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Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make “Lady Doctors for India,” 1874–1885

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Antoinette Burton
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Extract

Recent work in British studies suggests that the project of historicizing the institutions and cultural practices of British imperialism is crucial to understanding metropolitan society in the nineteenth century. Monographs by Catherine Hall, Thomas C. Holt, and Jenny Sharpe, together with the impressive nineteen-volume series on Studies in Imperial Culture, edited by John Mackenzie—to name just a few examples of scholarly production in this field—have effectively relocated the operations of imperial culture at the heart of the empire itself. By scrutinizing arenas as diverse as the English novel, governmental policy making at the highest levels, and the ephemera of consumer culture, scholars of the Victorian period are in the process of giving historical weight and evidentiary depth to Edward Said's claim that “we are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies.”

The origins of the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW), its concern for Indian women in the zenana (sex-segregated spaces), and the embeddedness of its institutional development in Victorian imperial mentalities is one discrete example of how ostensibly “domestic” institutions were bound up with the empire and its projects in nineteenth-century Britain. As this essay will demonstrate, the conviction that Indian women were trapped in the “sunless, airless,” and allegedly unhygienic Oriental zenana motivated the institutionalization of women's medicine and was crucial to the professionalization of women doctors in Victorian Britain. One need only scratch the surface of the archive of British women's entry into the medical profession to find traces of the colonial concerns that motivated some of its leading lights.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , July 1996 , pp. 368 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1996

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References

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3 The expression “sunless, airless” existence is Mary Carpenter's. For an example of Victorian women's interest in and attitudes toward the zenana, see her Six Months in India, 2 vols. (London: Longman's, Green, & Co., 1868)Google Scholar. Nair's, Janaki essay, “Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen's Writings, 1813–1940,” Journal of Women's History 2 (Spring 1990): 8–34Google Scholar, suggests how the zenana was constructed by a variety of English women writers from the early nineteenth century onward as a resourceful ideological and vocational space.

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6 For an extended discussion of this phenomenon, see Burton, Antoinette, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)Google Scholar. Rukhmabai trained at the LSMW; Ganguli, at Bengal Medical College and, later, at Edinburgh. For details of Rukhmabai's medical career, see the letter from S. Bhatia, president of the Association for Medical Women in India, to Dr. Lowrie of the Medical Women's Federation, April 17, 1967, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, SA/MWF/c. 144; and the “Report of the Cama Hospital's Jubilee Fund” (where she had been a house surgeon in 1895), Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, SA/MWF/ c. 146, 1936, pp. 14–17; and Lutzker, Edith, Edith Pechey-Phipson, M.D.: The Story of England's Foremost Pioneering Woman Doctor (New York: Exposition Press, 1973), pp. 199–208Google Scholar. For Ganguli, see Karlekar, Malavika, Voices from Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 173–78Google Scholar.

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12 Frances Power Cobbe ratified the claims of these petitioners when she narrated the following anecdote. A London woman was advised by her doctor to consult another male physician at Bath. He sent her along with a sealed note, but her curiosity got the best of her. “The seal was broken, and the lady read: ‘Keep the old fool for six weeks, and be sure to send her back to me at the end.’” “I rejoice to believe,” wrote Cobbe, “that thanks to men like … Mr. Cowper-Temple, there will soon be … women's hospitals attended by women-doctors, in every town and kingdom.” See Cobbe, Frances Power, “The Little Health of Ladies,” Contemporary Review 31 (1877): 294, 296Google Scholar.

13 Report of the London School of Medicine for Women (London, 1878), p. 12Google Scholar. Cowper-Temple had also been the author of several bills in the mid-1870s that called for the opening of British university medical courses to women. See Blake, Catriona, The Charge of the Parasols: Women's Entry into the Medical Profession (London: Women's Press, 1990), pp. 178, 183–84Google Scholar; and Bonner, Thomas Neville, To the Ends of the Earth: Women's Search for Education in Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, chap. 6. For a comprehensive analysis of the Victorian medical profession, see Peterson, M. Jeanne, The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

14 For example, Jex-Blake's recent biographer makes no mention of her colonial interests or concerns about the zenana. See Roberts, Shirley, Sophia lex-Blake: A Woman Pioneer in Nineteenth-Century Medical Reform (London: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar. Blake's Charge of the Parasols is an excellent study, though it does not reference India at all, except to talk briefly about Mary Scharlieb's experiences in Madras (pp. 175–76). Arnold's, DavidColonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar devotes a small section to “Women Doctors in India” and focuses chiefly on the Dufferin Fund (pp. 260–68); as does Harrison, Mark, “The Veil of the ‘Zenana,’” in his Public Health and Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 90–97Google Scholar.

