointment and tenure as the first woman inspector of state schools. Here, the photograph of McNamara provides insights into her presentation of self in the late nineteenth century.

13  Kathryn Gleadle. 2013. The imagined communities of women’s history: Current debates and emerging themes, a rhizomatic approach. Women’s History Review 22/4: 526.

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Constructing ‘Divided Responsibility’ in School Leadership With Adelaide as the capital, the white settler colony of South Australia was proclaimed in 1836, thereby initiating the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their land. In contrast to other Australian colonies, British family emigration rather than convict labour underpinned white settlement. Guaranteed freedom of religion also attracted German Lutherans who were escaping religious persecution. Staffed exclusively by men, Lutheran schools were established quickly and German missionaries also taught a few Aboriginal children in a separate school in the early years of settlement. However, Aboriginal children were never welcome in white settler schools.14 In 1838, Jane Hillier was Adelaide’s first white settler teacher to advertise in the press and her young ladies school was licensed by the Central Board of Education (CBE) under the 1851 Education Act.15 Licensed head teachers were recruited by their local community and paid an annual government stipend so long as instruction was secular. By the 1860s, men dominated numerically as licensed teachers; and there were about twenty Lutheran and countless private men and women teachers catering for white settler children in South Australia.16 In 1867, the newly appointed Catholic leader, Bishop Shiel, decided to establish a Catholic school system with Father Woods as director and a few Catholic lay teachers. Shiel returned to Ireland and recruited seven Dominican teaching sisters to provide a select school for young ladies while Woods and Mary MacKillop established the Institute of the Sisters of St Joseph (ISSJ) to teach poor white settler Catholic children and replace lay teachers as swiftly as possible. However, there was ongoing resistance from some clergy, especially Jesuits, who lost control of their parish schools. The ISSJ eventually triumphed and lay teachers had to find alternate sites for their work, the most common being the secular state school system where religious affiliation was not a factor in decision-­ making about teachers’ careers.17  Whitehead, The new women teachers, 11–22, 33–36.  Kay Whitehead. 2014. ‘Mrs Hillier begs to inform … the Public of Adelaide that she has opened a school’: Education in the early years of settlement in South Australia. Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia 42: 111–121. 16  Whitehead, The new women teachers, 23–31. 17  Marie Therese Foale. 1989. The Josephite story: The Sisters of St Joseph: Their foundation and early history 1866–1893. Sydney: St Joseph’s Generalate; H. Northey 1992. St Mary’s 14 15

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Among the potential candidates for the position of woman inspector in 1897 were three Catholic women who commenced their careers in the context of the struggles to do with Catholic schools. They were Kate Cooney, Catherine McMahon (later Francis) and Blanche McNamara. Sponsored by rural Jesuit priests, fifteen-year-old Kate Cooney began teaching in 1863 and joined the Catholic school system at its inception along with seventeen-year-old Catherine McMahon who was the lay teacher at Hectorville, near Adelaide.18 In April 1870, however, McMahon became a licensed teacher with the connivance of the local priests who stated that they ‘would rather have the [CBE] grant than the Sisters.’19 The ISSJ opened a school nearby and quickly displaced McMahon who left the CBE and moved to metropolitan Norwood Catholic school.20 McMahon was again defeated by the ISSJ, along with Cooney; and both women joined the CBE as licensed teachers in rural schools in 1872 and 1873 respectively.21 Meanwhile, student Blanche McNamara took advantage of the new select Dominican convent school in Adelaide, where ‘young ladies … are taught the usual branches of English Education … the French, Spanish and Italian languages, and every species of plain and ornamental needlework’.22 Catholic teaching orders also endeavoured to persuade students to join their ranks.23 By 1875, the ISSJ had replaced all lay teachers and women could not teach Catholic children unless they took holy orders. Like McMahon and Cooney, McNamara chose the CBE rather than the Dominicans and became a pupil teacher at nearby Rundle St School in 1875.24 The turmoil within Catholic schooling was also taking place in the context of attempts to legislate for the introduction of compulsory schooling for white settler children in South Australia. Legislation in 1871 was easily Convent schools. In William Shakespeare’s Adelaide, ed. Brian Dickey, 42–60. Adelaide: Association of Professional Historians. 18  Southern Cross and Catholic Herald, September 20 1867, 2; Observer, June 14 1873, 11. 19  Minute no. 1101 (1870), Minutes, Central Board of Education, GRG 50/1, State Records of South Australia (hereafter SRSA). 20  Irish Harp and Farmers Herald, January 21 1872, 6; Foale, The Josephite story, 147–149. 21  Incomes of School Teachers 1873–4, South Australian Parliamentary Papers 1877, no. 259, 7 (hereafter SAPP). 22  Register, December 31 1868, 1. 23  Tom O’Donoghue and S. Burley. 2008. God’s antipodean teaching force: An historical exposition on Catholic teaching religious in Australia. Teaching and Teacher Education 24/1: 182. 24  Northey, St Mary’s convent schools, 46.

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defeated and unsuccessful again in 1873. Amidst these debates the CBE was reconstituted and John Anderson Hartley elected as its president. Hartley’s influence was immediately apparent in the renewed pressure on the government to build a large state school in Adelaide.25 The Grote St Model School opened in the heart of Adelaide in January 1874. The boys’ department was separated from those of the girls and infants by a high wall in this new model of single campus sex-segregated schooling. Furthermore, teaching staff were recruited and employed by the CBE. Lewis Madley, Lavinia Seabrooke, and Jane Stanes won the positions as headmaster of the boys’ department, headmistress of the girls’ department and infant mistress; and their salaries were differentiated by gender.26 Although all of these leaders were experienced administrators, the CBE upheld male privilege and informed Madley that he would control the entire school. Seabrooke protested immediately and at a special meeting Madley’s overall authority was confirmed. However, Hartley granted Seabrooke and Stanes responsibility for the internal management, discipline and record-keeping of their departments, thereby setting the precedent for ‘divided responsibility’ in large schools which would play out in the 1897 debates over the appointment of the first woman inspector. The headmaster was not totally empowered and the headmistress and infant mistress were not entirely powerless, but they had fewer resources to bargain with, and Seabrooke continued to challenge Madley’s authority in her choice of assistants and pupil teachers, one of the latter being Eva Sellar.27 Sellar won a three-year pupil teacher apprenticeship amidst strong competition in 1874. Her father was a businessman, member of the Adelaide City Council, later member of parliament, and a ‘foremost worker for reform’.28 Besides establishing the Grote St schools, the CBE appointed three inspectors and issued new instructions for the classification of pupils, teaching methodology and timetables. In 1874 public examinations were also introduced for pupil teachers, assistants and candidates for licences. Late in 1875 legislation for compulsory and secular state schooling was passed by both houses of parliament. Free state schooling, however, was

 Miller, Long division, 29–37.  Whitehead, Lavinia Seabrooke, 9–12. 27  Ibid., 12–14. 28  Herald, December 22 1906, 7. 25 26

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not introduced in South Australia until 1891. There was no government funding for Lutheran, Catholic or private schools.29 The CBE was initially replaced by a council and then centralized bureaucratic education department led by inspector general Hartley until his accidental death in 1896. Hartley established a training college in Grote St and created two categories of schools on the basis of student numbers. One-room schools with fewer than twenty students were categorised as provisional. No training was required of their teachers; and the vast majority who were young women were subject to an informal marriage bar. Schools with more than twenty students were designated as public schools, staffed by qualified teachers and men’s privileged positions as headmasters were protected by the regulation: ‘Should the average attendance be higher than 100, in any mixed school, the principal must be a master’.30 All appointments and transfers between schools were decided by central administration, with or without negotiation. Retiring allowances were paid to some aged and infirm licensed teachers but most slotted in to the new structure. For example, Eva Sellar and Blanche McNamara completed their three-year pupil teacher apprenticeships. McNamara’s girl students presented her with a ‘writing desk furnished with every requisite’, thereby indicating their perspectives of her feminine tastes and intellectual commitments.31 Both women attended the new training college in 1878 and were appointed as assistant teachers in the girls and infant departments in Adelaide schools.32 Kate Cooney and Catherine McMahon passed the teachers certificate examinations and continued their careers. Inspector general Hartley was so impressed with Cooney’s work that he invited her to attend the training college for six months and learn ‘the principles of teaching’. Cooney asserted that it would be inconvenient to live in Adelaide while at the college so she was reimbursed for her rail fares.33 Blackmore argues that ‘benevolent paternalism’ was the mark of nineteenth-century Australian education, and that is an apt description of Hartley’s role.34 He recruited and mentored men and women whom he deemed potentially effective teachers and leaders,  Miller, Long division, 30–38.  Education Regulations, SAPP 1876, no. 21, 2, 4–7. 31  Express and Telegraph, August 16 1878, 2. 32  See Eva Sellar and Blanche McNamara’s teaching records in Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets, GRG 18/167, SRSA. 33  Advertiser, April 4 1908, 2. 34  Blackmore, Troubling women, 24. 29 30

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visited schools frequently and knew much about teachers’ personal as well as professional lives. Like many progressive white settler men of his time, he believed in women’s intellectual, if not economic, equality with men and established the Advanced School for Girls in 1879 to prepare girls for university entrance.35 In 1880, Kate Cooney was appointed as the infant mistress at Flinders St Model School, one of the premier schools in Adelaide.36 Hartley also supported McMahon who resigned from her rural school in March 1876 and married Thomas Francis who was the well-known ‘Electrician and Inspector of Block Signals’ in the railways department.37 Catherine was reemployed as an assistant teacher in the girls’ department (with headmistress Lavinia Seabrooke) of the new Norwood Model School in September 1877. Senior women were not subject to the informal marriage bar.38 Three more potential candidates for the position of inspector commenced their careers in the late 1870s. Marie Barclay attended the training college in 1877 and was soon appointed as an assistant teacher in the girls’ department at Flinders St Model School.39 Hartley ‘admired’ Barclay’s womanly devotion to her father, ‘a notorious drunkard’ who depended on her financially and domestically until his death in the late 1870s.40 Another potential candidate was Margaret Stone, a qualified teacher from the neighbouring colony of Victoria, who ascended quickly from assistant teacher in 1878 to headmistress of the girls’ department at Hindmarsh in 1883.41 Furthermore, she married Charles Woodman, a ‘chemist’ and founding member of the Pharmacological Society, in 1880, and continued her career.42 Finally, Marie Downing commenced her career as a rural licensed head teacher in 1875. Notwithstanding her ‘high character as a  Miller, Long division, 115, 119–125.  See Kate Cooney’s teaching record in Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets, GRG 18/167, SRSA. 37  Evening Journal, September 19 1881, 2. 38  See Catherine Francis teaching record in Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets, GRG 18/167, SRSA; Whitehead, Lavinia Seabrooke, 18–21. 39  See Marie Lucas (nee Barclay) teaching record in Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets, GRG 18/167, SRSA. 40  Inspector General Hartley to Jane Doudy, October 26 1889, in B. Condon, ed. 1976. The confidential letterbook of the inspector general of schools, 1880–1914. Adelaide: Murray Park College of Advanced Education. 41  See Margaret Woodman (nee Stone) teaching record in Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets, GRG 18/167, SRSA. 42  Observer, March 13 1906, 4. 35 36

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teacher’, she was relegated to assistant when enrolments exceeded 100 students and Victor Pavia was appointed as headmaster.43 When Pavia breached the regulations regarding the corporal punishment of girls and alienated the local community, Hartley wrote to him confidentially, offering advice about manly behaviour.44 Meanwhile Downing’s examination results were so impressive that she was promoted to headmistress of the girls’ department at Grote St Model School in 1883.45 In essence, the state school system expanded rapidly after 1875, and ‘teaching represented both an area of autonomy that allowed [white settler women] to leave home and undertake remunerated work, as well as a space where they were subjected to subordination’.46 Several headmistresses and infant mistresses of girls’ and infant departments in Adelaide’s largest schools left the education department through resignation, marriage, retirement and occasionally death, but Kate Cooney, Catherine Francis (nee McMahon), Blanche McNamara, Eva Sellar, Marie Barclay, Marie Downing and Margaret Woodman (nee Stone) continued their careers throughout the nineteenth century. All were white settler women whose comprehensive rather than basic education enabled them to enter the education department as teachers. Most had family connections in business or the civil service (including McNamara whose father was a customs officer), implying that they were probably middle class.47 Cooney and Francis had already negotiated very complex politics in the Catholic school system before joining the secular state where religious affiliations did not matter. In an era when inspectors ‘could make or break’ a teacher’s career, these women were carving paths within a highly centralised, ­hierarchical male-dominated institution. They were demonstrating pedagogical expertise and potential for leadership which enabled their promotions to assistant teachers in large schools in Adelaide.48 Sooner or later they would join Cooney as headmistresses or infant mistresses, and negotiate the thorny issue of ‘divided responsibility’. While all demonstrated  South Australian Chronicle and Weekly Mail, November 6 1875, 18.   Kay Whitehead. 2009. Making a modern manly/teacher’s career: Victor Pavia, 1856–1934. Journal of Educational Administration and History 41/1: 80–81. 45  See Marie Downing’s teaching record in Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets, GRG 18/167, SRSA. 46  Cortina and San Roman, Introduction, 13. 47  Copelman, London’s women teachers, 31–56; Gleadle, The imagined communities, 531. 48  Goodman and Harrop, The peculiar preserve, 137; Fitzgerald and May, Portraying lives, 2. 43 44

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agency and ambition in rising through the ranks of assistant teachers to become leaders, none engaged in public political debates about women’s position in white settler society because the education department’s regulations constrained their active participation, stating that ‘teachers are enjoined not to take part in political affairs, otherwise than by exercise of the franchise’.49 Hartley was also bound by this regulation.

‘Women Need the Suffrage’ Although education department employees were hamstrung from speaking out by regulation, women’s presence in the state school system attracted a great deal of public comment. Under the old CBE only the names of licensed teachers, 70 per cent of whom were men, were included in annual reports and in the minutes which were published in the newspapers. After 1875 these documents contained the names of most individuals employed by the state, and the presence of women was exposed. It was noted that fifteen out of the seventeen candidates for the training college entrance examination were women in January 1877, among them Kate Cooney.50 In May 1877 a letter to the editor of the Register pointed out that men constituted only two of the nineteen appointments to state schools in the previous month. The correspondent continued, ‘if this goes on the arduous task of training our youth must fall wholly into the hands of women’.51 In 1879 a correspondent claimed that there were four or five female applicants for pupil teacher apprenticeships for every male, bemoaned the absence of men, and predicted that ‘in no distant period the education of our youth will be almost entirely in the hands of unmarried women.’52 Inspector general Hartley was well aware of newspapers’ influence, stating in 1885 that ‘the period in which we live might justly be called “the newspaper age”, for never has the power of the Press been wielded with such marked effect, and its influence been so universally recognised, as at the present time’.53 Although he read newspapers avidly, he did not respond publicly to their contents.

 Education Regulations 1885, SAPP 1885, no. 34, 3.  Evening Journal, January 17 1877, 2. 51  Register, May 4 1877, 6. 52  Observer, June 28 1879, 14. 53  Education Gazette, January and March 1885, 5. 49 50

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It was not only women’s presence, but the speed and tenacity of restructuring also generated so much discontent that the government held a royal commission into the state school system between 1881 and 1883. Some former CBE headmasters complained about the intensification of labour and accused Hartley of autocratic leadership, but more recent employees sided with him.54 The only woman educator who gave evidence was the headmistress of the Advanced School for Girls. However, eight headmistresses and infant mistresses, including Cooney, lobbied Catherine Helen Spence, the colony’s foremost reformer (and Hartley’s friend), to represent them. There were seven major schools with separate boys’, girls’ and infant departments in Adelaide; and Spence complained that Hartley had not replaced several headmistresses and infant mistresses, thereby granting headmasters total control. When questioned, Hartley characterised ‘divided responsibility’ as an early misjudgement in need of rectification, and added that no more infant mistresses would be appointed.55 His response indicated how unready he had been to deal with Lavinia Seabrooke as an ‘assured, educated and self-determining woman’ in 1874.56 Hartley was exonerated by the commissioners and women’s career paths continued to be whittled away. By 1883, Cooney, Woodman and Downing were already leading their respective departments. Catherine Francis (nee McMahon) ascended through the ranks amidst stiff competition between departments at Norwood Model School and did not resign when her husband was retrenched and moved to Queensland where he died in 1886.57 In 1887, she was appointed as headmistress of Norwood’s girls’ department. Notwithstanding Hartley’s statement to the commission, Eva Sellar was appointed as an infant mistress in 1888, later claiming that ‘Hartley recognised her qualifications, and handed over the last position because he thought Miss Sellar was peculiarly competent to do the work’.58 Cooney and Sellar were also co-opted by Hartley to compose the ‘Adelaide Reading Sheets’ for use in schools.59 In 1890, Marie Barclay and Blanche McNamara were appointed as headmistresses of the girls’ departments at North Adelaide and Port Adelaide.  Whitehead, Making a modern manly/teacher’s career, 77.  Whitehead, Lavinia Seabrooke, 15, 20–21. 56  Fitzgerald and May, Portraying lives, 45. 57  Advertiser, June 28, 1886, 7. 58  Mail, June 22 1918, 2. 59  Whitehead, Lavinia Seabrooke, 16. 54 55

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Among inspectors and in the press, however, concerns about the lack of male teachers escalated to the extent that Hartley endeavoured to justify women teachers’ employment by invoking dominant understandings of white settler femininity and masculinity in his 1885 annual report. Sympathy with the child nature, liveliness, fertility of resource, and gentleness of manner are not less necessary attributes of the good teacher, and few will deny that these are essentially feminine characteristics, while in discipline and organisation the man probably has the advantage. Even the objection often urged, that women marry and give up the work, is minimised by the consideration that this leaves room for younger persons as teachers.60

While Kate Cooney apparently spoke with a ‘charming modesty’ and was ‘enthusiastic’ in her love for children; and Eva Sellar’s students reputedly ‘always regarded her as a big kind mother’; the headmistresses and infant mistresses were not homogenous in terms of their feminine identities.61 Little sympathy with child nature was evident when Marie Downing laid charges against a girl student for stealing her purse at Grote St, and the girl was sentenced to the industrial school for one year.62 In 1889, a father complained to Hartley about Catherine Francis’ brutal treatment of his daughter. Hartley wrote to Francis confidentially, ‘think the matter over calmly and, when your mind is made up, come and see me’.63 Francis was not penalised in this instant but she was officially cautioned about her harsh discipline some years later. Hartley supported both strong, assertive and gentle, modest women, but not at the expense of men’s career paths. Hartley’s strategy to quell anxieties about women teachers was not particularly successful. By the late nineteenth century, the term ‘new woman’ had been coined to describe well-educated, socially and economically independent white settler middle-class women.64 However, new women were also vulnerable to accusations of sexual independence. In 1894, the Argus claimed that ‘in taking to the bicycle, women are apt to become fast in the double sense of the word’.65 In South Australia, the Observer railed 60  Inspector General’s report 1885, SAPP 1886, no. 44, xx; Cortina and San Roman, Introduction, 12. 61  Advertiser, April 11 1908, 9; Register, May 8 1912, 5. 62  South Australian Weekly Chronicle, August 7 1885, 2. 63  J. Hartley to C. Francis, November 26, 1889, Condon The confidential letterbook. 64  Susan Magarey. 2001. Passions of the first wave feminists. Sydney: UNSW Press, 41–48. 65  Ibid., 42.

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against new women, and women teachers were identified as the most visible members of this group.66 Indeed, state school teachers were the largest group of white settler middle-class women in paid employment. If women teachers’ public presence was unsettling, so too their marital status. Waged employment by the state conferred sufficient independence to make marriage a choice rather than an economic necessity. Some teachers spent long periods in waged employment before marrying while others never married.67 Among the women leaders, Francis and Woodman continued their careers as married women. Aged thirty-nine, Marie Barclay married Henry Lucas in 1896 and maintained her career.68 Sellar, Cooney, McNamara and Downing lived their entire lives as single women. While white settler women’s position in society continued to be debated, the headmistresses and infant mistresses fulfilled the obligations that were commensurate with their senior positions. In addition to pedagogical and administrative duties, involvement in professional associations was integral to both men and women teachers’ work.69 Established in 1879, the Public Schools’ Floral and Industrial Society promoted the state school system through annual public exhibitions of children’s work. Of course men held most of the leadership roles, but Sellar was an assistant secretary for at least a decade. Woodman and Francis were long-term committee members and Barclay and Downing joined them some years.70 Francis, Woodman and Downing were also executive members of the South Australian Teachers Association (SATA) which began in 1885.71 In September 1888 Catherine Francis was the first woman to present a paper to SATA and registered her concerns about women’s workloads and career paths in government schools.72 A few days later, letters to the press expressed dismay about women teachers’ working conditions, adding that ‘if we had not been told this by a leading lady we could not have believed that the Minister of Education would tolerate such wrong’. The correspondent called for the appointment of a woman inspector and argued that ‘women ought to have the same plums as men … women need the  Observer, December 22 1894, 24; Observer, February 1 1896, 34.  Whitehead, The new women teachers, 71–72; Fitzgerald and May, Portraying lives, 6–7; Blount, Fit to teach, 16. 68  Advertiser, May 7 1896, 4. 69  Whitehead, Making a modern manly/teacher’s career, 79. 70  Education Gazette, September 1890, 92; Education Gazette, April 1896, 56. 71  Register, March 7 1887, 6. 72  Observer, September 8 1888, 35; Education Gazette, October 1888, 80. 66 67

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suffrage in order that they may obtain fair consideration in the schools and other public institutions’.73 As a government teacher, Francis could not openly work for this cause, but exposing women teachers’ working conditions was timely, following as it did the inauguration of the Women’s Suffrage League three months earlier. Following an unsuccessful attempt to pass suffrage legislation in 1885, the campaign began officially with the formation of the Women’s Suffrage League (WSL) in July 1888. Dr Edward Stirling chaired the inaugural meeting, and Eva Sellar’s father was among the men who spoke in favour of suffrage.74 Stirling was president until 1892 when Mary Colton took over with Mary Lee as the secretary. Most of the women leaders lived in Adelaide and were drawn from the Protestant churches, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Working Women’s Trade Union. Although women teachers in government schools could not participate in public debate, several signed suffrage petitions that were presented to parliament as the campaign intensified in the early 1890s.75 Furthermore, the minister of education, John Cockburn, played a seminal role in the suffrage campaign. Cockburn and the parliamentary treasurer and suffrage advocate, Frederick Holder, persuaded the South Australian premier, Charles Kingston, who was a controversial, anti-suffrage womaniser, to support women’s suffrage in 1893. Cockburn skilfully negotiated the successful passage of the Women’s Suffrage Bill through the House of Assembly in December 1894. All South Australian women, including Aboriginal women, were not only enfranchised but also eligible to be elected to parliament.76 Cockburn addressed the Advanced School for Girls annual speech day a few days later, arguing that the girls’ success had facilitated the suffrage movement, and that ‘a new era was opening up to womankind’.77 He subsequently argued that Aboriginal women should be enfranchised by the new Australian federal government but was unsuccessful and thus the vote was only granted to white women in 1901.78

 Register, September 11 1888, 7; Evening Journal, September 15 1888, 7.  Express and Telegraph, July 21 1888, 4. 75  Jones, In her own name, 83–98. 76  Kay Whitehead. 2020. Sir John and Lady Cockburn, suffrage and education. Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia 48: 49–63. 77  Register, 22 December 1894, 7. 78  Whitehead, Sir John and Lady Cockburn, 49–63. 73 74

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‘That Lady Inspector’ In September 1896 minister of education Cockburn faced an unprecedented crisis when inspector general Hartley was accidently knocked from his bicycle on his way home from work and rushed to the Adelaide Hospital.79 When Hartley died on September 15, there was extraordinary public mourning and much was said about him as ‘a counsellor and friend’ to teachers, and his ‘almost fatherly acts of kindness’.80 All schools and government offices were closed for his funeral which took forty-two minutes to pass a given point. Six headmasters led the procession to North Road cemetery, followed by 3000 children and some of their teachers (including Sellar, Francis, Cooney, Woodman, Barclay, McNamara and Downing), the premier and parliamentarians, the Police Band and hundreds of mourners.81 There was some speculation that Cockburn would assume Hartley’s role, but in December 1896 he eventually decided on a board of three current inspectors with inspector Lionel Stanton as chairman. This created vacancies for two new inspectors and Cockburn announced that one of these positions would be allocated to a woman.82 Coincidentally, the Observer condemned new women the same weekend as the minister’s plans were made public.83 Seven prominent headmasters in Adelaide schools responded immediately with a deputation to Cockburn expressing their opposition to the proposal. All of them ultimately ended their careers as inspectors so they clearly had a vested interest in keeping this rank closed to women. They argued that the choice of suitable candidates for the position of woman inspector was exceedingly limited, and ‘that no lady at present in the department had sufficient experience in the management of schools or was possessed of the necessary judgement to enable her to carry out the duties of an inspector.’ Here, they were taking advantage of ‘divided responsibility’ to downgrade women’s leadership experience as well as denigrating their capacity for rational decision-making. The headmasters also raised potential problems for women travelling alone to visit country schools.

 Ibid.  Evening Journal, September 17 1896, 3; Blackmore, Troubling women, 27. 81  Evening Journal, September 17 1896, 3. 82  Whitehead, Sir John and Lady Cockburn, 49–63. 83  Observer, January 2 1897, 45. 79 80

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Cockburn responded that the lady inspector’s duties ‘had not been settled’ at this point in time.84 Some days later the headmasters’ objections were made public at a special meeting of the Adelaide Teachers’ Association. The meeting began with an altercation about the presence of reporters in the audience. Catherine Francis, headmistress of Norwood, argued successfully that they be admitted. Then she proposed the motion: ‘That the appointment of a lady inspector is viewed with favour by teachers in the city and suburbs’, and immediately refuted the damning indictment of women teachers as it had been reported in the press. Margaret Woodman seconded the motion. In support of their stance, Francis pointed out that the majority of state school teachers were women and that they undertook the same training and work as men. Buoyed by the achievement of suffrage, she also stated that ‘ladies had come to the front so rapidly that they were proved to be quite competent to take part in making their own laws, educational or otherwise.’ William West, headmaster of Norwood, led the opposition. He stated that there would not be enough suitable work, which he deemed to be inspecting sewing and kindergarten classes, to occupy a woman inspector. He noted as well that headmistresses had all but disappeared from state schools. When he revealed the crux of the matter by saying that ‘headmasters did not like “petticoat government”  ’, Francis interjected, amidst laughter, ‘that’s just at the bottom of it’. Although at least one more woman addressed the meeting, men’s resistance dominated reports: Headmaster Cherry believed that ‘ladies’ were inferior teachers but they rode bicycles well so the new inspector could visit country schools. Much of the reported discussion revolved around the points that this appointment was an inevitable, if not favourable, consequence of women’s suffrage, and that the minister of education was determined to have his way. When the vote was taken, the motion was convincingly defeated by twenty-five votes to fifteen. The voting patterns revealed that there was not a neat split between men and women: Two or three men were among those who voted in favour and about half of the women attendees voted against the motion.85 Men’s anxieties about this assault on their privileged positions were reflected one week later in a cartoon in Adelaide’s provocative and satirical

 Advertiser, January 9 1897, 7; Register, January 9 1897, 5.  Evening Journal, January 21 1897, 3; Advertiser, January 21 1897, 7.

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weekly journal, Quiz and the Lantern.86 Deploying common tropes to encapsulate perceived gender relations in the education department and white settler South Australia, six uncomplimentary images of women were juxtaposed with men, some of whom were well known, in a full-page spread entitled ‘That Lady Inspector’. As Weiler states, ‘women have been constructed in the dominant imagination as “other”—in opposition to the norm, which is male’.87 She adds that at stake in these constructs are questions of power, privilege and control (Fig. 5.1). The central image represented a middle-aged spinster ‘schoolma’am with stern visage, threepenny knot of tight hair and a cane in hand’ struggling to control a small boy.88 This stereotype was pervasive in popular media internationally.89 The image captured the anxieties surrounding women as inadequate disciplinarians and stifling teachers of boys, the so-­ called ‘Woman Peril’ in the United States.90 Another image portrayed minister of education Cockburn using a chair to defend himself against the angular and flat-chested, intellectual bluestocking ‘likely applicant’ with pince-nez, pointy nose and umbrella. The University of Adelaide admitted women from 1881 and Edith Dornwell, the first woman graduate, had attended the Advanced School for Girls.91 Linked closely to the new woman, the bluestocking was reputedly ‘contemptuous towards the other sex’.92 A grotesque, mannish dominating woman inspector was pictured chastising a male teacher about his unswept classroom, at the same time calling his virility into question by linking it to domestic work. Here was the unthinkable petticoat government—a woman in a position of authority over a man. Blackmore states that ‘women’s seeming lack of “natural authority” over boys was secondary to adult male anxiety arising from the perceived unnaturalness of female authority over men’.93 Incorporating headmaster ‘Mr Cherry’s idea’ at the aforementioned meeting, a fashionably dressed new woman inspector was pictured travelling alone on a bicycle to visit rural schools. Given that Cherry later  Quiz and The Lantern, January 28 1897, 9.  Weiler, Country schoolwomen, 9. 88  SA Teachers Journal, February 1923, 411. 89  Blount, Fit to teach, 45. 90  Weiler, Country schoolwomen, 23. 91  Theobald, Knowing women, 1, 21. 92  Express and Telegraph, January 1 1895, 3; Observer, January 19 1895, 40. 93  Blackmore, Troubling women, 31. 86 87

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Fig. 5.1  That Lady Inspector, Quiz and the Lantern, January 28 1897, 9

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‘championship of the fairer sex comes just a little late in the day’.98 Additionally, Quiz accused Cockburn of overriding the board of inspectors, none of whom were known as progressive men.99 Quiz also predicted that Catherine Francis would be the successful candidate.100 Although Francis had never held a designated leadership position in SATA for example, she had claimed public space to represent women’s interests on more than one occasion. In 1891, she won a ballot to represent women teachers at a ‘Public Service Commission of Enquiry’; and her commitment to women’s equality with men was demonstrated convincingly at the controversial meeting about the inspector’s appointment.101 Francis’ application for the position was received on January 19 and Florence Jenkins from the colony of New South Wales submitted hers on January 27.102 While it was reported that ‘a local lady will receive the post’, there is no record of applications from the other potential candidates in the education department’s index of correspondence and Francis and Jenkins’ files are no longer extant.103 Given that the education department was a hierarchal organisation, the criteria for promotion were normally seniority and merit, the latter being based on the results of the annual examination and more nebulous assessments of interpersonal relationships and professional leadership.104 The seven potential candidates occupied the most senior positions allocated to women teachers, and it is likely that many factors were at play in the selection of the women inspector. Kate Cooney was the most senior woman in terms of length of appointment, and the headmaster of her school later opined that she was ‘the best tempered woman he ever met’.105 Nevertheless, Cooney and Eva Sellar were infant mistresses who ranked lower than headmistresses of girls’ departments. The longest-serving headmistress was Marie Downing and Cooney was the oldest woman in the group, followed closely by forty-eight-year-old (middle-aged) Francis. Quiz and the Lantern mused that the successful candidate would be welcomed if she was ‘tolerably young’ and susceptible to ‘delicate and  Quiz and The Lantern, February 18 1897, 4.  Quiz and The Lantern, January 21 1897, 13. 100  Quiz and The Lantern, February 18 1897, 5. 101  Whitehead, The new women teachers, 62. 102  Index of letters received, 1892–1901, GRG 18/8/1, SRSA. 103  Advertiser, February 4 1897, 4. 104  Blackmore, Troubling women, 25. 105  Advertiser, April 11 1908, 9. 98

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insidious compliments’ and a ‘nosegay of beautiful flowers’.106 Both aged thirty-nine, Sellar and Blanche McNamara were the youngest candidates, and McNamara and Marie Lucas (nee Barclay) were the most recently appointed headmistresses. All of the senior women except McNamara had demonstrated professional commitments to the Public Schools Floral and Industrial Society and South Australian Teachers Association, with Francis and Woodman’s leadership to the fore. However, Francis’ leadership, commitments and ambition had threatened some men at the aforementioned meeting. Indeed, the headmaster of Norwood discounted her by claiming that no ‘lady had the calm, critical judgement to go into a large school and examine its methods’.107 As Blackmore states, ‘strong women are difficult and dangerous because they trouble dominant masculinities and modes of management by being different. Feminists are particularly disruptive because they seek social change to achieve gender justice’.108 When it came to annual examinations, Lucas (nee Barclay) was likely discounted because her most recent results were ‘not satisfactory enough for an important school’.109 Francis and McNamara had the highest ‘A’ classification. For whatever reason, McNamara was chosen as the first woman inspector of state schools in South Australia, and the first in Australia, in March 1897. McNamara’s appointment was endorsed by the WCTU and ignored by the teachers’ association.110 The Express and Telegraph stated that she would retain her current salary and portrayed her as a highly qualified teacher at Port Adelaide whose ‘examination percentage has never been less than eighty’.111 The headmaster of Port Adelaide ‘considered her appointment an honour to the school and district’, and ‘felt assured that her selection would be extremely popular and for her benefit’. The staff presented Blanche with ‘a handsome silver-mounted lady’s dressing case as a token of their regard’, and in tacit recognition of her middle-class feminine presentation of self.112 Quiz and the Lantern agreed that the appointment ‘was likely to be popular as the lady has hosts of friends. Miss  Quiz and The Lantern, January 28 1897, 4.  Evening Journal, January 21 1897, 3. 108  Blackmore, Troubling women, 3. 109  See Marie Lucas (Barclay) teaching record in Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets, GRG 18/167, SRSA. 110  Education Gazette, October 1897, 132. 111  Express and Telegraph, March 16 1897, 3. 112  Express and Telegraph, March 25 1897, 2. 106 107

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McNamara has artistic tastes and is one of the oldest students of Mr James Ashton, the well-known artist’.113 McNamara’s art had ‘attracted considerable attention’ at an exhibition in 1889 and her ‘seascapes’ demonstrated ‘a delicate sense of colour and good judgement’ in 1893.114 Taken together, these reports constituted an ‘acceptable’ feminine representation of the woman teacher.115 They were not explicitly disrupting gender relations in the manner of the cartoons. Nevertheless, McNamara had chosen a secular teaching career rather than taking holy orders. She had worked her way up through the ranks in the girls’ departments of city schools to headmistress at Port Adelaide in 1890, and did not marry. Her career path is indicative of ambition and competence, and her marital status set her apart from the majority of women in white settler Australia. While there was no obvious transgression of dominant femininity in reports of her appointment, Blanche McNamara’s choices and agency were troubling gender relations in the late nineteenth century. Given the circumstances of her appointment, McNamara had to negotiate her new field of leadership carefully. In 1897, she assisted Inspector Clark by examining provisional one-teacher schools in the south east of the colony and was ‘delighted’ with their ‘good healthy tone’ and the ‘general influence’ of the young women teachers. Aside from examining a few larger country schools, she worked with the board of inspectors in Adelaide, ‘reporting specially on the work of girls’ and infant departments’ and examining the junior classes in metropolitan mixed schools led by headmasters. Her first report addressed all subjects in the curriculum and was mostly positive except for needlework which was ‘not properly taught’. McNamara asserted that needlework should be taught collectively to the class and not by individual instruction. She claimed that she had been ‘most cordially received in every school’.116 Minister of education Cockburn and the board of inspectors commented that the new lady inspector had ‘given general satisfaction’.117 Within a year of her appointment, however, McNamara contracted tuberculosis and from late 1898 had to take extended periods of sick leave. ‘Administered the last sacraments’ by her Catholic priest, Blanche  Quiz and The Lantern, March 25 1897, 13.  Evening Journal, September 28 1889, 5; Express and Telegraph, 29 September 1893, 2. 115  Weiler, Country schoolwomen, 9. 116  Inspector McNamara’s report 1897, SAPP 1898, no. 44, 12. 117  Report of the minister controlling education 1897, SAPP 1898, no. 44, 9, 10. 113 114

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became an inspector and was subsequently dismissed from the education department for sexual harassment of a woman teacher during inspection, it is possible that sexual innuendo underpinned his comment.94 General unease about women’s independence both sexual and intellectual was reflected in these images. South Australia’s lanky premier Kingston and portly treasurer, Frederick Holder, were featured in discussion as Cockburn walked arm-in-arm with the lady inspector. As noted previously, Holder was exactly the opposite to Kingston: highly respected and a staunch supporter of the WSL and WCTU in which his wife was prominent.95 Kingston was demanding a far less powerful position in another government department, ‘a Lady Inspector of Patents or something of that sort’, thereby limiting women’s potential power over men. This strategy was already in place in England where women inspectors’ roles were more restricted than their male counterparts.96 The final image suggested that such an appointment was futile as it would be truncated by the ultimate symbol of women’s subordination to men, namely marriage. A buxom ‘inspectoress’ was gleefully submitting her ‘resignation’ to minister Cockburn in order to marry ‘the headmaster of Dotheboys School’. Taken from Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickelby, the sadist Wackford Squeers and his cruel matron-wife conducted a thoroughly inhumane boys’ boarding school called Dotheboy Hall.97 Thus there are multiple renderings of white settler femininity in this cartoon, none of them positive and each one operating to preserve the status quo. Neither the cartoon nor the earlier protestations had any effect on the minister of education.

