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Dadabhai Naoroji, Liberal MP for Finsbury Central 1892

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Dadabhai Naoroji, Liberal MP for Finsbury Central 1892

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Martha Ricks, the Queen's Liberian Visitor 1892

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Martha Ricks, the Queen's Liberian Visitor 1892

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Five Things I wish I'd learnt at School about Empire- by Eddie Pile

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Five Things I wish I'd learnt at School about Empire- by Eddie Pile

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Artist Reenacts 19th-Century Portraits To Topple The 'Strong Black Woman' Stereotype

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Artist Reenacts 19th-Century Portraits To Topple The 'Strong Black Woman' Stereotype

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In 1843, Sarah Forbes Bonetta was born a princess of the Egbado clan of Nigeria's Yoruba people. However, when she was 4 years old, her entire family was killed in a slave raid, and King Gezo, the most infamous slave trading monarch in West Africa, took her as prisoner. Shortly after, a British commander named Frederick Forbes suggested Gezo give Bonetta to Queen Victoria as a diplomatic gift. "She would be a present from the King of the Blacks to the Queen of the Whites," he said.

Thanks to this bizarre turn of events, Bonetta wound up at Windsor Castle in 1850. The Queen, impressed with Bonetta's intelligence and musical talents, declared the girl her goddaughter and agreed to take on her educational expenses. Until her death in 1880, Bonetta lived among the British middle class ― ostensibly happy, or, at least, financially comfortable. Her story is often framed as a bizarre sort of fairytale, of a woman saved from horrific circumstances and plopped into a life of luxury.

When London-based contemporary artist Heather Agyepong learned Bonetta's story, it touched her on two levels. First, due to the lack of visibility of black diasporas predating the 1940s, Agyepong was surprised that there were black people in Britain in the 19th century. "It was both overwhelming and embarrassing as I was a little ashamed I didn't know that the diaspora has been around for over 500 years," she explained to The Huffington Post.

But Agyepong's fascination with Bonetta went deeper. She found herself wondering, despite the happily-ever-after tone that normally accompanies Bonetta's life story, how she really felt inside. What would it be like to lose your entire family and live in a world so different from the one you once knew? "How can a black woman living in Victorian Britain within the realms of aristocracy have such an pleasant experience?" Agyepong asked.

Agyepong scrutinized the formal portraits of Bonetta ― dressed in a gown, bonnet and pearls ― in which she appeared regal, composed and in control. But how much could she really glean from a sepia-toned, posed portrait anyway? "Her portraits reminded me of the way some black women feel they need to compose themselves in such a way that suits others but not ourselves," Agyepong continued.

As a young black woman living in London, Agyepong's experiences traveling throughout Europe have been tainted by discrimination and abuse, from strangers on the street laughing at her to soliciting her for sex. Some of this assault stems from the historical sexualization of black women's bodies. "I could be wearing a huge polo, wool jumper, boyfriend jeans and trainers and some creep would still look at me like a prostitute," Agyepong said. "It's ingrained."

All women, but especially women of color, learn to walk in the world acknowledging that some view them as sexual objects before human beings. Another fallacy that permeates Western culture ― less directly damaging but perhaps more insidious ― is the myth of the "strong black woman." Although women of color have certainly displayed tremendous strength to endure the injustices that shape their daily lives, the surface compliment can easily metamorphose to imply black women don't feel pain, or black women don't need help.

"I started to reimagine, well, maybe she suffered from the same struggles I have, maybe she pretended things were all right when they weren't," Agyepong expressed.

In a series titled " Too Many Blackamoors," Agyepong inserts herself into Bonetta's narrative, recreating her 19th-century portraits with her own image. The title takes its name from a 16th-century letter distributed throughout Elizabethan England, which called for mayors and sheriffs, under the Queen's will, to expel superfluous "blackamoors" from the land.

At first, Agyepong's portraits look like they were plucked straight out of the 1800s. Look closer, however, and certain contemporary details come into view ― Doc Martin boots, Peter Fryer's 1984 book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. Agyepong's process, technically referred to as "Re-enactment Phototherapy," is inspired by the work of two phototherapists, Rosy Martin and Jo Spence, who explored the relationship between photography, memory and identity by deconstructing the self-portrait.

"I reimagined my own struggles, worries and insecurities onto Bonetta in order to allow myself to reflect, relive and possibly heal from those traumas," Agyepong said. "I also really wanted other black women to share the experience with me, maybe evoke a cathartic experience whilst looking at the images to encourage a dialogue not just between others but between themselves."

Through the project, the artist hopes to dismantle the stereotype of the strong black woman, or at least make space for nuance, complexity and dissent. Agyepong spoke of the images in conjunction with her own struggles with mental health, her reluctance to reach out for help because "I felt it didn't fit the image of what I saw a black woman to be. All the talk about mental health was around white women so I thought, well, I can't be depressed."

Black women are burdened with innumerable weights and anxieties each and every day. As Jenna Wortham recently wrote in The New York Times, in reference to recent incidents of police violence against black people: " All the rage and mourning and angst works to exhaust you; it eats you alive with its relentlessness. These slayings obey no humane logic. They force you to reconcile your own helplessness in the face of such brutal injustice, and the terrifying reality that it could happen to you, or someone you hold dear."

In addition to living with the threat of brutal injustice, enough to make anyone anxious or depressed, women of color are left out of the larger conversation regarding mental health. The subject, for many, remains stigmatized and out of reach. "It seems like for generations, black women have hardly been included in conversations about mental well-being and, to be honest, I'm just over it," Agyepong said.

Some of Agyepong's photos are currently on view as part of the group exhibition " Unmasked Women," which grapples with the current state of black mental health for young women in the United Kingdom.

The show's curator Nicole Krystal Crentsil spoke to The Huffington Post about the difficulty of seeking help from therapists who are not a part of, or educated about, the black experience. "Some therapists are not aware of what it's like to be brought up with racial oppressions and institutionalized pressures," she said. "They think talking to your mum would solve all your issues."

Agyepong, along with nine other young women artists, contributed their work in order to show young black women in the U.K. and beyond that they are not alone, that it's OK to not be OK. "I'm sick of internalizing traumas, sick of pretending to make someone else feel comfortable whilst others can live free with their belly hanging out," Agyepong said.

"I just want to live as carefree as possible and bring whoever is around me with me. We need to dig ourselves out of these boxes as black women because as someone who has come out from the other side of mental health issues I feel that I owe it to them to speak up for the women who are still suffering in silence. I just want to leave the viewer empowered in whatever way I can; to feel release, ease, a sigh of relief."
"Too Many Blackamoors," commissioned by Autograph ABP, will go on view as part of "Visible:In," during Art Licks weekend, from Sept. 29-Oct. 2, at Seen Fifteen in London.

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Artist Reenacts 19th-Century Portraits To Topple The 'Strong Black Woman' Stereotype

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In 1843, Sarah Forbes Bonetta was born a princess of the Egbado clan of Nigeria's Yoruba people. However, when she was 4 years old, her entire family was killed in a slave raid, and King Gezo, the most infamous slave trading monarch in West Africa, took her as prisoner.

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Heather Agyepong as Sarah Forbes Bonetta

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Heather Agyepong as Sarah Forbes Bonetta

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Heather Agyepong as Sarah Forbes Bonetta

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Heather Agyepong as Sarah Forbes Bonetta

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Spotlight on Laure, the model known for her work with Manet

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Ex seaman street singer, Joseph Johnson who use to wear the ship Nelson, which he made, on his head. (1815)

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Mrs Victoria Randle with her 2 children 1901

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Mrs Victoria Randle with her 2 children 1901

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Maharani Duleep Singh nee Bamba Muller 1860s

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Maharani Duleep Singh nee Bamba Muller 1860s

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Johanna Jonkers, The African Choir, 1891

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Johanna Jonkers, The African Choir, 1891

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19th Century Portrait Painting of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, 'The Black Mahler' 1898

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19th Century Portrait Painting of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, 'The Black Mahler' 1898

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(Mrs. Eleanor Xiniwe) is a young lady-like, native woman, the regularity of whose features despite her sable complexion, vies with most European faces, and who has dignified and rather stately manners. – London Illustrated News, August 29, 1891

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(Mrs. Eleanor Xiniwe) is a young lady-like, native woman, the regularity of whose features despite her sable complexion, vies with most European faces, and who has dignified and rather stately manners. – London Illustrated News, August 29, 1891

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Kwame Asare visit to London 1928

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Interesting essay about Women's labour in 19th century Abẹ́òkúta

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Interesting essay about Women's labour in 19th century Abẹ́òkúta

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Women's economic independence in precolonial Yorùbáland has been extensively documented. Historical enquiry into Yorùbá women's work dates back to the mid-twentieth century and the start of second-wave feminism, which generated a new interest in women's studies and women's history. As Western feminists first attempted to rescue history from the normative androcentric paradigms pervasive in academia, they also sought to discover the origin of women's oppression in society. They traced this oppression to patriarchy and tried to uncover the global dynamics of this repressive male force (Jayawardena Reference Jayawardena1993: 11; Yuval-Davis Reference Yuval-Davis, Kennedy, Lubelska and Walsh1993: 3). Western feminists soon discovered, however, that in non-European societies, gender and patriarchy functioned in distinctive and often dissimilar ways. In certain areas, such as Yorùbáland, women were largely economically and financially independent of their husbands. Consequently, Yorùbá women were used as examples of women's economic and political empowerment in pre-industrial societies. Social historians including Judith Brown and Alice Schlegel, for example, described the position of Yorùbá women as enviable when compared with those in many other societies of the same period. They argued that Yorùbá women's significant economic contribution to the region conferred political clout to an extent that was absent in many European societies (Brown Reference Brown1970; Schlegel Reference Schlegel and Schlegel1977: 1-40). Through the decades, African and Yorùbá historians such as Bọlanle Awẹ, Niara Sudarkasa and Nina Mba continued to emphasize women's economic independence and proposed further that the relationship between men and women in precolonial Yorùbáland was one of mutual gender complementarity and balance rooted in Yorùbá cosmology, the significance of which 'obliterated oppression' - in essence, negating Western understandings of universal patriarchy (Awẹ Reference Awẹ and Schlegel1977: 144-60; Mba Reference Mba1982; Sudarkasa Reference Sudarkasa1986: 91; Olademo Reference Olademo2009: 44). However, the question of how women's work functioned on the micro-level, its connection to Yorùbá indigenous concepts of gender and polygyny, and how these ideals were perceived and influenced by Christianity in the nineteenth century is yet to be examined. This article aims to shed light on these issues.

