From Eve to Dawn, A History of Women in the World, Volume III: Infernos and Paradises, The Triumph of Capitalism in the 19th Century
400
From Eve to Dawn, A History of Women in the World, Volume III: Infernos and Paradises, The Triumph of Capitalism in the 19th Century
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781558615830 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Feminist Press at CUNY, The |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2008 |
| Series: | From Eve to Dawn Series , #3 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Margaret Atwood's most popular works include The Handmaid's Tale (1983) and The Blind Assassin (2000). She was born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1939, and received her undergraduate degree from Victoria University, along with a master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Between about 1830 and the second world war, two developments changed the human condition itself. One was the invention of power-driven machines that brought on the industrial revolution, changing not only the kind of work people did but also where, with whom, and under what conditions they worked and lived. The other was the emergence of a new vision of humanity, a new morality. Enlightenment ideas subverted the passive acceptance that characterizes much religious thinking. People burning with new conceptions of human nature and human rights envisioned new possibilities for living.
Power-driven machines gave humans greater control over matter and in some ways offered an easier life than they had imagined possible. But men's exploitation of this new power and of the people who worked the machines created infernos — working and living conditions more terrible than any large population had ever endured. Reacting to such conditions and armed with the new vision of humans as creatures with rights, people began to devise social and political arrangements that would foster human well-being and rebuild their societies. The resulting movements — abolitionism, socialism, feminism, utopian, social welfare, and labor movements — sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes overlapping, did create beneficial changes, but also some of the cruelest societies on earth.
For, everywhere, the new moral vision was ignored or co-opted by men with a newly intense and insatiable drive for power — domination through wealth or influence, and control through might or knowledge. These two tendencies, in opposition, intersection, and interconnection, gave the nineteenth century its character. Technology provided a means to ease the human lot, but it also created a dehumanizing hell on earth; at the same time, a new sense of power and right infused human images of alternative ways to live and attempts to realize heaven on earth. This chapter examines women's involvement in both sides of this dichotomy, their strategies for living and for changing their lives.
As the new ideas of freedom and equality that inspired revolutions in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe affected Western attitudes toward Africa, humanitarian groups, especially in England and the United States, began to protest slavery. Slavery was finally abolished — if mainly for economic rather than humanitarian reasons. Individuals and groups may have been morally motivated but societies were not. Moralists' efforts to push through emancipatory legislation were supported by early capitalists because a free-wage labor system was cheaper than slavery. The capitalists' goal of exploiting the resources and markets of what we now call Third World countries militated against depleting those populations. Their own countries had plenty of workers who did not have to be kept.
Britain's economy did not depend on slave labor, so its abolition movement began earlier and was stronger than that in the United States, where in 1860 slave-produced cotton made up 60 percent of exports. Britain passed laws in 1807 barring British subjects from slave trading, and in 1833 abolished slavery and slave trade in Canada and its Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and South African colonies (but not in India or other Eastern possessions). Thereafter, taking a high moral tone, Britain used influence and sometimes force to prevent other nations and their colonies from trafficking in and earning profits from the cheap labor of slaves English colonies were by then denied — although some Britons continued to trade slaves.
Of the other major slave-holding powers, France and Portugal, France was the first to prohibit slavery in its colonies. But this 1794 prohibition was a response to massive slave revolts in Martinique and St. Domingue the previous year. Napoleon later reinstituted slavery. After the English defeated Napoleon in 1818, the French, yielding to British pressure, outlawed slave trading, but barely enforced the ban. The 1848 French Revolution brought to power humanitarian thinkers who abolished slavery on French soil, including French colonies and possessions. Still, colonists had ways of deceiving governments, which themselves were not always averse to being deceived. Some of the cruelest instances of European viciousness to Africans occurred after abolition.
In Portugal slavery was merely whispered against until 1836, when the export of slaves from Portuguese territories was outlawed. Slave trade continued quite openly just the same. Portugal outlawed slavery in its territories in 1878, but slaves were shipped to French and Portuguese islands in the guise of contract labor well into the twentieth century. The Portuguese government impressed Africans to work in Portuguese mines until Mozambique became independent in 1975. Then labor became more "voluntary."
In the nineteenth century, European states expanded their power base in Africa simply by calling a region a "colony," subject to their law and power. They made deals with individual Africans to provide slaves and other commodities, using the age-old techniques of patriarchy — male supremacy, co-optation, and divisiveness — to undermine and destroy local solidarity. Africans devised strategies to survive, accommodate, resist, or oppose European power. Women used all tacks: they maintained their people, subverted foreign impositions, and led resistance movements. This section begins the discussion of women's experience in the nineteenth century by looking at the way the treatment of women in Africa was affected by predations of slave trading in the imperialist period.