‘Practically, She Stepped Over the Heads of Other Staff’ Quiz and the Lantern stoked the fires of discontent during the process of appointing the woman inspector, arguing that Cockburn had previously been ‘a party to the degradation of women teachers’ and that his  Daily Telegraph, June 6 1912, 10.  Jones, In her own name, 114. 96  Goodman and Harrop, The peculiar preserve, 146. 97  Charles Dickens. 1839. The life and adventures of Nicholas Nickelby. London: Chapman and Hall. 94 95

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McNamara died on April 21, 1900, and was buried before news of her death became public. The board of inspectors represented the education department at her funeral and stated that she ‘had discharged her duties with marked ability, and was held in the highest esteem.118 It almost goes without saying that McNamara’s obituaries began with her education at the Dominican convent and concluded with her ‘pioneering’ role as an inspector. Some added her recommendations for reshaping girls’ education so as ‘to better fit them for the duties they might in after years, perform as daughters, wives and mothers.’119 The Herald included a typical 1890s’ head-and-shoulders photograph of McNamara gazing intently at the camera.120 Her dark hair is parted in the middle and softly styled into a bun at the nape rather than on top. Her mouth is closed and her skin unblemished. She is wearing a fashionable, delicate and lightly-­ coloured, lace-trimmed, high-necked blouse, akin to the new woman’s clothes in the cartoon.121 Although the photograph signifies an ideal of white settler middle-class femininity, the insistence in McNamara’s gaze matches her challenge to the prevailing norms as the pioneering lady inspector. The light also falls on and highlights her forehead, suggesting the primacy of her intellect as a shaping force in her career and character. Finally, the accompanying caption disrupts the image entirely by citing her groundbreaking institutional leadership which was indubitably coded masculine: ‘The Late Miss Blanche McNamara: First lady Inspector of State Schools’ (Fig. 5.2).122 McNamara’s death renewed debates about the woman inspector’s position and harked back to 1897. One article referred to ‘that feeling of impatience’ among women teachers when ‘one of their sisters is placed in an authority over them’ and another declared that McNamara ‘had sustained the ordeal and by her tact and ability disarmed the opposition’.123 However, the so-called impatience was not confined to women teachers: McNamara had also been exercising authority over headmasters and  Southern Cross, April 27 1900, 7.  Ibid; Chronicle, April 28 1900, 18; Herald, April 28 1900, 3. 120  Herald, April 28 1900, 3; Robert Pols. 2005. Dating nineteenth century photographs. Bury: Federation of Family History Societies (Publications) Ltd., 53; My thanks to Jo May for her insights which assisted my analysis of the photograph. 121  Fitzgerald and May, Portraying lives, 22, 25, 31; Pols, Dating nineteenth century photographs, 60. 122  Herald, April 28 1900, 3. 123  Observer, May 5 1900, 29; Observer, June 9 1900, 30. 118 119

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Fig. 5.2  The late Miss Blanche McNamara: First Lady Inspector of State Schools, Herald, April 28, 1900, 3

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occupying a more prestigious institutional position than the male inspectors in rural districts because: her attention was entirely confined to the large schools in the city, suburbs and larger country centres. Practically, she stepped over the heads of other staff and became the metropolitan inspector, entering boys’ departments as freely as girls and infants and also having assigned to her the important work of recommending most of the candidates for pupil-teachership. She did the work, and did it well, but a man could have done it equally as well or better.124

In effect, McNamara had been troubling gender relations in her everyday work, and there were renewed calls for a more limited role for the woman inspector. The process of selecting McNamara’s replacement proceeded without former minister of education Cockburn. He had been appointed as South Australia’s agent-general in London in 1898, and also joined the British suffrage campaign, along with Lady Cockburn.125 Appointed in June 1900, McNamara’s successor, Alice Hills, was not a government teacher and her position was designated as ‘Inspector and Domestic Economy Instructor’. Paid less than McNamara, she was to ‘look after needlework and organising and conducting classes for teachers and children in domestic economy generally’, thereby ensuring that she would not exercise authority over men and boys.126 When it came to women inspectors, Cockburn’s predication that ‘a new era was opening up to womankind’ as a result of suffrage turned out to be temporary. Hills’ position was removed in 1902 and she resigned. The woman inspector’s position was not reinstated until 1917.127

Conclusion The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a period of rapid political, social and educational change in white settler South Australia and this chapter has focused on gender relations in the institutional space of the state education system. Confident, competent and ambitious, Kate Cooney, Catherine Francis (nee McMahon), Blanche McNamara, Eva  Observer, June 9 1900, 30.  Whitehead, Sir John and Lady Cockburn, 49–63. 126  Register, June 7 1900, 9. 127  Jones, In her own name, 273. 124 125

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Sellar, Marie Lucas (nee Barclay), Margaret Woodman (nee Stone) and Marie Downing negotiated their careers in this context, ascending through the ranks on the basis of their pedagogical and administrative expertise as assessed by male inspectors. By 1897 they occupied the most senior positions open to women teachers in a system which institutionalised male privilege; and in a post-suffrage colony where white settler women’s position was continually contested. Indeed, their individual life choices played into broader debates. Men’s anxieties were laid bare in the controversy surrounding Blanche McNamara’s appointment as the first woman inspector of state schools. McNamara might have appropriated the ideal of white settler middle-class femininity in some respects, but her agency as an inspector troubled gender relations. Although her tenure was tragically shortened, the next generation of women teachers recalled her work as they commenced their campaigns for equal pay in 1906: ‘Women teachers had hoped much when one of their number, Miss McNamara, was appointed an inspector, and Miss McNamara had discharged her duties with tact, judgment and common sense’.128 Perhaps Blanche McNamara’s enduring legacy was to be a standard bearer for early twentieth-century women teachers’ activism.

References Primary Sources Advertiser, 1886–1908. Chronicle, 1900. Condon, B. ed. 1976. The confidential letterbook of the inspector general of schools, 1880–1914. Adelaide: Murray Park College of Advanced Education. Daily Telegraph, 1912. Education Gazette, 1885–1906. Education Regulations, South Australian Parliamentary Papers 1876, no. 21. Evening Journal, 1877–1897. Express and Telegraph, 1878–1897. Herald, 1900–1906. Incomes of School Teachers 1873–4, South Australian Parliamentary Papers 1877, no. 259. Index of Letters Received 1892–1901, GRG 18/8/1, State Records of South Australia.  Education Gazette, July 1906, 172.

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Inspector General’s Report 1885, South Australian Parliamentary Papers 1886, no. 44. Inspector McNamara’s Report 1897, South Australian Parliamentary Papers 1898, no. 44. Irish Harp and Farmers Herald, 1872. Mail, 1918. Minutes, Central Board of Education, GRG 50/1, State Records of South Australia. Observer, 1873–1906. Quiz and The Lantern, 1897. Register, 1868–1900. Report of the Minister Controlling Education 1897, South Australian Parliamentary Papers 1898, no. 44. South Australian Chronicle and Weekly Mail, 1875. South Australian Teachers Journal, 1923. South Australian Weekly Chronicle, 1885. Southern Cross, 1900. Southern Cross and Catholic Herald, 1867. Teachers’ Classification Board and Teachers’ History Sheets, GRG 18/167, State Records of South Australia.

Secondary Sources Blackmore, J. (1999). Troubling Women: Feminism, Leadership and Educational Change. Buckingham: Open University Press. Blount, J. M. (2005). Fit to Teach: Same Sex Desire, Gender and School Work in the Twentieth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press. Copelman, D. (1996). London’s Women Teachers: Gender, Class and Feminism, 1870–1930. London: Routledge. Cortina, R., & Roman, S. S. (2006). Introduction: Women and Teaching—Global Perspectives on the Feminisation of a Profession. In R. Cortina & S. S. Roman (Eds.), Women and Teaching: Global Perspectives on the Feminisation of a Profession (pp. 1–20). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dickens, C. (1839). The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby. London: Chapman and Hall. Fitzgerald, T., & May, J. (2016). Portraying Lives: Headmistresses and Women Professors 1880s–1960s. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Foale, M. T. (1989). The Josephite Story: The Sisters of St. Joseph: Their Foundation and Early History 1866–1893. Sydney: St Joseph’s Generalate. Gleadle, K. (2013). The Imagined Communities of Women’s History: Current Debates and Emerging Themes, a Rhizomatic Approach. Women’s History Review, 22(4), 524–540.

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Goodman, J., & Harrop, S. (2000a). ‘The Peculiar Preserve of the Male Kind’: Women and the Educational Inspectorate, 1893 to the Second World War. In J.  Goodman & S.  Harrop (Eds.), Women, Educational Policy Making and Administration in England: Authoritative Women Since 1881 (pp. 137–155). London: Routledge. Goodman, J., & Harrop, S. (2000b). ‘Within Marked Boundaries’: Women and the Making of Educational Policy Since 1800. In J.  Goodman & S.  Harrop (Eds.), Women, Educational Policy Making and Administration in England: Authoritative Women Since 1881 (pp. 1–14). London: Routledge. Jones, H. (1994). In Her Own Name: A History of Women in South Australia from 1836. Adelaide: Wakefield Press. Magarey, S. (2001). Passions of the First Wave Feminists. Sydney: UNSW Press. Miller, P. (1986). Long Division: State Schooling in South Australian Society. Adelaide: Wakefield Press. Morris Matthews, Kay. (2009). Degrees of Separation? Early Women Principals in New Zealand State Schools, 1876–1926. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 41(3), 239–252. Northey, H. (1992). St Mary’s Convent Schools. In B.  Dickey (Ed.), William Shakespeare’s Adelaide (pp.  42–60). Adelaide: Association of Professional Historians. O’Donoghue, T., & Burley, S. (2008). God’s Antipodean Teaching Force: An Historical Exposition on Catholic Teaching Religious in Australia. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(1), 180–189. Oram, A. (1996). Women Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pols, R. (2005). Dating Nineteenth Century Photographs. Bury: Federation of Family History Societies (Publications) Ltd. Rousmaniere, K. (2013). The Principal’s Office: A Social History of the American School Principal. Albany: State University of New York Press. Theobald, M. (1996). Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in Nineteenth-Century Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Theobald, M. (2000). Women, Leadership and Gender Politics in the Interwar Years: The Case of Julia Flynn. History of Education, 29(1), 63–77. Weiler, K. (1998). Country School Women: Teaching in Rural California, 1850–1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weiler, K. (1999). Reflections on Writing a History of Women Teachers. In K. Weiler & S. Middleton (Eds.), Telling Women’s Lives: Narrative Inquiries in the History of Women’s Education (pp. 43–59). Buckingham: Open University Press, Buckingham. Whitehead, K. (1999). Lavinia Seabrooke, Gender and State Formation in the Late Nineteenth Century. Women’s History Review, 8(11), 7–25.

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Whitehead, K. (2003). The New Women Teachers Come Along: Transforming Teaching in the Nineteenth Century, ANZHES Monograph Series (Vol. 2). Sydney: Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society. Whitehead, K. (2009). Making a Modern Manly/Teacher’s Career: Victor Pavia, 1856–1934. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 41(1), 73–90. Whitehead, K. (2014). ‘Mrs Hillier Begs to Inform … the Public of Adelaide That She Has Opened a School’: Education in the Early Years of Settlement in South Australia. Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, 42, 111–121. Whitehead, K. (2020). Sir John and Lady Cockburn, Suffrage and Education, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, 48, 49–63.

CHAPTER 6

Shifting Spaces of Femininity: Everyday Life of Girl Guides in Hong Kong 1921–1941 Stella Meng Wang

On April 6, 1922, the Prince of Wales visited Hong Kong on his Far Eastern tour.1 The then 12-year-old Betty Steel, who was a Girl Guide, paraded for the Prince on Murry Parade Ground.2 After the parade, the local Boy Scouts and Girl Guides were invited to the Government House for luncheon where the Prince presented a life-saving medal to a Chinese Boy Scout.3 Molly Chiu (born in 1923) was a Girl Guide at Belilios Public School (a government English girls’ school for Chinese girls) and recalled, ‘every year, the Governor of Hong Kong invited the Girl Guides to the Government House and the Governor’s residence on the Peak to have fun for a day,’ and that Guiding was the main extra-curricular activity of her

 ‘Tomorrow’s Royal Visit’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, April. 5, 1922, 1.  Betty Steel. 2019. Impressions of an upbringing in 1920s Hong Kong. https://gwulo. com/node/20232/view-pages. Accessed on Nov. 6, 2019. 3  ‘Preparations to Welcome the Prince’, Hong Kong Daily Press, April. 3, 1922, 3. 1 2

S. M. Wang (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_6

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school time.4 A Former Guide at Lai Chack Girls’ School (a vernacular Chinese medium) girls’ school), Leung Yuk Jan (born in 1925) added, during her time as a Guide she had ‘to wear uniform, learn marching, knot ties and build a lookout terrace,’ and she had ‘marched in a large playground near the Ruttonjee Hospital.’5 Scouting and Guiding, as these movements grew, mobilised school children—regardless of their race, gender, and class—in public and imperial spaces in Hong Kong. For Guiding, in particular, this movement mobilised schoolgirls as active participants in public affairs. The high visibility of Guides in the imperial social and public service scene exposed the nature of the gender landscape at this historical moment: the spatial crossing of the feminine into the public sphere. This spatial crossing, in turn, reinvented the ways in which the public and imperial spaces were physically experienced and culturally imagined in the everyday lives of European and Chinese schoolgirls. This chapter considers how Girl Guiding interacted with English girls’ schools (schools for urban middle-class girls where the medium of instruction was English). These schools taught girls mostly of at least part Chinese descent. Distinct patterns emerged as a result of this interaction that resulted in a shifting landscape of gender interplay in the interwar period. This chapter shows that urban English girls’ schools diversified their curriculum to incorporate a separate branch of professional training to prepare schoolgirls for professional careers after college, such as teaching and clerical jobs. However, Guiding, on the other hand, invented ‘alternate’ performative spaces for ‘useful’ skills, particularly those that related to newly feminised nurturing roles such as nursing.6 This ‘alternate’ spatiality to perform conventional ‘feminine’ qualities of serving and compassionate care was enacted under the social service branch of Guiding.7 This 4  Molly Leung Wai Chiu. Hong Kong Memory Project: Oral History Archives, https:// www.hkmemory.hk/collections/oral_history/All_Items_OH/oha_48/records/index. html#p48150. Accessed on Nov. 6, 2019. 5  Leung Yuk Jan. Hong Kong Memory Project: Oral History Archives, https://www. hkmemor y.hk/collections/oral_histor y/All_Items_OH/oha_38/records/index. html#p74300. Accessed on Nov. 6, 2019. 6  For a discussion on the gendered history of the medical profession, see for example, Katherine Magyarody. 2016. “Odd Woman, Odd Girls: Reconsidering How Girls Can Help to Build Up the Empire: The Handbook for Girl Guides and Early Guiding Practices, 1909–1918.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 41(3): 238–262. 7  ‘Girl Guides’, The China Mail, Mar. 11, 1925, 6.

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program then reached out to females who were in rural areas and those who belonged to the working class: groups of females outside the privileged realms of the colonial ambit. The chapter argues that a key distinction emerged between English girls’ schools and Guiding as each responded differently to the public debate of women in the professional and the public realm. The schooling site—situated as part of an integrated and broader educational system— actively connected middle-class girls with higher education and professional training, thus contributing toward the emergence of the first generation of female Chinese professionals in Hong Kong. In contrast, Guiding’s social service branch brought participating schoolgirls into the public space. The alternative narratives created by Guiding emphasised the affective interior of the female gender as nurturer, rather than as custodians of professional expert knowledge that middle-class girls’ schools began to garner. Guiding thus had a ‘de-professionalising’ effect on the education of middle-class Chinese girls. In addition to the debate of girls in public life, this chapter also focuses on another site of ‘transgression’ which concerns middle-class girls in sport. In interwar Hong Kong, the female body was key site through which the social construct of sport and what was ‘appropriate’ for women was transformed. While the expanding learning and employment opportunities indicated a shifting social view of the intellectual competence of the ‘feminine mind,’8 the increasing presence of women in leisure and sports, on the other hand, illuminated a new cultural definition of the physical capability of the feminine body. In this period, the body became an important spatiality for the reconstruction of femininity where the earlier narrow focus on healthy feminine demeanour in English girls’ school was replaced by a broader physical training regime that incorporated racing and team and competitive sports.9 Guiding took this fit, resilient, and agile feminine body to a new ground in ‘showcasing’ it in imperial celebrations such as Empire Day and Jubilee Rally.10 Through these public exposures, the fit feminine body was rebranded as an imperial spectacle. 8  For a discussion on the historical view of the intellectual capability of the feminine mind, see Ruth Watts. 2013. Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History. New  York: Routledge. 9  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1932’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 13. 10  ‘Girl Guides Beat Scouts at Marching, Large Crowd Witness Very Impressive Display’, The Hong Kong Mail, May. 9, 1935, 7.

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Distinct to Hong Kong, Guiding functioned as a social space where girls from diverse social and cultural backgrounds ‘intermingled.’ While earlier members were recruited directly from urban English girls’ schools, and hence exhibited a multiracial middle-class character (illustrative of the racial and class makeup of these learning sites), the movement broadened its membership in the 1930s to include a wide spectrum of girls from rural and working-class domains, English and vernacular (where the medium of instruction was Chinese) girls’ schools, orphanages, hospitals, and sanatoria.11 This changing geography and membership structure of Guiding also reflected the movement’s cultural function to bridge new ideas and forms of femininity to the diverse spaces and communities in which European and Chinese girls resided.

Theorising Femininity This chapter historicises the feminine body as a spatial body in that it sees the social and cultural connotations of femininity associate the female body with particular sites and spaces that are deemed ‘suitable’ for the female gender. Rather than approaching femininity as an ‘object’ with a tangible essence, the chapter examines it as a sociocultural ‘sign,’ or ‘act’ that changes over time and through the body.12 This ‘sign’ is produced in the enactment and performance of gender. It is an ‘effect’ generated through ‘bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds’ that create, in Judith Butler’s words, an ‘illusion of an abiding gendered self.’13 Butler’s assertion on gender as ‘performative’ acknowledges both the mundane and subversive bodily act that inscribes gender on the surface of the body and the historical conditions that give these performances meaning.14 Seen in this light, femininity functions as the ‘stylised act’15 11  ‘Girl Guides Movement, Mrs. Southorn’s Interesting Broadcast Address Last Night’, Hong Kong Daily Press, Feb. 4, 1932, 7. 12  This approach is inspired by the work of Mary Jane Kehily. See Mary Jane Kehily. 2015. Bodies In and Out of Place: Schooling and the Production of Gender Identities Through Embodied Experience. In Handbook of Children and Youth Studies, eds. Johanna Wyn and Helen Cahill 217–229. New York: Springer. 13  Judith Butler. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 140. 14  Butler, Gender Trouble, 190. 15   Judith Butler. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre journal40 (4): 519.

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fitted to the contours of the social circumstances and practices of a time. These social circumstances also operate as the ‘historical conditions of possibility’16 that allow space for change, for alternate experiences.

The Invention of English Girls’ Schools for Urban Middle-Class Chinese Girls 1890–1921: A Background State and Voluntary Efforts English girls’ schools as a separate strand of schooling in Hong Kong emerged in the late nineteenth century in the context of rising state concern about English education for the middle-class Chinese girls in the colony. Up until the 1890s, apart from the private effort of home tutoring, Chinese girls from respectable families seeking an English or Anglo-­ Chinese education were not properly catered for by the education system, or as the Inspector of Schools E. J. Eitel suggested, ‘they practically have no school to go to.’17 This was partly owing to the fact that the sole provider of girls’ formal schooling in this period, the missions, devoted their efforts primarily to the care of destitute Chinese girls. Eitel proposed a government English girls’ school to be run on the same line as the Central School for Boys (founded in 1862).18 The proposal led to the opening of the Central School for Girls (later renamed as Belilios Public School for Chinese Girls) on March 1, 1890, that marked the systematic involvement of the colonial state in girls’ education. The curriculum at this school followed the public schools in England, subjects taught included ‘reading, arithmetic, English composition, grammar and analysis, geography, map drawing, history, and needlework.’19 By the turn of the century, in addition to missionary and state involvement (who had targeted the underprivileged and the middle-class girls in the colony), girls’ education was further textured by the growing interest 16  Butler asserts the body’s living and acting is conditioned by the infrastructural and environmental constraints. See Judith Butler. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 64–5. 17  The Hong Kong Government Gazette. Hong Kong Government, Mar. 30, 1889, 245. 18  ‘Proposal for Girls’ School, 1889’, Hong Kong Sessional Papers. Hong Kong Government, no. 18/89, 275–9. 19  ‘Report of the Government Central School for Girls for 1891’, Hong Kong Sessional Papers. Hong Kong Government, no.4/92, 135–6.

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the Chinese elites took in the education of their daughters.20 In 1901, the Chinese elites petitioned the colonial state to establish upper-class English schools for their sons and daughters, stating that the English education offered by the state was insufficient and undesirable in its ‘intermingling of students from all social classes.’21 The request to use public fund for the setting up of such exclusive institutions was rejected by the secretary of state for the colonies.22 The Chinese elites then approached the Church Missionary Society (the CMS). In collaboration with the CMS, in 1903, St Stephen’s College (for boys) was founded, and in 1906, St Stephen’s Girls’ College also came into existence.23 The Multiracial Makeup of Urban English Girls’ Schools In this period (1900s–1920s), the growing interest the Chinese merchants took in the matter of education also contributed to the increased presence of Chinese girls in grant-in-aid English girls’ schools, such as the Diocesan Girls’ School (founded by the Anglican Church in 1860 for the care of girls of mixed parentage, later had a multiracial admission),24 the French Convent (founded by Sisters of St Paul de Chartres in 1847 for European children, later had a multiracial admission),25 and the Italian Convent (founded by the Canossian Sisters of Charity in 1860, pupils being chiefly Chinese and Portuguese).26 At the Italian Convent School, for example, the Rev. Mother suggested: more and more are the Chinese becoming alive to the necessity of female education along western lines, and the marked success of Chinese girls in 20  David Pomfret. 2015. Youth and empire: Trans-colonial childhoods in British and French Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 209–243. 21  ‘A Petition for the Establishment of a High School for Chinese,’ Appendix A, in ‘Report of the Committee on Education, 1902’, Hong Kong Sessional Papers. Hong Kong Government, no. 14/ 1902, 399–408. 22  Patricia P.K. Chiu. 2017. The Making of Accomplished Women: English Education for Girls in Colonial Hong Kong, 1890s–1940s. In Meeting Place: Encounters across Cultures in Hong Kong, 1841–1984, eds. Elizabeth Sinn and Christopher Munn, 64–86. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 23  Ibid. 24  ‘Diocesan Girls’ School, Lady Caldecott Distributes Prizes’, The China Mail, Jan. 16, 1937, 4. 25  ‘French Convent School, Prize Distribution’, The China Mail, Jan. 31, 1917, 4. 26  ‘Italian Convent Prize Giving’, Hong Kong Daily Press, Feb. 28, 1933, 7.

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this school may be regarded as a very satisfactory evidence that the Italian Convent takes its place among the contributory factors towards the advancement of western education among the Chinese in Hong Kong.27

By the early 1920s, these principal English girls’ schools all had a multiracial admission. At the French Convent, for example, Betty Steel recalled during her school years, there were ‘English, French, Chinese, Portuguese, Scottish, Siamese, Parsee, Spanish, German, American, and Eurasian’ girls.28 As well, at the Diocesan Girls’ School, a former student Jean English suggested, the school: was quite multiracial, with white Russians and Germans, French, Spanish and Portuguese, Filipinos and Greeks, Parsees, Japanese and Danes and of course heaps of Chinese girls and just a smattering of English.29

At the government English girls’ school Belilios Public School, Molly Chiu also depicted its multiracial makeup: when I was in secondary school [at Belilios Public School], some of my classmates were not Chinese and some were of mixed race and could speak Cantonese fluently. All the classmates got along very well. Outside the class, everyone would chat and chase each other for fun.30

Here the multiracial makeup of the urban English girls’ schools reflected the social character of a racially diverse urban middle-class in interwar Hong Kong. The curriculum at these English girls’ schools also set them apart from the vernacular (Chinese medium) girls’ schools in its emphasis on feminine accomplishments—captured in the master of fine arts, namely ‘music, drawing, and fancy needlework.’31 This inculcation of refined femininity, as Marjorie Theobald argues, produced a form of feminine aesthetic—‘women at the piano’—where femininity became a performance  ‘Italian Convent, School Prize Day’, The China Mail, Feb. 11, 1925, 4.  Betty Steel. 2019. Betty Steel’s Diary: Impression of an up-bring in 1920s Hong Kong. https://gwulo.com/node/20284. Accessed on Nov. 6, 2019. 29  Jean English, A Vanished World: My Memories (publication for private circulation), 22–23, cited in Chiu, “The Making of Accomplished Women”. 30  Molly Leung Wai Chiu, Hong Kong Memory Project: Oral History Archives. https:// www.hkmemory.hk/collections/oral_history/All_Items_OH/oha_48/records/index. html#p48150. Accessed on Nov. 6, 2019. 31  ‘French Convent School, Distribution of Prizes’, The China Mail, Dec. 22, 1912, 7. 27 28

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that intimately connected with the cultural life of the urban middle class.32 This gendered curriculum also reflected an imperial ethic that saw ‘empire as a space in which cultured femininity was a dominant force to ensure the right class of women could be in place to domesticate and civilise the colony.’33 In its foundational years in Hong Kong, Guiding recruited members directly from these urban English girls’ schools. Rather than discarding this form of ‘refined femininity,’ Guiding rebranded and expanded these feminine accomplishments for alternate purposes such as fundraising and entertainment that legitimised Guides’ presence in a range of social service and imperial spaces.34

The Origin and Growth of Guiding in Hong Kong: The Changing Geography and Membership Structure 1921–1941 An Urban Middle-Class Phenomenon in the 1920s The Girl Guide movement—as a counterpart of the Boy Scouts—was officially started in England in 1909 by Boy Scouts’ founder and imperial war hero Robert Baden-Powell, in a landscape of fear and frustration among the middle and upper classes concerning the blurring gender ideals.35 Its initial purpose was to reinforce ‘appropriate’ gender norms and ‘reorient’ girls to be ‘efficient women citizens, good home-keepers and mothers.’36 The outbreak of the First World War opened up new spaces for Guides to perform their trained ‘character, handicraft, service for others, health and hygiene’ in the outer sphere.37 By 1915, news of Guides’ active participation in the war relief scene travelled to Hong Kong as the local newspaper The China Mail reported on the growth of the movement in the British 32  Marjorie Theobald. 1996. Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in NineteenthCentury Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 27. 33  Lisa Chilton. 2003. “A New Class of Women for The Colonies: The Imperial Colonist and the Construction of Empire.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31 (2): 36–56. 34  ‘Girl Guides, Kowloon Dance Success’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Nov. 11, 1926, 1. 35  Kristine Alexander. 2017. Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism In the 1920s and 1930s. Vancouver: UBC Press, 4. 36  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1923’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 27. 37  ‘Girl Guide’, The China Mail, Jan. 6, 1915, 5.

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Empire, praising its ‘usefulness’ in inculcating a sense of service.38 In the following year, Miss Day, a keen believer and active worker in the movement, arrived in Hong Kong from Home and started two companies similar to those in England in connection with one British school (Victoria British School, for European children only) and the Kowloon Young Women’s Christian Association (Kowloon YWCA). In an early ‘recruitment’ meeting, Miss Day corrected the public anxiety for the movement in ‘inspiring girls to be boyish and the military drill was not suitable for them,’ stating that drill was used as a means of installing discipline which was essential to proper training. Miss Day further explained the ‘comprehensive’ program Guiding offered, including: work of the home, cookery, housekeeping, first aid, home nursing, dress making, care of children, physical development, Swedish drill, the laws of health, life-saving, out-of-door games, woodcarving, camping, swimming, cycling, natural history, map reading and discipline.39

Unlike in other British colonial centres where Guiding started out and was sustained through voluntaries bodies, such as missionaries and the YWCA,40 in Hong Kong, the movement acquired an imperial leadership from 1920 when Lady Stubbs (wife of Governor Sir Reginald Stubbs) accepted the commissionership.41 In February 1921, under this imperial leadership, Guiding—as an instituted movement—officially started in Hong Kong. In the first year, its membership reached 130, with 100 Guides (girls over 11) enrolled in 5 companies, and one pack of 30 Brownies (girls under 11).42 Early members were recruited directly from the principal urban English girls’ schools, and hence exhibited a multiracial middle-class character. In 1922, at the Italian Convent (multiracial admission), for example, at the invitation of Lady Stubbs, 30 pupils availed themselves of the opportunity to join the Girl Guides under the leadership  Ibid.  ‘Girl Guides, the Movement Progressing in Hong Kong’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Feb. 17, 1916, 4. 40  See Carey A. Watt. 1999. “The Promise of ‘Character’ and the Spectre of Sedition: The Boy Scout Movement and Colonial Consternation in India, 1908–1921.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 22 (2): 37–62. 41  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1920’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 10. 42  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1921’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 8. 38 39

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of Miss Price (troop Guider).43 By 1923, there were Guide companies attached to Kowloon British School (a co-ed government school for European children), the Diocesan Girls’ School (multiracial admission), Wanchai Wesleyan Church, Garrison School (for European children), and the Italian Convent.44 In 1926, pupils at Belilios Public School expressed a wish that the school should become identified with the Girl Guide Movement, and three members of the staff together with two former pupils trained as officers with this end in view.45 In the same year, seven Chinese school teachers were admitted as Guiders.46 By January 1927, the Belilios Public School company was formed under the leadership of Mrs Cressy and Miss Lopes.47 Expanding Geography and Membership to Rural and Working-­Class Children in the 1930s Over the following decade, the expansion of schooling provision for rural and urban working-class girls in the colony48 also created opportunities for the Girl Guide Movement to penetrate into the diverse class sectors within the colonial society. Started out as a middle-class multiracial youth movement, by the 1930s, the movement broadened to include members from orphanages and vernacular (Chinese medium) girls’ schools. In 1932, for example, there were Guiding branches at Victoria Home and Orphanages (a grant-in-aid school founded in 1888 by Rev. J.B. Ost and Mrs Ost for the education of Chinese girls, whether orphans or otherwise, and for the reception and rescue of destitute girls49), St Paul’s College for Girls (a grant-in-aid school founded in 1915 by Miss Lam Woo and a group of St

 ‘Italian Convent School’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Jan. 25, 1922, 7.  ‘Our Girl Guides and Brownies, the Growth of the Local Division’, Hong Kong Daily Press, April. 16, 1923, 5. 45  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1926’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 15. 46  ‘Hong Kong Girl Guides, Welcome the Chinese Recruits’, Hong Kong Daily Press, Sep. 25, 1926, 1. 47  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1927’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 17. 48  ‘Annual Report of the Education Department of Hong Kong for 1939’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 18. 49  ‘Victoria Home and Orphanage, Presentation of Prizes’, The China Mail, Jan. 24, 1889, 3. 43 44

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Paul’s Church members to provide a Chinese education to Chinese girls50), Mui Fong School (a private vernacular school founded in 1918 by Ms Ng Mun Chee for the education of Chinese girls51), St Mary’s Convent School (a grant-in-aid school found in 1900 by the Institute of the Canossian Daughters of Charity for Portuguese girls, later had a multiracial admission52), Central British School (a co-ed government school for European children53), Belilios Public School, the Italian Convent, and the Diocesan Girls’ School.54 Recruiting Guides from this diverse range of schooling establishments became an important means for Guiding to retain its vitality. As the Chief Commissioner Mrs Southorn (wife of Governor Thomas Southorn) stated: the movement has consolidated considerably during the past year. We welcome heartily the formation of the new Chinese companies and we hope that many Chinese girls will join the training class so that they may qualify to assist in forming new companies and pack. It is only through the whole-­ hearted cooperation of Chinese women and girls that we can make the movement far-reaching in the colony. The Chinese Guide can convey to her sisters the true meaning and aims of Guiding.55

With this emphasis on multiculturalism, Guiding’s membership reached 330  in the early 1930s, among which there were ‘English, Chinese, Portuguese, American, Norwegian, German, French and Dutch Guides’.56 By the late 1930s, Guiding had penetrated into the rural hinterland of Hong Kong. In 1938, connected with the schools on Hong Kong Island, there were 5 companies (87 members) of Guides and 4 packs of Brownies (69 members). In Kowloon and the New Territories (the rural interior of 50  ‘New College Site: Extension of St. Paul’s Girls’ College’, The China Mail, June. 8, 1925, 11. 51  ‘Inauguration Special Issue of Mui Fong Girls’ Secondary School, 1934’. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong Library. 52  The school became a grant-in-aid school in 1904. School history in ‘St. Mary’s School’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Dec. 23, 1911, 5. 53  Former Kowloon British School, opened in 1902. ‘Report of the Inspector of Schools for the Year 1902’, Hong Kong Sessional Papers. Hong Kong Government, no. 4/1903, 14. 54  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the year 1932’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 9. 55  ‘The Girl Guide Movement’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Jan. 23, 1930, 7. 56  ‘Girl Guides Movement, Mrs. Southorn’s Interesting Broadcast Address Last Night’, Hong Kong Daily Press, Feb.4, 1932, 7.