15 The next year the university overturned this ruling, thereby preventing graduation from Edinburgh. See Blake, pt. 3, and esp. pp. 218–19.

16 Jex-Blake, , Medical Women: A Thesis and its History (n. 5 above), p. 154Google Scholar.

17 Ibid.

18 Hoggan, , “Medical Work for Women in India,” Englishwomen's Review (April 15, 1885): 150Google ScholarPubMed.

19 See Carpenter, Mary, Six Months in India (London: Longman's, 1868), esp. vol. 2Google Scholar; and “Miss Carpenter and Her Work for India,” Our Magazine (North London Collegiate School for Girls) (July 1876): 182–84Google Scholar.

20 Butler, Josephine, ed., Woman's Work and Woman's Culture (London: Macmillan, 1869)Google Scholar; Rendall, Jane, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (New York: Macmillan, 1985)Google Scholar; Levine, Philippa, Victorian Feminism, 1850–1900 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Burton, Antoinette, “The White Woman's Burden: British Feminists and ‘the Indian Woman,’ 1865–1915,” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Chaudhuri, Nupur and Strobel, Margaret (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 137–57Google Scholar.

21 The quote is in the Calcutta Englishman (July 8, 1878); Newspaper Cuttings Collection, Royal Free Hospital Archives, London. See also Forbes, Geraldine, “Medical Careers and Health Care for Indian Women: Patterns of Control,” Women's History ReviewGoogle Scholar (Special Issue: “Feminism, Imperialism and Race: Britain and India,” ed. Ramusack, Barbara N. and Burton, Antoinette) 3, no. 4 (December 1994): 515–30Google Scholar; Nair (n. 3 above), esp. pp. 17–19; and Burton, , “The White Woman's Burden,” pp. 146–47Google Scholar.

22 Ware, Vron, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992)Google Scholar, pts. 2, 3; Burton, Burdens of History (n. 6 above), chaps. 4, 6.

23 For a discussion of women doctors active in the suffrage movement, see Blake (n. 13 above), pp. 193–94; and Roberts, pp. 190, 167–68.

24 Countess of Dufferin's Fund, 1885–1935: Fifty Years' Retrospect (London: Women's Printing Society, 1935), p. 3Google Scholar. See also Lal, Maneesha, “The Politics of Gender and Medicine in Colonial India: The Countess of Dufferin's Fund, 1885–1888, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 68 (March 1994): 5–6Google Scholar.

25 See Davies, Collin C., “India and Queen Victoria,” Asiatic Review 33 (1937): 493Google Scholar.

26 According to W. W. Hunter, “the first object of the Association founded in 1885 … was to obtain from England, and to train up in India, a body of nurses and lady doctors, who should form the nucleus of a Female Medical Profession for India.” See Hunter, W. W., “A Female Medical Profession for India,” Contemporary Review 56 (August 1889): 211Google Scholar. Margaret Balfour and Ruth Young's characterization is equally revealing. They remembered the fund as having been organized to “bring women doctors to open women's hospitals and wards and “to train Indian women to follow in their footsteps.” See Balfour, Margaret and Young, Ruth, The Medical Work of Women in India (London: Humphrey, for Oxford University Press, 1929), p. 33Google Scholar. See also Hoggan, Frances, “Medical Work for Women in India,” Englishwomen's Review (May 15, 1885): 200Google Scholar. For other accounts of the Dufferin Fund, see Arnold (n. 14 above), pp. 260–68; and Forbes, Geraldine, “Managing Midwifery in India,” in Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India, ed. Engels, Dagmar and Marks, Shula (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1994), pp. 159–61Google Scholar.

27 Lal, pp. 7–8, 29.

28 See the Fourteenth Annual Report of the National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India (for the year 1898) (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1899), p. 13Google Scholar.

29 Although not trained by the fund, in 1888 Ganguli was appointed to the Lady Dufferin Women's Hospital with a monthly salary of 300 rupees (see Forbes, “Managing Midwifery,” p. 161), but she felt that the fund discriminated against her countrywomen in hiring European-trained Western women.

30 Racism was undoubtedly combined with sexism in the Indian Medical Service, where all members had to be of military rank, thus ensuring the exclusion of many “native” men and all women. Although the Indian Medical Service had been opened up to competitive examination in 1855, by 1905 only 5 percent of the service was of Indian origin, and these were all men. See Harrison (n. 14 above), pp. 15, 31.

