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The Politics of Recovery HISTORICIZING IMPERIAL FEMINISM, 1865-1915 Organized feminism in Britain emerged in the context of Victorian and Edwardian imperialism. Historically speaking, arguments for British women's emancipation were produced, made public, and contested during a period in which Britain experienced the confidence born of apparent geopolitical supremacy as well as the anxieties brought on by challenges to imperial permanence and stability. Although historians of women and feminist historians have been concerned with what Adrienne Rich calls "the politics of location" in the work of reconceptualizing traditional history, Western feminism's historically imperial location has not been the subject of comprehensive historical inquiry, except insofar as the origins of "international sisterhood" are concerned. 1 This is true, despite the imperial discourses that leading British feminists utilized, the world-civilizing significance they attached to their role in national political culture, and the frequent invocation of non-Western and especially of Indian women as subjects in need of salvation by their British feminist "sisters." Relocating British feminist ideologies in their imperial context and problematizing Western feminists' historical relationships to imperial culture at home are, therefore, the chief concerns of this book. As historical phenomena, feminism and imperialism might at first glance be considered an unlikely match. In the course of working on this pro... Woman in the Nation FEMINISM, RACE, AND EMPIRE IN THE "NATIONAL" CULTURE Although it is often taken to be synonymous with votes for women, the "woman question" in nineteenth-century Britain was as much about the public exercise of women's moral authority as it was about the battle over political rights. 1 Attention to suffrage campaigns has, until quite recently, obscured not only the importance of other (nonsuffrage) social reform projects taken up by women, but also the significance of late Victorian feminist definitions of female public authority and of the ways in which feminist writers constituted the "national" body politic. 2 Throughout feminist discourse the public and the national were held to be synonymous; citizenship was participation in and a sense of belonging to the nation; and the vote was the public and political exercise of national but traditionally privatized female authority. "Why are we out?" asked Charlotte Despard, leader of the Women's Freedom League, rhetorically in 1910. "Because we are citizens; because we belong to the nation . . . because the business of the nation is our business." 3 The quest for a recognition -- and, in light of the socioeconomic changes brought on by industrialization, a recalibration -- of women's moral authority in the nation was not limited to conventionally "feminist" reformers. Jane Lewis has suggested that the traditional divide between suffragists and antisuffrage women turns out to have been based on differences of d... 3 Female Emancipation and the Other Woman Victorian feminists' admiration for empire and their identification with its racial and cultural ideals shaped a nineteenth-century women's movement with recognizably imperial concerns and sympathies. Although a fully developed imperial feminist rhetoric did not emerge until the early twentieth century, British feminists exhibited an imperial worldview from the 1860s onward. For in addition to privileging the role of British women in the national-imperial enterprise, Victorian and Edwardian feminist writers relied on images of Eastern, and especially Indian, women to bolster a variety of arguments about female emancipation. 1 Descriptions of "Oriental" women as prisoners of the harem, suffocated by religious custom and at the mercy of brutish husbands, frequently interrupted the narrative of emancipationist arguments, serving as brief but apparently graphic "proof" of women's fate in cultures where female emancipation went unrecognized. Feminist writers who constructed arguments about the need for female emancipation built them around the specter of a passive and enslaved Indian womanhood. As a result, a colonial female Other was one of the conceptual foundations of Victorian feminist thinking. What this suggests, among other things, is that British feminism is part of Western European orientalist traditions -- traditions in which identity "relies on the concept of an essential, authentic core" and the search for identity itself is "a process of elimination of all that is considered [O]ther."-64 Representation, Empire, and Feminist History Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has argued that "it should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English." 1 As this study shows, it is virtually impossible to read the literature of middle-class British feminism in the Victorian and Edwardian periods without being reminded that imperialism was also an essential part of feminists' representation of British feminism to the British.