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Hong Kong), the corresponding figures were 6 companies (121) of Guides and 3 packs (72) of Brownies. The major difficulty hindering the further expansion of the movement was finding more officers, and this had been a constant struggle since its beginning.57

Usefulness in the Domestic and Public Sphere: A New Spatiality for the ‘Feminine Instinct of Service’ Across the British Empire, the interwar period was one in which the culturally imagined division between the domestic and public sphere was reconfigured by the new spaces opened up for women. As Kristine Alexander shows, even in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the expanding possibilities for young women in leisure, employment, and higher education had begun to frustrate the urban middle and upper classes: they lamented that girls were drifting away from domesticity into pleasure and autonomy.58 This cultural landscape—reflecting a shifting code of femininity—presented a paradox for schools and youth organisations. In interwar Hong Kong, at the English girls’ schools, on the one hand, the middle-class accomplishment curriculum branding ‘refined femininity’ lingered on, particularly as many middle- and upper-class Chinese merchants valued this strand of learning. On the other hand, professional training and science subjects entered the learning scene, and proved to be popular. In a schooling context, the shifting gender dynamics thus resulted in an expansion—rather than replacement—of earlier focuses on arts subjects. In Guiding, instead of merely ‘holding on’ to the conventionally feminine pursuits of ‘work of the home,’ the movement devised new performative spaces for these ‘feminine’ skills. Susan H. Swetnam depicted this new spatiality Guiding invented for conventional feminine qualities as ‘a careful dance between reinforcing the socially acceptable norms of a particular time and place and inviting girls to imagine lives beyond such constraints.’59 This new spatiality—underlined by the idea of ‘serving and compassionate 57  ‘Annual Report of the Education Department of Hong Kong for 1938’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 17. 58  Alexander, Guiding Modern Girls, 5. 59  Susan H. Swetnam. 2016. “Look Wider Still: The Subversive Nature of Girl Scouting in the 1950s.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 37 (1): 90–114.

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care’ in the outer sphere—entailed the dissemination of health and hygiene knowledge to the public, and the performance of ‘affective and emotion work’ in carceral and healing spaces such as the prison where Guides taught reading and gardening to female inmates; the hospitals where Guides visited the sick and ‘cheered up the children there’; and war relief associations where Guides assisted in medical supplies.60 By devising new performative spaces for these ‘desirable’ feminine skills, Guiding offered alternative ways for schoolgirls—from diverse social and cultural backgrounds—to experience and to ‘reimagine’ the previous male-dominate public sphere. The Shifting Frame of Femininity and Schooling Practices in Hong Kong 1921–1941 In contrast with the nineteenth century where schooling practices in Hong Kong were shaped by the dominant Victorian gender ideals that associated the feminine body with the domestic scene,61 the interwar period was a phase of rapid urban transition that saw the first-generation female professionals entering the work scene.62 This new spatiality—the profession—denoted alternative forms and expressions of femininities that connected with the newly reconfigured spheres of work. This changing landscape of gender also textured schooling practices at urban girls’ schools. By the early 1920s, an integrated educational system emerged that connected schoolgirls with higher education and professional training. Hong Kong University officially admitted female students in 1921, thereafter, girls at secondary level started to sit for matriculation examination.63 With this complete academic pathway now made available to schoolgirls, government and grant-in-aid English girls’ schools—acting as the primary feeders for universities—also adapted their curriculum to prepare girls for the professional possibilities after college. In the different strands of girls’ schools, the pace of adopting curricular change, however, was uneven. In elite English girls’ schools, such as the 60  ‘Girl Guides, Annual Report of Association’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Nov. 10, 1936, 5; ‘Annual Meeting of Hong Kong Girl Guides’ Association’, Hong Kong Daily Press, Nov. 28, 1939, 5. 61  Patricia Pok-kwan Chiu. 2008. “‘A position of usefulness’: gendering history of girls’ education in colonial Hong Kong (1850s–1890s).” History of Education 37 (6): 789–805. 62  Chiu, The Making of Accomplished Women. 63  ‘St. Stephen’s Girls’ College, Speech Day’, The China Mail, Jan. 19, 1922, 8.

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Church Missionary Society sponsored St Stephen’s Girls’ College, there was a gradual decline in the training of traditional home skills, and an increasing emphasis on science subjects. The college was one of the first girls’ schools in the colony to offer physics and chemistry in addition to botany and biology as the science subjects for Chinese girls.64 In the urban English girls’ schools that catered for the middle-class clientele, in addition to home skills and the accomplishment curriculum, an emerging strand of professional training chiefly run on the lines of clerical and nursing skills entered the learning scene. At the Italian Convent, for example, as early as 1915, complementing the subjects prescribed by the syllabus, the school offered private lessons in Portuguese, Italian and French, typewriting and shorthand, as well as painting and drawing. Many pupils attended these private classes, and there was evidence that typewriting and stenography were becoming increasingly popular.65 In 1916, a course of lectures in first aid was offered under the assistance of the St John’s Ambulance Association, and the usual examination was held at the end of the course for the certificate.66 By 1919, the school reported that ‘stenography had become an attractive subject of study with the girls in the higher classes, probably because of its commercial value (when added to a practical knowledge of typewriting) after the girls left school.’67 In 1920, no less than 144 Pitman’s shorthand certificates were issued from England to scholars attending the shorthand classes.68 As well, at the French Convent (multiracial admission), shorthand was introduced as an evening class.69 At the Diocesan Girls’ School (multiracial admission), lectures in nursing and first aid were also offered. In 1922, for example, 23 girls passed the Home Nursing examination in connection with the St John’s Ambulance Association.70

64  ‘Prospectus of St Stephen’s Girls’ College and Fairlea School, 1934’, Hong Kong Public Records Office, File No., HKMS 138/1/151, 6. 65  ‘Italian Convent School, Distribution of Prizes This Afternoon’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Dec. 22, 1915, 4–5. 66  ‘Italian Convent School’, The China Mail, Dec. 22, 1916, 4. 67  ‘Shorthand, Italian Convent School Results’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Sep. 8, 1919, 4. 68  ‘Italian Convent School, Annual Report and Prize List’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Jan. 19, 1920, 4. 69  ‘French Convent School, Distribution of Prizes’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Feb. 1, 1912, 5. 70  ‘Prize Day, Diocesan Girls’ School’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Feb. 13, 1922, 3.

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Here as economic transitions opened up possibilities for females to pursue professional careers, school life at secondary level also became increasingly diversified, where girls trailed their own ambitions and paths. As Molly Chiu suggested, in the 1930s: Belilios Public School did not offer family education for women. There were more sports activities than education on family care. Students there gave priority to study as preparation for future employment. At that time, many of my classmates quitted school to get married, but there were also some who planned to get into university.71

These competing ideas on the pursued spaces of the feminine, either home or profession oriented, reflected how the interwar period was characterised by the ‘multiple and contradictory meanings’ attached to gender.72 These multiplicities shaped and influenced the way in which girls lived their daily lives and their learning outcomes. In Butler’s words, the multiplicities functioned as the historical ‘conditions of possibility’ that allowed space for change.73 The ‘change’ referred here denoted both the social and practical status of women. Regarding the former, Butler asserts, the social understanding of gender undergoes drastic changes when ‘women first enter a profession or gain certain rights, or are reconceived in legal or political discourse in significantly new ways.’74 This changing gender dynamics in society further shapes the spatial practice of the female body in everyday life. Commenting on the spatiality of the gendered body, Henri Lefebvre suggests, women’s social status is intimately connected with their symbolic and practical status; indeed, these two aspects are inseparable as far as spatiality is concerned.75 Women’s presence in previous male-dominated professions, and a range of cultural, recreational, and social spaces in interwar Hong Kong reflected a changing spatiality— textured by the factor of race and social class—of the female body. 71  Molly Leung Wai Chiu, Hong Kong Memory Project: Oral History Archives. https:// www.hkmemory.hk/collections/oral_history/All_Items_OH/oha_48/records/index. html#p48150. Accessed on Nov. 6, 2019. 72  Joan Wallach Scott. 1999. Gender and the Politics of History. New  York: Columbia University Press, 25. 73  Butler, Gender Trouble, 190. 74  Butler, “Performative acts and gender constitution,” 524. 75  Henri Lefebvre. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 248.

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Usefulness and the Affective Interior of Guides: Social Work in the Public Sphere When Guiding started in Hong Kong, it entered this dynamic gender scene where middle- and upper-class schoolgirls were exploring the possibilities of their agentic work outside the domestic sphere. The movement promised a comprehensive package of new experiences including ‘cooking classes, nature study, rambles, first aid and sick nursing lectures, folk dancing, handicraft, together with many social meetings.’76 For skill training in particular, while Guiding’s program coincided with many that were already on offer through schools, one key distinction was that instead of using these trainings to prepare girls for professional futures, Guiding invented new cultural meanings to the ‘desirable’ feminine skills and constructed an ‘affective’ dimension of ‘happiness and fun’ to ‘being useful.’77 This rebranding of conventional skills in a new narrative tactically reinvented the movement so that it appealed to both the ‘conservative’ middle-class parents who feared their daughters losing ‘femininity’ and the urban girls who were eager to try new things and have fun.78 Betty Steel recalled her excitement of learning the ‘new and unusual’ things: At this time [1921] the Girl Guide Movement began in Hong Kong. Mrs. Porri, the energetic wife of the Methodist Church parson, the Reverend Clouston Porri, organised the first troop to be raised in the colony—ours. The Porris lived on Morrison Hill and our meetings were held in their garden, or if it rained in their house. We were known as the 1st Wanchai Girl Guides. Mrs. Porri was Captain. I joined with school friends Nancy McEwen, Marjorie Hansen, Ruby Chue and Daphne Nicol among others. We learned first aid, bandaging; and to drill, to track, to signal by morse and semaphore, to tie sailors’ knots, and many other new and unusual things. We were immensely proud of our blue uniforms, and our hats, stripes, badges and

76  ‘The Girl Guide Movement in the Colony, to the editor of the ‘China Mail”, The China Mail, Nov. 23, 1926, 6. 77  ‘Empire Day in Hong Kong, Celebration by Boy Scouts and Girl Guides’, Hong Kong Daily Press, May. 25, 1932, 7. 78  ‘Girl Guides Movement, Mrs. Southorn’s Interesting Broadcast Address Last Night’, Hong Kong Daily Press, Feb. 4, 1932, 7.

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Girl Guides belts. I was leader of the Forgetmenot Patrol, a strange flower to choose in a land where there were no forgetmenots!79

Here Guiding appealed to urban girls for its promise of new experiences while simultaneously allowing space for both schoolgirls and European women to take up leadership roles. This capacity to self-­organise and lead initiatives ‘provided the girls with opportunities to get out on their own, to be independent, to develop a close friendship with their schoolmates […] and to know their city.’80 More importantly, it legitimised Guides’ presence in the public sphere and contributed toward a new cultural geography of girlhood. This new spatiality was underlined by the idea of ‘serving’ in the outer sphere. In 1922, for example, several lectures in first aid were offered for Guides at Wanchai where Dr Hickling gave a special course on ‘artificial respiration’ and ‘how to save the apparently drowned.’81 In the same year, the Wanchai Wesleyan Church Guides demonstrated the procedures of life-saving in the case of drowning in a public event.82 This dissemination of health knowledge and emergency response to a public audience reflected a wider geography where Guides’ performance of useful skills took place. By the late 1920s, Guiding’s social work extended to new spatiality including prisons and hospitals. In 1928, for example, Miss Woo, herself a Guide, in conjunction with Miss Atkins and Miss Hazelnut, had carried on prison work where they taught various forms of needlework and raffia work, reading and writing, and pot gardening to female inmates.83 One woman told Miss Hazelnut that ‘the coming of these ladies had made all the difference to their lives.’84 In the 1930s, Dr G.R. Nash, who assisted in the first aid and sick nursing course for Guides, suggested that Chinese, or Chinese-speaking Guides might visit the Chinese hospitals to cheer the 79  Betty Steel. 2019. Betty Steel’s Diary: Impression of an up-bring in 1920s Hong Kong. https://gwulo.com/node/20284. Accessed on Nov. 6, 2019. 80  Cindy Yik-yi Chu. 2004. The Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 1921–1969: In Love with the Chinese. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 45. 81  ‘Our Girl Guides and Brownies, the Growth of the Local Division,’ Hong Kong Daily Press, April. 16, 1923, 5. 82  ‘Girl Guides and Brownies, an Enjoyable Entertainment’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Dec. 1, 1922, 6. 83  ‘Girl Guides, Annual Report Shows Brownie Increase’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Nov. 15, 1928, 10. 84  ‘The Girl Guide, Hong Kong Association Report’, Hong Kong Daily Press, Nov.15, 1928, 4.

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children there by teaching them games, singing, and so on. Mrs Herklots immediately took up the matter with her company and with the cooperation of the parents of the Guides, Lieut. Miss Chan and two patrol leaders visited the Tung Wah hospital (a Chinese philanthropic hospital) every week.85 By the late 1930s, when the Pacific War broke out, the Chinese Guides worked in connection with the International Red Cross to offer assistance in hospital supplies.86 Here Guides’ performance of ‘meaningful’ work in the carceral and healing spaces had an explicit ‘affective’ dimension that reflected a gendered division of emotion work.87 The emphasis on Guides to be ‘helpful, happy, and cheering under all circumstances’88 depicted the emotional demand Guiding put on girls to inspire ‘optimism and happiness.’89 This emotion work, while drawing upon a ‘conservative’ view of femininity that associated the females with ‘feminine’ instinct of caring and serving, nonetheless mobilised girls to lead initiatives that allowed them to ‘know their city.’ This new spatiality of serving depicted the ‘constraints’ and ‘conventions’ of what was deemed culturally ‘desirable’ in the female gender functioned as the very means that sustained the performance of this ‘desirable’ femininity in ‘alternate’ spaces. As Butler asserts, ‘constraint is not necessarily that which sets a limit to performativity; constraint is, rather, that which impels and sustains performativity.’90 Just as ‘constraint’ was a social and cultural product of its time, the performance of gender conditioned upon it also varied in time and place. In addition to introducing Guides to the philanthropic scene, the social service branch of Guiding also expanded through the growth of membership. In 1932, for example, Guiding started an extension branch, which included ‘Ranger (girls over fifteen) and Guide companies and Brownie 85  ‘Girl Guides, Annual Report of Association’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Nov. 10, 1936, 5. 86  ‘Annual Meeting of Hong Kong Girl Guides’ Association’, Hong Kong Daily Press, Nov. 28, 1939, 5. 87  For a discussion on gender and emotion work, see Kristine Alexander. 2015. “Agency and emotion work.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 7 (2): 120–128. 88  ‘Our Girl Guides and Brownies, the Growth of the Local Division’, The Hong Kong Daily Press, April. 16, 1923, 5. 89  At the Maryknoll Convent School, the school’s Girl Guides regularly visited patients and crippled children at Lai Chi Kok Hospital. A Sister said these activities were specially designed to provided ‘opportunities for enjoying optimism and happiness.’ In Chu, The Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 46. 90  Judith Butler. 2011. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 60.

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packs in hospitals and sanatoria, in homes and schools for cripples, for the blind and deaf, and for mentally defective.’ Therein, the Colony Commissioner Mrs Southorn modified Guiding’s program to suit the circumstances of these children ‘who feel themselves cut off from their active normal sisters and they are taught handicrafts, if in poor circumstances, which enable them to earn money.’ Camps for visual- and hearing-impaired Guides had also been held, and letters in Braille were sent to blind girls living at home.91 As well, in 1938, a new Guide company was opened at the Taipo Rural Home.92 Here through the broadening of membership to include Chinese Guides from diverse social backgrounds in the 1930s, Guiding opened up spaces for a wider spectrum of Chinese girls to participate in social service and to perform meaningful work in the war relief scene. As Katherine Magyarody asserts, Guiding allowed girls to ‘reimagine what is possible […] when searching for lives outside existing definitions of what was possible for women.’93 In interwar Hong Kong, Guiding brought new experiences to schoolgirls of varied social and cultural backgrounds not through considerable modifications of its training programs to suit a particular sub-­ group, but rather, through the broadening of its membership. The idea was to penetrate into wider geographies of rural and working-class neighbourhoods as a means to sustain Guiding’s vitality in the colony and also to bridge new forms of girlhood to Chinese girls. This cultural function of Guiding to bridge new possibilities of femininity and girlhood to Chinese girls—urban and rural alike—was a distinct feature of the movement in Hong Kong. As Kristine Alexander shows, in interwar India and Canada, Guiding’s feminine brand of training for citizenship and social service was modified to accommodate the class and racial diversity within the movement,94 which to certain extent intensified, rather than rectified, social divisions. As well, in interwar South Africa, Tammy Proctor shows that, in Scouting and Guiding, ‘each race, each

91  ‘Girl Guides Movement, Mrs. Southorn’s Interesting Broadcast Address Last Night’, Hong Kong Daily Press, Feb. 4, 1932, 7. 92  ‘Annual Meeting of Hong Kong Girl Guides’ Association’, Hong Kong Daily Press, Nov. 28, 1939, 5. 93  Magyarody, “Odd Woman, Odd Girls.” 94  Kristine Alexander. 2009. “The Girl Guide Movement and Imperial Internationalism During the 1920s and 1930s.” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2(1): 37–63.

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class, each sex, each religion needed a program tailored to meet its needs.’95 In Hong Kong, Guiding created a new social space where girls from diverse racial and class backgrounds ‘intermingled.’ As well, through the social service branch, Guiding reinvented the ways in which the public space was experienced and culturally imagined in the everyday lives of schoolgirls.

Feminine Physique in the Sporting and Outdoor Scene Rather than inventing new forms of femininity, Guiding’s social service branch created new performative spaces for the ‘feminine’ instincts of serving and compassionate care.96 This new spatiality stretched from the domestic sphere—traditionally seen as the performative spaces to which these ‘feminine’ skills of caring were attached. In addition to inscribing new cultural meanings and new spatiality to ‘conventional’ feminine qualities, Guiding contributed toward the creation of a new feminine physique: one that associated the feminine body with the sporting and outdoor scene. As Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska shows, post–World War I, the body was a key site for the construction of femininity. A modern, actively cultivated body functioned as an important element of women’s liberation along with political emancipation, greater gender equality, and expanding employment opportunities.97 In a schooling context, however, the development of physical education and sports had an earlier origin that coincided with wider movements for imperial efficiency arguments that emanated from Edwardian Britain.98 Enacted through Guiding, the imperial mentalities of eugenics further underlined the public display of the fit feminine physique as an imperial spectacle.99

95  Tammy M Proctor. 2000. ““A Separate Path”: Scouting and Guiding in Interwar South Africa.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42(3): 605–631. 96  ‘Girl Guides’, The China Mail, Mar. 11, 1925, 6. 97  Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska. 2010. Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 98  See Watt, “The Promise of ‘Character’”. 99  For a discussion on the intersection of imperial mentalities of eugenics, femininity, and youth movements, see, for example, Marion E.P. de Ras. 2012. Body, Femininity and Nationalism: Girls in the German Youth Movement 1900–1934. New York: Routledge. For a discussion on the development of the eugenics ideas in the British world, see, in particular,

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Feminine Physique and the Sporting Scene in English Girls’ Schools 1901–1941 The female body in sport has been a historically contested phenomenon. As Patricia Vertinsky argues, of all school subjects, physical education (PE), with its central focus on the body, has been most strongly influenced by the social understanding of gender attached to each sex. Traditionally, the activities offered to girls emphasised cooperation over competition, restricted their space, reduced their speed, and constrained their bodies. Femininity was constructed by accentuating ‘sociability, health, and beauty functions that focused not on skilled or competitive performance but on womanly play and the body as a reproductive machine and sexual object.’100 Sheila Scraton, focusing on the body in physical training, also suggests sport as a gendered phenomenon where desirable femininity functioned to emphasize appearance and control, and desirable masculinity highlighted physical strength and aggression.101 In colonial Hong Kong, from the late nineteenth and well into the early twentieth century, physical education for Chinese and European girls was discussed in the state education reports through a discourse that emphasised the function of PE and sport as a site to improve the physique and carriage of the female body. At Belilios Public School, for example, the headmistress Miss Bateman suggested in 1910 that ‘classes in physical drill were started in September […] The drill seemed to do good, as an improvement in carriage was noticeable, and among the Chinese girls there were fewer rounded shoulders and narrow chests.’102 As well, at Kowloon British School (a co-ed government school for European children), ‘physical education is carried on under the best condition, the result is already apparent in the upright carriage and healthy appearance of the pupils.’103 By the 1920s, physical education at urban girls’ schools expanded these earlier focuses on healthy feminine demeanor to include competitive and Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of The History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 100  Patricia Vertinsky. 1992. “Reclaiming Space, Revisioning the Body: The Quest for Gender-Sensitive Physical Education.” Quest 44 (3): 373–396. 101  Sheila Scraton. 1992. Shaping Up to Womanhood: Gender and Girls’ Physical Education. Buckingham: Open University. 102  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1910’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 16. 103  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1921’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 14.

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team sports such as racing and ball games. This expansion of physical education affected European and Chinese girls alike, and through a broader training regime, the feminine body took on new forms associated with qualities such as resilience, agility, and cooperation emphasised in team sports.104 The performative spaces of this new bodily practice featured the outdoor, and often beyond the individual school compound. At the Italian Convent, for example, by 1921, races and outdoor games had been set up for schoolgirls in the Convent’s garden. As well, day pupils took part annually in the race at the athletic sports in Happy Valley held under St Joseph’s College Old Boys’ Association.105 At Central British school (a co-ed government school for European children) and the Diocesan Girls’ School, hockey teams were formed, inside and outside matches were frequently organised. As well, additional team sports such as netball and tennis were becoming increasingly popular at the principal girls’ schools.106 By the 1930s, sport became a highly regulated site at secondary schools where the colonial state standardised the PE curriculum.107 At girls’ schools, in particular, physical training had been modernised with different gymnastic traditions.108 In the newly built sporting spaces, including, for example, gymnasium and tennis courts, the female body was disciplined, scrutinised, and transformed into a modern ideal of the feminine. As the Inspectors of English Schools A.R.  Sutherland and A.O.  Brawn suggested in 1933, ‘Chinese girls are now very keen on modern physical training and have even adopted “shorts” for use in the gymnasium.’109 By 1938, through the intervention of the colonial state, all girls in government and grant-in-aid schools received a minimum of one hour’s physical 104  This depiction of the desired qualities of female body in sports was offered by games mistress Miss Westcott at St. Stephen’s Girls’ College in the school’s magazine, News Echo, no.8, 1936, 36–9. Hong Kong Public Records Office, File No.: HKMS 136–1-90. 105  ‘Italian Convent, Annual Report’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, 23. Feb, 1921, 2. 106  ‘Diocesan Girls, Work Reviewed at Prize Distribution’, The China Mail, Mar. 15, 1926, 2. 107  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1936’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 6. 108  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1931’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 9. 109  ‘Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1933’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 16.

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education each week. Netball was the most popular game. An interschool league had been formed, and in 1938 was won by the Belilios Public School.110 Fit Feminine Physique as an Imperial Spectacle 1921–1941 This body training regime at girls’ schools was mirrored in Guiding where drill, racing, and ball games were organised. While many of these activities exhibited a similar character as PE in a schooling context, one key distinction was that Guiding functioned as an inclusive social space where Guides from different school branches came together and performed the ‘fit feminine physique’ to an imperial or public audience. In April 1922, for example, sports and games among the four Guide companies and five Brownie packs took place at the Government House. Among those present were HRE the Governor, Major-General Sir John Fowler and Lady Fowler, the Hon. E.A. Irving (Director of Education) and Mrs Irving and the Hon. Mr Claud Severn.111 This exposure to imperial audiences increased Guides’ public visibility, and through which ‘they appeared to have lost that shyness which was so noticeable when they made their first visit to the Government House.’112 In the following years, Guides functioned as active agents in raising public awareness of healthy living and bodily fitness. In 1925, for example, a display was given by Guides and Brownies at the Helena May Institute (opened by Governor Sir Francis Henry May and wife Helena May for the care of women in 1916). The program was varied including signal drill, enrolment with color knot tying, and ambulance and stretcher drill.113 By then, the portrait of the feminine body as fit and disciplined became intimately intertwined with the broader imperial project that branded a multicultural and ‘reviving’ British Empire.114 On Armistice Day in 1926, for 110  ‘Annual Report of the Education Department of Hong Kong for 1938’, Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government, 14. 111  ‘Farewell to Lady Stubbs, Girl Guides Gathering’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, April. 20, 1922, 2. 112  ‘Our Girl Guides and Brownies, the Growth of the Local Division’, Hong Kong Daily Press, April. 16, 1923, 5. 113  ‘Girl Guide Display, Entertainment at Helena May Institute’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Mar. 9, 1925, 5. 114  Fiona Skillen showed the physical training of girls in schools and youth organizations in interwar Britain was underpinned by an imperial emphasis that connected the health of youth

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example, Guides were for the first time represented at the cenotaph, side by side with the regular forces. A unique item in the ceremony was the laying of the Guides’ wreath on the cenotaph by one Chinese and one English guide (Miss Kotewall and Mrs Remington)—‘a token of the comradeship existing between the girls of both nations.’115 This ‘inclusive’ view of the British Empire further extended to the sporting and social events Guiding organised. In 1928, for example, a tennis tournament for Guides was arranged by Miss Marybud Hancock. The players included girls from varied racial backgrounds. All officers or Guides over eighteen years of age playing for their company were handicapped.116 Furthermore, with an imperial leadership, Guides were frequent guests at the Government House and the Governor’s Residence. These imperial spaces functioned as another performative site of fitness where Guides engaged in parade, games, and racing. In 1932, for example, nearly 500 Boy Scouts and Girl Guides attended a tea party at Mountain Lodge (governor’s residence) at the invitation of the Governor Sir William Peel, who was the chief scout of Hong Kong, and Lady Peel, who was the Colony’s chief guide. The afternoon started with a parade by Scouts and Guides. After tea, ‘all troops, packs, and companies indulged in their own games.’ For many boys and girls, ‘it was the first time they had been to the Peak [European Reserved Residential District, where Mountain Lodge was situated in].’117 Here the female body in sports, games, marching, and parade, or more broadly ‘in motion,’ created, in Butler’s words, a new ‘style of the flesh.’118 The performance of these ‘styles’ generated new forms of femininity. These styles emerged at a time when the imperial imperative of eugenics desired ‘fitter’ bodies119 of European and Chinese schoolgirls. The ‘inclusiveness’ of Guiding’s activities allowed these new forms and ideals of the feminine body to be bridged to a wide spectrum of girls in the colony. For with the strength of the British empire. See Fiona Skillen. 2013. Women, Sport and Modernity in Interwar Britain. Bern: Peter Lang AG International Academic Publishers. 115  ‘Girl Guides at the Cenotaph, Armistice Day Ceremony’, Hong Kong Daily Press, Nov. 13, 1926, 1. 116  ‘Girl Guides, Presentation to Lady Stuart Taylor’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Sep. 27, 1928, 3. 117  ‘Scouts and Guides Tea Party’, The Hong Kong Telegraph, Oct. 2, 1933, 17. 118  Butler, Gender trouble, 190. 119  Phillipa Levine and Alison Bashford, ‘Introduction: Eugenics and the Modern World.’ In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 1–23.

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urban Chinese schoolgirls, in addition to the performative spaces of fitness such as Empire Day and Jubilee Rally, the outdoor pursuits Guiding encouraged also became a means for them to explore the less frequented spaces in the city. At the vernacular (Chinese medium) girls’ school Mui Fong School, for example, in March 1940, the school’s Guides went on a trip to Taikoo Reservoir where they engaged in tracking and training in outdoor skills.120

Conclusion Rather than examining Guiding as an isolated cultural phenomenon texturing the experience of girlhood, this chapter has situated the movement into schoolgirls’ everyday life. The chapter has discussed Guiding as a site in which competing ideas of the feminine opened up new possibilities for girls to take up agentic performances in the spheres of philanthropy and sport. This positioning of Guiding in the wider social institutions of youth shifted the focus from the internal functioning of the movement as it responded to class and racial imperatives to the interactions and transactions of institutional practices. For Guides in the philanthropic scene, this spatial crossing concerned females entering higher education and the spheres of professional work. In response to this, schools, as a key institution through which gender was made and remade, adjusted their curriculum and fostered the idea of usefulness of the feminine in the outer sphere. Guiding took its brand of professional training in girls’ schools to new ground, using it to inculcate an affective interior of the feminine that, in turn, constructed Guides to be ‘cheering, helpful, and prepared’ under all circumstances. The training of feminine physique through Guiding, however, offered a more intricate picture. On the one hand, the movement continued to embrace the image of cultured femininity where girls were proficient in musical and theatrical skills. While simultaneously it emphasised a fit feminine body through training Guides in drills, marching, and sports. One key distinction that separated Guiding’s physical training from that of other social institutions of youth, was that Guiding gave access to schoolgirls to the upper levels of white colonial society. And this white participation in this movement was also broadened to include girls from rural and 120  Periodical of Mui Fong Secondary School, no. 292, August 1940, 14. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong Libraries.

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working-class backgrounds. Throughout the interwar period, Guiding’s program in Hong Kong did not undergo drastic change, but the broadening of its membership brought the new ideas of the feminine to schoolgirls of many classes in Hong Kong society.

References Primary Sources

I. Hong Kong Government Reports Annual Report of the Education Department of Hong Kong for 1938, 1939. Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government. Proposal for Girls’ School. (1889). Hong Kong Sessional Papers. Hong Kong Government, no. 18/89. Report of the Committee on Education. (1902). Hong Kong Sessional Papers. Hong Kong Government, no. 14/1902. Report of the Director of Education for the Year. (1910, 1920, 1921, 1923, 1926, 1927, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1936). Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports. Hong Kong Government. Report of the Government Central School for Girls for 1891. Hong Kong Sessional Papers. Hong Kong Government, no. 4/92. Report of the Inspector of Schools for the Year 1902. Hong Kong Sessional Papers. Hong Kong Government, no. 4/1903. The Hong Kong Government Gazette. Hong Kong Government, Mar. 30, 1889.

II. Life Histories Chiu, Molly Leung Wai. Hong Kong Memory Project: Oral History Archives. https://www.hkmemor y.hk/collections/oral_histor y/All_Items_OH/ oha_48/records/index.html#p48150. Accessed 6 Nov 2019. English, Jean. A Vanished World: My Memories (Publication for Private Circulation), 22–23, cited in Chiu, “The Making of Accomplished Women”. Leung, Yuk Jan. Hong Kong Memory Project: Oral History Archives. https://www. hkmemory.hk/collections/oral_history/All_Items_OH/oha_38/records/ index.html#p74300. Accessed 6 Nov 2019. Steel, Betty. 2019. Impressions of an Upbringing in 1920s Hong Kong. https:// gwulo.com/node/20232/view-pages. Accessed 6 Nov 2019.

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III. Newspapers Hong Kong Daily Press, April. 3, 1922, April. 16, 1923, Sep. 25, 1926, Nov. 13, 1926, Nov. 15, 1928, Feb. 4, 1932, May. 25, 1932, Feb. 28, 1933, Nov. 28, 1939. The China Mail, Jan. 24, 1889, Dec. 22, 1912, Jan. 6, 1915, Dec. 22, 1916, Jan. 31, 1917, Jan. 19, 1922, Feb. 11, 1925, Mar. 11, 1925, June. 8, 1925, Mar. 15, 1926, Nov. 23, 1926, Jan. 16, 1937. The Hong Kong Mail, May. 9, 1935. The Hong Kong Telegraph, Dec. 23, 1911, Feb. 1, 1912, Dec. 22, 1915, Feb. 17, 1916, Sep. 8, 1919, Jan. 19, 1920, 23. Feb, 1921, Jan. 25, 1922, Feb. 13, 1922, April. 5, 1922, April. 20, 1922, Dec. 1, 1922, Mar. 9, 1925, Nov. 11, 1926, Sep. 27, 1928, Nov. 15, 1928, Jan. 23, 1930, Oct. 2, 1933, Nov. 10, 1936.