31 See Blake, pp. 154–55. The margin of defeat was, significantly, slim: seven out of twelve voted against.

32 Garrett Anderson studied in Paris, and Blackwell, in Geneva, N.Y. See Blake, pp. 215–17.

33 Thome, Isabel, Sketch of the Foundation and Development of the London School of Medicine for Women (London: G. Milford, 1906), p. 17Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., pp. 18–19.

35 Ibid., pp. 20–21.

36 Chidambaram, S. Muthu, “Sex Stereotypes in Women Doctors' Contribution to Medicine: India,” in Gender, Work and Medicine: Women and the Medical Division of Labour, ed. Riska, Elianne and Wegar, Katarina, Sage Studies in International Sociology no. 44 (London: Sage, 1993), p. 16Google Scholar. I am grateful to Philippa Levine for this reference.

37 Tonge, E. M., Fanny Jane Butler: Pioneer Medical Missionary (London: Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, 1930), p. 9Google Scholar. As one columnist wrote of Elizabeth Blackwell, “It is impossible that a woman whose hands reek of gore can be possessed of the same nature or feelings as the generality of women.” Quoted in Jo Manton, , Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (New York: Dutton, 1965), p. 47Google Scholar.

38 Bell (n. 10 above), p. 113.

39 Tonge, p. 50.

40 Balfour and Young (n. 26 above), p. 18.

41 London School of Medicine Executive Council Minutes, 1893, Royal Free Hospital Archives, London; Meakin, E. B., “Medical Work among the Women of ‘Little’ Indur (Nizam), India,” Magazine of the London School of Medicine for Women and the Royal Free Hospital 5 (May 1903): 180Google Scholar.

42 Tonge, p. 10.

43 Jex-Blake, , Medical Women: A Thesis and its History (n. 5 above), pp. 6, 52Google Scholar.

44 Huntley (n. 4 above), pp. 42–43.

45 Pechey, Edith, “Inaugural Address, 1878” (McGowan's Steam Printing Co., London, 1878), p. 27Google Scholar; Wellcome Institute, SA/MWF/c. 4.

46 Ibid., p. 28.

47 West, Charles, Medical Women: A Statement and an Argument (London: J. A. Churchill, 1878), p. 17Google Scholar.

48 Blake (n. 13 above), p. 155.

49 Bell (n. 10 above), p. 115.

50 Ibid., pp. 115–16.

51 Ibid. See also “Women Doctors in India,” The Times (October 27, 1881)Google ScholarPubMed (where Beilby's account was excerpted from the Indian Female Evangelist); Newspaper Cuttings Collection, Royal Free Hospital Archives, London.

52 Lal (n. 21 above), p. 10. The National Indian Association had endeavored to project the same sense of woman-to-woman bond several years earlier when it printed an extensive account of Carpenter's personal meeting with the begum of Bhopal. See Etherington, Ellen, “A Visit to the Present Begum of Bhopal,” Journal of the National Indian Association 8 (May 1878): 215–19Google Scholar.

53 The Countess of Dufferin's Fund, 1885–1935: Fifty Years' Retrospect (n. 24 above), p. 3.

54 Balfour and Young (n. 26 above), p. 33.

55 Beilby, Elizabeth, reprinted in the Journal of the National Indian Association (June 1882): 342Google Scholar.

56 Ibid.

57 This was an issue debated at some length in the pages of the Journal of the National Indian Association. See, e.g., Etherington, Ellen, “Education in the North-west of India,” Journal of the National Indian Association 5 (December 1875): 267–73Google Scholar; and Shore, Arabella, “English Indifference Toward India,” Journal of the National Indian Association 11 (September 1882): 506–15Google Scholar.

58 Anderson's, Elizabeth Garrett letter, “Medical Women for India,” The Times (October 31, 1881)Google Scholar; Newspaper Cuttings Collection, Royal Free Hospital Archives, London.

59 Thome's, Isabel letter, “Medical Women for India,” The Times (October 31, 1881)Google Scholar; Newspaper Cuttings Collection, Royal Free Hospital Archives, London.

60 Garrett Anderson's rejection of royal benevolence was quite unusual in an era when many if not most female reform and feminist organizations sought out public figureheads. I am grateful to Philippa Levine for this observation.

61 See “Women Doctors in India,” Journal of the National Indian Association (December 1881): 718–22Google ScholarPubMed. Sarah Heckford was the wife of Nathaniel Heckford, the resident accoucheur for instruction at the London Hospital. See Manton (n. 37 above), p. 152.

62 “Medical Women for India,” Journal of the National Indian Association (December 1882): 681–84Google ScholarPubMed.