Before exploring women's work in nineteenth-century Yorùbáland, one must first ask if sex-based gender differentiation existed. Did 'women' actually exist in the nineteenth century? Some scholars argue that asking the 'woman' question in the context of precolonial Yorùbá society is an ahistorical Eurocentric imposition on Yorùbá history. In The Invention of Women, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyèwùmí argues that 'woman' as a social category did not exist in precolonial Yorùbá indigenous culture before 'sustained' European contact. She considers gender differences based on sex in Yorùbáland as 'European cultural baggage' and an 'alien distortion' (Oyèwùmí Reference Oyèwùmí1997: xi). Using the Ọ̀yọ́-Yorùbá as a case study, she contends that although the Yorùbá recognized biological sex differences, sex carried no social value, and she writes that, 'unlike [in] the west, physical bodies were not social bodies ... and the presence or absence of certain organs did not determine social position or ... social hierarchy'. Rather, she suggests that precolonial Yorùbáland was a gerontocratic society where rank, status and hierarchy were determined by age and seniority ( ibid.: ix-xiii).

Oyèwùmí's theory has been frequently challenged and refuted. J. D. Y. Peel and Lorand Matory, for instance, argue convincingly that social constructs based on sex existed in precolonial society. Matory's book, published before that of Oyèwùmí, shows that, in the nineteenth century, bridewealth payments and polygyny were common occurrences while dowry and polyandry were inconceivable (Matory Reference Matory1994: xxiv). Furthermore, women's consanguineal and conjugal residences were both patrilocal. Seniority in these patrilocal residences was determined not by actual age, but by the length of one's attachment to it. Peel argues that, regardless of her age, a new bride was considered younger than every child born into the lineage before her wedding. Women consequently experienced a mid-life social demotion at marriage to which men were immune (Peel Reference Peel2002: 139). Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, however, offers the most vocal and in-depth critique of Oyèwùmí's work, contesting her tendency to view language and meaning as static instead of fluid, shifting and mutable. She also critiques Oyèwùmí's emphasis on gerontocracy and seniority as the only forms of power relationships existing outside other hierarchies such as sex, socio-economic and socio-political position. She criticizes her claim that Yorùbá society lacked sex-based hierarchical dimensions because the Yorùbá language has age-based categories instead of sex-based ones. Bakare-Yusuf asserts that language may not always equate to social behaviour and that the absence of social phenomena in language does not preclude their presence in culture (Bakare-Yusuf Reference Bakare-Yusuf and Arnfrede2004: 1-12). The consensus that the social category 'woman' did exist therefore allows the exploration of women's work and its connections to Yorùbá indigenous gender ideals and Christianity in the town of Abẹ́òkúta.

Methodology

There has been a considerable amount of academic enquiry regarding gender and labour in nineteenth-century Yorùbáland. Most recent studies, including those of Marjorie Mackintosh and Judith Byfield, use precolonial society as a background to their core focus on the development and transformation of gender and work in the colonial and postcolonial periods (Byfield Reference Byfield2002; McIntosh Reference McIntosh2009). Olatunji Ojo, Robin Law and Francine Shields, however, take precolonial society as their main subject matter (Law Reference Law and Falola1993; Reference Law1995; Ojo Reference Ojo2005; Reference Ojo2008). While Ojo is principally concerned with the movement, economy and gendered aspects of domestic slavery, Law and Shields look at women and work in the precolonial era. Shields' impressive doctoral thesis, 'Palm oil and power: women in an era of economic and social transition in nineteenth-century Yorùbáland (south-western Nigeria)', is a macro-economic analysis of the gendered division of labour in Yorùbáland during a time of economic transition from the slave trade to 'legitimate' trade in areas such as Abẹ́òkúta and Ìbàdàn in the nineteenth century (Shields Reference Shields1997). While this article uses identical sources to Ojo, Law and Shields, it differs in focus as it attempts to explore labour in the quotidian lives of women alongside missionaries' perception of, and interaction with, female work and how this influenced their opinions of other aspects of Yorùbá social life, including marriage and polygyny. Following in the tradition of authors such as Saburi Biobaku, Judith Byfield and Agneta Pallinder-Law, it examines the practices of one Yorùbá town, Abẹ́òkúta, without attempting to portray these town specificities as necessarily universal to Yorùbáland (Biobaku Reference Biobaku1957; Pallinder-Law Reference Pallinder-Law1974). Although the Yorùbá spoke an identical language, differentiated by dialect, Yorùbá towns in the nineteenth century developed in distinctive forms under diverse circumstances, and, as a result, town characteristics were often unique. Nevertheless, with respect to marriage and labour, gaps in the archival sources necessitate that some examples and similarities are taken from Lagos, Ìbàdàn, Ońdó and Ọ̀tà, a town that bordered with Abẹ́òkúta; when used, these are clearly identified. However, the analysis is centred on the Ẹ̀gbá people of the prolific and dynamic town of Abẹ́òkúta. Without reiterating the town's history, which has already been widely and extensively debated (see Biobaku Reference Biobaku1957; Pallinder-Law Reference Pallinder-Law1974; Phillips Reference Phillips1969; Lloyd Reference Lloyd1971), it is important to say that Abẹ́òkúta came into existence only because of the nineteenth-century intra-ethnic wars.

The nineteenth century in Yorùbáland is popularly known as the age of confusion. The Ọ̀yọ́ Empire, the most powerful in the area from the seventeenth century, disintegrated in the early nineteenth century due to a combination of internal and external crises. An advancing Fulani jihad from the north, the rise of Dahomey in the west, the instability of the central Ọ̀yọ́ government, and successive inept Ọ̀yọ́ kings known as Aláàfin all contributed to the maelstrom of local instability. This was compounded by the impact of slave raiding and the struggles for the control of trade routes as the region became incorporated into global economies. The kingdoms of the Yorùbá were thrown into a state of crisis that was to last for over seventy years. Violent and debilitating wars, slave raids, widespread insecurity and grave human suffering devastated communities. There was mass migration, desertion of homesteads and means of livelihood, and families were separated. Whole towns and villages were deserted, and large areas of farmland were reclaimed by forest. Fought from the 1820s, these intra-ethnic wars ended in the 1890s when the British intervened and forced the signing of peace treaties (Biobaku Reference Biobaku1957; Awẹ Reference Awẹ1973; Falola Reference Falola1991). During one of the Yorùbá wars known as the Òwu war of 1817, the original Ẹ̀gbá homestead in the Ẹ̀gbá forest was destroyed and many of its citizens were enslaved. Those who escaped abandoned their homes and moved to a new area under Olúmọ rock in 1830, which they called Abẹ́òkúta ('under a stone'). Here, they rebuilt their political, economic and social structures and embarked on wars of expansion while defending their town from foreign incursion (Ajisafe Moore Reference Ajisafe Moore2010 [1916]; Biobaku Reference Biobaku1957: 16-17). Although the Ẹ̀gbá of Abẹ́òkúta consisted of many sub-groups, primary evidence demonstrates that the cultural practices of these groups were largely identical. Therefore, the town is explored as a single unit without significant reference to townships.

Abẹ́òkúta is an ideal case study for an enquiry into nineteenth-century practices because of the vibrancy of Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) evangelists in the area, the records of whom form the primary resource base. From 1845, when the CMS began its ministry in the region, missionaries were required to keep a journal of their daily activities; these were later sent to the CMS headquarters in London, in order to 'know accurately the state of the mission' (Peel Reference Peel2003: 10). These records and the nineteenth-century Abẹ́òkúta CMS newspaper Ìwé Ìròhìn (1859-67) now constitute a voluminous and indispensable source for understanding the nineteenth-century Yorùbá. Their daily entries, although primarily concerned with their religious undertakings, also include information on politics, economics and social organization. Missionary journals as sources do raise some concerns. First, there is evidence of frequent cultural bias and prejudice towards Yorùbá culture. Bowen once referred to Africans as 'deficient and ... stupid', and these prejudices coloured missionaries' perception of the Yorùbá (Bowen Reference Bowen2011 [1857]: 286). In many instances, missionaries also dismissed Yorùbá culture as dark, barbaric and heathenish. In 1853, the evangelist Thomas King described the last funeral rites of an Aláké, ruler of the áké section of Abẹ́òkúta. After recounting the funeral procession, sacrifices and dance, King concluded abruptly with 'then all [performed] obscene customs too shocking to relate'. This hasty end to the narration of a ritual leaves many unanswered questions. Several other events considered 'unimportant and irrelevant', most notably discussions about female household dynamics, were also overlooked. Detailed descriptions of culture are therefore infrequent. Commenting on the representation of indigenous Yorùbá religion in the CMS journals, Peel remarks that what is missing from the journals is precisely what is essential to social and cultural history: '"thick" descriptions of rituals, extensive vernacular texts, and exegeses of myths and symbols' (Peel Reference Peel2003: 12).