IV. School Publications Inauguration Special Issue of Mui Fong Girls’ Secondary School. (1934). Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong Library. Prospectus of St Stephen’s Girls’ College and Fairlea School. (1934). Hong Kong Public Records Office, File No., HKMS 138/1/151. News Echo, no. 8, 1936, 36-9. Hong Kong Public Records Office, File No.: HKMS 136-1-90. Periodical of Mui Fong Secondary School, no. 292, August 1940, 14. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong Libraries.

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Butler, J. (2011). Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2015). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chilton, L. (2003). A New Class of Women for the Colonies: The Imperial Colonist and the Construction of Empire. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31(2), 36–56. Chiu, P.  P. K. (2008). ‘A Position of Usefulness’: Gendering History of Girls’ Education in Colonial Hong Kong (1850s–1890s). History of Education, 37(6), 789–805. Chiu, P. P. K. (2017). The Making of Accomplished Women: English Education for Girls in Colonial Hong Kong, 1890s–1940s. In E. Sinn & C. Munn (Eds.), In Meeting Place: Encounters Across Cultures in Hong Kong, 1841–1984 (pp. 64–86). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Chu, Cindy Yik-yi. (2004). The Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 1921–1969: In Love with the Chinese. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. de Ras, M. E. P. (2012). Body, Femininity and Nationalism: Girls in the German Youth Movement 1900–1934. New York: Routledge. Kehily, M. J. (2015). Bodies in and out of Place: Schooling and the Production of Gender Identities Through Embodied Experience. In J.  Wyn & H.  Cahill (Eds.), Handbook of Children and Youth Studies (pp.  217–229). New  York: Springer. Lefebvre, Henri. (1991). The Production of Space (trans: Donald Nicholson-­ Smith). Oxford: Blackwell. Magyarody, K. (2016). Odd Woman, Odd Girls: Reconsidering How Girls Can Help to Build Up the Empire: The Handbook for Girl Guides and Early Guiding Practices, 1909–1918. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 41(3), 238–262. Panayotidis, E.  L., & Stortz, P. (Eds.). (2017). Women in Higher Education, 1850-1970: International Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Pomfret, D. (2015). Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Proctor, T.  M. (2000). “A Separate Path”: Scouting and Guiding in Interwar South Africa. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42(3), 605–631. Scott, J.  W. (1999). Gender and the Politics of History. New  York: Columbia University Press. Scraton, S. (1992). Shaping Up to Womanhood: Gender and Girls’ Physical Education. Buckingham: Open University. Skillen, F. (2013). Women, Sport and Modernity in Interwar Britain. Bern: Peter Lang AG International Academic Publishers. Swetnam, S. H. (2016). Look Wider Still: The Subversive Nature of Girl Scouting in the 1950s. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 37(1), 90–114.

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Theobald, M. (1996). Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in Nineteenth-Century Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Vertinsky, P. (1992). Reclaiming Space, Revisioning the Body: The Quest for Gender-Sensitive Physical Education. Quest, 44(3), 373–396. Watt, C. A. (1999). The Promise of ‘Character’ and the Spectre of Sedition: The Boy Scout Movement and Colonial Consternation in India, 1908–1921. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 22(2), 37–62. Watts, R. (2013). Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History. New  York: Routledge. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, I. (2010). Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 7

‘I turned into the boorish, stiff, unpleasant teenager… That was what he expected, and that was what I immediately therefore became’: Negotiating the ‘Risk’ of Femininity in Teenage Girls’ Reading in 1960s’ Britain Stephanie Spencer

Introduction Popular fiction as a source for historians of girlhood and youth provides an opportunity to explore the role that leisure reading plays in girls’ informal education. Fiction gives the readers full rein to imagine themselves at the centre of stories that promote, or critique, existing constructions of femininity. We cannot know the effect that stories had on the readers’ constructions of self, but the popularity of publications in the 1960s, aimed specifically at the teenage market, suggests that there was something in the fiction that struck a chord of familiarity, or reflected complex issues that confronted adolescent girls. In recent work on teenage fiction that spanned S. Spencer (*) University of Winchester, Winchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_7

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two continents and 50 years, we acknowledged the danger of producing what Giulia Clavi has described as a ‘thin description of timeless gender universals’,1 but identifying the problem, using such a broad brush also served to highlight the tenacity that gender expectations, inflected by class, held over young girls as they negotiated their entry into adulthood in the first part of the twentieth century.2 This chapter narrows the analysis to a single decade and identifies how constructions of femininity during the 1960s shifted according to perceived life stages, while at the same time being underpinned by an assumption of an unchanging essentialist notion of what it was to be female. It discusses the informal education provided by a range of stories as young readers encountered representations of the older women they might become. The chapter examines three examples of popular fiction written for British girls aged between 12 and 19: the monthly glossy magazine, Honey, aimed at the top end of the teen market; the well-established Chalet School series by Elinor Brent-Dyer that served the 12–16-year-old audience; and the popular weekly comic, Diana, targeting the 12–14 age group.3 The process of growing up involved shifting demands in the performance of femininity from youth to old age. Older women, including recently married sisters and friends, were not always shown as desirable role models. This was despite the apparent enthusiasm with which the younger girls may have anticipated the increased independence that came with each birthday or the older teen readers’ aspirations to romance and marriage. Representations of older women were usually only presented as ‘good’ characters to the readers if they retained visible signs of youth in either behaviour or appearance, suggesting that the shift in the performance of femininity from one life stage to the next was a complex and risky entanglement of outwardly constructed expectations and an unchanging essential self. Life stages of ‘young’, ‘middle-aged’, and ‘old’ appeared clearly defined concepts with impermeable boundaries. This complicates the relationship between an autonomous sense of self across a woman’s life and the 1  Giulia Calvi. 2010. Global Trends: Gender studies in Europe and the US. European History Quarterly 40: 641–855, 652. 2  Nancy G.  Rosoff and Stephanie Spencer. 2019. British and American School Stories, 1910–1960: Fiction, femininity and friendship. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 3  Diana retailed at 6d, the equivalent of around 46p in 2020. Honey a monthly magazine 2 shillings, now £1.84. http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/ Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html

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challenges presented by external expectations that mark the performance of femininity by physical, social and cultural life changes. The heroines of the stories were usually presented as the same age as their target readership; the fictional characters might have exhibited more independence of action but demonstrated similar concerns over the day-to-day business of growing ‘up’, but significantly not growing ‘old’. The chapter offers an analysis of the way that the teen fictions presented older women to their readers in a decade that saw the rapid rise of youth culture and recognition of the economic significance of the young unattached adolescent.4 While being ‘Young and Get Ahead’, the Honey strapline, was presented as fun and exciting, life beyond marriage and the early twenties, verged on dullness and a rapid descent into middle age. The younger the audience, the greater the diversity of older role models on offer, although women who remained physically attractive were more likely to be on the winning side than the embittered crones who thwart the younger heroines’ aspirations.5 The following discussion begins by considering how fiction might be brought together with theoretical approaches to understanding the formation of life stages. It considers how Mike Hepworth’s symbolic interactionist analysis of aging can be identified in the fictions that address the subtle shifts of femininity across the life stage collectively understood as ‘teenage’.6 Examining older women’s invisibility in the stories leads to a conclusion that while girls may have been prepared both formally, and informally, for the swift changes required in their performance of femininity between the ages of 12 and 18, the post-marriage hinterland remained a rather bleak monolithic prospect. For the historian of education these ephemeral sources offer insight into the shifting and layered nature of femininity at specific moments in time. Individual women transgressed those life-stage boundaries at some risk to the respect owed to them by wider society. Diana Fuss’s analysis of the relationship between essentialist and constructed understandings of the performance of femininity questions that binary and highlights the ‘risk’ that recognition of female essentialism presents as an individual conforms to changing expectations 4  See Mark Abrams. 1959. The Teenage Consumer. London: Press Exchange; Jeanette King. 2013. Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The invisible woman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 5  For example, Julie Against the Dragon. Diana, September 1966. 6   Mike Hepworth. 2000. Stories of Aging (Rethinking Aging). Buckingham: Open University.

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of the performance of femininity as they reach maturity. The second part of the chapter examines a representative selection of 1960s teen fiction in the light of the previous discussion.

Stories, Stages, and Theories of Ageing Fictions offer constructions of femininity that go beyond temporal and spatial boundaries as the division between fiction and reality blurs in the reader’s imagination. The role that fiction plays as an educative tool has been well documented by children’s authors such as W.E.  Johns, who wrote the Worrals and Biggles stories, He was quite clear that fiction enabled him to teach ‘under camouflage’.7 In children’s literature, the tension between assumptions of an essential child who becomes the focus for fictions targeted at specific age groups and the child as a product of its environment has been highlighted by David Rudd.8 The popularity of the school story suggests that there was an underlying appeal in stories of girls of a similar age and their construction of identity. As Rudd concludes, it is impossible to ‘relegate the child to a discursive effect.’9 He asserts that ‘there is no question of the social and economic reality’ of children’s literature and its place in our understanding of the history of childhood, and in this case, girlhood.10 Jonathan Rose highlights the relationship between the history of reading and the history of education, noting that treating the reader as a ‘passive victim of mass culture or capitalism or discourses of patriarchy’ fails to recognise the interactive nature of the reading process.11 Fictions also allowed the reader insight into perspectives of women of all ages. Rudd emphasises that the process of fiction is not top down and that the readers, with their own subject position constructed from ‘peers, books playground folklore, the media’, will decide for themselves how to read a text and what they learn from it. The advantage of fiction is that everyone knows that it is not ‘true’. However, the emotions and the 7  Geoffrey Trease. 1964. Tales Out of School: A survey of children’s fiction. London: Heinemann, 80–81. 8  David Rudd. 2004. Theorising and theories: The conditions and possibility of children’s literature. In International Companion Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature, volume 1, ed. Peter Hunt, 29–43. London: Routledge. 9  Ibid., 33. 10  Ibid., 34. 11  Jonathan Rose. 2007. The History of Education as the History of Reading. History of Education, 36:4–5, 595–605, 602.

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scenarios that play out may be close enough to readers’ experience for them to engage with the ideas and learn from the actions of the heroines. Gill Frith argues that school stories are (and were) read at a time when girls negotiate the contradictory messages around growing up: ‘In its re-­ assemblage of lived experience, girls’ fiction also re-assembles the ideologies which inform those experiences, offering the possibility of a positive female identity not bound by the material or the possible.’12 Sociological research into ageing that tends to focus on the shift from middle to old age can also offer analytical insights into the emergent importance of ‘being young’ in the 1960s. In Tamara Hareven’s exploration of life stages, she argues that the boundaries between childhood and adolescence and between adolescence and adulthood ‘became more clearly demarcated over the twentieth century’.13 She also identifies how a new life stage (e.g. the teenager) emerged: First, individuals become aware of the specific characteristics of a given life stage as a distinct condition amongst certain social classes or groups. This discovery is then made public and popularised on a societal level. Professionals and reformers define and formulate the unique conditions of such a stage of life, and then it is publicised in the popular culture.14

The identification of youth as the epitome of the ‘swinging sixties’ was reflected in popular fiction. This is not to assert that teenagers engaged uncritically with their fictional counterparts but that the appetite for fiction that offered an imaginative glance into the possibilities of a new life stage would have played a part in shifting the frame of idealised femininity

12  Gill Frith. 1985. ‘The time of your life’: The meaning of the school story. In Language, Gender and Childhood, eds. Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin, and Valerie Walkerdine, 113–137. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 133. 13  Tamara K. Hareven. 1995. Changing images of aging and the social construction of the life course. In Images of Aging: Cultural representations of later life, eds Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, 119–134. London & New York: Routledge, 123. See also Jon Savage. 2007. Teenage: The creation of youth, 1875–1945. London: Chatto and Windus. Savage identifies the emergence of the teenager as a discrete consumer group in and immediately after World War 2. 14  Tamara K. Hareven. Changing images of aging and the social construction of the life course, 121.

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from the mature sophistication of ideal 1950s woman to the go ahead young free 1960s ‘girl-about-town’.15 Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick observed the difficulty of understanding the perspective of a life stage that is not the one that, as individuals, we currently inhabit. They suggest that literary and cultural forms provide one way ‘to get a sense of the meaning of old age’.16 They argue that as the body ages, it is ‘continuously being inscribed and reinscribed with cultural meanings’.17 The invisibility of the older individual in society has recently generated significant insights into the role that culture plays in prescribing how older bodies should present themselves to the external world, despite the oft-repeated assertion by older people that they ‘feel the same’ as they did when young. Tamara Hareven coined the phrase ‘social age’ in her attempts to reconcile how individuals felt, with how they were perceived by those around them.18 Fiction allows the author to present both the internal world of the individual and the way that others see them and recognise the inherent tension for the construction of self. Mike Hepworth’s study of how ageing is presented in fiction has resonance with how we might approach the presentation of younger life stages in the 1960s literature. He states that ‘my main aim in writing this book is to encourage you as readers to explore fiction as an imaginative resource for understanding variations in the meaning of the experience of aging in society’.19 In a decade when ‘youth’ ended with marriage, a young readership had little time to take up the opportunities presented by a new teenage identity and the constantly shifting ‘complex and potentially open-ended process of interaction between body, self and society’.20 Hepworth’s symbolic interactionist approach analyses the importance of fiction in explorations of constructions of age. He argues that the imagination is key to an individual’s creation of self and that imagination is 15  For a discussion of oral histories of women growing up into the 1960s and their observations that despite awareness of sweeping changes and the ‘swinging sixties’ their reality had been very different. Stephanie Spencer. 2005. Gender Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 16  Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick. 1995. Introduction. Images of Aging: cultural representations of later life, 2. 17  Ibid., 23. 18  Hareven, Changing images of aging and the social construction of the life course, 121. 19  Mike Hepworth. 2000. Stories of Aging (Rethinking Aging). Buckingham: Open University, 1. 20  Ibid.

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stimulated thorough reading fiction that is, at one and the same time, a private and a social act.21 His approach argues that: An awareness of personal self hood depends on the human ability to imagine the perspective of the other: to put ourselves, in other words, into other people’s shoes. The self is not seen as something that we are born with but as emerging out of interaction with other human beings and continually shaped by interaction with other people throughout the entire life course.22

Cultural symbols as presented in ‘books and magazines are not only collections of words with shared meanings but are material articles for sustaining social relationships’.23 However, if the symbols and fictional characters available are themselves limited, as in some of the older teen fiction discussed below, the possibility for recognising or appreciating the possibilities for the performance of femininity in later life stages is reduced. There was a risk that the agentic self was overwhelmed by the expectation that the only positive frame of femininity in the 1960s was young, heterosexual, unattached and independent. If popular magazines were to be believed, young women had little left to look forward to once the goal of marriage had been attained, before any physical signs of ageing appeared. Research on aging and identity discussed above tends to overlook the gendered nature of attitudes to aging. Susan Sontag, however, remarked on the centrality of the body for being a woman. The strength of expectations to maintain a youthful appearance led to the ‘double standard of aging’ whereby an individual’s femininity was compromised by outward signs of physical change.24

Negotiating the Frames of Femininity By imagining themselves into the text readers effectively negotiated an identity that drew on both fictional representation and their experience of everyday life. The act of negotiation incorporates both individual agency and the existence of externally imposed barriers. If the most desirable form of femininity during the 1960s was presented within a limited timeframe  Ibid., 5.  Ibid., 6. 23  Ibid., 13. 24  Susan Sontag. 1978. The double standard of aging. https://archive.org/stream/pdfyY6o4iGliJNpAyGcb/double-satandard.aging_djvu.txt. Accessed 15 February 2020. 21 22

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of the potentially independent years between 16 and 20, then there was also a teleological impetus to the performance of femininity that reached its peak around the age of 20, diminishing thereafter. Such an interpretation assumed that a negotiation must have an end point, a finish and a completion, but the project of identity formation could not end at the age of 20 or the physical waning of youth. A more detailed investigation of the meaning and representation of femininity in later years, as presented to a younger audience, demonstrates the subtlety with which the possibilities for anything other than marriage were whittled away during the teenage years. Neither were the political and social contextual temporal boundaries of the 1960s fixed. The long 1950s and the long 1970s were not self-­ contained but the notion of the ‘sixties’ imposes some limitations for an analysis of how femininity shifted, or was shifted, when ‘the permissive moment’ reduced censorship, changed popular culture, embraced a more child-centred form of education and, at the end of the decade, saw the age of majority move from 21 to 18. This was the terrain to be negotiated in terms of the utility of the term ‘femininity’ as one generation of young women clashed with the expectations of their mothers and those in authority. Liz Heron observed: ‘if we are to acquire genuine insights into the versions of femininity we now inhabit, we also need to look at the specific features of our childhood.’25 In the 1960s generational difference was striking. The childhood that impacted on post-war babies who grew to be teenagers in the 1960s, was significantly different from that of their siblings just ten years older who grew up in the shadow of war. This was different again from their mothers’ experience of youth in the 1920s and 1930s of an economic depression, and at a time when young women claimed more independence through the flapper vote, shortened their skirts and took up smoking.26 In short, women of different ages in the same decade were allowed, or even expected, to perform their femininity in different ways; the 1960s marked the beginning of a time when teenagers could challenge old ideas, stop perming their hair or entering marriage and motherhood when barely out of their teens. They lived alongside 25  Liz Heron. 1985. Truth Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties. London: Virago, 2. 26  See Penny Tinkler. 2006. Smoke Signals: Women, smoking and visual culture in Britain. Oxford: Berg.

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women in their thirties who had taken on such early responsibilities in the late 1950s, had young children and were maybe on the brink of divorce or even widowhood. Women in their forties who had focused on domesticity found opportunities to return to work and reclaim their identity beyond wife and mother.27 Each of these experienced the 1960s differently and drew on expectations of femininity learned in childhood that were also quantifiably different. If the nature of femininity in even one decade is defined differently for different generations, this begs the question of how an individual is educated into her next life stage as age and circumstances move her from one category of ‘woman’ to the next. Before a discussion of the way these life stages were presented in fiction, the chapter now briefly discusses the extent to which the concept of femininity has been contested across time. The nature of femininity has been contested since Simone de Beauvoir asserted that one is not made but becomes woman.28 Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity continued the debate that explored the borderlines between what individuals do through some innate essence based on the physical body, and how they are programmed to behave by the society in which they mature.29 This highlighted the significance of gender alongside factors of social class, race and ethnicity in identity formation. Complicating historically situated constructed notions of gender are the proponents of innate sex differences that were not dependent upon time, but on an Aristotelian female essentialism that rested on women’s inborn ability to care and nurture. The debate endlessly polarised essentialist and constructed definitions of femininity that demanded allegiance to one side or the other. Diana Fuss offers a way out of this quagmire. Fuss argues that notions of essentialism ‘a female essence outside the boundaries of the social’ stubbornly underpin some of the protestations of those who see femininity as constructed by society, whether through formal or informal educational channels.30 Constructionism is, she argues, in effect a more sophisticated form of essentialism; the two are deeply entangled. It is in the ‘productive 27  Carol Dyhouse. 2013. Girl Trouble: Panic and progress in the history of young women. London: Zed books. 28  Simone de Beauvoir. 2015 (1949). London: Vintage Classics. 29  Judith Butler. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge; 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge. 30  Diana Fuss. 1989. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, nature, difference. New  York and London: Routledge.

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tension’ where these two approaches meet that allows both for the recognition of the physicality of being female that defines girls’ lives, and the almost impenetrable demands that different societies construct for young women as to how they should behave. This leaves us with two variables to examine alongside a self that clings to a continuity of self; changes that are dictated by the demands of wider society, and the equally dramatic physical changes that may not impact upon how an individual sees themselves but does impact on how society sees them. Fuss argues that ‘ “Experience” emerges as the essential truth of the individual subject, and personal “identity” metamorphoses into knowledge. Who we are becomes what we know’.31 This chapter suggests that ‘what we know’ of aging was, for a teenage audience in the 1960s, as likely to come from reading popular fiction as it was from the classroom. A character in the Honey story ‘West End Walkabout’ observed that her mother ‘reads the same books as I do and knows how to behave in emotional situations.’32 Honey As noted above, the representations of older women in 1960s popular teenage fiction suggests that there was a wider availability of positive representations of older women the further away the teen readership were from negotiating their own entry into adulthood. As they reached their late teens, stories published in Honey presented a more clearly defined binary between the apotheosis of femininity that was young, attractive, heterosexual and independent, and a dull, invisible older age that began as soon as marriage was accomplished. Throughout the 1960s each edition of the monthly magazine Honey contained two stories: a long-running serial and a short complete story. Both overwhelmingly focused on heterosexual love as their topic. The culmination of the aspirations towards finding ‘true love’ was marriage. Yet surprisingly, there were few stories that included a young married character that a readership might desire to emulate. A serial by Anne Weale ‘If This Is Love’ in 1963 presented two negative views of older women as Sylvia, the young 19-year-old model, negotiated her way to adulthood. The reader first met her living with her aunt and uncle, helping to run a commercial hotel in Starmouth. The link between youth and age was  Ibid., 113.  Willa Vaughan. West End Walkabouot. Honey. November 1963, 58.

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clearly spelled out: ‘Twenty years ago her aunt had been as pretty as Sylvia. But now she was a plump, faded matron, too heavily made up and fussily dressed.’33 Sylvia escaped to London, to enter the world of modelling. However, the alternative to fussy middle age was also daunting. Later in the series, once Sylvia was well established in the glamorous world of modelling, a warning was served up to the reader when an older model entered the story. Mrs Fensham had married, but for money not love, to a millionaire who was ‘a short gross man with a shiny bald head … he wasn’t only old, he was repulsive’.34 While unlike Sylvia’s aunt, the older woman ‘looked at first young and beautiful’, the description continued, ‘And then one saw that, while her face was taut and unlined, her eyes were old. There was something grotesque and repellent about her old, old eyes in the smooth mask of youth. She must have had a facelift, but nothing could rejuvenate her eyes, or the thin claw like hands.’35 Eventually an accident disfigured Sylvia and ended her career, but not before marriage to a handsome young man was on the horizon. In a later story two middle-aged women ‘Mrs Wordsworth and Mrs Grant holding empty cocktail glasses like idle dreams, their dimple dappled arms gushing from sleeveless dresses of dreadful prints’ were described on the periphery of a party, observers, not full participants in the gathering.36 While marriage and motherhood might be presented to the readers as a goal, the representation of mothers in terms of their teenage daughters was complex, suggesting that the editors commissioned or accepted stories that reminded young readers that wisdom might be a small compensation for lost youth. In ‘The Letter’ by Jean Graham, the heroine first established that ‘until this year, I used to think none of the other girls’ mothers could hold a candle’ to her own mother. ‘She tried so hard to be all broad-minded and modern that it stuck out a mile.’37 Implicitly other mothers were less au fait with the changing world. The plot of the story revolved around the narrator’s gradual realisation that her new boyfriend was not the right man for her. The reader was encouraged to take the mother’s view of the relationship and in so doing, the tenacity of traditional views of sex that underpinned the apparent modernity of the  Anne Weale. If This Is Love. Honey, February 1963, 56.  Anne Weale. If This Is Love. Honey, May 1963, 53. 35  Anne Weale. If This Is Love. Honey, June 1963, 75. 36  Katinka Loeser. Messy and Windy. Honey, June 1969, 56. 37  Jean Graham. The Letter. Honey, January 1962, 6. 33 34

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magazine were apparent: ‘I said I liked him to kiss me, but I didn’t think he should sort of, well kiss quite the way he did—not unless we were really engaged or something. He just snorted and said I’d better run back to my mother’s apron strings where I belonged.’38 The twist of the story was that the narrator jumped to the conclusion that her mother had written to the problem page of a magazine when she read the agony aunt’s response to a similar problem: ‘the letter was bad but the reply was worse. It just said hundreds of girls go through this phase, be patient and tolerant. Don’t whatever you do take any steps that may force her hand. Play for time and, before you dare hope, your daughter’s good sense will come to her aid.’ The narrator ruefully observed: ‘The trouble was the magazine was right.’39 The figure of the mother emphasised the gap between generations and the dominance of youth as the most attractive, if headstrong, representation of femininity. The threat of divorce, widowhood and death were concepts that undermined the stability of ‘happily ever after’ and the discomfort that came with old age. In 1960 in ‘The Alchemy of Love’, the heroine was about to leave university, leading to a crunch point in her relationship with Jim. When he proposed she declared that she could not love anyone. Her emotional problems were put down to her parents’ separation when she was ten years old. But despite this, her mother still applied pressure to her flirtatious single daughter: ‘Margot knew that her mother was concerned about her and wanted to see her safely settled down.’40 A similar ­background of a broken home in the serial ‘Reach me a Gentian’ that ran in 1962, featured a narrator whose parents divorced through incompatibility: Mother is like a pearl. Silver blond hair, pastel pink cheeks, her clothes, her voice, her whole personality done in cool soft tones. I don’t wonder she left him. Left is too strong a word. Mother withdrew from him driven out by an overpowering man and his overpowering pictures.41

The author was detached from her mother’s quiet ordered life that reflected earlier representations of the 1950s housewife, even though she stated that she would like to be like her: ‘The flat where mother now lives  Ibid., 8.  Ibid. 40  Harriet Pratt. The Alchemy of Love. Honey, August 1960, 67. 41  A.A. Murray. Reach me a Gentian. Honey, April 1962, 14. 38 39

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is immaculate … Then quite suddenly I couldn’t stand it. All that pale orderliness began to get on my nerves’. It was left to the mother to articulate the generational difference: ‘My mother relinquished me as charmingly as I had been received “you are too young for life in a flat my darling Teresa”.’42 Death also claimed some of the fictional mothers, and life for the heroines was more difficult as a result. The moral of a rare story with a young man as a central character was that the young man’s life had descended into turmoil because of his mother’s death. This emphasised both the fragility of femininity ‘Mum had been small and dainty with eyes that grew bigger and bigger the nearer she came to death’ and the accompanying responsibility for the well-being of the next generation. Without his mother’s guidance the young man ended up homeless and jobless.43 In the short story ‘Romance in Winter’ by Nansi Pugh, the authorial voice, ‘Sandra’, was 18 years old and lived with her widowed mother. Sandra was excited by the cold weather, full of life and expectations. Her mother she described as having a ‘fragile charm’, ‘any kind of strain brought on a headache.’44 The contrast between the young and middle-­ aged woman was strong. Yet in this story, unusually, it was the romance between the mother and the ‘handsome and patronising’ advertising executive Andrew that took centre stage. This story clearly illustrated the tension between the thoughtful inner self and the performance that was expected of the age group. It demonstrated the symbolic interactionism that offers insights into age that Mike Hepworth identifies. Sandra told the reader ‘I turned into the boorish, stiff, unpleasant teenager … That was what he expected and that was what I immediately therefore became.’45 Sandra clearly resented her mother finding a new love, possibly because it should have been the young Sandra, not her mother who was romantically entangled. However, by the end of the story, Sandra was reconciled to the situation because a young love interest appeared and asked Sandra out on the day of her mother’s marriage. The story ended with Sandra saying to the young man ‘I have to go, but I’m free this evening. Yes, this evening I shall be free.’46 The story highlighted the responsibility that daughters might have for their widowed mothers but also allowed the fragile widow  Ibid.  Jane Wallace. Justice. Honey, April 1970, 51. 44  Nansi Pugh. Romance in Winter. Honey, December 1965, 29. 45  Ibid. 46  Ibid., 39. 42 43

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the freedom to embark on a new stage, which in turn freed her daughter to move to her next expected stage of young womanhood unencumbered by responsibility. Responsibility was also the theme of the serial. ‘Enough rope’ by Andrea Newman which ran for six months in 1965, giving the author time to develop the characters.47Again love, or rather sex, was the pivot for the story. There were strong moral lessons which did not reflect what we might have expected from a trend-setting magazine. Valerie, the central character, struggled to assert agency or autonomy, as circumstances dictated appropriate gendered behaviour that led to a loveless marriage when her inner self that yearned to be free of such constraints. The ties of motherhood were presented first as those constructed by society and later as an innate essence of femininity. Valerie had given up her dream of university when she became pregnant. She married Malcolm whose love for her intensified as hers for him waned. The story was told from Valerie’s perspective and the detailed description of giving birth, effectively the marker of the transition from one life stage to another, sat at odds with romance fiction: ‘I tried to think how I really felt: tired, sore, stretched, aching and decided the word that came nearest was mangled. All that pushing and shoving and sweating so that they could finally drag out a thing like a skinned rabbit with a huge and deformed head.’ As much as Valerie tried to remain detached, she stated: ‘All the same, I felt odd: I had produced that: I had a daughter. It was absurd.’48 Gradually she recognised the impossibility of leaving the baby with her in-laws as planned, and although she grew fonder of her daughter, she still planned escape: ‘I want someone to believe in me, to tell me it will all work out, that we shall escape. I know I can do it alone, this is a temporary state and, as such, I must bear it. ‘ “One day” I say to Vicky “We’re going away, you and I” and she looks at me and laughs.’49 The story was bleak, especially for a Christmas edition of the magazine. Valerie wanted to reject the change in her life stage that the physical ‘mangling’ of childbirth represented, yet the natural instincts of motherhood were presented as an end to youth and freedom.

 Andrea Newman. Enough Rope. Honey, December 1965.  Ibid., 79. 49  Ibid., 96. 47 48

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The Chalet School Series 1960s readers of the Chalet School series of novels, set in an upper-class girls’ boarding school, might well have graduated to Honey by the 1970s. In terms of a recognised life stage they came under the catch all ‘teenager’ but most still had several years of school ahead of them before thinking of jobs, flats and independence. The ‘Chalet Club’ for readers was in existence for the decade under discussion from 1959 to 1969. The newsletters that came as part of membership of the Club included notes of competition winners indicating their ages which ran up to 16.50 Elinor Brent-Dyer created a school that the reader could imagine herself part of, with detailed explanations of daily routines, lessons, sickness and health. As with much fiction the author offered her readers an insight into all sides of a dilemma: that of the teachers, the older girls in the sixth form and the youngest girls who were frequently up to mischief. Accordingly, while the readers might have identified with the naughty middle-school antics, they were given a clear insight into the working and performance of older femininity. When Brent-Dyer began the series, she had recent experience of teaching the secondary age group. As the success of the stories enabled her to focus full time on her writing, the characters and activities of the school unsurprisingly appeared dated in contrast to the stories in Honey.51 However, the ongoing popularity of the Chalet School indicates that the stories appealed to the 1960s reader as much as to their mothers in the 1920s.52 This does suggest that there were aspects of femininity across all life stages that drew on an unchanging essentialism and were recognisable to a young audience. In the Chalet stories such characteristics were portrayed primarily as ones of caring for others, and duty to those less fortunate, so that aspects of social class underpinned the performance of upper and middle-class femininity represented in the characters of teachers and pupils. The novels also emphasised female friendship and solidarity amongst the age groups. Girls resolved their own problems and the young teachers in turn supported each other.

50  Chalet Club Newsletters, ed. Clarissa Cridland. 2016. Radstock: Girls Gone By. By 1969 the Club had a membership of 4000 members indicating a wide readership. 51  Helen McClelland. 1986. Behind the Chalet School. Bognor Regis: Anchor. 52  In 1964 Elinor Brent-Dyer was interviewed on the television Tonight programme and invited to the Children’s Book Exhibition at Olympia where she ‘signed autographs until my hand was aching’. Helen McClelland, Behind the Chalet School, 169.

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The series started in 1925 with the last story published posthumously in 1970. Readers watched their favourite characters grow up and retain their schoolgirl characteristics into adulthood. Unlike the fictions in Honey, mothers were largely absent from the day-to-day adventures of girls between 12 and 18 in the school environment. The 50th anniversary of the series offered the author the opportunity to use a plot for a novel that brought back some of the original pupils. The Chalet School Reunion demonstrated how characteristics formed in youth might be seen to have developed but not disappeared with maturity.53 In the Reunion, Joey Bettany Maynard, who featured in the first book as a sickly 12-year-old, had become a married woman with 11 children. The first pupil cohort that included Joey were in their middle thirties and mostly married with children. Joey lived close to the school in Switzerland, and discussed aging with her friend Grizel, who was on her way back to England after a failed love affair in New Zealand. They discussed the physical effects of aging, Grizel had lost weight while Joey had gained ten pounds. Joey attributed this to middle-aged spread, Grizel laughed her out of it by saying ‘In your middle thirties? Talk sense, Joey. In any case no-one would think you’d reached more than middle twenties. You may have lost your scragginess but you’ve retained your youth.’ Jo responded that she and Jack had ‘a family which persists in regarding us as more or less their own contemporaries. We haven’t much chance of aging.’54 Despite her married status, Joey presented to the younger readers a more positive role model than the married women in the Honey fiction. Prefects and younger girls accepted Joey’s advice as she had the wisdom that came with motherhood and at the same time, her youthful appearance and approach to life rendered her approachable. In addition to the performance of femininity that aligned with the readers’ age, and the inevitable rapid move into marriage and motherhood, the Chalet stories offered a range of options that teaching offered for women as they progressed from one life stage to the next. Kathie Ferrars was introduced into the series as she started her first job at the school. The New Mistress at the Chalet School offered insights into the problems that a very young teacher faced as she moved to the next, more responsible iteration of femininity. Her aunt reprimanded her when she received confirmation of her new job: ‘Oh Kathie! Be your age—do! … You aren’t a baby now.  Elinor Brent-Dyer. 2015 (fp 1963). The Chalet School Reunion. Radstock: Girls Gone By.  Ibid., 57.