Slavery's Destruction of African Societies
Slavery had a profound effect on all Africans, but it affected men and women differently. It treated men individually, women as a caste. Africans of both sexes were enslaved and transported; but of Africans involved in trading, only men profited. After the British and French governments abandoned the slave trade, it was taken over by Angolans, Brazilians, Americans, Dutch, English, and French commercial firms that insinuated themselves along the coast. Backed with capital from their lineage, African men ran these new commercial centers as merchant lords over all-male households. They charged Europeans customs fees, regulated local business, provided auxiliary services, and sent goods to the interior on credit. A successful man called his household his "town" and demonstrated status in the old way — collecting wives, clients, and slaves. He educated his sons and nephews, trained them in the business, and gave them a patrimony in slaves.
Some slaves remained slaves even after the decline of the "peculiar institution": they were "slaves of the church," agricultural and household slaves attached to missions. Missionaries required agricultural slaves to marry and live in clusters near the mission. All household slaves were male — boys and young men; women could not enter mission houses. After the missionaries left, the "slaves of the church" went on living in all-male enclaves. Both sexes were impressed to serve an overlord to work on his or her behalf; but owners valued women as providers — of food, sex, and children — and men as worker-sons being trained to take over an all-male institution.
Kongo
In dealings between Africans and Europeans, only formal political power counted; Europeans were comfortable dealing man-to-man with Africans but would not accept female African leaders. In dealings with Europeans, African men gained power — and cash. No longer dependent on women, they could buy food and goods that wives had formerly provided. Exposed to new languages and customs, they gained education and experience as merchants and brokers. In time, matrilineal inheritance faded and women's elite status crumbled; they became wives, not sisters, sequestered at home and segregated at public events. Some merchants reportedly offered visiting European men sexual use of their wives or daughters. Territories like Kongo may have remained sexually integrated even after class stratification, but they were now transformed into patriarchal societies in which only men functioned publicly and women were relegated to back rooms. As social mobility increased for men, it decreased for women.
People in the interior still followed the old ways, but the foreclosure of women from coastal commerce kept women out of the new commercial world. Women found new markets for their crops, supplying the barracoons (pens for slaves awaiting export) near the coast. When slave trade ended, they sold foods like groundnuts to Europeans for cash. As commerce expanded, women offered more variety at local markets and opened roadside food stands to cater to commercial caravans. But barter was still the rule: few women had cash, needed to purchase European goods.
Aside from commerce, the only way to get rich was by tribute. The old tribute system had died; men now controlled roads and markets, and granted titles. On the coast almost every man, even a low-level worker, could afford a slave; slaves were in such demand that they could negotiate their working conditions. But female slaves could rise in status only through marriage and motherhood, and all wives — royal, free, or slave — did field work. No woman had leisure; rich men's wives had only the help of co-wives. Some scholars believe that women may perhaps have preferred polygyny because it lessened their workload. Some co-wives developed close bonds. There were virtually no women in politics; Kongo was now an outpost in a Western commercial network in which women had lost most of their power.
East Africa: Zanzibar
The city-states of east Africa, which had grown rich by controlling trade routes, were invaded and conquered by Portugal in the sixteenth century. Over the next 200 years, various New World, Asian, and north African states contested to control the rising demand for slaves. In 1840, after conquering the Mazrui rulers of Mombasa, the Sultan of Oman, Seyyid Said, moved his headquarters to Zanzibar and consolidated his control over the east African coast, neighboring islands, slave routes, and major trade centers and towns in the interior, creating the Zanzibar commercial empire. Zanzibari rulers set the conditions under which Asian and European merchants could reside and trade in the empire.
As the Atlantic slave trade declined in the early nineteenth century, slave trading in east Africa expanded. After British, American, and Indian financiers wrested control of trade routes from Muslim Zanzibari rulers, the Arabs built huge coconut and clove plantations on Zanzibar. By 1850 they dominated the world clove market. African plantations were little worlds centered on a compound where owners lived with their family and servants. Until the mechanization of farming, plantation agriculture relied heavily on slave labor. Huge farms dedicated to few crops required enormous amounts of human labor and were most profitable when that labor was unpaid.
Basil Davidson writes that African slavery was not like that of the New World. In the Americas, slaves could not marry, testify in court, or own slaves; they were overworked, often punished, whipped, tortured, separated from their families, and killed. African slaves were more like European serfs or peasants. An observer of the Ashanti (Asante) of west Africa, quoted by Howard Zinn, attested that slaves could marry, own property or slaves themselves, and swear oaths as competent witnesses. "An Ashanti slave, nine cases out of ten ... became an adopted member of the family, and in time his descendants so merged and intermarried with the owner's kinsmen that only a few [knew] their origin." Africans tended to absorb slaves into their families to increase their lineage, and even made them their heirs. In Sierra Leone, slaves were never overworked and never punished so as to draw blood. Zinn quotes John Newton, slave trader turned anti-slavery leader: "The state of slavery, among these wild barbarous people, as we esteem them, is much milder than in our colonies. For as, on the one hand, they have no land in high cultivation, like our West India plantations, and therefore no call for that excessive, unintermitted labor, which exhausts our slaves: so, on the other hand, no man is permitted to draw blood even from a slave."