Missionary records are also cold and do not adequately depict tone, emotion, silences, hesitations and other important linguistic tools that are necessary for an adequate assessment of events. Furthermore, missionaries' records give mere glimpses into moments in the lives of the Yorùbá people with whom they interacted. As these encounters would undoubtedly have been limited, records are not necessarily representative of the entire Yorùbá life experience. The fact that journals are uncritical of their authors' activities also poses a problem (Adeboye Reference Adeboye, Falola and Genova2006: 91). Mission records must thus be read for what they are: expressions of how evangelists perceived the Yorùbá, which may not always be consistent with, or reflective of, the life experiences of the entire populace. Other sources used, such as the published books of missionaries, Western travellers, explorers, ethnologists and early indigenous elites, also pose similar constraints.

Despite these limitations, evangelical records are important to social enquiry. When missionary records are read along the grain, one observes that some of their remarks and observations were insightful and accurate because their motive to convert the people demanded that they invest considerable time and effort in learning about Yorùbá cultures, institutions and languages. In reference to Yorùbá marital arrangements, a European missionary wrote in January 1864 that 'young married women should be keepers at home and guide the house. In this country, women are consistently in the market, or carrying loads, or doing some work.' Despite the observer's Western prejudices concerning the 'proper' duties of wives, his observation that Yorùbá women worked outside the home is accurate and other nineteenth-century observers and Yorùbá oral traditions corroborate this claim. As I will discuss, working was a compulsory duty for every wife and integral to indigenous ideals of femininity. Another interesting dimension to CMS records, especially in relation to women's labour, is the personal accounts of indigenous Yorùbá missionaries concerning their personal struggle with conforming to the European ideals that they espoused. The majority of CMS missionaries in the nineteenth century were either Sierra Leonean ex-slaves originally captured from Yorùbáland or homegrown Yorùbá converts. Their documentation of women's work was often deeply personal, as they had to mediate between the cultural expectations of their faith, their wives' insistence on engaging in economic activities and the realities of Yorùbá life. The use of CMS journals also dictates the timeline because this enquiry into female labour begins in 1845, the start of CMS activities in Abẹ́òkúta and the subsequent documentation of Yorùbá life, and ends in 1893 when the region came under British suzerainty; they therefore are useful for exploring indigenous culture before pervasive European rule and influences. Although I do not assume that the nineteenth century was a static, unchanging time, the lack of extensive social commentary in the sources necessitates that the entire period be explored as a single entity.

Much of my enquiry into women's labour explores the quotidian, lineage level, because ebi (lineage) was the primary mode of organization at the time. The lineage comprised a group of people who traced their origin along agnatic lines to a single ancestor, along with their wives, slaves, pawns, followers and hangers-on, who lived together in a polygamous spatial patrilocal dwelling known as the compound, or idile in the Yorùbá language. The lineage was an economic, political, religious, judicial and social unit. Land was corporately owned by the lineage and all members laboured for the compound's economic success. Chieftaincy candidates and other public officials were nominated from within lineages, marriages were brokered among lineages, and members collectively worshipped household deities. Lineages also internally policed their members, and disputes were referred to higher town authorities only if they either could not be resolved in-house or involved non-lineage members. All individuals were born into a lineage and remained in one for their lifetime. Should a member be exiled from a community for committing a crime for which the penalty was excommunication, they would attach themselves to another household in the host town. Even death did not release an individual from lineage affiliations, as they were buried in the compound and worshipped as ancestors who were expected to intervene in the lives of their descendants (Johnson Reference Johnson2010 [1921]: 95). It was within the lineage that females first learned to work.

The introduction of girls to labour in nineteenth-century Abẹ́òkúta

At about the age of four, when young children began to show a measure of independence, such as bathing and feeding themselves, children in Abẹ́òkúta, and indeed all of Yorùbáland, were taught to perform household chores (Crowther Reference Crowther1852: 235). The Yorùbá considered this measure of independence as a sign that a child had developed the cognitive capacities required to begin learning the skills needed to survive in society. One such important skill was household labour, which included domestic sanitation, running errands, cooking and tending to livestock (Drewal Reference Drewal1977: 561). These tasks were intended to promote individual household competencies and cooperation with others to achieve larger tasks. Children also cared for the old and invalids of the household, which taught compassion and care, and their duty to serve household visitors encouraged familiarity with strangers and built social and communicative skills (Renne Reference Renne2003). There is some indication that different tasks were assigned to boys and girls. Young boys tended to horses and large livestock and ran errands while girls engaged in household activities such as cleaning and fetching water. In nineteenth-century Abẹ́òkúta, however, these tasks often overlapped, and although some household duties were stereotyped as female work, boys were taught these chores so that they could perform them when girls were unable to do so. When the townsmen and civil chiefs met to discuss town politics in Abẹ́òkúta, women and girls were confined to their homes, under pain of death, for the duration of these meetings. Depending on the undertaking, these confinements lasted anything from a couple of hours to seven days, according to one 1847 report. During this time, boys assumed all the female duties that required leaving the compound. During one such confinement in 1859, Robert Campbell, a Caribbean traveller of Ẹ̀gbá descent, noticed that there were a few men and boys about 'looking as if in the perpetration of some guilty action, because ... they were compelled to perform some office regarded according to their customs, as proper only for women' (Campbell Reference Campbell1861: 87). Thomas Jefferson Bowen, a Southern Baptist missionary, also noted that during one such confinement several boys hawked goods, which was a stereotypical female task. He described them as 'awkward and sheepish, clearly inadequate to the smiles and chats of girls whose places they were endeavouring to fill' (Bowen Reference Bowen2011 [1857]: 141). From birth until the age of six or eight, children were primarily socialized by their mothers, who, through daily observation and instruction, taught children good work ethics, cultural practices, good morals and proper Yorùbá social behaviour. From around the age of six, however, male and female socialization began to differ (Schwab Reference Schwab1955: 366). At that age, boys began to spend an increasing amount of time with their fathers and other men learning male occupations such as farming and smelting, while girls began to learn their mothers' commercial activities, since female instruction from then on was geared towards preparing them for economic production and wifely duties.

Nineteenth-century observers often disagreed about the gendered division of labour in nineteenth-century Yorùbáland. Observers such as Bowen and William Clarke insisted that women never engaged in farming activities, with Clarke stating emphatically that 'females ... are never known to cultivate the farms ... so strong is the aversion of the native mind to this kind of female servitude that I have yet to see the first instance of a woman engaged, hoe in hand, in cultivating the soil' (Clarke Reference Clarke1972: 58). Other nineteenth-century visitors including Hugh Clapperton, however, wrote that women performed 'all the labour of the land' (Clapperton Reference Clapperton1966: 58). While the evidence is too sparse to definitively confirm why there is such a disparity in the records, researchers of Yorùbáland including Robin Law and Francine Shields now accept that nineteenth-century observers wrote only about the places they visited. Since Bowen and Clarke remained in Western Yorùbáland, it is probable that women in these areas indeed did not farm. In places such as Ońdó in Eastern Yorùbáland, which missionaries did not penetrate until the late nineteenth century, evidence suggests that women did engage in farming. In 1875, the missionary Nathaniel Young in Ode-Ońdó stated that 'a good many of the men and children have gone away to their farms and a good many of the women too - as their women also cultivate lands as well as the men'. Young's emphasis on women cultivating lands 'as well' is telling, as it suggests that women's role in farming was peculiar to these areas. Despite this, in Western Yorùbáland, there were some reports of men trading and isolated instances of some females engaged in agricultural labour in extenuating circumstances, for example when their fathers were sick or if male members of the lineage were away at war, or when elderly women who could no longer engage in rigorous trade assisted on farms (Shields Reference Shields1997: 57). However, these were the exception and not the rule, because in Western Yorùbáland, which is where Abẹ́òkúta is located, men farmed while women traded and boys and girls were socialized along these lines.

From a very early age, girls learned economic labour by accompanying, assisting and imitating older women. They were initially given light tasks and slowly progressed to harder work. Girls first accompanied their mothers to the market to observe and assist, and later they became responsible for trading in their mother's absence. When they could be trusted with this task, they began hawking goods locally before venturing further afield; first they visited the rural markets surrounding the towns, and then they joined large caravans to trade in distant towns and markets (Awẹ Reference Awẹ and Awẹ1992: 60). These activities ensured that girls had the requisite competences for future economic independence. Through trading, girls learned assertiveness, confidence, resolve, effective communication, bargaining, negotiation and financial savvy. Girls neither kept the profits acquired from their commercial dealings nor received a salary or remuneration. Childhood was considered a training stage used to acquire the vital skills for later life. Profits were turned over to their mothers or the female with whom they were apprenticed. Girls continued to work for their mothers until they married and began to work for themselves.