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You must learn to stand on your own two feet.’55 Kathie did learn to fend for herself, and after a false start, where her attempt to discipline girls not much younger than herself was met with disobedience, she became a long-­ serving member of the Chalet community. While Kathie Ferrars remained single (and youthful) and committed to a teaching career, Simone LeCoutier provided an example to the reader of the dual role of career and marriage identified at the end of the 1950s by Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein.56 Simone attended the Sorbonne after leaving the Chalet School and then returned to teach maths. Once married she remained in touch with her school friends and from a sense of loyalty and duty, returned when her daughter was small, and the school needed her services.57 Miss Wilson and Miss Annersley, the two heads who took over after the founder of the school, Madge Maynard, retired to focus on motherhood, aged imperceptibly through the series but retained an understanding of the younger generation that was implicit but often misunderstood, in the magazine fiction discussed above. As with Honey, the Chalet stories presented older women as wiser, but unlike the fiction for the older age group, the younger characters did not challenge, or resent, the generational hierarchy. In the final story Prefects of the Chalet School, published in 1970, Joey’s triplets were on the point of leaving school themselves, and although the intended readership might have been younger, Brent-Dyer emphasised the change of status that school leaving at 18 offered. The prefects were much the same age as the heroines in the Honey stories, yet their femininity was enacted within a boarding school, rather than an independent context. When it appeared however that there was a possible romance brewing between Len Maynard and young Dr Entwhistle, gossip between two younger girls was met with derision: ‘Nonsense!’ replied Ruey Richardson ‘Len is far too busy for anything like that. What’s more if the Head caught you talking in that way, she’d have something to say about it’. Zita observed that as Len was nearly 18, ‘that is not too young’. The conversation was shut down by Ruey who simply stated ‘Well, we don’t talk of 55  Elinor Brent-Dyer. 1957. The New Mistress at the Chalet School. Edinburgh & London: W. & R. Chambers, 10. 56  Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein. 1956. Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 57  Elinor Brent-Dyer. 1951. Gay from China at the Chalet School. London and Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers.

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things like that’.58 Brent-Dyer, from the author’s eye view, explained that the gossip spread, especially among the Continental girls who were ‘accustomed to early betrothals.’ In this example the essentialist nature of young love is entangled with constructed notions of marriage according to national custom. Joey herself was married at 21 and was a mother within a year. Brent-Dyer noted her performance of motherhood in contrast to continental custom: ‘Joey had always tended to keep her girls young, and neither she nor Jack Maynard wanted any of their three to be thinking of marriage at the present.’59 But by the end of the book, romance had blossomed and Reg is injured in one of many Chalet School floods. Len talked of her relationship to her mother who asked, ‘Is it the real thing, Len?’ Len nodded but said, ‘I don’t want to be married yet. I want my college course. A degree is a useful sort of thing to have, particularly in these days. Once I’ve got that if Reg still wants me then I’m his’.60 Once Len went to visit the ailing Reg, Brent-Dyer’s writing took on a tone more redolent of Honey: ‘Reg pulled her to him and Len sank down beside the bed. His arms went round her, then he held her from him and looked at her searchingly. “I take it we’re engaged. Like it, darling?” Len chuckled “So much I can’t think why I didn’t know it before. It all seems absolutely natural and very nice! Yes, of course we are engaged, only it must be kept dark until term ends’.61 Len’s frame of femininity shifted from schoolgirl to fiancée but, despite her parents’ agreement to the marriage, the shift could not take place within the school environment. Joey quickly attained the wisdom of maturity as well as giving birth to 11 children, but ‘In spite of all this she contrived to remain very much of a girl both in character and looks and she always insisted that even if she lived to be a great grandmother, she would be a Chalet Girl to the end’.62 Diana Honey was the first glossy teen magazine for girls in the top teen age bracket. The Chalet School series led the school story market which 58  Elinor Brent-Dyer. 1994. fp W & R Chambers, 1970. Prefects of the Chalet School. London: Armada, 72. 59  Ibid. 60  Ibid., 198. 61  Ibid. 62  Ibid., 36.

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peaked in the interwar period when Elinor Brent-Dyer, Angela Brazil and Dorita Fairlie Bruce dominated the bookshelves. Although the genre continued in popularity from the 1950s, it was only the Chalet School series that published new stories and kept a loyal contemporary readership, ensuring its position as the market leader into the 1960s.63 The comics for younger teenage girls flourished in the 1950s and 1960s before declining in the 1970s. Diana was the third girls’ comic to be launched by D.C.  Thomson who already published Bunty and Judy. By the 1970s Diana’s merger with Jackie changed the target age group to one more interested in romance than adventures, kittens and ponies.64 Angela McRobbie’s analysis of Jackie and its role as a driver of ideologies of girlhood explains its efficacy in defining clearly delimited categories of age. McRobbie argued that Jackie offered ‘a system of messages, a signifying system and a bearer of a certain ideology, an ideology of teenage femininity’.65 She points to the conservatism of the D.C. Thomson house and the significance of the use of girls’ popular names for the titles of the publications, Jackie ‘is both the magazine and the ideal girl.’66 McRobbie also noted the nuanced relationship discussed earlier in this chapter between essential and constructed notions of femininity, claiming that ‘this ideological work is also grounded on certain natural, even biological categories.’67 McRobbie highlights the significant role that the magazines played in defining and shaping ‘the women’s world, spanning every stage from early childhood to old age’.68 If, as McRobbie claimed, that romance-­ focused Jackie was aimed at a 10–14 age group, then the very different girls’ world presented in Diana might presume a younger age group, although the age of the heroines of the stories and the girls featured on the front covers would suggest that it too focused on the 10–14 age group. Although the magazines were consumed by girls in their leisure time and 63  Attempts to bring the Dimsie stories by Dorita Fairlie Bruce up to date in the 1950s were unsuccessful and although Angela Brazil’s stories continued to be read, as with Dimsie, they remained set in an earlier period. The Chalet stories continued to be set in the present. 64  See http://girlscomicsofyesterday.com/2014/08/mergers-d-c-thomson/ for a detailed explanation of the young teen comic market in the mid twentieth century. (accessed 2nd February 2020). 65  Angela McRobbie. 1991. Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 81. 66  Ibid., 82. 67  Ibid., 83. 68  Ibid.

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were not therefore part of a formal educational syllabus, there would have been some surveillance on this group in how they spent their pocket money. Readers’ mothers were probably the same age as Joey in the Chalet Reunion and were aware of the limitations that a conventional performance of femininity imposed all too soon. They may have welcomed a publication that offered a frame of young teenage femininity that foregrounded freedom, adventure, and fun within a girls’ world across time. There was little romance in the 1960s’ Diana fiction. Most stories were presented in the form of a cartoon picture strip that inevitably curtailed anything other than superficial characterisation. Whereas the authors of Honey and Chalet School fiction seem to have deliberately set out to present ‘real’ individuals to the reader, the Diana stories tended towards fantasy that kept the reader’s immediate world separate. The heroines were brave, adventurous and frequently outwitted adult criminals, but they were often helped by some form of ‘special’ power, or located in another time or place, that would not have been accessible by the readers. This plot device suggests that girls were essentially brave and resourceful and that they were only prevented by circumstances from emulating the characters in the stories. In just one year, 1966, readers were introduced to a wide range of girl-centred adventures. ‘Starr of Wonderland’, a long-running serial, had rocket boots that propelled her at speed through the air to rescue a kidnapped child. ‘Two Ton Ingrid’ who because of her exposure to some specific X-rays had to wear glasses to stop her weighing two tons was able, when necessary, to put her weight to her advantage. Another story was set in Ancient Greece and explained how two young girls escaped with their pet goat in the Minoan earthquake. This gave readers an insight into mythology and placed girls at the centre of the story. ‘Nina Never Give In’ told of a young girl in Southern Italy who defeated bandits helped by her disguise as a masked raider.69 Unlike Honey the stories in Diana portrayed a wider range of older women, some of whom were themselves strong and/or sympathetic representations of femininity. ‘School with Super Ma’am’ featured Miss Sarah Brown, headmistress of a school on the top of a skyscraper in a South American republic in the throes of a revolution. Both the president and the rebel leader had been pupils at Miss Brown’s school; her niece and the 69  In contrast to the stories which ran in weekly instalments over two or three months, the front colour covers usually used young models pursuing traditional activities: skating, ballet, feeding ponies, cuddling kittens.

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other pupils managed to capture both men and take them to the school. Miss Brown, by bringing in children who had been injured in the fighting, shamed the two men into giving up their fight. The figure of middle-­aged Miss Brown was drawn as slim, tall, strong, with short hair and glasses. Although she outwitted the two much physically stronger men and demonstrated that brain outweighed brawn, she was also not averse to giving her ex-pupils a blow across their arms. She also thumped the table vigorously, a very male action when making her point. Her uniform of safari jacket and knickerbockers was exchanged for a skirt suit as she waved her niece off to England and reverted to the conventional appearance of a headmistress once the adventure was over.70 The Chalet pupils were ambivalent about leaving school and embarking on either university or matrimony but the young women looking for love who provided the role models in Honey were portrayed in Diana as either weak or foolish. Another of the Diana heroines was Winnie who acted as the eyes for her father, a professional golfer, who was playing in golf tournaments to raise money for an operation. In one story he was required to partner the young wife of the captain of the golf club. The wife was drawn as young, blonde, and pretty, in contrast to Winnie who was quite plain and brunette. The young woman talked too much and was more interested in her ‘new golf shoes and such a pretty shirt’ than being able to play the game. In the end Winnie told her that her father was deaf so she should not try to make conversation, and all was well.71 The story sent a clear message to the reader that taking life and duty seriously was preferable to acting out the more superficial stereotype of femininity. A series that ran in late 1966 did take matrimony as its theme, but from the perspective of the younger sister (aka the reader): ‘Young Jill Pearson’s sister, Leonie, has lost interest in life since her fiancé was killed in a car crash. She sits around the house all day, listless and moping.’72 The girls’ mother, a widow, worked to make ends meet, leaving Jill to help around the house, do the shopping, and walk the dog. Jill tried everything to lift her sister’s depression. When she returned to school after the holidays, Jill made the decision to act as matchmaker between Leonie and the new, hapless, English teacher, Mr Hunt. When it became apparent that Mr Hunt’s ‘bachelor housekeeping isn’t too good’, Jill decided ‘he obviously  School with Super Ma’am. Diana, December 1966.  Winnie with the Winning Eyes. Diana, July 1966. 72  Jill Wants a Wedding. Diana, November 1966, 6. 70 71

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needs a wife to look after him.’ The weekly serial ran for two months until eventually it ended with the wedding scene and the comment from Jill that ‘they all expect the couple to live happily ever after.’73 The clear framing of femininity between three generations in this story is striking. The older woman, a widow, but given the age of her children probably only in her early forties, was careworn, tired and burdened with her maternal responsibility. Jill, the young teenager was by contrast, carefree, having fun with her schoolfriends, playing tricks on the teachers. However, she still displayed an essential caring nature taking on the housework and looking after her older sister. Leonie’s femininity was characterised by her relationship to heterosexual romance. She realised that Mr Hunt was her ‘true love’ when he saved her from a charging bull. She declared ‘Oh Jim, you were wonderful. That was the bravest thing I ever saw!’74 The prospect of changing expectations of femininity as presented to the reader of ‘Jill wants a wedding’, suggested that the best time to be female was that of the reader’s age. Jill’s natural energy, exuberance and initiative were underpinned by motives of caring and duty. It was, however, yet to encounter imposed constructions of femininity that were complicated in the next few years when boys and men became part of the girls’ world.

Conclusion A revised reading of teen fiction in the 1960s, which focuses on their representation of older women, demonstrates the risk of framing femininity within any one decade as a seamless trajectory from girlhood to old age where the individual retains a continuous sense of self, in harmony with the constructions of femininity imposed by the world around her. The stories discussed present three clearly marked stages of young, mid, and older teenage femininity that co-existed in a decade of social and cultural change. Honey, the Chalet School series, and Diana created heroines that were the same age as their targeted readership. Older women were almost invisible but a close reading of the three publications highlights the diminishing range of older role models as the reader herself moved closer to maturity. The portrayal of older women for the teenage reader reflects Jeanette King’s assertion that in the 1960s ‘to be old for women in particular, was to be invisible, since the visual codes of the fashionable in all  Diana, 20th January 1967, 7.  Ibid.

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areas of cultural life were predicated on the young, immature body.’75 The effect of the emphasis on youth was to present aging as a spectre to be feared and for every effort to be made to distinguish and distance young women from the older generation’s values and expectations. In doing so, the performance of young femininity itself became a performance of difference and challenge to codes of behaviour expected by the older generation, further increasing the gulf between them. This in turn rendered any essentialist notions of a continuous self problematic and increased the difficulty of the transition between one stage and the next. The youngest readers were offered a myriad of examples of resourceful young girls across time and space (quite literally in Diana’s ‘The School Under the Rocket’) who encountered a range of both positive and negative representations of older women. The central character of the Chalet stories, Joey Bettany, matured physically but remained youthful, thanks to the influence of her young family. With the exception of Joey, Brent-Dyer offered positive but distinct representations of older women teachers, not all of whom married, but all of whom appeared to live fulfilled lives, respected, not challenged by the pupils. The generation gap was most pronounced in the Honey fiction, read by a generation who grew to be teenagers in the 1950s and who were therefore only beginning to break free of the restrictions placed on young women in an earlier decade. Once the goal of marriage was achieved, the Honey stories offered a negative view of older femininity where the wisdom that came with motherhood, only slightly compensated for the physical disappearance of youth. As readers aged, positive images of old age disappeared. This warned them to make the most of the new freedoms offered by contemporary social change before the inevitable demands of essential femininity aligned to duty and responsibility and the accompanying physical deterioration, rendered them almost invisible.

References Primary Sources Brent-Dye, E. (1951). Gay from China at the Chalet School. London/Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers. Brent-Dyer, E. (1957). The New Mistress at the Chalet School. Edinburgh/London: W. and R. Chambers. 75  Jeanette King. Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The invisible woman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 58.

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Brent-Dyer, E. (1994). fp W & R Chambers, 1970. Prefects of the Chalet School. London: Armada. Brent-Dyer, E. (2015. fp 1963). The Chalet School Reunion. Radstock: Girls Gone By. Cridland, C. ed. Chalet Club Newsletters. 2016. Radstock: Girls Gone By. Diana ‘For Girls who love good stores’ published by D.C. Thomson, 1963–1976. Honey Magazine. Fleetway publications (closed by IPC magazines in 1986), 1960–1970.

Secondary Sources Abrams, M. (1959). The Teenage Consumer. London: Press Exchange. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge. Calvi, G. (2010). Global Trends: Gender Studies in Europe and the US. European History Quarterly, 40, 641–855. de Beauvoir, S. 2015 (first published 1949). London: Vintage Classics. Dyhouse, C. (2013). Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women. London: Zed books. Frith, G. (1985). ‘The Time of Your Life’: The Meaning of the School Story. In C.  Steedman, C.  Urwin, & V.  Walkerdine (Eds.), Language, Gender and Childhood (pp. 113–137). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fuss, D. (1989). Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, Difference. New York/ London: Routledge. Hareven, T. K. (1995). Changing Images of Aging and the Social Construction of the Life Course. In M.  Featherstone & A.  Wernick (Eds.), Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life (pp.  119–134). London/New York: Routledge. Hepworth, M. (2000). Stories of Aging (Rethinking Aging). Buckingham: Open University. Heron, L. (1985). Truth Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties. London: Virago. King, J. (2013). Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible Woman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McClelland, H. (1986). Behind the Chalet School. Bognor Regis: Anchor. McRobbie, A. (1991). Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Myrdal, A., & Klein, V. (1956). Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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Rose, J. (2007). The History of Education as the History of Reading. History of Education, 36,4–5, 595–605. Rosoff, N.  G., & Spencer, S. (2019). British and American School Stories, 1910–1960: Fiction, Femininity and Friendship. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rudd, D. (2004). Theorising and Theories: The Conditions and Possibility of Children’s Literature. In P. Hunt (Ed.), International Companion Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature (Vol. 1, pp. 29–43). London: Routledge. Savage, J. (2007). Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875–1945. London: Chatto and Windus. Sontag, S. (1978). The Double Standard of Aging. https://archive.org/stream/ pdfy-Y6o4iGliJNpAyGcb/double-satandard.aging_djvu.txt Spencer, S. (2005). Gender Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tinkler, P. (2006). Smoke Signals: Women, Smoking and Visual Culture in Britain. Oxford: Berg. Trease, G. (1964). Tales Out of School: A Survey of Children’s Fiction (pp. 80–81). London: Heinemann.

CHAPTER 8

‘A Great Builder’: Female Enterprise, Architectural Ambition and the Construction of Convents Deirdre Raftery and Deirdre Bennett

Introduction It is not uncommon to find annotated photographs of nuns1 in convent archives; a common annotation on the verso of images of nineteenth-­ century nuns who were founders of convents is ‘A Great Builder’, or ‘The Builder’.2 These women challenged contemporaneous conceptions of 1  In the nineteenth-century Catholic Church, a woman in a religious ‘order’, who took solemn vows, was known as a ‘nun’, while women in ‘congregations’ took simple vows and were called ‘Sister’. Throughout the article, the terms nun, woman religious, and Sister are used interchangeably, as is common in scholarship. See Mary Peckham Magray. 1998. The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 138. 2  For example, in the Marist Archives Rome, a photograph of Mother Margaret Mary Cummins SM (1858–1942) has the words ‘A great builder’ pencilled on the image verso; similarly, an image of Mother John Byrne in the Presentation Archives, is captioned ‘The

D. Raftery (*) • D. Bennett School of Education, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_8

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femininity: though they dressed in the habit and veil, and modelled themselves on Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, they were astute business women who engaged with some of the premier architects of the day, including Augustus Welby Pugin for example, who was hired to work on several convents in Ireland and England.3 This chapter considers how women religious negotiated the distinctly male spaces of architectural design and engineering.4 The chapter analyses some of the ways in which nineteenth-century nuns—archetypes of Catholic Church femininity— adopted the distinctly ‘male’ role of builder, thus shifting the frame on femininity in a way that allowed them to occupy a male and a female space, simultaneously. The chapter includes a study of the case of one foundress whose work had a global impact: Honora (Nano) Nagle. As foundress of the Presentation Sisters, Nagle operated in the restricted, gendered and hierarchical space of eighteenth-century Irish Catholicism, yet she secured building sites, planned, financed and co-ordinated the construction of two convent houses in less than a decade, and harboured ambitions of expansion. She set in motion a train of events which would see convents of Presentation Sisters established worldwide. Described by their male contemporaries as ‘pious ladies who drink tea and say their beads’, the women who worked alongside Nagle, and those who succeeded her, lived feminine lives as religious women and practical lives as teachers; however, they also challenged the social construct of gender by engaging in the design and construction of convents, chapels and schools, and by developing networks of support to finance such building programmes. Images, drawings and documents in convent archives reveal how women religious went about the business of expanding their network of Builder’, and depicts the nun holding architectural plans, in a clear attempt to profile this nun as a leader in the construction of nineteenth-century Presentation convents in Australia. See (Fig. 8.1). 3  Augustus Welby Pugin (1812–1852) was one of England’s leading architects of the Victorian period, who is best known for his promotion of the Gothic Revival style, evident in many of his designs for churches and convents in England and Ireland. 4  Research on the history of women in architecture and building includes Carla Blank and Tania Martin. 2014. Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel: Two Pioneer Women Architects of Nineteenth Century North America. USA: Baraka Books, which includes a study of Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart; see also Jo Burr Margadant. 2000. The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France. USA: University of California Press.

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convent schools in Ireland, India, Australia and North America. Throughout the nineteenth century, nuns educated themselves on the details of convent construction, and also became fully involved in the building of convent schools. For example, Irish-born Mother John Byrne pioneered the building and expansion of Presentation convent schools in Australia. An image survives which depicts Mother John holding in her hands the plans for one of her Australian convent schools (see Fig. 8.1). Mother John was recognised for her intrepid approach to funding, designing and building, and she was known in her Australian community as ‘The Builder’.5 Such archival sources have prompted us to use this chapter to examine some of the ways in which nuns became involved in the male-­ dominated world of building and design. Though these women had no formal training in engineering or architecture, they were interested in every stage of convent construction. Like many trained women architects and designers, nuns who were involved in building convents are missing from history. Recent scholarship has recovered some of the history of lay women’s contribution to the built environment, and to an area of work that is widely recognised as ‘masculine’.6 However, research is needed that extends this kind of enquiry to women religious. This chapter attempts to widen our understanding of how nuns participated in the design and building of convents in the nineteenth century. While the focus of the chapter is mainly on Irish-born nuns, these women worked around the globe. As will be seen, many of them ‘exported’ ideas about convent school design to many parts of the world, requiring architects to reproduce features of the Irish convents from which they had originated. 5  Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney and Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck. 2019. Nano Nagle: The Life and the Legacy. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 190–192. 6  See Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze and Carol Henderson (eds). 1996. Architecture and Feminism. New York: Princeton Architectural Press; Francesca Hughes (ed.). 1996. The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice. Boston: MIT Press; Joel Sanders. 1996. STUD: Architectures of Masculinity. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press; Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes Weisman (eds.). 1996. The Sex of Architecture. New York: Abrams; Julie Willis. 1998. ‘Invisible contributions: the problem of history and women architects’, Architectural Theory Review, 3:2. 57–68; Hilde Heynen and Gulsum Baydar. 2005. Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture. London: Routledge; Despina Stratigakos. 2016. Where are the Women Architects? New York: Princeton University Press.

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Fig. 8.1  Mother John Byrne PBVM, Australia (By kind permission of the Presentation Archives, George’s Hill, Dublin, Ireland)

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Nuns and the ‘Female Space’ of the Convent The 1990s saw a proliferation of publications on gender and architecture, which argued that ‘both the profession and discipline of architecture are constructed as male, masculine and heterosexual.’7 Scholars were particularly influenced by the theoretical perspectives of Diana Agrest, who argued that ‘the male sexing of architecture is … materialized.’8 Other scholars who contributed to architectural theorisation and gender, have drawn on feminist perspectives in their arguments that the construction of the ‘city’, and the ‘home’, are gendered inscriptions of binaries such as masculine/feminine, public/private, outside/inside, and active/passive.9 However, Gilchrist, in a ground-breaking study entitled Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women, challenged the ‘negative characterization of space’ found in the work of feminist theorists including Luce Irigaray.10 While Irigaray saw ‘female’ spaces, such as the private domain of the household, as limiting for women, Gilchrist argues that spaces in nunneries were ordered and codified. She does not see nunneries as ‘passive’ gendered spaces that are ‘prohibitive’ for nuns: rather she argues that a ‘much more subtle categorization of cloister space can be constructed, through which individual and group identities were forged.’11 We argue that archival sources suggest that the nineteenth-century convent was equally a place in which female identities were forged, and part of that process included that nuns were active and agentic in the process of convent-building. They defined the use and purpose of the female space of the convent. As architectural historian Tracy Collins has argued, ‘nunneries were not deviant to a male standard—nunneries were different, having different purposes from male religious houses’.12 Our research on nineteenth-century convents argues that, far from being passive users of convents that were designed and constructed by men, women religious 7  Durham Crout. 2000. Review in Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 17:3, 260. 8  Ibid. 9  Ibid., 261. 10  See Roberta Gilchrist. 1997. Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women. London: Routledge, 150. 11  Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture, 152. 12  Tracy Collins. 2019. ‘Space and place: archaeologies of female monasticism in later medieval Ireland’. In Victoria Blud, Diane Heath, and Eintat Klafter (eds). Gender in Medieval Places, Spaces and Thresholds. London: School of Advanced Study, University of London, 42.

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were central to their convent projects, in a way that challenged contemporary constructions of femininity. Though they have not been recognised as ‘builders’, nuns were the financers, designers and builders of many convents. We recognise that the women religious discussed in this chapter were not architects, and they had no professional training in draughtsmanship or design. Nonetheless, even though the design and construction of convents was the professional domain of male architects, only nuns had first-­ hand knowledge of how the spatial and material contexts of the convent impacted on every part of their daily lives. Additionally, nineteenth-­century convents were the sites of reciprocal relationships between nuns and the people who lived around them. Convents were important not just because they provided education and the benefaction of prayer, but because they became entwined in community life, local employment, and trade.13 Part of that engagement with local communities included the hire of bricklayers, plasterers, carpenters, roofers and painters. As account books and convent Annals indicate, oversight of the labour of these men often fell to nuns. Further, as we will indicate, women religious who were also wealthy heiresses—such as Nano Nagle and Catherine McAuley—were well positioned to make demands of the architects that they hired, and they were very involved in convent design.

Convent Expansion in the Nineteenth Century Between the mid-eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced a major increase in the number of women entering religious orders and the number of convents in operation.14 The Reformation during the sixteenth century, and anti-Catholic legislation enacted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had placed many 13  For discussions of ways in which convents became entwined in community life by providing employment, see Deirdre Raftery. 2015. ‘Teaching Sisters and transnational networks: recruitment and education expansion in the long nineteenth century’, History of Education, 44:6, 727. 14  Irish census figures record an increase in the number of nuns, from 120 at the beginning of the nineteenth century to over 8000 by 1900. See Tony Fahey. 1987. ‘Nuns in the Catholic Church in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century’ in M. Cullen (ed.). Girls Don’t do Honours. Irish Women in Education in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Dublin: WEB Press, 7–30.

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restrictions on the lives of practising Catholics.15 Among other things, convents and monasteries had been suppressed so that by 1750 only four religious orders of nuns existed. These were orders who had arrived in Ireland during the first half of the seventeenth century and who were operating out of twelve houses in total.16 By the late eighteenth century, however, most penal laws had been repealed and, while still debarred from sitting in parliament or holding any of the more important offices in the state, Catholics could now run schools, join the professions and vote in parliamentary elections. The drive towards full Catholic emancipation had begun and it was eventually granted in 1829. The late eighteenth century, therefore, marked the beginning of a Catholic revival which was accompanied by a period of profound change in terms of social, cultural and religious practices.17 Part of this rapidly changing social landscape was that an unprecedented number of Irish women established and entered convents, and they continued to do so in increasing numbers throughout the nineteenth century. Catriona Clear and Mary Peckham Magray have noted the predominantly middle-class, well-educated backgrounds of the women who became nuns, and who sought to participate in meaningful labour while living spiritual lives. The religious orders they formed played an important and fundamental role in the reshaping of Irish Catholicism during the nineteenth century.18 The four religious orders that existed in 1750 had increased to six by 1800. A community of French Ursulines had been introduced in Cork in 1771 by Nano Nagle, who quickly followed up, in 1775, with the 15  Maureen Wall. 2001. ‘The Age of the Penal Laws’, in T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin (eds) The Course of Irish History. Cork: Mercier Press, revised edition, 176–189; Richard Bourke. 2015. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke. Princeton, NJ and Woodstock, Oxon: Princeton University Press. 16  The convents in 1750 comprised two houses of Poor Clare Sisters, four houses of Dominicans nuns, four Carmelite communities and two Augustinian communities. See Catriona Clear. 1987. Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan; Mary Peckham Magray. 1998. The Transforming Power of the Nuns. Women, Religion and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 17  Nigel Yates. 2006. The Religious Condition of Ireland, 1770–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Sean J.  Connolly. 1982. Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan; J. H. Whyte. 2001. ‘The Age of Daniel O’Connell, 1800–47’ in T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin (eds), The Course of Irish History. Cork: Mercier Press, revised edition, 204–216. 18  Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland; Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns.

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establishment of a new religious congregation, the Sisters of Charitable Instruction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, later renamed the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (PBVM). This was the first post-­ penal Irish congregation established in Ireland and marked the starting point of a conventual movement which saw the establishment of several new Irish orders during the following decades, all with a modern, socially active mission.19 The Presentation Sisters experienced a period of expansion before the turn of the century; between 1775 and 1800, five new Presentation convents were established, bringing their total to six located in various parts of the country.20 There followed a period of rapid expansion between 1807 and 1840 when thirty-three new convents of the Presentation Sisters were established in just thirty-four years.21 By the last quarter of the century, they had established forty-six more convents in Ireland, and a further twenty-one convents abroad.22 19  New Irish congregations established during the first half of the nineteenth-century included the Brigidine Sisters, established in 1807 by Right Rev. Daniel Delaney, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin; the Sisters of Charity, founded in 1815 by Mary Aikenhead; the Loreto Sisters (the Irish branch of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary), established in 1820 by Frances Ball; and the Sisters of Mercy, established in 1831 by Catherine McAuley. 20  South Presentation Convent Cork (1775), Presentation Convent Killarney (1793), Presentation Convent George’s Hill, Dublin (1794), Presentation Convent Waterford (1798), North Presentation Convent Cork (1799), Presentation Convent Kilkenny (1800). 21  Presentation Convent Richmond, Dublin (1807), Presentation Convent Tralee (1809), Presentation Convent Dungarvan (1809), Presentation Convent Carlow (1811), Presentation Convent Drogheda (1813), Presentation Convent Carrick-on-Suir (1813), Presentation Convent Clonmel (1813), Presentation Convent Galway (1815), Presentation Convent Rahan (1817), Presentation Convent Thurles (1817), Presentation Convent Doneraile (1818), Presentation Convent Wexford (1818), Presentation Convent Maryborough (1824), Presentation Convent Maynooth (1824), Presentation Convent Mullingar (1825), Presentation Convent Kildare (1829), Presentation Convent Castlecomer (1829), Presentation Convent Bandon (1829), Presentation Convent Enniscorthy (1829), Presentation Convent Dingle (1829), Presentation Convent Mooncoin (1830), Presentation Convent Cashel (1830), Presentation Convent Youghal (1834), Presentation Convent Midleton (1834), Presentation Convent Tuam (1835), Presentation Convent Lismore (1836), Presentation Convent Limerick (1836), Presentation Convent Milltown (1838), Presentation Convent Bagenalstown (1838), Presentation Convent Fermoy (1838), Presentation Convent Clane (1839), Presentation Convent Millstreet (1840), Presentation Convent Cahirciveen (1840). 22  For a full conspectus of all foundations made in Ireland and abroad up to the year 1873, see ‘Conspectus’ in William Hutch. 1875. Nano Nagle; Her Life, her Labours and their Fruits. Dublin: McGlashan & Gill; Presentation Foundation Chart, in T.  J. Walsh. 1959. Nano Nagle and the Presentation Sisters. Dublin: Gill and Son Ltd.

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The Presentations founded their first overseas convent in 1833, when they sent a group from Galway to Newfoundland, at the request of Bishop Fleming.23 In 1842 they sent nuns to India, to commence what would become a significant mission to educate the daughters of Irish-born members of the British Army, and to run orphanages and free schools for Indian and Anglo-Indian children.24 The nineteenth century also saw Presentation nuns leaving Ireland to found convents in California, the Dakotas, and New York; they also went to Australia and New Zealand.25 Wherever there were large communities of Catholic immigrants, especially Irish immigrants, the Presentations were welcomed by Bishops, to provide free schooling. Another Irish congregation, the Sisters of Mercy (SM), became established in Ireland from 1831, building convents across the country.26 The Sisters of Mercy also expanded their mission in education outside Ireland, by sending nuns to establish convents in Newfoundland in 1842, Australia (1846), New Zealand (1850), and America (1851), where they also played a significant role in the education of Catholic immigrant communities. By the twentieth century, the Irish Sisters of Mercy would have become the largest order of Sisters in the history of the Catholic Church. In addition to these two large indigenous congregations of women religious, nineteenth-century Ireland also had other religious orders of women. The Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM) was established in Ireland in 1821, when Irishwoman Mother Teresa Ball left the Bar Convent in York to make the first IBVM foundation overseas: Loreto Abbey, at Rathfarnham in Dublin. Loreto Abbey would soon send out nuns to make foundations in India (1841), Mauritius (1845), Gibraltar (1845), Canada (1847), Spain (1851), and Australia (1875). Even as Irishwomen were leaving their country to make foundations around the globe, other congregations came into Ireland from France, to build convents and provide education to the rising middle classes, and to the upper ranks of Catholic society. For example, the Religious of the Sacred Heart (RSCJ) came to Ireland from France in 1842 and established several  For an account of the start of this foundation, see Raftery et al., Nano Nagle, 60–64.  Ibid., 181–182. 25  Ibid., 185–193, passim. 26  The first Convent of the Sisters of Mercy was founded at Baggott Street, Dublin, in 1831. There followed convents in Tullamore (1836), Charleville (1836), Carlow (1837), Cork (1837), Limerick (1838), Bermondsey, London (1839), Galway (1840), Birr (1840), and Birmingham (1841), and branch houses of the Dublin community in Kingstown (1835) and Booterstown (1838). 23 24

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convents and schools. Their founder, Madeleine Sophie Barat, had written in 1800 that she wished to ‘build houses all over the world.’27 It is precisely this impetus to ‘build’ that drove many nuns to challenge norms by developing traditionally ‘male’ skills so that they could oversee the work of the architects, builders and tradesmen in their employ, as they continued to expand a vast Catholic ‘empire’ of schools and colleges. The expansion of female religious communities that occurred throughout the nineteenth century could not have happened without the support of bishops and priests. Nor could it have occurred without a substantial financial input. Maria Luddy has outlined how convents received funding from a variety of sources and that the contributions from lay women and men were of enormous benefit to religious congregations.28 Raftery, Delaney and Nowlan-Roebuck note that ‘invariably the records show a combination of individual effort on the part of nuns, lay philanthropic women (some of whom became nuns), and local clergy, often underpinned by the financial support of the professional and business classes.’29 However, it is clear that nuns did not depend solely on the world outside the convent for support; each woman who entered a convent brought with her an income sufficient to support herself, and often women brought with them a far greater level of funding than was required for their own upkeep. This surplus was used to support those with small dowries, and those with no dowries, and it was invested in ways that supported the building and expansion projects of the nuns.30 Women who entered convents with neither an education nor a dowry were supported by the convent finances; these women occupied the position of Lay Sister and carried out tasks such as cooking and cleaning which ensured the smooth running of the convent household. It was this injection of both labour and capital that helped to power the spread of the conventual movement and provided the superiors of individual convents with the means to extend existing premises, purchase new property and erect new buildings that served as convents and schools.