63 See Journal of the National Indian Association 12 (January 1883): 11–18Google Scholar. See also Hoggan, , “Medical Work for Women in India,” Englishwomen's Review (April 15, 1885): 145–58Google Scholar, and (May 15, 1885): 193–200.

64 Journal of the National Indian Association 12 (January 1883): 12Google Scholar.

65 Ibid., p. 19. For accounts of the Indian Women's Medical Service, see Balfour and Young (n. 26 above), chap. 4; and Arnold (n. 14 above), pp. 267–68.

66 “Medical Women for India,” Journal of the National Indian Association 12 (January 1883): 25Google Scholar. Blackwell was also less agonized over the schism between the medical missionary and the lady doctor than some of her contemporaries, believing that “the arbitrary distinction between the physician of the body and the physician of the soul … tends to disappear as science advances.” Quoted in Morant, Regina Markell, “Feminism, Professionalism and Germs: The Thought of Mary Putnam Jacobi and Elizabeth Blackwell,” American Quarterly 34 (Winter 1982): 465Google Scholar.

67 For a general discussion of the loneliness and emotional hardships the first generation of women doctors faced, see Morant-Sanchez, Regina M., “The Many Faces of Intimacy: Professional Options and Personal Choices among Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women Physicians,” in Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789–1979, ed. Abir-Am, Pnina G. and Outram, Dorinda (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 45–59Google Scholar.

68 “Medical Women for India,” Journal of the National Indian Association 12 (January 1883): 28Google ScholarPubMed. Quote is from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson's letter to The Times (October 31, 1881); Newspaper Cuttings Collection, Royal Free Hospital Archives, London.

69 “Medical Women for India,” Journal of the National Indian Association 12 (January 1883): 31Google ScholarPubMed. For a full account of Kittredge's involvement and the establishment of medical aid for women in Bombay, see Lutzker (n. 6 above), pp. 67–68.

70 “Medical Women for India,” Journal of the National Indian Association 12 (January 1883): 11Google Scholar. Dufferin, for her part, was not loathe to admit that zenana medical missionary women had the best opportunities of knowing Indian women most “intimately.” See Dufferin, Harriot, “The Women of India,” Nineteenth Century 169 (March 1891): 359Google Scholar.

71 In addition to the alleged impropriety of working in labs and taking lecture courses on anatomy, women's physical unfitness for medical work had always been one of the arguments against removing the legal disabilities that aspiring female doctors faced. The harsh conditions in India, particularly the ill effects of its “burning sun” and “banishment from all that makes life worth living” were mustered with even more force in the debate about colonial women doctors. See West (n. 47 above), pp. 19 ff.

72 Huntley (n. 4 above), p. 43.

73 Ibid., p. 32.

74 Beilby, Elizabeth, “Medical Women for India,” Journal of the National Indian Association (August 1883): 358Google Scholar. Beilby qualified in the summer of 1885 by passing her examinations at the Kings and Queens College of Physicians, Ireland. She then went to Lahore, where she headed the Lady Aitchison Hospital. See Balfour and Young, pp. 21–22.

75 Lal (n. 21 above), p. 11. By the same token, many women who came to hospitals for treatment were brought there by husbands and fathers or by police who picked up indigent women suspected of having the plague or other “contagious” diseases. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.

76 Sharpe (n. 1 above), p. 12.

77 Hoggan, , “Medical Work for Women in India,” Englishwomen's Review (May 1885): 200Google ScholarPubMed.

78 Thorne, Susan, “Missionary-Imperial Feminism” (paper given at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., November 1993), p. 5Google Scholar. This paper was provided courtesy of the author.

79 Some medical missionary men, however, saw the fund as a direct threat to their proselytizing efforts: “Shall the Queen-Empress, or Lady Dufferin, or the National Association stand between you and the most blessed of all your privileges as a servant of Christ?” See Maxwell, J. L., “Lady Dufferin's Scheme: Its Bearing on Christian Freedom,” Medical Missionary Record 2 (1887): 231Google Scholar, quoted in Lal, p. 26.

80 The NIA, e.g., initiated the John Stuart Mill Scholarship, under whose auspices a number of women attended the LSMW. It stipulated, as did the Fanny Butler Scholarship, that the winner would devote a specified numbers of years to medical service in India. See Thorne, Isabel, “The London (R.F.H.) School of Medicine, Its Foundation and Development,” Magazine of the L.S.M.W. (May 1896): 742–43Google Scholar.

81 Fourteenth Annual Report of the Countess of Dufferin's Fund (n. 28 above), p. 15Google Scholar. After 1886, Edinburgh was another site. See Thorne, Isabel, “The London (R.F.H.) School of Medicine,” p. 741Google Scholar.