Marriage and women's matrimonial labour in precolonial Abẹ́òkúta

In nineteenth-century Yorùbáland there were few spinsters. Everyone who could marry did so. LaRay Denzer calls marriage in Yorùbáland 'a condition of adulthood', suggesting that one could not begin the journey from childhood to adulthood without first getting married (Denzer Reference Denzer1994: 3). People were expected to enter into matrimony when they reached the culturally acceptable marriageable age, usually around eighteen to twenty for females and mid-twenties to early thirties for males. These relatively late ages for both sexes may be linked to Yorùbá attempts to retain the crucial lineage labour of their children for as long as possible. Once married, parents would likely lose their children's labour and the financial gains that resulted from this, because, as I will discuss, their offspring began working for themselves and their own households. Additionally, the age gap between what was considered an acceptable marrying age for girls and boys could be linked to women's shorter childbearing years, which necessitated that they married sooner than men.

There were two types of marriage in precolonial Yorùbáland: marriages between free men and free women and those between free men and slaves. For free women, marriage in precolonial Yorùbáland followed three distinct stages. The first stage was the initial formal betrothal ceremony known as ìjọ́hun or ìṣìhun, when the groom's family paid the first instalment of the bridewealth to engage a prospective bride, who was usually either an infant or a young girl. The groom could be a young boy or man, to be married for the first time, or an older man who wished to marry additional wives to grow his household. Ìjọ́hun included a variety of agricultural produce, local alcohol and cowries (money), the amount of which had been previously negotiated and agreed to by both families before the ceremony. Ìjọ́hun ensured the intended groom's sole sexual access to the girl, and legal rights over all children she bore in the future (Fadipe Reference Fadipe1991: 60-1; Ajisafe Moore Reference Ajisafe Moore2010 [1916]: 26; Johnson Reference Johnson2010 [1921]: 113). From that day, any sexual indiscretion on her part was considered pan̄ságà (adultery). After ìjọ́hun, the prospective husband then performed bride service in the form of free manual labour for his bride-to-be's family to show his commitment to the lineage and his dependability as an àna (in-law) (Fadipe Reference Fadipe1991: 74). Such work included clearing land for farming, supplying firewood - sometimes as often as once a week - building or thatching roofs, and other general household repairs (Delano Reference Delano1937: 128; Ajisafe Moore Reference Ajisafe Moore2010 [1916]: 23). He also began to contribute to the financial undertakings of his intended in-laws, including costs incurred during yearly feasts and funeral expenses. W. Williams, a CMS missionary, also added that the intended groom was obliged to send an annual amount of new corn and yam every year until his intended bride could be wed. When the bride came of age, the bridegroom paid ìdána, the final bride price, just before the wedding. Ìdána again included agricultural produce and money and marked the union of the two families. Once paid, the bride moved permanently to her conjugal home in a wedding ceremony known as ìgbéyàwó, literally translated as 'to carry the bride' (Johnson Reference Johnson2010 [1921]: 114).

The sparse records concerning marriages to slaves suggest that many men married slave wives in the nineteenth century, often to ease the bridewealth burden. To wed a slave, a man needed only to capture or buy a female slave from a slave market or a slave dealer, have sexual relations with her, and keep her in his compound. Campbell commented that 'a less troublesome way of procuring a wife, with many, is to resort to the slave-marts of Ilorin at once, money in hand, and make their choice' (Campbell Reference Campbell1861: 28-9). Although slaves were expensive, men considered them cheaper than the long-term costs of bridewealth. Shields argues that while slave women may have been called wives, the title was not necessarily representative of their status and many women perceived themselves as concubines (Shields Reference Shields1997: 275). Slave wives did not hold the same status as free wives, as they could be punished or killed without consequence, did not need to consent to marriage, could be sold for profit, and, as I will discuss, had to work for both themselves and their masters/husbands. In essence, they were at once 'concubine, commodity and worker' (Burrill Reference Burrill2008: 52). The sources also indicate that slave wives were never married as first wives, since, in Yorùbáland, the ascension to adulthood required that a man pass through the proper betrothal and bridewealth process. Finally, rarer still are clues regarding informal relations between slaves or marriage among slaves. The only record found about slave marriage was written by Ajisafe Moore, who stated that '[a] master may give his slave another woman slave of his in marriage. In that case, nothing is paid. Of course, the children, their offspring are included in the property of the master' (Ajisafe Moore Reference Ajisafe Moore2010 [1916]: 27).

After marriage, women lived permanently with their husband's kin group. Within matrimony, men and women had clear economic roles and responsibilities to one another. Since girls did not accumulate any income while working for their mothers, they often had no independent finances at the start of their marriage. The bargain of marriage required that a husband give his wife starting capital to trade and the woman used income from this trade to meet her responsibilities in the compound, which included providing for her own upkeep and that of her children (Ajisafe Moore Reference Ajisafe Moore2010 [1916]: 28-9; Oyèwùmí Reference Oyèwùmí1997: 65). A husband could decide to give his wife more resources over time but this was solely at his discretion, as only the initial capital was mandatory. Most women traded - even those who had other primary occupations traded part time. Niara Sudarkasa's claim that 'virtually all women in [Yorùbá society] are engaged in some type of trade activity' is confirmed by the nineteenth-century missionary William Clarke, who observed that, despite women carrying out other occupations, they left their work from about 5 p.m. during the peak market period to 'try their fortune at trade' (Sudarkasa Reference Sudarkasa1973: 2; Clarke Reference Clarke1972: 265).

Although Ajisafe Moore, and later Simi Afonja, wrote that a wife was required to help her husband in his vocation as well as carry out their own independent trading ventures, there is little historical evidence to support this claim as many nineteenth-century observers expressly stated that women were not obliged to work for their husbands (Ajisafe Moore Reference Ajisafe Moore2010 [1916]: 28; Afonja Reference Afonja1981: 305; Bowen Reference Bowen2011 [1857]: 305). It is possible that Ajisafe Moore may have been referring to slave wives, since they were expected to work for their upkeep and perhaps to buy their freedom, and work for their masters/husbands (Shields Reference Shields1997: 217-76). Free husbands and wives had complete economic independence and exclusive control over their financial affairs. There was no common purse. There is also little evidence to suggest that husbands and wives contributed jointly towards household expenses. Helen Callaway argues that, within the compound, ọmọ-ìyá (children of the same mother) formed stronger bonds than the ọbàkan (siblings with the same father) because mothers were responsible for the feeding, clothing and upkeep of their children (Callaway Reference Callaway and Ardener1997: 180). Spouses kept the profits from their economic activities and neither could be held responsible for the other's debt, either in their lifetime or posthumously. Wives had no rights or claims over their husband's property and vice versa, nor could a spouse inherit in the event of death. The only property to which a wife was entitled was a room for herself and her children upon marriage (Bowen Reference Bowen2011 [1857]: 305). In practice, the patrilineage, and not the husband, allocated this room.

The independence of Yorùbá wives was emphasized in numerous missionary reports. The Sierra Leonean missionary James White recounted a significant event that took place in the town of Ọ̀tà in 1870. This town bordered Abẹ́òkúta, and White described it as being so much like Abẹ́òkúta that 'it may be inferred with safety that they are from the same origin'. White wrote that Abraham Àjàká, a convert, loaned his wife fourteen heads of cowries to buy a slave, who cost 134 heads of cowries. After about a year, a scarcity of slaves led to a rise in prices and someone offered him twice what his wife had paid for the slave. Intending to buy his wife's share of the slave and then sell for a profit, Abraham accepted. However, when he informed his wife of his plans to sell the slave, she refused, insisting that she required the slave's services. When Abraham attempted to pressure her to sell, the wife took the case to the mission house. John King, and later James White, heard the case and decided in favour of the wife, stating that, since Abraham had lent her the money, the slave was her property and he had no right to sell him or her. However, they ruled that the wife should pay Abraham the fourteen heads of cowries he had loaned her. Unsatisfied with the ruling, Abraham took the matter to the chiefs, who again upheld White's decision and told the wife to restore to Abraham fourteen heads of cowries. Still displeased, Abraham continued to pressure his wife to sell, beating her and once throwing her out of the compound. When the authorities became aware of this state of affairs, he was exiled from the town on 25 May 1871 for insubordination to the government. Although insubordination was ordinarily a capital offence, his sentence was commuted because White pleaded on his behalf. This account is even more remarkable when one considers that missionaries often disapproved of slave ownership and, as I will discuss, women's work. Nevertheless, when arbitrated as an economic dispute rather than a moral one, the wife's claim was upheld because of local understandings of marital finances. Should a spouse provide capital towards his wife's ventures, outside his mandatory initial contribution, he was only entitled to his investment and not the profits. The only exception to this was if both parties had previously agreed to alternative terms.

Missionaries and women's labour

Missionaries often opposed Yorùbá marriage structures, recommending instead that Christian marriage based on Victorian bourgeois patterns of the male breadwinner and patriarch who provided for his (house)wife and children was a better model for society. In the Aké section of Abẹ́òkúta, Reverend (later Bishop) Ajayi Crowther stated optimistically in 1853 that many of the converts who were married in church now entered into male breadwinner/female housewife roles 'with all readiness and happiness', encouraging others to do the same. His assertion may have been true for some Christian couples in some parts of Lagos. Kristin Mann argues that Christian influences and the introduction of ordinance marriages prompted a rise in matrimonial arrangements modelled along European lines in which women depended first on their fathers, and then on their husbands (Mann Reference Mann1991). However, evidence from Abẹ́òkúta was markedly different.

In Abẹ́òkúta, Crowther's comment was more of an aspiration than a reality, as very few converts lived up to these ideals. About twenty years later, Daniel Coker in his 1875 annual letter still stated disapprovingly that women were so intent on trading that some neglected church. He wrote that:

the principal business of most of the women in the church is selling the articles received from Lagos in the neighbouring towns ... Some of the candidates of baptism are tempted to neglect class and Sunday service when the fifth day falls on a Thursday and Sunday.