 See Raftery, ‘Teaching Sisters and transnational networks’, 723.  Maria Luddy. 2012. ‘Possessed of fine properties’ in Maarten Van Dijck, Jan de Maeyer, Jeffrey Tyssens and Jimmy Koppen (eds). The Economics of Providence. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 227–246. 29  Raftery et al., Nano Nagle, 38. 30  Luddy, ‘Possessed of fine properties’; Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the nuns; Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland; Raftery et al., Nano Nagle. 27 28

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Founders and Funders: The Case of Nano Nagle The Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, otherwise known as Presentation Sisters, was founded in Cork city, in 1775, by Nano Nagle. Nagle was born into a wealthy Catholic family of landowners in 1718. Her wealth, and the political acumen of her family, ensured that she enjoyed the advantage of an education, despite existing penal legislation which forbade Catholics from running schools in Ireland at that time.31 Nano Nagle was approximately ten or twelve years old when she was sent to a continental convent to complete her education and spiritual development.32 For reasons which historians have explored, that convent was probably the Benedictine Monastery at Ypres. Within its impressive enclosure, Nagle would have become attuned to the importance of every element of this female space: cloister, chapel, refectory, classrooms, and many rooms for the domestic work of the community. The few surviving images of the Ypres monastery, and its floorplan, give some insight into what Nagle experienced, and hint at how her time at Ypres may have influenced her later ideas for building convents in Ireland. [See Fig. 8.2]. Following her schooling, Nagle spent several years in Paris, during which time she lived in at least one other convent, an Ursuline foundation.33 No similar places were known to her in Ireland. While she was impressed enough to want to found a female monastery in Cork, she was not convinced of her own vocation to religious life and she did not become a nun at this time.34 Instead, she returned to Ireland in the mid-­eighteenth century, firstly to run free schools for the poor in Cork city and then to plan the founding of a convent. This was a major undertaking, at a time when Catholics were still under scrutiny, and she knew that there were risks attached to pursuing her ambition. The decision to embark on such a venture in eighteenth-century Ireland involved carefully negotiating a space between the dichotomous goals of a male, hierarchical Catholic 31  The Popery Acts (Will 7., c. 4) 1695, ‘Act to restrain foreign education’; (Ann 2., c. 6) 1703, ‘Act to prevent the further growth of popery; (Ann 8., c. 3) 1709, ‘Act for explaining and emending an act entitled An act to prevent the further growth of popery’. For more information on penal legislation in Ireland see Maureen Wall. ‘The Age of the Penal Laws’, 176–189; See also Richard Bourke. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke. 32  See Raftery et al., Nano Nagle. 33  Ibid. 34  Ibid.

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Fig. 8.2  Floor plan by the nuns of the Benedictine Monastery, Ypres (By kind permission of the Kylemore Abbey Archives, Ireland)

Church and the ruling Protestant State authorities. Nagle’s position as a member of an elite Catholic family, along with her substantial inherited wealth and educational experiences, provided her with a measure of leeway. However, she was a single woman, approaching middle age, and implementation of her project necessitated that she push further at the gendered boundaries of society. She had turned her back on marriage,

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childbirth and the kind of social life enjoyed by women of her rank, and she had also dismissed the possibility of life as a nun, which would have afforded her some respectability. Having rejected the two female roles that her social world deemed acceptable, she embarked on what would become a highly successful, but often very lonely, venture as a builder of convents and schools. Having acquired the lease of a plot of land 60-foot wide and 200-foot long, Nagle engaged the services of a builder to construct a new dwelling that would serve as a convent for Ursuline nuns.35 Her involvement in the project is evident in her extant letters. The political climate of the day demanded that attention could not be drawn to the project and, unlike the splendid convent on Rue St Jacques in Paris, there could be nothing overt that would suggest its intended use as a house of Ursuline nuns. As she began her project, she sought ‘counsel learnd in the law’ in order to ‘guard against penal laws.’ She went about her business quietly, writing that ‘we are in a country [in which] we cant doe [sic] as we please’.36 To ensure that her convent blended into its surrounds, it was designed to be of similar size and style to existing homes of the gentry. It was five-bay wide and three-storey high with a dormer attic.37 It was situated in an inconspicuous location on the site, positioned in the centre of the plot, obscured from two boundary roads by a high wall to the south and an existing cottage to the north.38 There was no formal gateway or ostentatious entrance. Nagle’s attention was not limited to style and planning: she also supervised the construction phase, visiting the site, examining the walls and commenting on their condition as they dried out. She also wanted value for her money; as the sole financier of this project which cost between 4000 and 5000 pounds, Nagle mused over the disadvantages of building during the winter and ruefully considered the increased expense of paying workmen a daily rate during winter months, when shorter daylight hours meant shorter working days.39

35  Indenture between Isabella Harper and Nano Nagle, 23rd December 1768. SPCA, IE PBVM [SPC]. 36  Nano Nagle to Miss Fitzsimons, 28 Sept 1770, PSCA, IE PBVM NN 1/1/6. 37  Jessie Castle and Gillian O’Brien. 2016. ‘“I am building a house”: Nano Nagle’s Georgian convents’ in Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, Vol. XIX. 38  Ibid. 39  Nano Nagle to Miss Fitzsimons, 28 Sept 1770, PSCA, IE PBVM NN 1/1/6.

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While the convent was carefully designed to sit unobtrusively on an obscured site, it did not go unnoticed. In 1772, an article published in the Freeman’s Journal expressed the concern among some Cork Protestants: We have had nuns brought from France to preside at, and conduct a nunnery lately built here; in this seminary, they mean to receive the children of Protestants for tuition; and you may judge of the principles they are likely to imbibe from their teachers, who will lose no pains to seduce and make converts of the young and weak minds committed to their care; and it is well known that they are indefatigable in schemes to bring over as many as they can to their religion.40

The danger of allowing this convent to prevail was subsequently debated by the corporate authorities at a special session held in the Guildhall. The economic advantages of allowing a Catholic school to operate locally, rather than losing money abroad, was weighed against the proposal to suppress Nagle’s convent. Ultimately, it was decided that no threat existed from a group of pious ladies who chose to live together, say their beads and drink tea.41 By 1775, Nagle was once more in the process of establishing a convent. This time she had decided to found a completely new religious congregation, as her initial venture had not unfolded as she had hoped. The Ursuline nuns followed the Rule of their mother house in Rue St Jacques which required the Sisters to take solemn vows and observe strict enclosure.42 Nagle, on the other hand, required an order of nuns who would engage with people in the wider community and, most importantly, teach in the schools which she had established in various parts of the city. The rule of enclosure forbade the Ursuline sisters from leaving the grounds of their convent and, as only one of Nagle’s schools lay within this enclosure,  Freeman’s Journal 18 February 1772.  Walsh, Nano Nagle, 84. 42  In a religious organisation, solemn vows were regarded as more prestigious than simple vows which were taken annually. Those members of a religious organisation who took simple vows were referred to as ‘sisters’, belonging to a ‘congregation’ and were often viewed as something less than ‘real’ religious. Those who took solemn vows were referred to as ‘nuns’ who formed an ‘order’ and were generally held in higher religious esteem than ‘sisters.’ An important corollary of solemn vows, however, was the mandatory adoption of monastic enclosure, while women who took simple vows were not confined to their cloister. For further information see Elizabeth Rapley. 2001. A Social History of the Cloister. Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 40 41

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the other schools were excluded from their care.43 In addition, the Ursuline tradition was to take in wealthier students as boarders, so their focus was not exclusively on education of the poor. The poor schools they operated were an addition to education of the daughters of the wealthy whose tuition fees would provide the Ursulines with an income. This was not the outcome that Nagle had envisaged and invested in. An entry in the Ursuline Annals states: her views were rather disappointed than fulfilled as soon as she discovered that Ursulines were bound by their Constitutions to enclosure and the education of the higher orders of society, consequently could not, as she wished, visit the poor and the sick abroad nor devote themselves solely to the instruction of the poor at home.44

For the second time in five years, Nagle assumed the role of a ‘builder’. She began to plan for the building of a new convent. Once more Nagle found herself traversing the boundaries of gender, politics and religion; however, this second project did not initially have the consent of the local clergy and it was the Catholic hierarchy, rather than the Protestant ascendancy, who voiced their objections this time. Nagle found herself at odds with Catholic clergyman Francis Moylan who forbade her from proceeding with her plans and attempted to assert his authority by threatening to have the new building dismantled.45 Nagle refused to be coerced, instead 43  It is possible that Nagle overlooked the difficulties that later arose due to enclosure as the origins of the Ursuline congregation bore a strong resemblance to what Nano was trying to establish in Cork. In Brescia, Italy, in 1535, a small group of women, under the leadership of Angela Merici, took the title of St Ursula, and dedicated themselves to the education of girls. In 1572, Pope Gregory XIII permitted the group to live a community life without the need for enclosure, and the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience were taken as simple vows. As the Ursuline congregation spread to different parts of France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some houses sought adaptations to their Rule. A foundation in Paris, in 1608, sought the permission of the Holy See for a reform of their observance; instead of the original simple vows, the community wished to take solemn vows with the addition of a fourth vow to instruct children according to the principles of Angela Merici. This was approved by Pope Paul V, but solemn vows were accompanied by strict religious enclosure. Similarly, in 1609, the Ursuline Congrégées of Toulouse sent a representative to Rome requesting the elevation of their lay congregation into an enclosed convent. See Laurence Lux-Sterritt. 2002. ‘Between the Cloister and the World: The Successful Compromise of the Ursulines of Toulouse, 1604–1616’ in French History, vol.16, issue 3, September, 247–268. 44  Ursuline Convent Annals, MS copy, 32. UAB. 45  South Presentation Convent Annals, 12, PSCA, IE PBVM [SPC] 1/1.

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informing Moylan that if she was forced to comply she would take her money and her initiative away from his jurisdiction and pursue her project in another part of the country. She was allowed to continue. The second convent was located adjacent to the Ursuline convent and shared a common boundary, but it occupied a smaller plot of land. The site measured 31’ wide by 80’ deep and the structure was also designed on a smaller scale than the first.46 No part of the building has survived, nor are there any illustrations, but it is described in the convent Annals as being small and dark, poorly built with low and narrow rooms.47 Nano Nagle was more positive in her appraisal of it and wrote optimistically to her friend, Teresa Mulally, in August 1777, stating: ‘I am building a house and when it will be fit to inhabit, I believe young Ladies that have fortunes will join us.’48 The building was two-storey high with the front door opening onto Cove Lane. An extant account book indicates that it had eight hearths and twelve windows.49 Given that Nagle had invested heavily in her first building project, and that undertaking a second major building project was not something that she had planned to do, it is perhaps not surprising that this convent was substantially smaller than the first. In less than a decade, Nagle had founded two religious houses, and had been fully involved in planning, designing, financing and building these convents.

Managing Bishops and Builders: A Question of Control Records clearly indicate that, as religious orders expanded their footprint in Ireland and elsewhere, nuns had to engage with two groups of men: bishops and builders. Bishops issued invitations to orders to come into a parish; they could also refuse to welcome an order or make it extremely  Indenture between Ann Robbins and Nano Nagle, 1774, SPCA, IE PBVM [SPC].  South Presentation Convent Annals, 21, PSCA, IE PBVM [SPC] 1/1. 48  Nano Nagle to Teresa Mulally, AL 21st August 1777, GHAD, IE PBVM [GHD] 3/1/1/1/2. Teresa Mulally was a Dublin woman who had opened a school for poor children in St Michan’s parish in Dublin in 1766 and an orphanage in 1771. Nagle and Mulally, having similar goals, exchanged letters. Nine of these, written by Nagle to Mulally between 1776 and 1783 have survived and are a major primary source of information for this period. For more information on the work of Teresa Mulally, see R. Burke Savage. 1940. A Valiant Dublin Woman: The Story of George’s Hill. Dublin. M. H. Gill & Son Ltd. 49  Castle and O’Brien, ‘“I am building a house”’. 46 47

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difficult for a convent community to flourish. Once a community had been welcomed into a diocese, they had to either adapt an existing house— such as a large mansion—or they had to set about building a convent; for this kind of work they relied on networks of professional men, including engineers and architects. Nuns, by virtue of their semi-enclosed lives, had little contact with the outside world; those who ran convent schools were mainly in contact with women and girls. But all of the stages of building a new foundation involved close interaction with men. How did nuns work with bishops and builders, and how was control exercised when new building projects got underway? The relationships between nuns and the Catholic hierarchy were as diverse and complicated as all human relationships. They shared common goals and objectives, and nuns were very valuable partners in the education and catechisation of the Irish population. But the power differential that was inherent in the Church structures meant that conflict was inevitable at times. Obedience to ecclesiastical superiors placed nuns in a position that demanded intelligent and competent women be directed by male clergy. This did not always run smoothly. Some bishops tended to allow convents a greater degree of autonomy than others, and on occasions, it was possible for nuns to retain a level of control. In 1800, for example, the Presentation Convent, Kilkenny was established at the request of Dr James Lanigan, Bishop of Ossory. Three women entered the novitiate in South Presentation Convent in Cork, to be prepared for this purpose. However, it became clear that the novice, a Miss Lyons, who had been selected by Bishop Lanigan to be the Superioress of the new convent, was not suitable for profession. The other two women were professed, and then went to establish the new convent in Kilkenny. ‘On arrival they expected to be met and welcomed by the Bishop, however they were disappointed.’50 No such warm welcome awaited them. ‘In the course of the day his Lordship came over, [and] they then understood the delay to be owing to the absence of Miss Lyons whom he intended to be Superioress.’51 As the nineteenth century progressed, it became more common for bishops to assume tighter control. Right Rev. Dr James Doyle was one of the earliest reforming bishops who asserted his authority. As Bishop of 50  Presentation Convent Kilkenny. Fragment of an account of the early days of the foundation, undated. PSCA, IE PBVM [KIL] 1/1/3. 51  Presentation Convent Kilkenny. An account of the foundation by a member of the community who had known the foundresses, undated. PSCA, IE PBVM [KIL] 1/1/4.

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Kildare and Leighlin between 1819 and 1834, he tightened the reins of control over the convents in his diocese. Within weeks of his appointment Doyle moved towards re-shaping two convents of Brigidine Sisters which had been established by his predecessor Bishop Daniel Delaney. Doyle’s preference was for nuns who would prioritise the education of the poor, and so he attempted to mould the Brigidines into something more akin to the Presentation Sisters;52 the Brigidines, however, ‘respectfully objected’,53 preferring to retain their own identity and to adhere to their own mission of teaching all classes. In 1821, he dismissed Sister M. Augustine from the convent in Mountrath, followed by Sisters Brigid and Kate Delaney in 1823; ‘the bishop considered their influence and example prejudicial to the good order and discipline of the community.’54 Bishop Doyle also involved himself closely with convent finances which led to a degree of tension with the Presentation Sisters in Carlow. The Bishop felt the convent should operate in a more frugal manner. In 1820 he wrote, ‘I only sometimes fear that they are too comfortable … as privations are the best property of a convent’.55 By 1824, Doyle had removed two of the three founding members from the convent and from his diocese. Mother de Sales Meighan had made her novitiate in Cove Lane before establishing a convent of the Presentation order in Kilkenny in 1800. She then founded a convent in Carlow in 1811. Mother de Sales was well regarded by other members of the order who described her as ‘an amiable little creature, simple, humble and holy’56 and ‘eminently calculated to form others to the perfect practice of Religious Life’.57 Along with Sr M. Agnes Madden, she had been in Carlow for thirteen years when ‘the ecclesiastical superiors deemed it prudent to counsel their return, the

52  Thomas McGrath. 1999. Religious Renewal and Reform in the Pastoral Ministry of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, 1786–1834. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 53  Directory of the Brigidine Sisters (Dublin, 1956), 8, quoted in McGrath, Religious Renewal and Reform, 122. 54  Mother Margaret Mary Dunne. 1945. Gleanings from the Brigidine Annals. Carlow, 22. Cited in McGrath, Religious Renewal and Reform, 123. 55  Bishop James Doyle to Sister Mary Nolan, 30 Nov. 1820, quoted in McGrath, Religious Renewal and Reform, 120. 56  M. Raphael Consedine PBVM. 1983. Listening Journey, A Study of the Spirit and Ideals of Nano Nagle and the Presentation Sisters. Victoria: The Congregation of The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 145. 57  Presentation Convent, Carlow Annals, unpaginated Vol I, 1810–1834. PSCA, IE PBVM [CAR] 1/1.

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funds of this convent not being sufficient for their maintenance’.58 The extant convent Annals state that the loss of the two nuns was a very severe one and that many trials were endured, both before and after their departure.59 While some bishops interfered in new convent projects in order to control the activities of nuns, some architects also presented them with challenges. Architects might have wanted their projects to reflect ingenuity of design, but nuns wanted buildings that served a practical purpose. To get what they wanted, they had to be involved in every stage of the planning, and they had to be forceful with experienced professional men. Catherine McAuley, for example, was conscious of the need to avoid extravagance and unwilling to build ostentatious convents. She had to be direct in her dealings with Augustus Welby Pugin. Pugin was the architect of choice for several bishops who approved Mercy convents in both Ireland and England. When McAuley arrived in Bermondsey in November 1839, to open a new Mercy foundation, she was dismayed by the design that had been executed by the giant of English architecture. She wrote: I do not admire Mr Pugin’s taste, though so celebrated—it is quite the old heavy monastic style. He was determined we should not look out at the windows—they are up to the ceiling—we could not touch the glass without standing on a chair.60

Her dismay at the opulence of Pugin’s work was expressed in several letters, in which she complained about the kitchen which was ‘fit for a castle’ and there were too many plaster cornices and ornamental features. What she wanted was a ‘plain, simple, durable building’ with ‘well-lighted’ corridors and small sleeping rooms.61 She needed lots of space for a community of nuns to grow in number, but her nuns did not need luxuries such as large ‘cells’ or bedrooms. McAuley was frustrated by Pugin’s preference for small, ornate convent buildings. She complained: ‘The Convent in Bermondsey is not well suited to the purpose—the sleeping rooms are

 Ibid.  Ibid. 60  Catherine McAuley, Letter 149, 24 December 1839, cited in Mary C. Sullivan. 2012. The Path of Mercy: The Life of Catherine McAuley. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 268. 61  Catherine McAuley, Letter 149, 24 December 1839 and Letter 160, 4 February 1840, cited in Sullivan, The Path of Mercy, 268. 58 59

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too large—the other rooms too small—the corridors confined and not well lighted—all the gothic work outside has made it expensive.’62 When Dr Thomas Walsh, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District of England, requested Catherine McAuley to found a convent in Birmingham in 1840, she was firm about the design and construction of the convent from the outset, since once again Pugin was to be the architect. She wrote to Dr Walsh: My Lord—as to building … Your convent should have at least twenty cells—10 feet by 7—and a small door made so close to the partition wall as to leave sufficient space for the Bed’s head—a noviceship—about 18 feet by 14—a Community Room, Refectory, and Choir [chapel]—each to be 25 feet by 19—a good room for Infirmary—and a small reception parlour. It is very desirable that there should be only two floors above the basement story. The refectory should be close to the Kitchen—all executed in the plainest style, without any cornice.63

McAuley concluded by saying that all of Pugin’s work ‘could be completed in ten months, and would not cost more than a smaller building where ornamental work would be introduced’.64 Her instructions for the convent in Birmingham included that it should be furnished with ‘a straw and hair mattress’ for each bed, and each cell should have nothing more than a ‘small press, not too high, that will answer for a wash hand stand with a small drawer and cupboard for linen.’65 Lest Pugin should misunderstand her requirements, she added details on the length, width and height of the tables for the convent, and insisted that the refectory tables should be made ‘of plain deal, not painted.’66 Though some of her requests were heeded by Pugin, and the convent did not have ‘one rib of stucco, or one panelled door’, she later commented of the great architect: ‘I do think some of his plans would admit of improvements … I do not admire his gilded figures of saints, they are very coarse representations, and by no means calculated to inspire devotion’.67 62  Catherine McAuley, Letter 160, 4 February 1840, cited in Sullivan, The Path of Mercy, 288. 63  Ibid. 64  Ibid. 65  Catherine McAuley, Letter 276, July 1841, cited in Sullivan, The Path of Mercy, 339. 66  Ibid. 67  Catherine McAuley, Letter 298, July 1841, cited in Sullivan, The Path of Mercy, 344.

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In the decades that followed, the expanding family partnership of Pugin and Ashlin was responsible for many churches and convents in Ireland. For example, they were contracted to design the Convent of Mercy in Clonakility, County Kerry. The Annals of the convent in Clonakilty record that, in July 1865, ‘with the bishop’s permission and approval, Reverend Mother determined to continue the buildings and raise the proposed convent church’.68 However, when George Ashlin submitted elaborate plans for a convent industrial school for the Reverend Mother’s approval, she indicated that she ‘would not undertake more than a two storey house.’69 She was acutely aware of the costs attached to building, and the Annals of the Clonakilty convent indicate that all of the fundraising was undertaken by the community. ‘We continue to work and pray for money’, the Annals recorded.70 Pugin and Ashlin also secured the contract to design the chapel at the Mercy Convent in Skibbereen, County Cork, and in 1866 the nuns were busy running a ‘four day bazaar’ to raise funds ‘for the convent chapel.’ Further bazaars were held in the years that followed, to clear the costs of the chapel.71 The desire of Mercy nuns to build plain but practical convents reflected two things: a clear understanding of how the convent space would be used by women religious, and a recognition of the costs that had to be met through fundraising, borrowing and occasional legacies. While Catherine McAuley was a very wealthy heiress, who controlled the spending of her fortune on building convents and supporting the poor, she was not willing to squander any of the money at her disposal. To conclude, while there is no indication that any of the foundresses of nineteenth-century convents had training in draughtsmanship, engineering or design, they were deeply involved in the building of convents. They gained expertise through undertaking building projects in which they had to pay close attention to the various stages of work, and they had to keep a close oversight on spending. That architects such as Pugin paid at least some attention to the directions of nuns is an indication that their views— when articulated with force—were heeded within the distinctly 68   Annals of Clonakilty Archives, Dublin. 69   Annals of Clonakilty Archives, Dublin. 70   Annals of Clonakilty Archives, Dublin. 71   Annals of Clonakilty Archives, Dublin.

Convent of Mercy, July 1865. Mercy Congregational Convent of Mercy, July 1871. Mercy Congregational Convent of Mercy, July 1865. Mercy Congregational Convent Mercy, August 1866. Mercy Congregational

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‘masculine’ world of architecture and building. It is perhaps no coincidence, however, that the nuns who were most successful in forcing their points of view—such as Nano Nagle and Catherine McAuley—were wealthy women who held the purse strings. Nuns usually made an ‘unofficial’ and undocumented contribution to the construction of their convents, and their contribution to the design of convents is therefore poorly understood. Indeed, women’s contribution generally to architecture and the built environment has ‘never sat comfortably within or in parallel with mainstream architectural history.’72 As Willis has argued, in her discussion of the collaborative nature of contemporary architectural practice, ‘individuals are still identified as architects of projects without acknowledging the contributions of others.’73 We would contend that this emphasis serves to erase the contributions of unqualified women—such as Nano Nagle and Catherine McAuley, who had strong views on the way in which their convents should be built, who communicated their demands to architects, and who pushed the boundaries of contemporary views of femininity through their work as builders of convents. Archives indicate that nuns were directly involved in building convents; they commissioned architects, gave detailed briefs, oversaw construction, and managed the financing of these projects. However, nuns have suffered from a double erasure; as women who were unqualified to partake in professional building projects, they have not been recognised for their ‘unofficial’ contribution to the construction of convents. And as women religious, they have—until recently—been erased from the history of education and from women’s history. The process by which historians are writing women religious into the historical narrative is one that is beginning to widen our understanding of the roles they fulfilled, and the ways in which they pushed the boundaries on contemporary understandings of femininity. Acknowledgements  The authors gratefully acknowledge the following: the Mercy Congregational Archives, Dublin; the Order of St Ursula Archives, Cork; the Presentation Sisters Congregational Archives, Cork; and the Presentation Archives, George’s Hill, Dublin.

72  See Julie Willis, ‘Invisible contributions: the problem of history and women architects’, Architectural Theory Review (3:2), 57. 73  Ibid., 63.

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References (I) Archives Mercy Congregational Archives, Dublin. Presentation Sisters Archive, George’s Hill, Dublin. Presentation Sisters Congregational Archive, Cork. Ursuline Congregational Archives, Cork.

(II) Publications Agrest, D., Conway, P., & Kanes Weisman, L. (1996). The Sex of Architecture. New York: Abrams. Blank, C., & Martin, T. (2014). Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel: Two Pioneer Women Architects of Nineteenth Century North America. Montréal: Baraka Books. Bourke, R. (2015). Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke. Princeton, NJ/Woodstock, Oxon: Princeton University Press. Burke Savage, Roland. (1940). A Valiant Dublin Woman. The Story of Georges Hill, 1760–1940. Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son Ltd. Castle, J, & O’Brien, G. (2016). “I am Building a House”: Nano Nagle’s Georgian Convents. Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies (Vol. 19). Clear, C. (1987). Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Coleman, D., Danze, E., & Henderson, C. (1996). Architecture and Feminism. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Collins, T. (2019). Space and Place: Archaeologies of Female Monasticism in Later Medieval Ireland. In V. Blud, D. Heath, & E. Klafter (Eds.), Gender in Medieval Places, Spaces and Thresholds (pp. 25–43). London: School of Advanced Study, University of London. Connolly, S.  J. (1982). Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Consedine, M.  R. (1983). Listening Journey, a Study of the Spirit and Ideals of Nano Nagle and the Presentation Sisters. Victoria: The Congregation of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Crout, D. (2000). Review. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 17(3), 260–267. Dickson, D. (2005). Old World Colony: Cork and Munster 1630–1830. Cork: Cork University Press. Fahey, T. (1987). Nuns in the Catholic Church in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. In M. Cullen (Ed.), Girls Don’t do Honours. Irish Women in Education in the 19th and 20th Centuries (pp. 7–30). Dublin: WEB Press. Freeman’s Journal, 18 February 1772.

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Gilchrist, R. (1997). Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women. London: Routledge. Grimes, B. (2015). Patrons and Architects and the Creation of Roman Catholic Church Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Dublin. Dublin Historical Record, 68(1), 6–20. Heynen, H., & Baydar, G. (2005). Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture. London: Routledge. Hughes, F. (Ed.). (1996). The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice (p.  1996). Boston: MIT Press. Hutch, W. (1875). Nano Nagle; Her Life, her Labours and Their Fruits. Dublin: McGlashan & Gill. Luddy, M. (2012). Possessed of fine Properties. In M. Van Dijck, J. de Maeyer, J. Tyssens, & J. Koppens (Eds.), The Economics of Providence (pp. 227–246). Leuven: Leuven University Press. Lux-Sterritt, L. (2002). Between the Cloister and the World: The Successful Compromise of the Ursulines of Toulouse, 1604–1616. French History, 16(3), 247–268. Margadant, J. B. (2000). The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-­ Century France. California: University of California Press. McGrath, T. (1999). Religious Renewal and Reform in the Pastoral Ministry of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, 1786–1834. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Peckham Magray, Mary. (1998). The Transforming Power of the Nuns. Women, Religion and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raftery, D. (2015). Teaching Sisters and Transnational Networks: Recruitment and Education Expansion in the Long Nineteenth Century. History of Education, 44(6), 717–728. Raftery, D., & Smyth, E.  M. (Eds.). (2016). Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800–1950: Convents, Classrooms and Colleges. London: Routledge. Raftery, D., Delaney, C., & Nowlan-Roebuck, C. (2019). Nano Nagle. The Life and the Legacy. Kildare: Irish Academic Press. Rapley, E. (2001). A Social History of the Cloister. Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Sanders, J. (1996). STUD: Architectures of Masculinity. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Schulenberg, J. (2005). Gender, Celibacy and Proscriptions of Sacred Space: Symbol and Practice. In V.  C. Raguin & S.  Stanbury (Eds.), Women’s Space Patronage: Place and Gender in the Medieval Church. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Stratigakos, D. (2016). Where are the Women Architects? New  York: Princeton University Press.

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Sullivan, M. C. (2012). The Path of Mercy: the Life of Catherine McAuley. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Walker, L. (1986). The Entry of Women into the Architectural Profession. Women’s Art Journal, 7(1), 13–18. Wall, M. (2001). The Age of the Penal Laws. In T. W. Moody & F. X. Martin (Eds.), The Course of Irish History (pp. 176–189). Cork: Mercier Press. Revised edition. Walsh, T.  J. (1959). Nano Nagle and the Presentation Sisters. Dublin: Gill and Son Ltd. Whyte, J. H. (2001). The Age of Daniel O’Connell, 1800–47. In T. W. Moody & F. X. Martin (Eds.), The Course of Irish History (pp. 204–216). Cork: Mercier Press. Revised edition. Willis, J. (1998). Invisible Contributions: The Problem of History and Women Architects. Architectural Theory Review, 3(2), 57–68. Yates, N. (2006). The Religious Condition of Ireland, 1770–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Reconfiguring Women and Empire: Sex, Race and Femininity in British India, 1785–1922 Tim Allender

In 1886 the social diarist, Robert Kerr, wrote about prostitution in Calcutta. The city, in the province of Bengal (north eastern India), was the capital of British India until 1911. By Indian standards Calcutta was of relatively new foundation, only some 196 years earlier in 1690. The city had become a thriving centre of British trade, containing a particularly complex melange of races and religions—Hindu, Muslim, Eurasians (mostly part-Portuguese decent Roman Catholics), Armenians and Chinese Buddhists. Kerr’s commentary dealt with the condition of European prostitutes, describing one in the following terms: Passing through a low red door, you came to a veranda (sic), in the centre of which stands a rickety table, on which the filth lies thick enough to come off in patches on your coat sleeve. Great smudges of ink, and marks of wineglasses do not improve its character. In the corner, with her back against the wall, which bears the stains of half a dozen liquids, and the marks of unclean

T. Allender (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_9

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fingers, lounges a girl of about 20 years of age. Those large magnificent eyes, which darken all in their vicinity, cannot even now be looked at without admiration, but oh, that face, so ghastly, colourless and haggard, surely it is the face of a corpse, and yet it is something infinitely more repulsive. The skin appears drawn so tightly over the bones as to leave white circles over the cheek bones, the angles of the jaw, the bridge of the nose, even the point of the chin.1

Kerr’s description is almost visceral. It lacks the broader social and disease-­ oppression perspectives shown by Elizabeth Andrew and Kate Bushnell, when writing about prostitutes in the British military cantonments a decade later in 1899.2 Rather, his concern is about a loss of femininity, more so than a loss of female virtue. For Kerr, the European prostitute’s femininity, or the lack of it, relates to her physical appearance and also to the surroundings she found herself in: neither hygienic nor well kempt in what he assumed was her domestic domain. In fact, the above account of this European woman in her bordello, in the oppressive heat of Calcutta, partly exemplifies long-held sensitivities around the question of femininity. Such constructions were reflective of the broader colonial context in British India, where femininity was up for grabs with statecraft directing its participants. Additionally, shifting identities on this question impacted on many other European-driven mentalities that were part of the British colonial project itself. These mentalities applied in the urban spaces across the subcontinent where this project was most socially operative. Additionally, two incongruous and paradoxical official colonial vistas of inclusion and exclusion had emerged. In a cultural sense, the loss of femininity of the European prostitute was as a signifier that she could no longer belong to the European community in India. Politically, European femininity was a coda that signalled eugenic superiority in empire where such prostitutes could not even possibly exist. This obfuscation was significant in that in Calcutta  alone, by 1886, 525 European (as distinct from Eurasian and Indian) women were earning their living in this manner.3 1  Robert Kerr. 1886. Social Evil in Calcutta: Its Strength, Its Haunts Its Causes & Its Consequences with Suggestions for Hindering Its Growth and Rescuing Its Victims. Calcutta: Thomas S. Smith. 2  Elizabeth W. Andrew and Katharine C. Bushnell. 1889. The Queen’s Daughters. London: Morgan and Scott. 3  The Social Evil in Calcutta (1886) cited in Tim R.  Barrett. 2004. Calcutta: Strange Memoirs-Foreign Perceptions. New Delhi: Sankar Mondal, 380.

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Seeing the significance of this phenomenon, this chapter traces the shifting scene regarding femininity across a 137-year time period in British India. Though not identifying ‘femininity’ as an analytical category in itself, unlike feminism or gender, the chapter delineates it as a powerful driving force across race and class boundaries, on the colonial side of the ledger. The etymology of empire is also important here. Categorisations such as ‘feminism’ or ‘gender’ were hardly heard, if at all, during the colonial era in India and elsewhere. They have become constructs instead that drive many current academic inquiries when interpreting the imperial turn. Yet, the phrase ‘femininity’, though strongly contestable and shifting in meaning as this chapter will show, was used frequently by colonial actors as a known categorisation to them, and it is a phrase that continues to hold meaning today.4 The chapter first briefly looks at the Indian side of this story. It then moves through key eras of British colonial rule in India and it focuses on teaching and learning, as well as medicine: professions that became lightning rods, in a sense, for broader and shifting femininity mentalities about what might be the prototype non-European colonial woman in British India.

Indian Femininity Before looking at the colonial side of this story, it is worth briefly noting Indian sensibilities on the same question of femininity across the time period of this chapter, particularly regarding the reforming elements of the Hindu polity in the nineteenth century. Again, the profile of females was strong. Yet, these sensibilities belonged to the Indian cultural domain and were largely separate from empire. In particular, in the nineteenth century, Hindu renovations of its own polity often centred on the social position of females and their femininity, though these renovations were also mostly led by men. Ram Mohan Roy, Indian educationalist and reformer who was opposed to caste, sati (widow burning) and child marriage was one of the founders of the Brahmo Samaj. He had died while visiting Bristol in England on a cultural exchange in 1833. Roy’s leadership of the Brahmo Samaj was partly inherited in 1866 by Keshub Chandra Sen in a breakaway 4  For elaboration on relational etymology regarding sexuality and empire see Julie Peakman. 2019. Licentious Worlds: Sex and Exploitation in Global Empires. London: Reaktion Books, 15.

