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What is a “friend”? Changing vocabularies of connection in the mission of British Protestant women missionaries to Indian women, 1870s to 1940s

Recent historical studies outline how by the turn of the c19th. a multiplicity of spaces were opening up: of “intercultural encounters, intermixture and fusion, as much as conflict and separatism” (Holton 2002: 159) within and across the borders of nations, empires and colonial boundaries of race, class and gender. A key sphere of cross-cultural and transnational activity was that of religion, specifically the missionary movements based in the metropolitan centers, in which both colonizing and colonised women played important roles as proselytizers and activists in a variety of transnational networks. Sandra Stanley Holton (2002) in her study of British Quaker women reformers active in the transnational movements over segregation and racism during the period argues there is a shift in thinking about racial difference. A more ambiguous continuum of positions is produced she suggests, in the interstices of scientific racism, and maternalist feminism on the one hand, and a growing auto-critique of British racism and colonialism, alongside a more visible (to the white reformer) autonomous agency of black activists. This was a continuum in which “some black individuals appeared more equal with white than others” at the same time as there was “a weakening of the form and degree of identity that had previously been possible between black and white activists” (ibid. p. 19). This paper uses a case study of the 1910 World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Australian, Indian and British women’s involvements within and around it, to explore Holton’s idea of an ambiguous continuum of racialized positioning in terms of the concepts of whiteness, cosmopolitanism and anti-colonialism. In so doing, the paper contributes to a deeper historical sociology of gender and colonialism, and the ways in which women participated in the making of new cross-cultural spaces and discourses in the early c20th.

Jane Haggis is member of Centre for Development Studies, School of International Studies, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Flinders University Adelaide, Australia. Author of: Imperial Emotions: Affective communities of Mission in British Protestant Women’s Missionary Publications c1880-1920, Journal of Social History, Spring 2008, p. 691-716 initially presented at Panel: Missionary Women and Global Christian Communities, 2005 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 2-5 2005 at Scripps College, Claremont, California ; “Beyond Race and Whiteness? Reflections on the New Abolitionists and an Australian Critical Whiteness Studies” in D. Riggs (2007) ed. Taking Up The Challenge: Critical Race and Whiteness Studies in a Postcolonising Nation, Crawford House, Adelaide, 2004, p. 307-321 ; (with Meera Kosambi, Ed) “Reconstructing Femininities: Intersections of Gender, Race, Religion and Class”, special edition of Feminist Review, 2000, Issue n° 65 (with Margaret Allan).

They shew no signs of resistance: Indigenous domestic work in early colonial Australia, 1789 to 1820

A cause de raisons techniques indépendantes de notre volonté, cette communication n’a pas pu être enregistrée. Nous nous en excusons.
Due to technical difficulties beyond our control, this paper could not be recorded. We wish to apologise.

In December 1790, Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, returning to England from the fledgling British colony of New South Wales, stoutly denied rumours then circulating of conflict between the British and the native people. On the contrary, a ‘principal chief among the natives’ lived with the Governor in his house, while ‘a native female’ lived ‘as servant’ with the colony’s lone chaplain. ‘They are convinced of the superiority of the British Government, and shew no signs of resistance,’ stated King. Forgotten today, the young girl in the clergyman’s home might be seen as the first of the ‘Stolen Generations’, the generations of Aboriginal children removed from their families and communities to be brought up amongst white people. But in 1790, it was the symbolic role Boorong had as a native servant, signifying the submission of the colonized, that was most important to King. As historians, however, we do well not to take King’s complacent assessment of the colonial project at face value, and not just because by the time King had returned to England, the ‘chief’ King referred to had escaped captivity and returned to his people. By December 1790 Boorong was still with the Johnsons, but she and numbers of other Aboriginal people were now coming and going from the British settlement, and very much on their own terms, it would seem. In this paper, I reconstruct a history of Aboriginal girls and women’s domestic labour in the early colonial period, based on a careful reading of the fragmentary record of colonizers determined to convince themselves of their superiority, and of female, as well as native, subordination. The engagement of Indigenous girls and women in domestic services for colonizers should not, I argue, be mistaken for signs of Indigenous submission or acquiescence. Instead, as the participation of Aboriginal workers in the day-to-day life of the colony and the problems the British had in interpreting such participation reveals, the domestic space of the colonial encounter in settler societies has been fraught with instabilities and ambiguities from the very outset.

Victoria Haskins is Associate Professor in the Research Institute for Social Inclusion and Wellbeing of The University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of: Domestic Frontiers: The Home and Colonization (special double issue Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 28: 1-2 (ed. with Margaret Jacobs), 2007 ; One Bright Spot. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005 ; Uncommon Ground: White women in Aboriginal history. Ed. with Anna Cole & Fiona Paisley, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005.