Every fifth day was a large market day known as ọjọ́ ọjà (day of the market). Larger than the daily town market, the market on these days attracted people from the surrounding towns and villages who brought various wares and merchandise to Abẹ́òkúta to buy and sell. For many women converts, the financial draw of the market took precedence over church attendance. The wives of Yorùbá missionaries, who were supposed to act as examples to the congregation, continued to engage in large-scale economic undertakings that were separate and independent from their husbands. In 1864, Arthur Harrison, a European missionary, wrote a letter to Henry Venn, the secretary of the CMS, expressing his disapproval of Mrs White, the wife of James White, a Sierra Leonean evangelist. He complained that her trading activities were so large that she had employed three women and two men to assist in her trade of European goods including plates, cloth and tobacco. He added that, contrary to CMS proscription against the sale and consumption of alcohol, 'Mrs White had received [and traded] one hundred cases of gin'. Harrison was further exasperated by the news that Mrs White had employed a Mrs Talabì, a 'disgraced' convert suspended from the church, who had left her husband to cohabit and bear children by another man. Even worse, rather than moving with her husband when he was transferred to Ọ̀tà, Mrs White remained in Abẹ́òkúta to continue her trade. This type of economic independence was typical of Yorùbá missionary wives at the time and was in sharp contrast to European wives, such as Anna Hinderer, the wife of the German CMS missionary David Hinderer, who simply supported her husband's ministry. Indeed, the wives of Yorùbá missionaries seemed to have viewed their activities as separate from the church, hence Mrs White's lack of qualms regarding her sale of alcohol and the moral status of her employees.

Some wives of Yorùbá missionaries did not concern themselves with church activities at all, reflecting historical patterns of separate labour spheres. They saw church work as their husbands' duty, which had little to do with their profession. James Johnson expressed his disapproval of Mrs Allen, the wife of another of the town's Ẹ̀gbá pastors, who did little to identify with her husband's job and church work. He complained that she 'scarcely resided in her station ... sometimes sleeping there only at night or other times spending only a few hours on Sundays out of the whole week'. She instead lived in Ìpòrò, where they had a house. There, she carried out her trade and even had her own slaves, despite Johnson's opposition to Christians owning slaves. Judith Byfield proposes a reason why missions opposed women's economic ventures. She writes that although missionaries admired the socio-economic independence of women, they opposed it because it impeded their desire to create a monogamous family unit modelled after European patriarchy (Byfield Reference Byfield2002: 23). Missionaries such as T. J. Bowen thought that the Yorùbá family unit 'lacked unity' since women had independent affairs, separate from their husbands, and supported their own children. His call for a 'family unit' was entrenched in his idealized androcentric Western view of the family (Bowen Reference Bowen2011 [1857]: 343). Some missionaries even suggested that teaching men commerce was the only remedy for women's supposed monopoly on trade. Accordingly, the CMS introduced a new cotton gin to promote cotton trade and teach vocational trading to men, stating that they felt 'it was proper for men rather than women to do so'.

Some missionaries articulated their disapproval of Yorùbá marriages by insinuating that a lack of a common purse somehow led to suspicion and mistrust between spouses. A European missionary wrote in Ìwé Ìròhìn that according to indigenous custom, husbands and wives had different purses and interests, and since converts decided to follow this 'native' principle, Christian marriages, like 'heathen' unions, lacked any domestic peace or cohesion. He argued that a husband did not entrust his property to his wife lest she appropriate it for her own use. He added that since husbands were not consulted on financial matters, women would most likely end up 'hopelessly in debt'. This account distorted the facts about Yorùbá customs, introducing negative connotations, and is quite revealing about the missionary's bias against Yorùbá models of marriage. Rather than view the Yorùbá system as an alternative arrangement that promoted women's independence and self-sufficiency, many missionaries saw it as a destructive institution that bred hostility and distrust. Furthermore, the missionary's insinuation that men were better traders whom women needed to consult in order to make appropriate business decisions was unfounded. By all indications, women were in a better position than men to make accurate and informed decisions in commerce, as they - and not men - had been socialized in this role.

Within the discourse of women's labour, a few missionaries changed their stance slightly towards the mid-1860s, perhaps due to a realization that they could not prevent women from pursuing economic activities. Missionary discourse changed from opposing all women's formal economic and commercial activities to insisting that women perform gender-appropriate 'reasonable work'. Missionaries asked that Christian wives engage in petty-trading activities at home to earn extra money rather than large-scale, long-distance trade ventures that took them away from their husbands and children for extended periods. Nevertheless, even this was unsuccessful, as Yorùbá Christian wives continued to trade along traditional lines well into the twentieth century. In 1900, L. A. Lijadu, a Yorùbá missionary based in Ondo, defended his wife's trading activities to his supervisors by claiming that they were within the 'reasonable limit' specified by the CMS. In response to accusations levied against himself and his wife, he wrote that his wife was not 'uncontrollable' as others had suggested and her travels for trade were not as frequent as reported. He argued that, contrary to the accusations, she spent most of her time with him at the mission house rather than on trading activities. Evidently, up until the end of the century, not much had changed with regard to the economics of the household.

Rather than a system of mutual benefit, many European missionaries saw the separate purse system as a hindrance to 'happy' and successful marriages. They argued that 'husbands no doubt fancy it is cheaper for them if their wives earn their own living', rather than supporting them. An Ìwé Ìròhìn contributor - who, from his tone, was most likely European - commented that 'a selfish husband makes his wife do all the hard work so that she has no time to attend to her proper duties of minding the house and bringing up the children'. Therefore, men were also the targets of this vilifying narrative. European missionaries stated that the usual excuse a woman gave for trading was that her husband's earnings were insufficient. Showing a lack of understanding of local realities and the position of indigenous missionaries, they considered this reason a ruse for women's desire to satisfy their need for gain and luxuries. The only way to remedy this was by teaching the new generation of females 'the correct way to live', which was why mission schools' curricula for girls put subjects such as cooking and sewing at the forefront of female education, hoping that these would make women better housewives.

It is ironic that although indigenous evangelists often sided with their European counterparts and wrote disparagingly about Yorùbá marriage models, many had wives engaged in large-scale, long-distance trading, highlighting what little control, if any, local missionaries had over their wives' activities. This African missionary narrative also often flew in the face of reality because many local evangelists depended on the labour of their wives for sustenance, as they repeatedly complained that their salaries were inadequate to provide for their families. Their perpetual requests for salary increases were seldom granted, leading them to rely on spousal labour for support. This collaboration between husbands and wives was rare and seldom practised beyond the marriages of missionaries. African missionaries thus lived lives of contradiction: caught between Christian cultural expectations of conjugality and the realities of sustaining a family on an inadequate single income. As a compromise, some missionaries took up a second occupation; notably, James White bred and sold livestock and livestock produce. Some indigenous missionaries could not even afford to start a trade. In a letter to Reverend Venn, Samuel Crowther, son of Ajayi Crowther and head of the dispensary at Abẹ́òkúta, wrote that 'my present salary being not sufficient to keep myself and wife, I have in consequence not been able to keep anything for extra expenses such as building a house or commencing a trade'. He continued that if the financial committee again denied his request for an increase in salary, he would be forced to join a merchant group. He added that in such an eventuality, 'my medical services will no longer be required and I shall consequently be obliged to quit my present house under such circumstances, I have fancied this a most unfavourable result'.

The pressure for converts to conform to European ideals of marriage also had other unforeseen effects, one of which was infidelity, which was reported to have become near endemic in congregations towards the end of the nineteenth century. It is difficult to assess these changes in Abẹ́òkúta in depth. By the time they became pervasive in the 1880s, daily missionary journals had largely been replaced with annual church reports that gave little detail about social life. Nonetheless, we can appreciate the general characteristics of the changes that took place by examining Yorùbá communities in Lagos from the 1870s because the social, religious and economic structures in Lagos and Abẹ́òkúta were similar. In 1873, Charles Phillips began a six-page lament about the immoral state of the Breadfruit Church in Lagos with comments about adultery. He wrote that:

The greatest drawback that I find to the cause of the gospel in this place is the prominence of the sin of adultery among the members of the church. We have our leaders meeting once a month and there is so scarcely a leaders meeting before which a case of this sin is not brought and I am sorry to remark that the number of members suspended on account of this sin is far greater than those suspended for other sins.

Among other reasons given for this increase, Phillips insightfully suggested that the pressure placed on young Christian men to live according to European bourgeois ideals of masculinity compounded the prevalence of premarital liaisons. As an Ìwé Ìròhìn contributor observed, before a man married, 'he was to have a house, furnish it, and earn a living on which he depended to keep him, his wife and his children respectable'. Without it, the writer claimed that the marriage would be that of 'discontent and trouble'. The failure of Christian men to find employment and live up to these archetypes resulted in many young men delaying marriage for longer periods and instead engaging in premarital liaisons.