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branch of this organisation who, like Roy, was interested in forging stronger links with English philanthropists. In fact, Sen’s willingness to discard medieval Indian  vestiges on the question of female issues offered other insights. On this score, Sen, was met with immovable refusals when offering Christian missionaries in the UK a similar invitation to rethink the medieval legacies embedded  in their Judeo-Christian faith systems that also relegated females.5 These refusals signified to informed Indians the rigidity of empire when Sen’s and others capacity for fluidity and accommodation in religious matters was not met with accommodations from the other side of the colonial ledger. Even if this impasse had been breached between West and East, and others like it, and more fluid conversations around femininity could have reached a common dialogue, it is unlikely much would have changed in terms of the trajectories that were being set in place that ultimately led to Indian independence from Britain in 1947. Of course, there were some notable Indian women whose writing and work crossed over this barrier, including the likes of Pandita Ramabai and Cornelia Sorabji later in the nineteenth century.6 But, more generally, the Indian side of this story was driven by deeper, longer-standing and highly variable socio-cultural traditions, at the hands of local Indian patriarchies and matriarchies, that sometimes oppressed many Indian women. And when the increasingly anti-British, anti-colonial nationalist debates of the early twentieth century became more willing in the contest for power, the role assigned to Indian women by Indian nationalists was still different from that for Indian men and remained based in part on the Indian household. Further on this point, Partha Chatterjee rightly sees these different predications of Indian female identity, though adaptive to an intensifying national movement activism, as still controlled by new Indian patriarchies.7 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to go more deeply into what is a complex and largely undocumented story of Indian femininity in the colonial era. However, some initial anecdotal observations are interesting 5  Meredith Borthwick. 1977. Keshub Chunder Sen. Calcutta: Minerva, 153–69; Christopher A. Bayly. 2012. Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, Cambridge: CUP, 39. 6  For a fuller description of these crossovers see Padma Anagol. 2005. The Emergence of Feminism in India. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922) was an Indian social and educational reformer based in Bombay, chiefly concerned with women. Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954) was a lawyer and a leading advocate for female education in India. 7  Partha Chatterjee. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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concerning the end of empire in the twentieth century that embroider this complex narrative about Indian females. Most particularly, the complexities on the question of Indian femininity could still signify the alienable, but separate nature of Indian constructions (where this happened outside the strong grip of traditional, often rural, societies). In other words, these separate constructions about desirable Indian femininity traits likely did shift within progressive Indian circles, even in colonial times and shortly afterwards. For example, the technology of Western photography was appropriated by wealthier Indian families, mostly on the periphery of empire. This was through their use of ‘showing photographs’ to display desirable femininity traits in their daughters for prospective Indian mothers-­in-law. As Geraldine Forbes has shown, the photographs, in the early twentieth century, could, in fact, become sites of defiance around such Indian femininity traits. This was when their daughters aimed to look ‘as mean as possible’ in these photographs  so to stave off an unwanted husband in order that they might pursue a college education instead.8 And, even as late as Independence in 1947, Nayantara Pothen has shown that feminine identity spaces left behind by the British, such as ‘the club’, were appropriated by a new cohort of Indian women who became, in turn, excluders of their own race.9

British India On the British colonial side of the story, architectures of femininity and shifting mentalities around it were much more orchestrated at the government level and subject to broader power-plays concerning colonial statecraft. Furthermore, as the nineteenth century unfolded, these different precursors of feminine identity built an irreconcilable interface that the colonial state was then unable to ultimately traverse with Indians, including the colonial education mission that this identity promoted. In one sense the lacuna was best indicated by Annie Besant, who was a European reformer living in India. She was leader of the Indian-based Theosophists and briefly president of the Indian National Congress in 1917. In the 8  Geraldine Forbes. 2007. ‘Small Acts of Rebellion: Women Tell their Photographs’ in Anindita Ghosh (ed.), Behind the Veil: Resistance, Women, and the Everyday in Colonial South Asia. Chandigarh: Permanent Black, 66. 9  Nayantara Pothen. 2012. Glittering Decades: New Delhi in Love and War. New Delhi: Viking, passim.

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period preceding World War One, she, in fact, rejected Western notions of feminism for Indian women because of the colonial-associated brands of Western professionalism attached to these notions, as she saw it. And this while other progressive Europeans began promoting feminism for Indian women as a supposed sign of the veracity of empire.10 Antoinette Burton goes somewhat further by broadly stating that Western feminism was internal to the colonial project itself, and with it, I would venture, Western feminine identity formation in India as well.11 This was not only a British-­ led phenomenon. Other empires configured these mentalities of control over the destiny of colonial women in related but different ways, as Rebecca Rodgers has demonstrated regarding Algeria under the colonial rule of the French.12 Taking this story back to early British India, this chapter now considers the various phases that colonial femininity constructions went through in broad terms, and how the hand of the colonial state increasingly orchestrated these changes. With macro-state imperatives driving much of this change at the centre, it is more feasible to trace this change (unlike the Indian side of the story) over the relatively long time period that this chapter covers.

Domestic Femininity, 1780–1810 British India in the 1780s was a ramshackle affair. East India Company power in most of the domain that it claimed was still a matter of contest with Indian powerbrokers. Yet enclaves of European settlement, in what were to become India’s major cities under the British, were already strong enough to give rise to European-based household sensibilities. The material surroundings were also sensitive to Indian conditions. For example, rooms were sparsely furnished as it was believed this contributed to a cooler household environment as well as providing less refuge for vermin. These households also lacked a uniform décor. European furniture consisted of what could be commandeered from arriving ships. Chairs in 10  Annie Besant, ‘Annie Besant on the Type of Education for Indian Girls, 1904’ in S. Bhattacharya, J. Bara et al. 2001 (eds). Development of Women’s Education in India, a collection of documents, 1850–1920. New Delhi: Kanishka, 316. 11  Antoinette Burton. 1994. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: North Carolina, 11. 12  Rebecca Rogers. 2013. A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in 19th-Century Algeria. California: Stanford University Press.

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households were rarely of one sort, some being copies made in China, and with furniture orders sent to Bombay taking up to three years to fill. However, more demanding of feminine spaces in this period were European men. Despite the dangers of a military death, or one from disease, there was freedom for them where they could escape the moral strictures of Europe (and in some cases criminal convictions in Britain) in the exotic and generally relaxed society of British India. Many of these men were also employed by the East India Company. In these early years they were encouraged by their employer, sometimes with financial subsidy, to live in concubinage with or to be married to Indian women. From the Company’s perspective, this was considered good for morale and increased the chances that these men would stay and make careers in India. These arrangements were also necessary because there was a severe shortage of European women in this early period in India, even though in Calcutta, at least by 1844, 38 per cent of the European population were female.13 However, in this very early period of the 1780s what is less ­apparent are the acceptable forms of colonial femininity considered worthy for India at this time. In a rare document written in 1779 (discovered at the Serampore Mission in Bengal), European women arriving in Calcutta could be highly critical of each other as they stepped ashore hoping for an early marriage. Here, in this charged atmosphere of the marriage market, their focus was on outward displays of femininity and particularly deficits concerning it. Delineations for those over fifty were about poor physical appearances: ‘old maids, shrivelled and dry in description’. Additionally, a good complexion was paramount. Yet for very young women their femininity was about their ignorance as the result of a frivolous middle-class accomplishments education (judged to be so  even in 1779) ‘merely to cover the surface of their mental deformity’. And the men whom they met dockside were hardly more promising. They were categorised in a different manner that was about their medical conditions, degrees of decrepitude and, oddly for Europeans in India, their ‘pale appearances’.14 13  Lt.-Col. W.  H. Sykes ‘On the Population and Morality of Calcutta: Statistics of the Hospitals for the Insane Under the Bengal Presidency’ ‘Read before the British Association at York, Sept. 26 &28, 1844’, Serampore Mission Archive, Serampore, India. 14  [no author cited] 1882. The Good Old Days of Honourable John Company Being Curious Reminiscences Illustrating the Manners and Customs of the British In India. Simla: Argus Press, 72–3.

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Prospects for happy and emotionally supportive relationships seemed slim. Anne de Courcy’s The Fishing Fleet, documents the marriage market in India in greater detail later in the nineteenth century.15 However, what is interesting here is that in this very early period of the 1790s, the Western feminine ascetic is strongly in play even as it was translocated to India. Its eschewing as far as the European female body was concerned, both in physical and in intellectual terms, was then directly related to very poor prospects for future happiness. In this early period, marriage or concubinage to an Indian woman offered different dynamics compared to marriage to a European woman. These alliances between European men with Indian women were often authentic relationships that did not have to be struck dockside based on first impressions by both parties in hasty circumstances. Indian women and their European partners often had more time to negotiate emotional bonds and other foundational aspects of long-term relationships, even though power through race and wealth was always with the European male. These relationships could be genuine enough, too, in that 30 per cent of European wills of the period, in Bengal at least, made Indian female companions, or their natural children, substantial beneficiaries.16 However, there were also dangers for these Indian women. The shifting by Indian women from traditional Indian forms of femininity to ones that were European, marked a strong cultural journey that could not be reversed as far as traditional Indian communities were concerned. In Maharashtra (southwest India), at least, her former servants were also threatened with excommunication by outside high-caste Indian communities if they followed her: and even if they did not, they had to undergo purification ceremonies after the departure of their former mistress.17 Sexual relations with a European male were naturally implied by co-­ habitation. Yet, the feminine body of these Indian women remained traditionally Indian: sari and uncut hair. She still looked traditionally Indian.

15  Anne De Courcy. 2013. The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj. London: Phoenix. 16  Tim R. Barrett, Calcutta…, 233; Bengal Wills, 1780–5, L/AG/34/29/4–5, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library, (OIOC) cited in Christopher. J. Hawes. 1996. Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833. Surrey: Curzon Press, 4, n. 16. 17  Meera Kosambi. 1998. ‘The Home and the Social Universe’ in Irina Glushkova and Anne Feldhaus (eds). House and Home in Maharashtra, Delhi: OUP, 82–101.

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Class and religion of these Indian women also seemed to be a determinant as to how far Western brands of femininity intruded upon their lifestyle. C. J. Hawes observes, that in this early period Indian women from wealthier Muslim backgrounds were able to maintain their zenanas (Indian female living quarters) and were still permitted to practice purdah (seclusion): feminine semiotics that were quintessentially Indian of course. They were not pressured to convert to Christianity, although almost invariably their children were brought up as Christians and given a European predicated name and education.18 Not much evidence remains of these households, particularly when Indian women partners were poor and of Hindu backgrounds. But what mattered most were the outward displays of household spatial organization and furnishings occupied by their European partners. There were some colourful exceptions such as the early male colonial example of ‘Hindoo Stuart’ (c. 1758–1828) of Calcutta, but for the most part these colonial displays were essentially European with the odd concession to the orientalism of the East.19 As with her earlier Indian ­background, the household was her domain, but the food she served, or had served, was now European, as mandated by most European partners and their Western sensibilities.20

Eurasian Domestic Intervention, 1790–1830 Another powerful force that shifted the frame of femininity in this early period was the agency of a new generation of Eurasian females (themselves mostly the result of earlier Indo-European relationships). While Indian women were generally content with co-habitation with European men, Eurasian women aspirants (many of  whom also came from very poor  Christopher. J. Hawes, Poor Relations…, 7–8.  An Irishman who became a Major General in the Indian army. He became fascinated with Indian languages and custom and took to wearing Indian dress. An opponent of the missions and their Westernisation/conversion attempts. His distinctive Indophile attitudes and sensitivity are reflected in his grave with strong and detailed Hindu motifs situated in the Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata. 20  There are several extant accounts of these early relationships in the Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library in London. One of the best contemporaneous published accounts is that of William Hickey, former Attorney at Law in who escaped larceny charges in London. Escaping the moral strictures imposed by the church and the middle class in England, he was able to build a strong and authentic relationship with his Indian partner, Jemdanee. Alfred Spencer, (ed.) 1948. Memoirs of William Hickey. London: Hurst and Blackett. 18 19

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circumstances) often demanded marriage and, with it, greater future security. This might even involve a later life in Europe with their husbands. Compared with liaisons formed with Indian women there were other differences as well. The husbands of Eurasian women of this period were usually younger, more recently arrived and belonged to the army officer class or were ranked officials in the East India Company. Indian women, usually less demanding, often settled for European fortune hunters seeking emotional solace in their later years. Furthermore, in the period of the early nineteenth century, these Eurasian women constructed new racial barriers that were largely independent of empire. This was particularly so when it came to seeing themselves as separate from Indian women who occupied the same feminine spaces of European household domesticity. Theirs was an aspiration to be European and what happened in the household defined their European femininity rather than the irreversible separateness Indian women suffered from their traditional communities as a result of their relationships with European men. This form of Eurasian sensibility of belonging to the European domain also infected East India Company mentalities at the time. And as a measure of the power of this aspirational sensibility, Eurasian orphanages in the 1810s and 1820s, consciously served only Indian food, lest their destitute Eurasian inmates might acquire a taste for expensive European habits through eating European food: seen as an unhealthy early trajectory given their likely future destitute status.21 In British India the most significant element in the shifting frame of colonial femininity now became the issue of race. In particular, the feminine body of the mixed-race (Eurasian) female was a medium through which powerful, mostly white men could orchestrate their statecraft. The incarnations of the Eurasian female now became many though she remained enmeshed in what Anne McClintock sees as the relational aspects of race, class and gender that were not distinct realms of experience in empire but came into existence in relation with each other.22 The Eurasian woman might appear as the housemaker, acting as an emotional refuge for a European male, as he embarked upon an early life in British India, with all of its moral freedoms. This relationship status was an unequal one with 21  ‘Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Constitution and Working of the Lawrence Military Asylums in India’ [1871], Appendix vi, 9 (OIOC) L/Mil/17/5/2295. 22  Anne McClintock. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge.

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European patriarchies mostly defining her femininity. Yet, as custodian of a European household, she won greater status and material comfort. She also had an opportunity to negotiate her part Indianness, and her youth, as an Eastern exotic that was a powerful allurement in this era to European men.

Different Marginalities: Eurasian and Indian Deficit Femininities, 1810–1840 However, this kind of transferred femininity began to break apart a generation later in the 1810s. A key determinant here was state intervention by proxy through East India Company directives. The focus of these directives was not Indian women, but rather their offspring who, being of mixed European-Indian lineage, were deemed East Indians (or Eurasians as the rest of this chapter will refer to them). From the late 1790s onwards, these developments about Eurasians in India were driven by official anxieties around miscegenation that signalled out Eurasians for focus: anxieties that also tapped into transnational narratives that had begun to emerge elsewhere in other colonial domains and were probably the forerunners of eugenic thought later in the nineteenth century. Significantly, it was a decade later before Indian femininity came under such close scrutiny, and this for different reasons that concerned the admission of the missions to India in 1813 as will be discussed below. By the 1810s Eurasians were considered racially dangerous in other empires. It was true, in Senegal, French West Africa, signares (women of Afro-French decent) acted as intermediaries: providing French traders with access to African commercial networks.23 Yet, in the Dutch East Indies, poor Eurasians troubled the Dutch colonial mind because of their lack of innerlijke (moral strength).24 Probably of more immediacy to the British mindset were the mutinous mulattos (part-European lineage locals) in San Domingo and Haiti who led revolts against the Spanish and French in the West Indies (1791–1794). These events were not lost on the Court of Directors of the East India Company who were based in London (after a report by Lord Valentina in 1811 who worried about the rapid rise in 23  Nancy Hafkin and Edna Bay. 1976. Women in Africa, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 7. 24  Joost Cotè. 2009. ‘“Sins of their Fathers”: Culturally at Risk Children and the Colonial State in Asia’, Paedagogica Historica, 45: 1–2, 137.

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‘half-caste’ children British India and Ceylon for similar reasons).25 More locally, in India, it was resident European women who  garnered these attitudes against this rising Eurasian racial group in India. For example, Lady Nugent (wife of the Commander in Chief of the British Army) claimed the femininity of Eurasians in Calcutta was weaponised by them at the monthly balls in the town, where their Western accomplishment displays of dress, deportment and dancing were, in fact, ‘a snare’ to ‘entrap’ young British officers into early marriages with cruel emotional consequences for both parties. It was not long after that these balls were banned in 1814 as a result.26 As resident European women now viewed them, these forms of femininity offered dangerous cross-racial bridges. Furthermore, these views contrasted with their attitudes towards traditional and European-interacting Indian nautch dancers, documented in Julie Peakman’s research, who were often also high-end prostitutes or mistresses.27 They were more outside the bounds of postulated European moral codes, yet they scarcely rated a mention largely because their feminine torpor was much less of a threat. These dancers did not seek crossracial relationships with European men but rather only to sexually trade with them. At an official level, East India Company regulations had already framed these changing attitudes regarding femininity. As early as 1786 Eurasian orphans (if their European father was no longer living) were prohibited from completing their education in England: the fear being that their racial imperfections would eventually dilute the British ‘blood’ stock as they assimilated into the metropole world. Five years later another ban by the East India Company was placed on Eurasians serving as officers in the civil, military and marine services or their ships. And in 1795 Eurasians could no longer serve in the military at all in India except as ‘fifers, drummers, bandsmen, and farriers’.28 To reinforce this hardening racial barrier regarding Eurasian males, Indian and Eurasian girls were then discouraged from marrying European soldiers after 1810.29

25  S. Muthiah and Harry MacLure. 2013. The Anglo-Indians: a Five Hundred Year History. New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 25. 26  ‘Lady Nugent, 1812 and 1814’, cited in Tim R. Barrett, Calcutta…, 245. 27  Julie Peakman, Licentious Worlds…, 165. 28  S. Muthiah and Harry MacLure, The Anglo-Indians…, 24–25. 29  ‘Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Constitution and Working of the Lawrence Military Asylums in India’ [1871], Appendix vi, 8 (OIOC) L/Mil/17/5/2295.

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Colonial Constructions of Indian Femininity and the Entry of the Missions, 1813 As shown above, it was official attitudes towards Eurasians in India that brought about the first shifts in colonial feminine mentalities in British India. Only later in the 1810s and 1820s did the focus move to reconstituting these colonial attitudes towards less powerful Indian women: particularly regarding their potentiality to provide viable feminine spaces within the households owned by European men. And this change regarding Indian women was brought about much more by the missions. Much against the East India Company’s wishes, formal British missionary access to India was granted by Westminster (Parliament in London) in 1813. The Company feared the damage such access would do to the delicate social settlement that was contained within, and gave structure to, the European ambit in India. Well before this time, in the 1790s, the first Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, had been careful to negotiate with still powerful traditional and highly literate Indian elites. These elites would not really brook Western claims to cultural or intellectual superiority, particularly as the East India Company’s chief purpose was a transparent pursuit of profit. Additionally, the rich orientalist period of the 1820s and 1830s which acknowledged the standing of Indian learning and languages, brought with it new crossovers with Indian culture. These crossovers intrigued intelligent European educators and philosophers, located mostly in Bengal and they encouraged colonial attitudes in the other direction as to the merits of Indian intellectual and social culture. However, in 1813 Evangelical missionaries, in particular, made their case for what amounted to a hostile cultural intervention on the subcontinent, focusing on Indian women. They now attacked the seeming moral degeneracy of the Indian female whose lack of apt femininity was made apparent to European audiences by lithographs and apocryphal stories fed back from India to Westminster, which related to these audiences the seeming emotional cruelty of Indian women. She might drown an unwanted elderly relative by pegging him near the rising tidal waters of the Ganges or she might abandon an unwanted daughter to crocodiles on Sagar Island in Bengal.30 European accounts of traditional practices such as sati later added to this potent genre of story-telling. These stories de-­ humanized the femininity of the Indian female, by pointing to her deficit  Tim R. Barrett, Calcutta…, 282, 285.

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psychological and moral makeup, as she remained stranded on the edges of empire. As well, she seemed somehow complicit in the barbarism of traditional cultural practices directed by some male Indian elites.31 This colonial relegation of Indian femininity was to endure in colonial circles for much of the rest of the nineteenth century. Where the Indian female did engage with the colonial ambit her future was usually made worse, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Missionaries, eager for conversion, unsustainably removed mostly Indian ‘orphans’ from the sustenance of their traditional communities. And colonial education schemes for Indian girls in the nineteenth century, often only offered forced labour in ‘prison schools’, ‘laundry schools’ or where she was engaged in dystopic colonial-built factories, processing raw agricultural produce such as cotton and jute.

The New Eurasian Feminine Body, 1850–1870 However, stronger colonial dynamics were in play for Eurasian femininity by the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1850s Eurasian women were now on the periphery, neither accepted by the European expatriate community nor willing to merge with Indians, even when both groups were closely connected with British commerce. As mentioned, East India Company politics and arriving white European women had intervened to relegate their status. Largely as a result of the exploitative nature of empire, many Eurasians of the mid-nineteenth century were very poor. It was not until the 1850s with the rise of the railways, the institution of Western postage services (that replaced the traditional Indian dak [runner] deliverer) and the customs services, that Eurasian families were able to find more secure employment in the raj after their un-ceremonial ejection from Company and Army employment half a century earlier. A distinctive patois and cuisine began to emerge within their ranks, largely directed by Eurasian women, yet their femininity was now seen through European eyes as distinctively tawdry, recumbent and dishevelled.32 The writer Rumer Godden typified

31  See Jyoti Atwal. 2013. ‘Foul unhallow’d fires’: Officiating Sati and the Colonial Hindu Widow in the United Provinces’, in Studies in History, 29:2, 229–272. 32  Norman I.  Marshall. 2011. The Anglo-Indian Absconder Soldier Daddy. New Delhi: Marshall and Myers.

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European stereoptyping of the household of the Eurasian female in later colonial India: There was wire-netting over the windows to keep out thieves, and it was rusty and sagging … Someone had left the skins of eaten fruit on the dish so the room reeked of bananas. It was Auntie’s habit to leave the cloth on the table because the wood was marked from hot plates: after the first meal it was usually soiled, especially where father sat …. The garden was untidy, the flowers beginning to seed, and there was a congregation of crows worshipping a dead rat they had dropped on the grass.33

In the 1850s there was further colonial slippage. The femininity of the Eurasian female garnered additional deficits as seen by Europeans. She was now anonymous: her race had become a danger, seemingly out of control in burgeoning numbers. Yet, she was  still the subaltern (underclass), inconveniently attached, as the British saw her, to the broader colonial project because of her immutable, part-European lineage. However, after the scarifying experience of the Great Revolt of 1857 (and the replacement of East India Company rule with direct control from Westminster in 1858), attitudes of government galvanised around what amounted to a perceived need to direct colonial femininity in more central and strategic ways. Simmering anxieties, (first voiced over two generations earlier, about the imagined trajectories of mixed-race communities and their likely corrosive effect on Indian colonial governance), came to a head in 1860. Projected demographics about Eurasians and their capacity to produce children in the future were unsettling for colonial administrators, who simultaneously ignored the vast numbers of Indians from these race-driven calculations. For example, in Bombay, which had 10 per cent of India’s Eurasian population, 32 per cent of these Eurasians were children under the age of 14, compared to just 13 per cent for the European population. In Calcutta Eurasian children under the age of 11 were 25 per cent of the Eurasian population compared to 16 per cent of the European population being children of the same age. Also, in terms of future reproduction prospects, other comparisons were just as bleak if it was hoped Europeans would continue to hold sway. For Eurasians gender was evenly balanced but for Europeans, males still outnumbered females by over three to one.34  Rumer Godden. 1937. The Lady and the Unicorn, London: Mayflower.  Statistical Abstract Relating to British India from 1840 to 1865 (as far as the particulars can be stated) (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1867), 3, (OIOC). 33 34

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These figures could only ever be approximations of the true picture, despite the tendency of the British to overly categorise and stratify India’s cultural, linguistic and religious domains. Yet, emerging imperial narratives soon directed new incarnations of Eurasian femininine identity: although this time only for the few. In 1860 Lord Canning, the Viceroy, issued a key Minute about Eurasian children, of which the following is an extract: If measures for educating these children are not promptly and vigorously encouraged and aided by Government, we shall soon find ourselves embarrassed in all large towns and stations with a floating population of Indianized English, loosely brought up, and exhibiting the worst qualities of both races … I can hardly imagine a more profitless, unmanageable community than one so composed … it could be called a class dangerous to the State.35

In post-1857 Revolt India, the idea of louche and vagrant Eurasians, demonstrating to aloof Indian elites something other than the superiority of European ‘blood’ was too much to countenance. Additionally, Eurasians had generally fought for the British during the Revolt and legal restrictions concerning them, imposed early in the century, were relaxed.36 Eurasian boys might find employment on British plantations and other colonial commerce, but for Eurasian girls’, education (beyond the usual tokenistic elementary schooling for some) was seen as the best alternative.37 The funds for this new cohort were not yet provided. And what little was eventually offered was mostly taken away from proposed schools for Indians, promised just six years earlier by Charles Wood’s Education Despatch of 1854.38 35  ‘Minute by the Governor General, October 29, 1860’, no. 2, Government of India Proceedings (OIOC) P/188/75. 36  Tim R. Barrett, Calcutta…, 238. 37  From the 1860s onwards provincial education reports boasted a steady increase in colonial schooling for boys and girls. European pupils were counted separately. But for the rest these figures were highly dubious, with some schools counted twice and when schooling did actually occur it was for elementary levels only with high levels of truancy, partly caused by children needing to assist their parents in agricultural or small-scale commerce. The literacy rate under the British rarely rose above a meagre two per cent in all provinces. 38  Charles Wood ‘Despatch from the Court of Directors of the East India Company to the Governor General of India in Council, dated the 19th of July, 1854’ in James A. Richey. 1922. Selections from the Educational Records, 1840–1859. Calcutta: Government Printing, ii, 388.

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As the chapter will now show, this new state imperative of enculturating and Westernising at least some Eurasian females, then fed into what was already happening in (i) the army and (ii) what was about to happen when the Utilitarian and philanthropist, Mary Carpenter stepped ashore in India for the first time in 1866. In brief, the army had already created fledgling spaces for new feminine Eurasian education, and Mary Carpenter, as well as other like agents from England, then appropriated these feminine spaces to suddenly create new mentalities around teacher training.

The Army and New Eurasian Femininity, 1847–1871 The connection between femininity and the British army was an odd juxtaposition. Ever since the early nineteenth century the East India Company had conducted asylums or ‘orphanages’ for mostly illegitimate children of military men. These asylums were built partly on the model of the Royal Military Asylum founded by the Duke of York (second son of George III) at Chelsea in England in 1801, even though some Indian asylums had an earlier provenance. Typical of army regimentation these institutions separated the children of officers from those of the ‘ordinary ranks’ and, though heavily subsidized by the Company, military fathers were actually identified in military gazettes by their compulsory monthly contributions for the upkeep of their illegitimate children.39 These asylums were grim affairs, particularly for girls, without even the limited education offered to their brothers, including important experimental sites such as Andrew Bell’s monitorial school in Madras. However, in 1847, as a result of the benefaction of Henry Lawrence (statesmen, military man and administrator in India, killed in the Great Revolt of 1857) Lawrence Military Asylums were established at key military cantonments where the children of the military (including many Eurasian children) were now given a superior education by the standards of the time. Of course, the imperatives behind the care of such Eurasians applied to girls as well as boys. And the genuine affection of some military fathers 39  The richest documentary records regarding the separate arrangements for children of officers and those soldiers of ordinary ranks, (and before the Lawrence Asylum innovations), concern Calcutta. See Maureen Evers. 2009 and 2010. ‘Four Orphan Schools in Calcutta and the Lawrence Military Asylum, Sanawar’ in The Journal of the Families in British India Society, i, 1–14; ii, 5–15; First Report of the Lawrence Asylum in the Indian Hills for the Orphan and Other Children of European Soldiers Serving or Having Served in India (Delhi: Gazette Press, n. d. [1849]), 1, (OIOC).

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combined with the extra resourcing provided by Lawrence’s benefaction, offered new education opportunities for girls. Fathers (and mothers) could visit and stay at these institutions, provided they could provide their own bedding and victuals. This placement reinforced filial responsibilities, and new feminine spaces emerged that involved their daughters being responsible for newly arrived babies, their personal cleanliness and the neatness of their uniforms (possibly modelled on the uniforms and daily routines of the Foundling Hospital in London for babies given up by unwed mothers in that city).40 In the Lawrence Asylums in India, the girl inmates were taught a European curriculum along with the boys for three days a week, including English history, geography, arithmetic and geometry, as well as the elite and demanding Indian language of Urdu. On the remaining two days they also learnt a European accomplishments ­curriculum of needlework and drawing.41 Pedagogical innovation from England was deployed mostly from the Norwood school for the poor in London with earlier cheap and ineffective monitorial teaching done away with.42 The Lawrence Asylums created new, officially funded feminine spaces for daughters of the military that were about community building, based on socio-cultural inclusion, and were influenced by transferrals of benefaction-­based practice from England. They were refuges from a world in which colonial commerce was otherwise particularly aggressive in robbing children of their identity and dignity. Significantly, these new military-­ funded femininity spaces shifted the frame for these few fortunate Eurasian girls, firmly back into the European domain of culture, education and social expectations.

40  Fourth Report of the Lawrence Asylum in the Indian Hills for the Orphans and Other Children of European Soldiers Serving or Having Served in India, Appendix III, (Sanawar: Institution Press, 1853), 6, (OIOC). 41  ‘Accomplishments’ was a curriculum that developed for middle class girls from the 1780s in Europe that signified their class. It involved learning music, deportment, geography, needlework, poetry, nature study and history amongst other subjects. It generally did not include the sciences or classical languages, considered the preserve of boys of privilege. As the nineteenth century progressed, accomplishments became a means to restrict girls of ability who might otherwise enrol at university. 42  ‘Inspector’s report’ W. Holroyd to Captain Paske, July 19, 1859’, Fourth Report of the Lawrence Asylum in the Indian Hills for the Orphans and Other Children of European Soldiers Serving or Having Served in India, Appendix III, (Sanawar: Institution Press, 1853) (OIOC).

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Mary Carpenter and Teacher Training, 1866–1882 In the late 1850s, as a mark of the increasing British separateness from Indian culture, Western femininity took hold in the new classrooms of the raj. Lawrence Military asylums in north India embedded brands of accomplishment feminine learning in India. As mentioned, aspirations for the learning of Indian girls was largely abandoned by the state post the Great Revolt of 1857. This was despite the promises contained in Charles Wood’s Education Despatch of 1854 just three years earlier and official rhetoric promoting female education that would remain for the rest of the century. However, teacher training, with English philanthropist and social theorist Mary Carpenter at its head, offered new possibilities for the colonial state. Training of female teachers in new accomplishments-based learning gave the raj the opportunity to justify new forms of racial exclusion of Indian females. This new brand of femininity allowed the state to recover its earlier narratives around Eurasians, even though it actually applied to very few of them. Colonial femininity narratives, and the racialized female bodies that might be permitted to convey them, also veiled another worrying innovation. Eurasian and European females could become teachers, even before they had really completed much schooling themselves. This racial preference prized open new class and gender constituencies in the 1860s. Only more affluent Eurasian females (the state refused funding for poorer Eurasians and removed most of it from fledgling efforts to educate Indian females) were able to participate as trainee accomplishments teachers. Official photographs showed them wearing self-worked needlework smocked blouses, now couturiers of a new fashion mélange, covering over their bare shoulders and midriffs as they still wore their Indian saris beneath. Furthermore, their learning was now unequivocally Western in predication. These developments in the late 1860s and 1870s were unwittingly made possible by Mary Carpenter who, with semi-official permission, toured India on four occasions to visit schools for females. This was a complex transnational overlay, also assisted by some other women working in India, that introduced different relational aspects of femininity, this time with a direct European flavour. Her mission was mostly about quite fashionable mentalities regarding femininity at the time in England, around the importance of the emotional maturity and education of females, so that they might become the mainstays and prototypes of a stable Protestant British society.

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According to Carpenter, this might be achieved in two ways: girls (and eventual mothers) having nurturing mothers of their own or, lacking this, receiving a relatively sound education that might otherwise teach young females their responsibilities in the adult world as mothers for the betterment of society as a whole. Carpenter’s strong views on this brand of femininity, applicable as she saw it to India too, came from her earlier work at Red Lodge in Bristol and writing about the institutionalisation and education of ‘juvenile delinquents’ to be found on the streets or in the prisons in England.43 Although contrary to the views of most officials in India she would later clash with, she did not discriminate in her educational outlook when it came to applying this rationale to Indian females as well as to Eurasians and Europeans. In England Carpenter’s Unitarian circles knew well the sophisticated reforming ideas of visiting Indian luminaries. These included Ram Mohan Roy who was of her father’s acquaintance and, a generation later, Keshub Chunder Sen (then leader of a breakaway branch of the Brahmo Samaj) mentioned earlier in this chapter. Yet, she remained heavily on the side of Western civilisation where, she imagined, Indians would benefit from superior English household domestic procedure and law.44 This was typical, of course, of most female philanthropists based in England at the time. Though her approach, like many Victorians of her age, was also interested in amateur forms of anthropology about the human condition. However, the upshot of Carpenter’s intervention (reinforced by her allies at Westminster), was not so much about trying to re-configure colonial femininity on the subcontinent: never a realistic goal given her sporadic though extended visits to India. Rather its significance turned out to be the premature forcing of reluctant British officials in India to promote teacher training for females, even ahead of their schooling first. Of course, the raj was never going to allow the work of just one European woman direct its own agendas for very long. And after Carpenter’s death in 1877, there were important imperial provisos imposed on Eurasian teacher training as well. These provisos racialized and embedded class into Carpenter’s project. The new legal device was the 43  Mary Carpenter. 1953. Juvenile Delinquents: Their Condition and Their Treatment. London: W. and F. Cash. 44  Mary Carpenter. [reprint 1915]. The Last Days in England of the Rajah Rammohan Roy. Calcutta: The Rammohan Roy Library, first edition preface, iii–iv, vii and third edition, 104–05. See also Ruth Watts. 2001. ‘Mary Carpenter and India: Enlightened liberalism or condescending imperialism’ in Paedagogica Historica, 37(1), 193–210.

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‘European Code’, conceived in the Viceroy’s office, during the tenure of Lord Lytton, in 1879. ‘The Code’ applied to males as well as females. It offered protected funding status for Eurasians and Europeans across most social fields of colonial intervention, but to the exclusion of all Indians.45 For female Eurasian education, this proved to be a highly effective legal device. Up until 1919 (when education was ‘decentralised’, passing control mostly to Indians that then diluted the Code’s effectiveness), most government spending on female education was directed towards this middle-class Eurasian and European female cohort in India. The continued teaching of an accomplishments curriculum was encouraged. And, like in England and the white dominions of British Empire, this signified their privileged social status. It also enticed these women to accept an inferior brand of education for many of them, when they might have aspired instead to the more academic education offered to men by India’s leading universities. The focus of colonial femininity of the late 1700s and early 1800s on the European-led household in India had now fundamentally shifted by 1850. These mentalities had been captured by the state as part of mainstream secular colonial governance (itself having burgeoned mid-century). Few poor Eurasians and even fewer Indian females could participate in any genuine colonial education as the second half of the nineteenth century progressed, and with accomplishments predicated femininity now tucked in under the Code available only to wealthier Eurasians and Europeans.