But if conditions there were less excruciating than in the New World, they were still very abusive: slaves died young and did not reproduce. Plantation work did not use slaves, it consumed them. Over half of Zanzibar's slaves were women. Work was divided by sex: men picked cloves, women separated the buds from the stems, spread them on mats to dry, and supervised the drying, which took about a week. When slaves threatened slowdowns, wanting piecework wages and a five-day week, the Arabs gave them Thursday and Friday (the Muslim holy day). On these days, slaves could hire themselves out to carry loads, clean copra (coconut shells), do construction, tote water, or make products to sell, and keep their wages. Asians and Europeans, who were barred from owning slaves, hired slaves on their days off, directly or from their owners.
Owners established a hierarchy to keep slaves under control, writes Frederick Cooper. Lowest in rank was the new unskilled plantation worker, mtumwa mjinga (stupid slave); then came those brought to the coast as children and socialized locally: wakulia ("people brought up here"). Above them were the locally born wazalia. The highest rank, except for concubines, were the skilled workers — carpenters, masons, metal workers, door carvers, and boat builders — solely male trades. Women could reach high rank only as seamstresses or concubines. Muslim law held that concubines could not be resold in an owner's lifetime and were to be freed at his death. Actually, they were freed at caprice by owners who were moved by a show of submissiveness. Wazalia, often freed with nothing after years of labor, ended up as serfs, wahadimu, still dependent on their former owners for land, shelter, and work. Some remained on the plantation as tenants or servants after their owner died, and, when the British took over east Africa, became their tenants, sharecroppers.
Women slaves worked in the fields, sold produce for the mistress in town markets, and carried goods outside the house in daylight. Wazalia were often house slaves; in the 1890s Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari outlined their work (mzalia is the singular of wazalia).
The work of the [female] mzalia is to serve in the house, to wash vessels and plates or clothes or to be taught to cook, to plait mats, to sweep the house, to go to the well to draw water, to go to the shop to buy rice or meat; when food is ready, to dish it up for the master, to hold the basin for him to wash his hands ... to wash his feet, and to oil him; but only if his wife approves. If the wife wants to go into the country or to a mourning or a wedding, she accompanies her, and if she has an umbrella, she carries it.
In societies with huge disparities in wealth and power, the privileged, always fearful of rebellion, must justify their superiority. Their claims must contain enough seeming truth to be swallowed by the oppressed. Today, the rich justify their wealth on grounds of merit and hard work; they claim to be more talented or to work harder than others. Since some rich people do work hard and are talented, the claim seems real, and other grounds for privilege — inherited status, inherited wealth, willingness to exploit — melt into invisibility. For millennia, male superiority has been rationalized by the claim that it is based in nature. Legal and institutional leashes on women cast an aura of truth on the claim. Whites made precisely the same claims about blacks, claims that were "proven" true by similar leashes. Arab slaveholders, who at first did not hold the racist belief that dark skin denoted inferiority, justified black slavery by devising an ideology making Africans uncultured outsiders.
Owners knew that to keep their slaves they had to control a huge class which might over generations become conscious of its solidarity and strength and rebel or resist. Slaves living within thinking distance of their homelands might flee. To reconcile them to subjection, the Arabs presented slavery as a reciprocal arrangement placing obligations on both slaves and owners. Although owners granted concessions under pressure, they presented them (like a five-day week) as generous benefits conferred by a superior people. Their major weapon was religion: the Arabs assimilated Africans to Islam, offering them religious instruction and encouraging them to spread it among themselves — to a degree. The problem was that Islam preaches equality. So owners concocted a two-tiered religion that accepted slaves as lower-level Muslims with fewer obligations. Muslims in the city of Lamu relegated slaves to one section of the mosque, barring them from certain rituals (as they did women). They invented a symbolism associating free Lamuans with light, heaven, and purity, and slaves with nature, beings too earthbound to understand more than the basic precepts of Islam. Close contact with slaves would contaminate free Lamuans; Arabs were better Muslims.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume 3"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Marilyn French.
Excerpted by permission of Feminist Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Margaret Atwood,
Introduction,
Capitalism Triumphant,
Chapter 1: Imperialism in Africa,
Chapter 2: Industrialization,
Chapter 3: Utopianism and Socialism,
Chapter 4: Middle-Class Women in England,
Chapter 5: Middle-Class Women in the United States Before the Civil War,
Chapter 6: The Civil War and Its Aftermath,
Chapter 7: Woman Suffrage in the United States and Great Britain,
Chapter 8: Labor Movements,
Chapter 9: The War Against Women,
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,
Map: Map of the World: Peters Projection,