Missionaries, women's work and polygyny

Missionaries routinely considered Yorùbá women's matrimonial labour and polygyny as two sides of the same coin. They often accused Yorùbá marriages of being 'contrary to true morality' and 'founded on idolatry and polygamy'. They claimed that a woman separated from her husband during trading ventures would most likely be unfaithful as only 'Christian principles ... could deny the feelings of nature'. These assertions contradicted the true state of affairs because the problem of adultery was, as suggested by archival sources, more pervasive in churches than among non-Christians. Missionaries also often suggested that women's labour led to child neglect. An article in the June 1864 edition of Ìwé Ìròhìn read:

Missionaries thus consistently linked women's labour to polygamy and all its principles, which they vehemently opposed. This perceived inextricable connection between polygyny and women's labour may also explain why missions opposed labour for their female congregation and for the wives of missionaries. Although a considerable number of these women were in monogamous relationships, missionaries, especially European missionaries, would have perceived Christian women's continued economic activities as an endorsement of indigenous tenets of polygyny, a practice that, according to them, was 'founded on idolatry'. Several historians have discussed polygyny in nineteenth-century Yorùbáland and missionary opposition to it. Consequently, this will not be discussed extensively here. It is necessary to say that polygyny was near universal in nineteenth-century Yorùbáland. Royalty, chiefs and rich men had large numbers of wives, and ordinary citizens were said to have had two or three (Bowen Reference Bowen2011 [1857]: 304-5; Campbell Reference Campbell1861: 29-60). To put it simplistically, a man's wealth and status were not measured in monetary terms but according to the size of his household, and women were married for their productive and reproductive value. The more wives a man married, the more children he could have. The more children he had, the more productive labour he acquired for economic ventures, increasing his means, which he used to purchase more slaves and marry more wives. This allowed a man to progress from junior masculinity when he married his first wife to adult and elite masculinity where he had a large household of wives, children and slaves, which in turn attracted followers to his household (Campbell Reference Campbell1861: 28; Barber Reference Barber1991: 195). Besides, Yorùbá customs that prescribed that men and women had separate incomes freed male members from having to financially provide for their wives, increasing their ability to acquire more resources in terms of future wives and slaves.

Beyond its many advantages for men, polygyny was also practically beneficial to women. Having other wives in the compound not only freed women from boredom and the burden of domestic tasks, a certain household reciprocity also allowed women to engage in longer periods of trade (Brown Reference Brown1970: 1075). When her children were still young, a woman could only engage in limited commercial activities because she had to care for her own children and those of the older wives. As her children grew older, they in turn were placed in the care of wives who were new mothers so that she could actively pursue economic activities, expand her trading interests, and accumulate wealth (Brown Reference Brown1970: 1075; Afonja Reference Afonja1981: 309). Women's independent finances meant that wives did not have to support their husbands and they could use their resources as they wished without fear of their husband's dealings or debt. Some women even became much richer than their husbands. Examples include Madam Tinúbu and Madam Jọjọlọlá, both of Abẹ́òkúta, who were large-scale entrepreneurs and prominent chiefs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alice Schlegel and Judith Brown argue that women in pre-industrial societies, including Yorùbáland, did not perform tasks that were considered stressful, exposed them to danger, or took them away from home for long periods (Schlegel Reference Schlegel and Schlegel1977: 35; Brown Reference Brown1970: 1075). Schlegel contends that long-distance trade and dangerous tasks were incompatible with child bearing; as a result, most women were not socialized to - or expected to - perform such tasks (Schlegel Reference Schlegel and Schlegel1977: 35). In the same vein, Niara Sudarkasa wrote that, in Yorùbáland, 'normally too, men predominated in long-distance trade, and women were pre-dominant in local markets' (Sudarkasa Reference Sudarkasa1986: 100). This was not necessarily the case in nineteenth-century Yorùbá country as observers stressed women's long-distance trading activities. Captain Clapperton, a British explorer, commented that women were everywhere in Yorùbáland, carrying heavy loads from town to town (Clapperton and Lander Reference Clapperton and Lander1829: 28). Similarly, Samuel Johnson, a Sierra Leonean missionary, described women as 'hardy as men' who engaged in the long-distance trade of cotton, palm oil, ammunition and slaves (Johnson Reference Johnson2010 [1921]: 245). Although there is little evidence that women's work led to child neglect as missionaries suggested, such long-distance trading activities did often leave women and their children vulnerable to danger. Thomas King, a Sierra Leonean ex-slave with the CMS, recalled how he was captured by slave raiders when he was home alone with some younger siblings because his mother and elder sister had gone to a town about fifteen miles away for several weeks of trading. Likewise, in 1860, 400 women traders were either killed or captured into slavery when they travelled in caravans to Ẹ̀rìn town for provisions.

Conclusion

Labour was central to indigenous ideals of femininity in nineteenth-century Abẹ́òkúta. Young girls were socialized to work from a very young age and they continued to actively pursue labour after marriage. Matrimonial labour was key to women's wifely duties because only through work could they sustain themselves and their children. The introduction of Christianity to nineteenth-century Abẹ́òkúta complicated women's pursuit of economic and financial independence, especially among Christians. Coloured by their desire to convert Yorùbá polygamous households into monogamous family units based on Victorian bourgeois ideals of the male breadwinner and female homemaker, missionaries, and especially European missionaries, actively sought to halt women's economic activities. They often considered women's labour and polygyny as mutually reinforcing and blamed the indigenous institution for supposed disharmony within marriages.

Nevertheless, their attacks on women's economic pursuits were ultimately unsuccessful in the nineteenth century as many Yorùbá Christian women, including the wives of missionaries, continued to work along traditional lines. As a result, Yorùbá missionaries often had to choose between their adopted Christian culture and the economic realities of the time. The question of women's labour, particularly Christian women's labour, in nineteenth-century Abẹ́òkúta was fraught with conflicts, but, ultimately, little compromise was made. Indeed, when European influences became more persuasive in the twentieth century, and more women were educated, women did not stop working. Educated women simply changed the type of work in which they participated, choosing teaching, nursing and clerical jobs over traditional trading patterns. Many women also used subjects such as cooking and sewing, which were intended to produce better housewives, to build careers as professional caterers and seamstresses.

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Church Missionary Society evangelists and women's labour in nineteenth-century Abẹ́òkúta | Africa | Cambridge Core

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Women's economic independence in precolonial Yorùbáland has been extensively documented. Historical enquiry into Yorùbá women's work dates back to the mid-twentieth century and the start of second-wave feminism, which generated a new interest in women's studies and women's history.

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It is generally agreed that Funny Folks (1874 - 1894) became the first publication to meet the accepted definition of a comic. Funny Folks began as a supplement to the Weekly Budget. Its popularity led to it being published as a separate weekly paper. The success of Funny Folks encouraged the publication of other weekly comics. One such comic was the famous Victorian comic, Ally Sloper's Half Holiday (1884 - 1916). Ally Sloper's Half Holiday was the inspiration of the engraver and publisher, Gilbert Dalziel. Ally Sloper had a characteristic red nose, battered top hat and he was usually drunk. Ally Sloper is notably the first ever comic strip hero and undoubtedly laid the foundations for the likes of Chubblock Homes -(Comic Cuts), Weary Willie and Tired Tim - (Illustrated Chips), Roy of the Rovers - (Tiger), Desperate Dan - (The Dandy), Dan Dare - (The Eagle) and more recently Judge Dredd - (2000AD). These are but a few names from the canon of British Comic heroes

The late 1890's saw an explosion in comic publishing. Alfred Harmsworth 's Comic Cuts (1890 - 1953) cost just half a penny, which was half the cost of its contemporaries. Comic Cuts soon had competition from rival publishers with titles such as Funny Cuts (1890 - 1920). Harmsworths response was to bring out further titles of his own including Illustrated Chips. Although these publications were classed as comics, they were primarily aimed at and published for an adult audience. Comics for young children (Nursery Comics) didn't start being published until the early years of the twentieth century. Rainbow (1914 - 1956) is generally accepted as the first children's comic although Puck (1904 - 1940) did have a junior section after issue eleven and gradually became a children's comic.

The 1930's are known as the Golden age of comics. The Golden age saw the appearance of comics like Tiny Tots (1927 - 1959), Crackers (1929 - 1941), The Dandy (1937 - Present) and The Beano (1938 - Present). Both the Beano and the Dandy appeared just prior to the outbreak of the 2nd World War and their timing can be considered fortunate because paper shortages led to laws prohibiting the launching of new comics during the war years. The Beano and Dandy became a vanguard of a new era with the introduction of a new size and style of comic artistry, which included the introduction of speech bubbles in some of the stories.Puck was the first comic to print a s substantial number of its pages in colour but it wasn't until Mickey Mouse Weekly (1936 - 1955) that a comic was published completely in full colour photogravure. Photogravure is a picture produced from a photographic negative and transferred to a metal plate where it is etched on.

The 1950's is known as the Silver Age and it saw the appearance of a more sophisticated type of comic epitomised by the Eagle (1950 - 1969) with its hero Dan Dare. The silver age comics were post war publications and gone were the paper shortages of the war years, these comics were printed on a better quality paper with full photogravure.The success of the two DC Thomson titles (Beano and Dandy) led Thomson's rivals, The Amalgamated Press, to launch two of their own rival comics namely Radio Fun (1938 - 1961) and Knockout (1939 -1963). Although The Beano and Dandy are still continuing to be published, Radio Fun and Knockout ended their days in the early 1960's. In July 1939 DC Thomson had launched a comic called The Magic Comic (1939 - 1941) but it was short lived due to the over saturation of the comics market at that time. The Dandy continues to be the oldest British comic still in publication.

No history of British comics would be complete without paying homage to the great Denis Gifford who was born on Boxing day 1927. Gifford's contribution to British comics both as a contributor in the 1940s and 1950s, including Flip & Flop', and historian is immeasurable. Gifford, who died in 2000 aged 72, wrote over fifty books on British comics which included 'The Best of the Eagle (1989).