Medicine However, this restrictiveness was not the case regarding medical endeavours which were transmitted largely through the agency of a significant number of female missionaries after 1870 (whose experience in the field had taken them away from the stereotypes about Indian females held by some of their predecessors two generations earlier). In fact, this new generation of missionaries created different geographies in the 1870s and 1880s that embraced many more Indians with another brand of femininity that involved a crossing over of cultural thresholds through the deployment of Western medical and tropical science.

45  ‘Draft Code of Regulations for European Schools as Finally Accepted by the Government of India, October 1884’ (OIOC), P/2257.

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The cultural problematics around transmitting knowledge and form in the colonial classroom were generally far less contested when it came to medicine. Medical science was more transparently developed and applied in India as well as in Europe as simultaneous ontologies of academic research were developed. David Arnold sees this process as one of plural dialogue, of occidental therapeutics, between India and Britain, although still dependent on the cultural and political forces in play in British India.46 Of course, in applying these medical developments in India, there were still strong cultural barriers regarding Indian women that needed to be negotiated. Missionary zenana (Indian household) visits, which grew in popularity from the late 1860s onwards, were problematic in attempting to teach secluded Indian women in their domestic spaces often bible-­ based knowledge without also signifying a loss of their culture. However, these visits served to open up some lines of communication for new Western feminine agency regarding medicine. The work of Priscilla Winter (Society of the Propagation of the Gospel [middle church Anglican mission]) at Delhi (north India), American Methodist missionaries Clara Swain and Isabella Thoburn at Lucknow and Bareilly (north-central India), and Edith Brown (a British medical missionary) at Ludhiana (north India) were significant examples in this period where these missionary lodgements eventually led to major and enduring medical institutions such as the St Stephen’s Hospital for Women and Children, and the Ludhiana Medical College for Women. Colonial femininity, as conveyed by these and other missionaries, now moved outside officially constructed spaces, although still with a touch of evangelism and paternalism. In the very early days of these developments, in the late 1860s, Priscilla Winter’s strategy was to encourage Indian women to come to her dispensaries to receive limited treatment for the ailments of their families. She did this by visiting them on washing day mornings on the bathing ghats (steps) of the Yamuna River in Delhi, where they also took their daily vows in the sacred river.47 There were dangerous visits, involving long walks by other missionaries through the jungle, to remote Indian dispensaries where offers of Western medicine 46  David Arnold. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. London: University of California Press, 11–60. 47  R. R. Winter to Mr Tucker, April 3, 1889, Rhodes House Library, Oxford (RHL) SPG E44, f. 495; Jenny C. Muller. 1910. Some Personal Reminiscences of Work in the Delhi Medical Mission, 1884–1910. Suffolk: Richmond Clay, 3.

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were made in return for bible classes.48 These medical missionaries often confused supposed Indian languor with the results of grinding poverty: ‘her wasted body was partially covered with rags, as dirty and filthy as rags ever became’.49 Most harrowing of all, however, were eye operations, performed in Indian villages without anaesthetic, where there were long queues for treatment in houses with mud floors and poor light: ‘Dr Nell had herself to operate … the screams were terrible to the onlooker’.50 However, the gender overlay remained complex. Masculine colonial intervention still had a part to play in what remained a paternal oversight. Its earlier colonial medical focus in the 1830s and 1840s had been the military and for men only. On the other hand, for Indians, a traditional, Indian, male practitioner’s job in the village was to put together a package of religious, dietary, moral and physical remedies for the Indian sufferer.51 Hindu refusals for smallpox vaccination, coming from a cow, assigned many Indian children to an early death.52 Before the 1880s, the main government-­ run medical colleges in each province were citadels that excluded even European women. Yet, European and Eurasian women finally gained limited admittance, only after using different but clever bureaucratic ploys in each of these institutions.53 Furthermore, just as government had artificially categorised caste to denigrate Indian cultural practice in earlier decades, so too did it hold up stereotypes about Indian dhais (midwives) as wilfully murdering infants at birth, supposedly as a means of birth control; or engaging in witchcraft practices such as forcing expectant mothers to stand astride cooking fires and infusing them with cardamom and ginger. These emotional deficit stereotypes about Indian women carers persisted until at least 1910.54 48  ‘The Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Indian Female Normal School and Instructional Society, April, 1875’ (Birmingham: Josiah Allen, 1875) (OIOC). This organisation, founded by Lady Kinnaird, was nominally interdenominational but with a significant CMS membership that broke away from it in 1881. 49  ‘The Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Indian Female Normal School and Instructional Society, April, 1875’ (Birmingham: Josiah Allen, 1875), 102 (RHL). 50  Letters of Una Saunders, August 3, 1898 (OIOC) MSS Eur F 186/141. 51  Christopher A. Bayly. 1999. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870, New Delhi: CUP, 274. 52  Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information…, 270. 53  Tim Allender. 2016. Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932. Manchester, MUP, 179–80. 54  ‘Notes on the Annual Returns of the Dispensaries and Charitable Institutions of the NWP and & Oudh ending 1910’, V/12/713, (OIOC).

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Science and Medical Outreach Yet, parallel spaces of colonial medical femininity were built after 1870, also partly because of fortuitous circumstances that then embraced more Indians. As Western interest in tropical medicine in India took hold so, too, was there international focus on the medical treatment protocols in India that could no longer be seen to exclude Indians. Additionally, Indian cultural permission was only available for women to treat women (whether European, Eurasian or Indian) with male operatives specifically excluded, especially for obstetrics and gynaecology: which, after eye conditions, were the most common categories of treatment of the time. As a result, a highly gendered medical profession burgeoned in India in order to facilitate the cultural permission needed for the intimate clinical treatment of Indian females: the cornerstone of an otherwise anonymous relationship between medic and patient.55 And at this periphery, the professional connections of nurses, midwives and female doctors were to become much more powerful even than colonial teachers in taking a reluctant raj to new Indian female terrain. This different story regarding femininity within the medical setting established a paradox. European women and their agents were authorised to be in control of the Indian female body, unlike women teachers, who needed to contend with the vagaries of pedagogy and an esoteric connection between Eastern and Western classroom knowledge. The ‘treatment’ contact between ‘trained’ medical women and Indian recipients was usually brief.56 Yet, such brevity also built capacity for the female practitioner to interact with many more individuals than the schoolteacher, who ministered to a smaller and less transient classroom cohort. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, colonial medical femininity then developed through two strands. Firstly, through the longer-standing female medical schools and colleges that the missions had founded (mentioned above). And, secondly, through those institutions eventually set up by government or private secular philanthropic bodies at the behest of

55  Gender categorisations were particularly strong in India concerning the European, Eurasian and Indian ‘treatment’ of Indian females. 56  This assertion is based on the elevated numbers of patients recorded in government reports as being consulted each day by the medical carers, particularly in the Eurasian and Indian categories.

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secular women feminists such as Edith Pechey and others in Bombay.57 By 1899, the British Medical Journal reported that 324 women were undergoing medical training, mostly in the mission hospitals, including 121 women ‘assistant surgeons’ (trainee or qualified physicians), 191 hospital assistants and over 1200 nurses, midwives and compounders (chemists) already qualified to carry out these services for the public.58 The expansion was greatly assisted by the Lady Reay Fund for Women in Bombay, as well as the pan-Indian Lady Dufferin Fund.59 By 1912 there were 160 women’s hospitals across India, though there were still battles being fought by women to remove incompetent male administrators in what these women regarded as their professional domain.60 A key feature of this expansion was that many women had their credentials recognised as physicians, ahead of even England where qualifying female doctors still needed to have their credentials recognised at universities in Ireland, Germany or even in India. This professional domain was one mostly for Eurasians and Europeans. Although the development of the nursing and midwifery professions had become much more cross-­ racial enterprises that included many Indians, whose femininity became Western enculturated based on scientific treatment protocols around cure and Western clinical dress, but without any seeming threat to their Indian culture. Significantly, for Indian female patients, formal hospital work spaces remained organised around the race agendas of the raj. There were different hospitals with superior levels of care offered to Europeans, and then for Eurasians, and finally much more casual and compromising short-term bedding annexes for Indians: with the latter also sensitive to the caste of their carers. Under-resourcing by the British of ‘overflowing’ state hospitals placed overwhelming pressure on the mission dispensaries and the nursing staff at mission sites where the medical care of larger numbers of Indian women had originated. For example, at the CMS mission at Ranaghat (Bengal [East India]), nurses and compounders typically worked from 7 am to 5 pm in the blazing heat, treating over 1000 patients a day, 57  Mridula Ramanna. 2002. Western Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Bombay, Bangalore: Orient Longman Private Ltd., 185. 58  The British Medical Journal (September 30, 1899), 888. 59  Mridula Ramanna. Western Medicine, 196. 60  ‘The National Association for Providing Female Medical Aid to the Women of India’ (1912) (OIOC) V/24/713.

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a number that rose to 1400  in the monsoon season.61 Away from the direct gaze of the state, mission work remained vibrant. Local medical outreach to purdah nashíns (elite women behind the screen) reached 4009 women in 1901  in the northern Indian province of the NWP.62 Furthermore, in Bombay, in the southwest, nursing outreach saw the treatment of almost half a million Indian females by 1910.63 By the beginning of the twentieth century, medical science, whether developed in Asia or Europe, reached many more Indian women than colonial teaching did. However, medical care remained wedded to its missionary precursors of the 1860s. For example, by 1927, the ninety-three mission hospitals for women represented over half the total number of such institutions on the subcontinent. Additionally, by this time there were 102 mission training schools for nurses compared to just 59 provided by government. And by the Second World War, 80 per cent of all Indian nurses had been trained in mission hospitals.64

Conclusion The scope of this chapter has only allowed a discussion of some factors relating to feminine identity in colonial India. There were no doubt exceptions to the broad characterisations that I have made. However, the chapter reveals several important phenomena. As mentioned in my introduction, femininity is not a paradigmatic category in modern scholarship like gender or feminism, that mostly interests academic writing on this and related topics today. However, changing constructions of femininity were more strongly culturally operative in the historical domain itself and remain so today. As has been shown by this chapter, on the colonial side of the ledger, femininity mentalities were powerful in covering over race and class barriers in empire concerning women. These mentalities came to be an instrument of statecraft and as state agendas changed, so did officially 61  CMS Annual Report, 1925–26, 129, Cadbury Research Library Birmingham (CRL) XCMS/B/OMS/I1/G2/0. 62  ‘Report of the Civil Hospitals and Dispensaries Under the Government of Bombay, 1910’ (OIOC) V/24/700. 63  ‘Report of the Civil Hospitals…, 1910’ (OIOC) V/24/700. 64  Rosemary Fitzgerald. 1997. ‘Rescue and Redemption: the rise of female medical missions in colonial India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ in Anne M.  Rafferty and Jane Robinson, Nursing History and the Politics of Welfare. London: Routledge, 65, 76.

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favoured identities that related to femininity. These new identities were then normalised and reconfigured in new power contexts of a masculine empire. However, the state could not always wrangle femininity in this way and the agency of some colonial women could render it non-compliant to the racial and class agendas of the raj. Medicine and international medical science offered the most important opportunity for this underlying activism. New non-state colonial geographies were created as part of this process. And regarding female-directed medical care, it was religion through the missions rather than Western secularism or Western feminism that produced the basis for the new dynamic. Some aspects remained immovable: throughout the entire colonial period European women wore European dress, even when in the hottest conditions.65 This remained a signifier that their own culture was not lost. This was a tough conformity in the Indian climate, particularly when whale bone corsets of the 1880s were in vogue. Only a few women challenged these outward displays of European femininity: Margaret Noble became ‘Nivedita’ under Swami Vivekananda and adopted Indian-styled robes as she set up a school teaching handicrafts, Bengali and knowledge as it appeared to the child in play. While unconventional CMS missionary, Amy Carmichael, in southern India, whose life’s work involved rescuing devadasis (female temple workers) from prostitution, involved her choosing to wear Indian clothes and using coffee to dye her own skin brown.66 Geraldine Forbes rightly observes Indian feminism, in the first decades of the twentieth century, did emerge from behind the purdah (traditional seclusion), but not as a carbon copy of Western feminism in either ideology or goals, as the Indian social system bore little resemblance to that of European countries.67 Yet the shifting scene regarding colonial constructed femininity on the subcontinent remained central to imagined delineations of inclusion by the West where the colonial hand was most active. In reality, up until Independence from the British in 1947, these femininity identities in fact simultaneously represented much stronger geographies of exclusion rather than inclusion. And they offered a powerful symbolism, indicating a raj, which was the custodian of these artificial delineations, that could no longer claim a part in India’s modernity story. 65  Bernard Cohn. 1997. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 136–43. 66  Elisabeth Elliot. 1987. A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael, Old Tappan: NJ: Revell. 67  Geraldine Forbes. 2008. Women in Colonial India. New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 11.

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References Primary Sources Andrew, E.  W., & Bushnell, K.  C. (1889). The Queen’s Daughters. London: Morgan and Scott. Besant, A. (2001). Annie Besant on the Type of Education for Indian Girls, 1904. In S. Bhattacharya, J. Bara, et al. (Eds.), Development of Women’s Education in India, a Collection of Documents, 1850–1920. New Delhi: Kanishka. Carpenter, M. (1853). Juvenile Delinquents: Their Condition and Their Treatment. London: W. and F. Cash. Carpenter, M. (1915). [Reprint] The Last Days in England of the Rajah Rammohan Roy. Calcutta: The Rammohan Roy Library. CMS Annual Report. (1925–26). 129, Cadbury Research Library Birmingham (CRL) XCMS/B/OMS/I1/G2/0. Draft Code of Regulations for European Schools as Finally Accepted by the Government of India. October (1884). Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library, (OIOC), P/2257. First Report of the Lawrence Asylum in the Indian Hills for the Orphan and Other Children of European Soldiers Serving or Having Served in India (Delhi: Gazette Press, n. d. [1849]), 1, (OIOC). Fourth Report of the Lawrence Asylum in the Indian Hills for the Orphans and Other Children of European Soldiers Serving or Having Served in India, Appendix III. (Sanawar: Institution Press, 1853), 6, (OIOC). Godden, R. (1937). The Lady and the Unicorn. London: Mayflower. Inspector’s report W. Holroyd to Captain Paske, July 19, 1859, Fourth Report of the Lawrence Asylum in the Indian Hills for the Orphans and Other Children of European Soldiers Serving or Having Served in India, Appendix III, (Sanawar: Institution Press, 1853) (OIOC). Kerr, R. (1886). Social Evil in Calcutta: Its Strength, Its Haunts Its Causes. Calcutta: Thomas S. Smith. Letters of Una Saunders. August 3, (1898). (OIOC) MSS Eur F 186/141. Minute by the Governor General. October 29, (1860). no. 2, Government of India Proceedings (OIOC) P/188/75. Muller, J.  C. (1910). Some Personal Reminiscences of Work in the Delhi Medical Mission, 1884–1910. Suffolk: Richmond Clay. No author cited. (1882). The Good Old Days of Honourable John Company Being Curious Reminiscences Illustrating the Manners and Customs of the British In India. Simla: Argus Press, 72–3. Notes on the Annual Returns of the Dispensaries and Charitable Institutions of the NWP and & Oudh Ending. (1910). V/12/713, (OIOC).

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Report of the Civil Hospitals and Dispensaries Under the Government of Bombay. (1910). (OIOC) V/24/700. Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Constitution and Working of the Lawrence Military Asylums in India. (1871). Appendix vi, 9 (OIOC) L/Mil/17/5/2295. Rhodes House Library, Oxford (RHL) SPG E44. Spencer, A. (Ed.). (1948). Memoirs of William Hickey. London: Hurst & Blackett. Statistical Abstract Relating to British India from 1840 to 1865 (as far as the particulars can be stated) (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1867), 3, (OIOC). Sykes, W.  H., Lt.-Col. (1844). On the Population and Morality of Calcutta: Statistics of the Hospitals for the Insane Under the Bengal Presidency Read before the British Association at York, Sept. 26 & 28, 1844. Serampore Mission Archive, Serampore, India. The British Medical Journal. (September 30, 1899), 888. The National Association for Providing Female Medical Aid to the Women of India. (1912). (OIOC) V/24/713. The Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Indian Female Normal School and Instructional Society. (1875, April). Birmingham: Josiah Allen (OIOC). Wood, C. (1922). Despatch from the Court of Directors of the East India Company to the Governor General of India in Council, dated the 19th of July, 1854. In J. A. Richey (Ed.), Selections from the Educational Records, 1840–1859 (p. ii, 388). Calcutta: Government Printing.

Secondary Sources Allender, T. (2016). Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Anagol, P. (2005). The Emergence of Feminism in India. Aldershot: Ashgate. Arnold, D. (1993). Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. London: University of California Press. Atwal, J. (2013). ‘Foul unhallow’d fires’: Officiating Sati and the Colonial Hindu Widow in the United Provinces. Studies in History, 29(2), 229–272. Barrett, T.  R. (2004). Calcutta: Strange Memoirs-Foreign Perceptions. Kolkata: Sankar Mondal. Bayly, C. A. (1999). Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Bayly, C. A. (2012). Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Borthwick, M. (1977). Keshub Chunder Sen. Calcutta: Minerva. Burton, A. (1994). Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: North Carolina.

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Chatterjee, P. (1993). The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohn, B. (1997). Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Cotè, J. (2009). “Sins of their Fathers”: Culturally at Risk Children and the Colonial State in Asia. Paedagogica Historica, 45(1–2), 137. De Courcy, A. (2013). The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj. London: Phoenix. Elliot, E. (1987). A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael. Old Tappan, NJ: Revell. Evers, M. (2009 and 2010). Four Orphan Schools in Calcutta…. The Journal of the Families in British India Society. pt. 1, 1–14, pt. 2, 5–15. Fitzgerald, R. (1997). Rescue and Redemption…. In A. M. Rafferty & J. Robinson (Eds.), Nursing History and the Politics of Welfare. Routledge: London. Forbes, G. (2007). Small Acts of Rebellion: Women Tell their Photographs. In A.  Ghosh (Ed.), Behind the Veil: Resistance, Women, and the Everyday in Colonial South Asia (p. 66). Chandigarh: Permanent Black. Forbes, G. (2008). Women in Colonial India. New Delhi: Chronicle Books. Hafkin, N., & Bay, E. (1976). Women in Africa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hawes, C.  J. (1996). Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833. Surrey: Curzon Press. Kosambi, M. (1998). The Home and the Social Universe. In I.  Glushkova & A.  Feldhaus (Eds.), House and Home in Maharashtra. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Marshall, N. I. (2011). The Anglo-Indian Absconder Soldier Daddy. New Delhi: Marshall and Myers. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge. Muthiah, S., & MacLure, H. (2013). The Anglo-Indians: a Five Hundred Year History. New Delhi: Niyogi Books. Peakman, J. (2019). Licentious Worlds: Sex and Exploitation in Global Empires. London: Reaktion Books. Pothen, N. (2012). Glittering Decades: New Delhi in Love and War. New Delhi: Viking. Ramanna, M. (2002). Western Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Bombay. Bangalore: Orient Longman Private Ltd. Richey, J. A. (1922). Selections from the Educational Records, 1840–1859. Calcutta: Government Printing. Rogers, R. (2013). A French Woman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in 19th-­ Century Algeria. California: Stanford University Press. Watts, R. (2001). Mary Carpenter and India: Enlightened Liberalism or Condescending Imperialism. Paedagogica Historica, 37(1), 193–210.

CHAPTER 10

Histories of Women’s Education and Shifting Frames of ‘Femininity’ Stephanie Spencer and Tim Allender

The analytical and metaphorical possibilities that are revealed by the concept of ‘shifting femininity’ are many. The entanglement of women’s history with history of education emphasises the centrality of gender as an organising paradigm in research, which in turn, requires new constructions of historicised femininity and masculinity. Chapters in this book have identified how girls and women negotiated, challenged and shifted the frame of femininity in ways where their agency was specific to their positioning in time and place. Despite such positioning these chapters have also demonstrated the power that such constructions held in guiding, empowering and, at times, constraining women’s individual and collective experiences. In turn, multiple interpretations of the educative process are revealed with new theorisation possible when considering how femininity codas were transmitted, received and enacted in these contexts. S. Spencer University of Winchester, Winchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. Allender (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_10

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The following brief conclusion is a reflection on, rather than a summary of, some of the themes that emerge when the chapters are read as a collection. The way we have framed ‘femininity’ as a shifting phenomenon has, in fact, accentuated important analytical and metaphorical elements. With regard to the analytical notion of a frame Emma Björnehed and Josefina Erikson suggest that a combination of frame analysis with institutional perspectives allows the researcher to capture both meaning and effect, not simply in terms of the success or failure of historical actors, but the way concepts themselves act upon, and are acted upon, by the study of these actors.1 This phenomenon they argue ‘serves to capture the process in which frames gain or lose influence and new meaning is established.’2 The chapters in this book have highlighted the role that formal educational institutions and the state played in creating and maintaining constructions of femininity appropriate to contemporaneous and normalised notions of race, religion, and social class. However, such powerful overarching prescriptions of femininity were not static and these chapters also demonstrate how education, when viewed in settings outside the classroom, enabled girls and women to shift established expectations of femininity and build new meanings for everyday life that, when interactive with innovative or repressive policy making, brought about powerful societal and educational change. For example, disciplinary boundaries that delineated science as peculiarly masculine could be shifted once women demonstrated that artistic skills learned (as part of a feminine aesthetic) could also be brought to bear on a detailed scientific analysis of plants and their environment. The chapters in the book range across time and place, identifying a wide range of context-specific, acceptable and unacceptable manifestations of femininity. Collectively, the conceptualisations of these chapters regarding education facilitate deeper understandings about how intersecting hierarchies of race, social class and age interacted to create change. This research also centres on frames of femininity in more intimate analytical terms to examine the implications when these frames shifted. For example, whereas some young women might have found an education limited to feminine ‘accomplishments’ restrictive, this brand of education also acted as a marker of respectability for others and offered access to social, if not 1  Emma Björnehed and Josefina Erikson. 2018. Making the most of the frame: developing the analytical potential of frame analysis. Policy Studies. 39. 2, 109–126, 109. 2  Ibid., 111.

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gendered, mobility for both pupils and educators. Yet, for other recipients, moving beyond these bounds into male domains of university learning, and leaving behind ‘accomplishments’, marked a new feminist predicated journey and often a largely different life story. The procedure of inscribing femininity onto a sexed body at different moments in time reveals the significance of physical as well as intellectual education, prescribing ways of being in space, dress and deportment that also marked the transitions in women’s lives from youth to an invisible old age. The risk inherent in not conforming to the physical framing of a young, healthy, non-competitive, female body that was graceful, and strong enough to bear children (but still weak in comparison to men), pushed some women to the margins. Additionally, inextricably linked with the normalcy of heterosexuality and fecundity, the putative degeneracy of older, unmarried, or lesbian women sits uncomfortably within frames of analysis that focus only on marriage and motherhood. A more universal characterisation of femininity points the way to more sophisticated analytical frameworks that retain the potential for teasing out the essentialist/ constructionist assumptions at work when considering the agency of all women. A frame of analysis that retains the female body as both a cultural construction and a physical experience also highlights the relationship between the individual and their environment. The significance of research that interrogates the agentic possibilities set up by tracing women’s physical journeys across geographic, cultural and religious borders is now well recognised. Using an analytical frame that measures ‘effect’ rather than ‘effectiveness’ enables biographical research to recognise how women engaged with, and on occasions shifted, local concerns over the ascription of femininity to women who appeared to transgress gender boundaries. The role that the individual played in the process of local and ultimately global shifts becomes visible, as do the more intractable boundaries of masculinity that remained in place. As several authors in this book have observed, despite some of its anachronistic features, ‘femininity’ was, and perhaps still is, a more embracing and less antagonistic term compared to ‘feminism’, especially when framing an analysis of women’s increased participation in the public sphere. Contested meanings of femininity, particularly in colonial settings, were heavily infused with race, religion and class. Indeed, changing frames of femininity, might even be recognised as the drivers for moments of transformational cultural and social adjustment. Yet, individual women

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and groups of women who were pioneers in gaining access to professional recognition also often had to reconcile conflicting possibilities wrought by such political change according to their femininity, as a marker of their place in society. In contrast to analytical frames, the metaphorical frame has taken us in other directions. Lakoff and Johnson observe that ‘metaphorical thought is normal and ubiquitous in our mental life, both conscious and unconscious.’3 This phrase also serves to unite the historian with the people, places and objects that are studied, as the use of metaphor can explore meaning that is not confined by space and time. As historians we can seek to broaden knowledge of the past and to understand the dynamics of change working within this frame. And as educationists it is also recognisable that education is not just a simple transfer of knowledge from teacher to student but is also the result of a more complex web of individual interaction with metaphorical expectations of class, race, gender and religion in given specific cultural, social and political contexts. Additionally, Eugenie Samier has recently observed that metaphors have a theoretical value which allows for alternative interpretations of data and meaning, and these metaphors also have ‘social value in capturing how we live organisationally within our identity, personal values, and roles, as well as [our] resistances and critiques.’4 Furthermore, Hefferman, Notolicky and Mockler argue that metaphors can be used to ‘open up complex concepts (abstract, theoretical, nuanced or contextualised work) to outsiders, making the unfamiliar accessible and familiar.’5 For example, primary teaching might initially have been accepted as a suitable profession for women where they might exercise their natural mothering instincts that were a recognisable characteristic of femininity. Yet, as women progressed into school leadership or the inspectorate, they first challenged these assumptions by moving into managerial roles more normally associated with masculinity. Such progression also furthered the professionalisation of classroom teaching as part of a structured career ladder, and therefore shifted the expectation that primary teaching required more formal training and less reliance on 3  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live By, with Afterword. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 244. 4  Eugenie Samier. 2019. The theory and uses of metaphor in educational administration and leadership: a rejoinder. Journal of Educational Administration and History. 51 (2) 182–195, 187. 5  Amanda Hefferman, Deborah Netolicky and Nicole Mockler. 2019. New and alternative metaphors for school leadership. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 51: 2, 83–86, 84.

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instinct than was hitherto acknowledged. Putting primary teaching on a professional basis could then explain to outsiders why women were suitable for, and entitled to, for more advanced positions. And while a frame can exclude, it can also protect and nurture those within its borders. For example, detailed biographical studies of women whose life’s work is marked through their religious devotion, demonstrate how similar problems of access and acceptance are refigured across time and place by being brought together within a frame of refuge. And patterns also emerge that highlight women’s individual and collective agency in the face of opposition. In this sense, women and girls as far apart as India and Hong Kong, similarly challenged state expectations of the performance of femininity through their small acts that, repeated over time, resulted in broader, substantive social change. Additionally, Samier references the unconscious use of metaphor as a thinking tool when she uses the term ‘framework’ without acknowledging the possibilities that it holds as a metaphor in itself.6 She concludes that metaphors allow for a multilevel analysis ‘from the individual, the social interactional, organisational, social institutional and international levels.’7 As well, the notion of ‘a’ or ‘the’ frame allows for the role that material objects play to be included in the organisational or thinking process. Inanimate objects now join the increasing diversity of sources that should be taken into account when assessing the performance of femininity across time and place. Men and women interact differently with apparently neutral objects that are imbued with gendered meaning. And these objects can also act as intermediaries between the sexes. As historians engage with post-human analysis, the additional role that the environment, and even the use of furniture, act as both physical and metaphorical reminders of the taboos that are generated by performances of gender. Furthermore, the authors in this book have demonstrated a wide range of metaphors to describe the complexity of the interaction between individuals and society and they have analysed intricate patterns of intellectual and physical movement. This approach serves to foreground the non-­ linear progress that women made in their professional lives and helps to explain why formal admittance to any role did not automatically imply acceptance. Once a boundary was overcome there remained metaphorical obstacles, whether these were institutional or conceptual. 6 7

 Samier, 187.  Ibid.

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Given the implications of boundaries inherent in a frame metaphor, the empty space within the frame provides a multitude of possibilities for rhizomatic travel in many directions within those boundaries, of the kind referenced in Chap. 1. Small steps of professional progress were sometimes met with unforeseen setbacks and when analysing relations between educators and their students, metaphors provide guidance as to the direction of such travel. Following a rhizomatic metaphor a little further, the role that Catholicism played, in the education of girls, in the preparation of teachers and in the foundation of convents, offers many possibilities for re-visioning their performance of femininity: gradually pushing the boundaries of femininity to include independence outside the usual gender roles of convent life or traditional marriage and motherhood amongst the laity. Women whose individual lives have gone largely unrecorded, or who have been overlooked, lose this invisibility when brought together as individual pieces in the kaleidoscope of women’s history. This book’s authors have demonstrated the multiple sources that are needed to piece together these hitherto invisible lives. And it is equally important to understand the significance of what exists outside the metaphorical frame. Just as femininity was complicated by race, class, and religion, so too were the external factors whereby it is not possible to explain women’s place in the gender hierarchy simply by using catch-all phrases such as ‘patriarchy’ or ‘oppression’. Such expectations were written into formal educational provision and into popular culture usually by male power brokers. That the frame shifted only gradually meant that for many men and women (especially those who had most to lose from such change), this change to long-held assumptions was a threat to the hard-won stability in established class, race and/or religious relationships. In conclusion, the chapters in this book have examined how an acceptable and appropriate femininity was transmitted to girls and women in educational settings and in their daily lives, and how they reacted with, and against, agents of change. Through accounts of individuals and collective stories, the chapters have explored the effect of dominant paradigms in their respective socio-cultural and political contexts, in the construction of the femininity that was expected of a sexed body. They have demonstrated how at any one time or place, ‘femininity’, although sometimes elusive and shifting, was still a recognisable concept, especially in its manifestation as a performative frame. This is a phenomenon worthy of further historical research.

Index1

A African American, 37–59 Ashlin, George, 195 B Belilios Public School for Girls, 119, 123, 125, 128, 129, 133, 139, 141 Björnehed, Emma, 232, 232n1 Black Colleges, 37, 50, 52, 54–56, 59 Botanists, 18–20, 24, 27, 30 Brahmo Samaj, 203, 220 Brent-Dyer, Elinor, 150, 163, 163n52, 165–167, 171 Buddhist Institute, 63, 65, 67–71, 75, 82 Butler, Judith, 122, 123n16, 133, 136, 142

C Chalet School stories (The), 150, 163–170 Chiu, Molly, 125, 133 Cinematography, 65, 78, 80 Coachman, Alice, 56–58 Convents, French and Italian, 124, 125, 127–129, 132, 140 Cooney, Kate, 94, 96–102, 104, 108, 114 Crandall, Prudence, 39–41 D Darwin, Charles, 25–27, 30 de Feo, Luciano, 80, 81 di Robilant, Daisy, 79 Diana, 150, 150n3, 151n5, 166–171 Diocesan Girls’ School, 124, 125, 128, 129, 132, 140

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2021 T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7

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INDEX

Downing, Marie, 97, 98, 100–102, 104, 108, 115 Doyle, Right Rev Dr James, 191, 192

I International Congress of Orientalists, 65

E East India Company, 206, 207, 210–215, 216n38, 217 Empire, 126, 142n114 Eurasian, 201, 202, 209–221, 223–225, 224n55, 224n56

K Karpelès, Suzanne, 63–83 Kew Gardens, 16, 21, 22 Khmer, 70, 71, 74, 77, 81, 82 Kowloon British School, 128, 129n53, 139 Kuhn, Thomas, 12

F Femininity, 1–9 Feminist, 2–4 Forbes, Geraldine, 205, 227 Francis, Catherine (nee McMahon), 98, 100–105, 108, 109, 114 Fuss, Diana, 151, 157, 158

L Lakoff, George, 234 League of Nations, 65, 66, 78 Loreto Abbey, 183 Lucas, Marie (nee Barclay), 109, 115

G Gates, Barbara, 27 Girl Guides, 119–144 Gleadle, Kathryn, 2 Gould, Elizabeth, 15 H Hardy, George, 76, 77 Hareven, Tamara, 153, 153n13, 153n14, 154, 154n18 Hartley, John Anderson, 95–101, 104 Hefferman, Amanda, 234, 234n5 Hepworth, Mike, 151, 154, 161 Homophobic, 54 Honey, 150, 150n3, 151, 158–166, 168–171

M McAuley, Catherine, 180, 182n19, 193–196 McClintock, Anne, 210 McNamara, Blanche, 89–115 McRobbie, Angela, 167 Missionary, 3 Molly, Chiu, 119 Mother John Byrne, 175n2, 177, 178 N Nagle, Honoria (Nano), 176, 180, 181, 185–190, 189n43, 190n46, 190n48, 196 Natural science, 11n1, 12, 27, 32, 33 Nieves, Angel David, 4 North, Marianne, 16, 17, 21, 22, 25n61, 31, 32 Nurses, 224–226

 INDEX 

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P Pāli, 63, 73, 74 Peakman, Julie, 212 Pechey, Edith, 225 Physical education (PE), 37–59, 138–141 Postcolonial, 4 Postmodern, 4 Potter, Beatrix, 14, 15 Presentation Sisters (PBVM), 176, 178, 182, 185, 192 Prostitutes, 201, 202, 212 Pugin, Augustus Welby, 176, 176n3, 193–195

Slavery, 37, 44, 45 South Australia Teachers’ Association (SATA), 102, 108 Stanes, Jane, 95 Stephen’s Girls’ College, 124, 132, 140n104

R Racism, 38, 48 Roberts, Ordie, 55 Roman Catholic, 8

U Ursuline, 181, 185, 187–190, 189n43

S Samier, Eugenie, 234, 234n4, 235 Seabrooke, Lavinia, 90n6, 95, 97, 100 Sellar, Eve, 95, 96, 98, 100–104, 108, 109, 114 Sisters of Mercy (SM), 175n2, 182n19, 183, 183n26

T Tanjore, 20, 23 Teenage, 149–171 Transnational, 4, 5, 5n11 Tropical Science, 221

V Verbrugge, Martha, 46, 53 W Woodman, Margaret (nee Stone), 98, 100, 102, 104, 105, 109, 115