82 Mangan, ed. (n. 1 above).

83 “Sketches at the London School of Medicine for Women,” Daily Graphic (June 28, 1890)Google ScholarPubMed; Newspaper Cuttings Collection, Royal Free Hospital, London.

84 “How Can I Earn My Living?” Young Woman (November 1893): 63Google ScholarPubMed; Newspaper Cuttings Collection, Royal Free Hospital Archives, London.

85 See the mimeographed copy of the ledger, “Entry of Students, 1874–1927,” Royal Free Hospital Archives, LondonGoogle Scholar. See Lutzker (n. 6 above); Hanson, Helen, “From East to West: Women's Suffrage in Relation to Foreign Missions” (London: Francis & Co., 1913), pp. 1–21Google Scholar; and Lilian Trewby, letter to the secretary of the Association for Registered Medical Women (Bombay, April 19, 1912), Wellcome Institute, SA/MFW/c. 148. See also “D.Y.,” “A Chat About India,” Magazine of the L.S.M.W. andR.F.H. (October 1900): 688–95Google Scholar; and Pailthorpe, Mary, “A Letter from India, “ Our Magazine (North London Collegiate School for Girls) (July 1886): 74–81Google Scholar.

86 See the reports of the Executive Committee, 1884–1899, Royal Free Hospital Archives, London.

87 Of these, apparently only Vakil did not complete the training course at the LSMW.

88 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for urging a distinction between trained and untrained dhais since the British in India continued to use the word dhai for women (not of the dhai caste) whom they trained in their hospitals. Significantly perhaps, the horror of the traditional dhai was shared by both men and women Indian doctors who had been trained in Western medicine.

89 See the London School of Medicine for Women Executive Committee Minutes, 1895, Royal Free Hospital Archives. As the school continued to expand, calls for better midwifery and gynecology instruction multiplied. The charge was led by Garrett Anderson. She hired Scharlieb, who had practiced in India, to teach the course in gynecology. See Thorne, Isabel, “The London (R.F.H.) School of Medicine,” pp. 741–45Google Scholar; Echo (March 17, 1891); “Women and the Medical Profession,” The Times (December 11, 1896)Google Scholar; Huntley (n. 4 above), pp. 37–45; Blackwell, Elizabeth, “The Influence of Women in the Profession of Medicine,” in her Essays in Medical Sociology (London: Ernest Bell, 1902), 2:29 ff.Google Scholar; and Manton (n. 37 above), pp. 269–70, 287–90.

90 Theriot, Nancy M., “Women's Voices in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse: A Step toward Deconstructing Science,” Signs 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 Scharlieb, Mary, “How to Become a Lady Doctor,” Queen (December 15, 1888)Google Scholar; Newspaper Cuttings Collection, Royal Free Hospital Archives, London.

92 Jex-Blake, Sophia, Medical Women: A Ten Years' Retrospect (Edinburgh: National Association for Promoting the Medical Education of Women, 1888), pp. 15–16Google Scholar.

93 Ibid., p. 23.

94 London School of Medicine Annual Report, 1894, p. 23; Royal Free Hospital Archives, London.

95 “North India School for Medicine for Christian Women, Ludhiana,” Magazine of the L.S.M.W. and R.F.H. (May 1895): 40–44Google Scholar.

96 I am indebted to Angela Woollacott for pressing this line of argument. She deals with some of these same issues in her paper, “From Moral to Professional Authority: Secularism, Social Work, and Middle-Class Women's Self-Construction in World War I,” which she kindly shared with me.

97 I am grateful to DeWitt Ellinwood for encouraging me to consider this point during a panel discussion at the South Asia Conference at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, November 1994.

98 For an excellent example of the linkages made between women's medicine and scientific progress, see Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett, “On the Progress of Medicine in the Victoria Era,” Magazine of the R. F. H. S. M. W. 2 (October 1897): 290–305Google Scholar.

99 Lal (n. 21 above), pp. 12–15.

100 Ganguli faced accusations of being a prostitute simply because she was an Indian woman who had gone to Britain for higher medical training and who practiced medicine “in public.” See Karlekar (n. 6 above), p. 178.

101 Chidambaram (n. 36 above), p. 13.

102 The verse is, of course, from the Kipling poem, “The White Man's Burden” (1899). See Mary Scharlieb, in her preface to Balfour and Young (n. 26 above), pp. 11–12.

103 For an insightful set of reflections on the challenges of narrating British women's/feminist histories, see Mayhall, Laura E. Nym, “Creating the ‘Suffragette Spirit’: British Feminism and the Historical Imagination,” Women's History Review 4, no. 3 (1995): 319–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.