Such was his passion for comics that he stored any edible free gifts in his fridge and his home became so overwhelmed by his collection of over 20, 000 comics that it became difficult for him to move around his home. Denis Gifford had collected comics from an early age and his collection had included the first issue of The Dandy with its free gift of a tin whistle. The first issue of The Dandy and the other comics in his collection were lost when he was evacuated during the Second World War. Although vehemently denying any involvement, his mother remained prime suspect for disposal of the comics during his absence.

In the early 1940's, Gifford began drawing for The Dandy after sending in a drawing to The Dandy publishers, DC Thomson in Dundee, Scotland. It was during this time while he was at Dulwich College that he made friends with Bob Monkhouse. Not only did Bob Monkhouse and Denis Gifford later go on to produce their own comic together but they also gave concerts together when they served in the RAF with Monkhouse being the straight man to Gifford the comedian.

Once the war was over, Gifford returned to his love of drawing and worked as a freelance artist working for newspapers such as the London evening News and the Sunday Despatch. He worked as a freelance artist until the 1960's when he started creating panel games for radio including Sounds Familiar which later successfully transferred to television as Looks Familiar. Gifford had many successes with television and worked for ITV, BBC and worked on designing stunts for The Generation Game. However, Gifford's first love was British comics and in particular Christmas issues. Gifford once said "I loved the way the snow used to hang over the title on the front page and the last page was always a Christmas party".

The first British Comics Convention which was held in 1976 was organised by Denis Gifford who managed to bring together over 250 dealers and artists. Gifford and Monkhouse remained friends and shortly before his death worked on a two part radio show entitled A Hundred Laughs for a Ha'penny which was a history of comic papers.

Gifford's books included 'The British Film catalogue 1895 - 1995 (1986) which took him twenty years to complete, Laughter in the Air (1979) Run, Adolf, Run (1975, a compilation of cartoons from the war), The Best of Girl Annual (1952-1959), Monsters of the Movies (1977), The Great Cartoon Stars (1979), The Complete Catalogue of British Comics (1985).

On the 20th March 2012, a number of British comics including 'The Beano', The Dandy', 'The Topper', '2000AD', 'Tiger', 'Buster', 'Bunty', 'Twinkle', 'Valiant' and 'Eagle', were remembered with the issue of commemorative stamps by the Royal Mail. The Royal Mail were celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the world's longest running comic, 'The Dandy'. Each stamp appeared with the star of the comic in the foreground and a image of the comic in the background.

Comics Timeline

2000 AD : 26 Feb. 1977 -
Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday : 3 May 1884 - 9 Sept. 1916
Beano : 30 July 1938 -
Big Comic : 17 Jan. 1914 - 28 Sept. 1918
Bimbo : 18 March 1961 - 22 Jan. 1972
Bo-Peep and Little Boy Blue : 19 Oct. 1929 - 14 April 1934
Bubbles and the Children's Fairy : 16 April 1921 - 24 May 1941
Buster : 28 May 1960 -
Butterfly : 17 Sept. 1904 - 18 May 1940
Champion : 28 Jan. 1922 - 19 March 1955
Chicks' Own : 25 Sept. 1920 - 9 March 1957
Chuckler (Bath) : 31 March 1934 - 15 Oct. 1938
Chuckles : 10 Jan. 1914 - 1 Dec. 1923
Coloured Comic : 21 May 1898 - 28 April 1906
Comet : 14 Jan. 1950 - 17 Oct. 1959
Comet (Sale) : 20 Sept. 1946 - 17 Oct. 1959
Comic Cuts : 17 May 1890 - 12 Sept. 1953
Comic Home Journal : 11 May 1895 - 10 Sept. 1904
Cor!! : 6 June 1970 - 15 June 1974
Crackers : 23 Feb. 1929 - 31 May 1941
Dandy : 4 Dec. 1937 -
Dazzler (Bath) : 19 Aug. 1933 - 8 April 1939
Eagle : 14 April 1950 - 2 March 1963
Eagle and Swift : 9 March 1963 - 26 April 1969
Favorite Comic : 21 Jan. 1911 - 31 March 1917
Film Fun : 17 Jan. 1920 - 8 Sept. 1962
Firefly : 20 Feb. 1915 - 31 March 1917
Fireman Sam : 9 Dec. 1989-
Flintstones and Friends : 21 May 1988 - 25 March 1989
Frolix: The Children's Weekly Comic : [Aug. 1928] - 9 May 1930
Funny Cuts : 12 July 1890 - 3 July 1920
Funny Folks : 12 Dec. 1874 - 28 April 1894
Funny Wonder : 4 Feb. 1893 - 25 May 1901
Funny Wonder : 2 Jan. 1915 - 25 May 1940
Coloured Comic: 16 July 1898
Favorite Comic: 13 January 1917
Giggle: A Chidren's Comic : 29 April 1967 - 13 Jan. 1968
Girl : 2 Nov. 1951 - 3 Oct. 1964
Golden : 23 Oct. 1937 - 11 May 1940
Golden Penny Comic : 14 Oct. 1922 - 28 Jan. 1928
Halfpenny Comic : 22 Jan. 1898 - 29 Dec. 1906
Hey Diddle Diddle : 25 March 1972 - 15 Sept. 1973
Hornet : 14 Sept. 1963 - 7 Feb. 1976
Hwyl! (Liverpool) [Welsh] : July 1949 - Summer 1989
Illustrated Chips : 26 July 1890 - 23 Aug. 1952
Its a Hoot : 26 Oct. 1985 - 25 Oct. 1986
Its Wicked : 27 May 1989-
Jack and Jill : 7 March 1885 - 7 May 1887
Jack and Jill : 27 Feb. 1954 - 29 June 1985
Jackie : 11 Jan. 1964 - 3 July 1993
James Bond Jr. : 1 Oct. 1993 - 4 Feb. 1994
Jester : 27 Jan. 1912 - 18 Dec. 1920
Jester : 23 Feb. 1924 - 18 May 1940
Jester and Wonder : 24 May 1902 - 20 Jan. 1912
Jim Henson's Muppet Babies : 3 Jan. 1987 - Sept. 1988
Jingles : 13 Jan. 1934 - 29 May 1954
Jinty : 11 May 1974 - 21 Nov. 1981
Joker : 18 July 1891 - 28 Oct. 1897
Joker : 5 Nov. 1927 - 18 May 1940
Jolly Comic : 19 Jan. 1935 - 28 Oct. 1939
Jolly Jester : 25 Dec. 1920 - 16 Feb. 1924
Kinema Comic : 24 April 1920 - 15 Oct. 1932
Krazy : 16 Oct. 1976 -
Larks : 1 May 1893 - 29 Dec. 1906
Larks : 29 Oct. 1927 - 18 May 1940
Little Sparks 24 April 1920 - 30 Sept. 1922
Lot-o'-Fun : 17 March 1906 - 16 Feb. 1929
Jack and Jill : 2 January 1886
Lot-o'-Fun : 24 April 1926
Mandy : 21 Jan. 1967 - 5 May 1991
Mask : [1986 preview issue]; 3 Jan. 1987 -
Merry and Bright : 22 Oct. 1910 - 19 Jan. 1935
Mickey Mouse Weekly : 8 Feb. 1936 - 24 Sept. 1955
Mirabelle : 10 Sept. 1956 - 22 Oct. 1977
Monster Comic : 23 Sept. 1922 - 25 Jan. 1930
My Favourite : 28 Jan. 1928 - 13 Oct. 1934
Nuggets : 26 Nov. 1892 - 10 March 1906
Picture Politics : March 1894 - Feb. 1914
Picture Fun : 16 Feb. 1909 - 3 July 1920
Pippin : 24 Sept. 1966 - 26 Sept. 1986
Playbox : Nov. 1904 - May 1910
Playbox : 14 Feb. 1925 - 11 June 1955
Pow! [and Wham!] : 21 Jan. 1967 - 7 Sept. 1968
Princess : 30 Jan. 1960 - 16 Sept. 1967
Puck : 30 July 1904 - 11 May 1940
Rainbow : 14 Feb. 1914 - 28 April 1956
Rattler (Bath) : 19 Aug. 1933 - 15 Oct. 1938
Real Ghostbusters : 26 March 1988 - Sept. 1992
Robin : 28 March 1953 - 25 Jan. 1969
Romeo : 31 Aug. 1957 - 14 Sept. 1974
Roxy : 15 March 1958 - 14 Sept. 1963
Roy of the Rovers : 25 Sept. 1976 - 22 Sept. 1990
My Favourite : 8 December 1928
Playbox : 14 February 1925
Scramble : March 1947
Scraps : 1 Sept. 1883 - 30 April 1910
Smash : 5 Feb. 1966 - 3 April 1971
Snap-Shots : 9 Aug. 1890 - 19 Nov. 1907
Sparkler : 20 Oct. 1934 -5 Aug. 1939
Sparks : 5 Oct. 1918 - 17 April 1920
Sparky : 23 Jan. 1965 - 16 July 1977
Star Wars : 8 Feb. 1978 - 7 June 1986
Sun : 20 Jan. 1948 - 17 Oct. 1959
Sunbeam : 7 Oct. 1922 - 25 May 1940
Superted : 10 March 1990 - Dec. 1995
Swift : 20 March 1954 - 2 March 1963
Tammy : 6 Feb. 1971 - 23 June 1984
Teddy Bear : 21 Sept. 1963 - 15 Sept. 1973
Tiger Tim's Weekly : 31 Jan. 1920 - 18 May 1940
Tiny Tots : 22 Oct. 1927 - 24 Jan. 1959
Tip Top : 21 April 1934 - 29 May 1954
Topper : 7 Feb. 1953 - 15 Sept. 1990
Treasure : 19 Jan. 1963 - 16 Jan. 1972
TV Comic : 9 Nov. 1951 - 22 June 1984
Twinkle : 27 Jan. 1968 -
Valentine : 19 Jan. 1957 - 9 Nov. 1974
Valiant : 6 Oct. 1962 - 3 April 1971
Victor : 25 Feb. 1961 - 21 Nov. 1992
Whizzer and Chips : 18 Oct. 1969 - 27 Oct. 1990
Wonder : 30 May 1942 - 12 Sept. 1953
World's Comic : 6 July 1892 - 10 Nov. 1908

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What better place to find British comics on the Internet than BritishComics.com? Whilst at this site you can view the history of British comics as well as individual histories of your favourite comics. Each comic histories page has links for images of first issues, last issues and annuals galleries.

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While the inconveniences brought by the COVID-19/coronavirus situation has rendered the world static, life still must go on. This means plenty of telecommuting and teleconferencing for many employees. has been indispensable in this crisis, and it leaves room for plenty of fun in the background of the endless calls.

DC Comics are certainly helpful on that front, providing us with the likes of the Batcave, the Daily Planet, the Hall of Justice, Themyscira, and more for all the Zoom calls.

"Whether it's for work, school or just keeping in touch with your friends, you've likely found yourself video chatting with a lot of people over the past couple of weeks. After all, it's a great way to stay connected in this time of social distancing," the DC press release stated.

"But why take video calls from your living room or bedroom when you could take them from the Batcave, the Fortress of Solitude, Themyscira or the Hall of Justice?"

Marvel has also joined in the fun with backgrounds for Wakanda, Doctor Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum, Asgard, Avengers Tower and Tony Stark's workshop.

How about Studio Ghibli backgrounds too?

That is not all, as plenty of popular entertainment properties are also joining the mix in providing the world with a different perspective. Star Trek, Animal Crossing, Final Fantasy VII Remake, The Simpsons, and even Seinfeld are now ready to be your new home. Check them out:

StarWars.com has a whopping 31 backgrounds:

LEGO.com has 9 backgrounds to choose from:

https://twitter.com/finalfantasyvii/status/1245682642806288385

https://twitter.com/letmesaveyouuu/status/1245314596803457024

Drop a Facebook comment below!

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Here Are Geeky Backgrounds For Zoom To Enhance Your Teleconferencing During COVID-19 | Geek Culture

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While the inconveniences brought by the COVID-19/coronavirus situation has rendered the world static, life still must go on. This means plenty of telecommuting and teleconferencing for many employees. has been indispensable in this crisis, and it leaves room for plenty of fun in the background of the endless calls.

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As late as the 1930s photographs rarely show women smiling for to do so would reveal the poor state of their teeth.

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As late as the 1930s photographs rarely show women smiling for to do so would reveal the poor state of their teeth.

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"In no city have I ever witnessed a scene of more open, brutal and general intemperance.
The public houses and gin shops were roaring full. Rows, and fights and scuffles were every moment taking place within the doors and in the streets."

So wrote Angus Reach in the Morning Chronicle after a trip through Ancoats on a Saturday night in 1849.

I suspect his readers reacted with that mix of moral indignation and smug satisfaction which comes of living in another place.

Safe in their large well appointed villas in Whalley Range and Rusholme, looked after by cooks, and maids, and footman, Ancoats with all its noise, dirt and overcrowding was to be both pitied and feared.

Sunday sermons might reflect on the plight of the poor, but from those run down areas came a perceived danger.

This was after all just three decades since Peterloo, just seven years since the General Strike and still we were in the midst of Chartist agitation.

And from those dark unsanitary streets and courts there was always the abiding danger of typhus, typhoid and above all Cholera, infectious diseases which knew no barrier of class or gated community.

In the 1830s and 40s no one was safe. It mattered not if you were clean, ate the right food drank the purest water and lived in the gentle suburbs.

Deadly Cholera was always just a servants visit away to family in Ancoats or an omnibus ride through town.

Nor did it matter that by the late 19th century public health had improved, some of the worst excesses of factory conditions had been curbed and some at least of the working class had the vote.

Life was still uncertain, the workhouse still a possibility through sickness, unemployment or just bad luck and the closed airless courts and mean streets a reality for many people.

Poor diet, little of it and still long hours of hard labour took their toll.

As late as the 1930s photographs rarely show women smiling for to do so would reveal the poor state of their teeth.

All of which is a trailer for the talk by Andrew Davies on the Social Conditions of Victorian Manchester & Salford at the Post Box Cafe.*

Mr Davies is the author of The Gangs of Manchester which is a powerful description of the gang culture of the city in the late 19th century and along the way gives a vivid description of the poorer parts of the twin cities.**

The gangs were known as Scuttlers and most inhabited the warren of streets in places like Ancoats, Hulme, and Bradford and some atleast might just have been born soon after Angus Reach's walk through Ancoats on a Saturday night

I have not only read the book but heard Mr Davies talk on the Scuttlers and the conditions which gave rise to the gangs and came away from both with a better understanding of the period.

So I shall be ther tonight.

Pictures; Angel Street, 1900, Samuel Coulhurst, m08978 and Flatiron market Salford, Samuel Coulhurst, 1894, m59569 courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, and the cover from the original edition of The Gangs of Manchester, Andrew Davies

* The Post Box http://www.thepostboxchorlton.co.uk/ 0161 881 4853
** The Gangs of Manchester, Andrew Davies, Milo Books, 2008

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When "poverty busied itself"....... a little bit of the grim side of Manchester & Salford in the 19th century, tonight at the Post Box Cafe, with historian Andrew Davies

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"In no city have I ever witnessed a scene of more open, brutal and general intemperance. The public houses and gin shops were roaring full. Rows, and fights and scuffles were every moment taking place within the doors and in the streets."

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[Those curious about the history of the Victorian Web (which began before the WWW in another hypermedia environment) might be interested to learn that this document was one of the very first written specifically for what became this site by someone outside Brown University. (The materials on public health that Professor Wohl also contributed came from his previously published book [ GPL].]

uring the nineteenth century theories of race were advanced both by the scientific community and in the popular daily and periodical press. Even before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, the old concept of the great chain of being, marking the gradations of mankind, was being subjected to a new scientific racism. The "science "of phrenology purported to demonstrate that the structure of the skull, especially the jaw formation and facial angles, revealed the position of various races on the evolutionary scale, and a debate raged on whether there had been one creation for all mankind (monogenism) or several (polygenism). "To a large extent, the story of racial science in Britain between 1800 and 1850," Nancy Stepan writes "is the story of desperate efforts to rebut polygenism and the eventual acceptance of popular quasi-polygenist prejudices in the language of science" (30). Polygenists stressed the unequal nature of the various creations and this theory mingled with general evolutionary theories and concepts of arrested development to create an atmosphere congenial to racial stereotyping.

In much of the pseudo-scientific literature of the day the Irish were held to be inferior, an example of a lower evolutionary form, closer to the apes than their "superiors", the Anglo-Saxons . Cartoons in portrayed the Irish as having bestial, ape-like or demonic features and the Irishman, (especially the political radical) was invariably given a long or prognathous jaw, the stigmata to the phrenologists of a lower evolutionary order, degeneracy, or criminality. Thus John Beddoe, who later became the President of the Anthropological Institute (1889-1891), wrote in his Races of Britain (1862) that all men of genius were orthognathous (less prominent jaw bones) while the Irish and the Welsh were prognathous and that the Celt was closely related to Cromagnon man, who, in turn, was linked, according to Beddoe, to the "Africanoid". The position of the Celt in Beddoe's "Index of Nigrescence" was very different from that of the Anglo-Saxon. These ideas were not confined to a lunatic fringe of the scientific community, for although they never won over the mainstream of British scientists they were disseminated broadly and it was even hinted that the Irish might be the elusive missing link! Certainly the "ape-like" Celt became something of an malevolent cliche of Victorian racism. Thus Charles Kingsley could write

I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw [in Ireland] . . . I don't believe they are our fault. . . . But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much. . . ." (Charles Kingsley in a letter to his wife, quoted in L.P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts, p.84).

Even seemingly complimentary generalizations about the Irish national character could, in the Victorian context, be damaging to the Celt. Thus, following the work of Ernest Renan's La Poésie des Races Celtiques (1854), it was broadly argued that the Celt was poetic, light-hearted and imaginative, highly emotional, playful, passionate, and sentimental. But these were characteristics the Victorians also associated with children. Thus the Irish were "immature" and in need of guidance by others, more highly developed than themselves. Irish "emotion" was contrasted, unfavorably, with English "reason", Irish "femininity" with English "masculine" virtues, Irish "poetic" attributes with English "pragmatism". These were all arguments which conveniently supported British rule in Ireland.

Bibliography

L.P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (1968).

L.P. Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (1971).

N. Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain (1982)

S. Gilley, "English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1789-1900", in C. Homes, ed., Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (1978:check)

N. Kirk, "Ethnicity, Class and Popular Toryism, 1850-1870", in K. Lunn, ed., Host, Immigrants and Minorities. Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society, 1870-1914 (1980).

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Racism and Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England

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Those curious about the history of the Victorian Web (which began before the WWW in another hypermedia environment) might be interested to learn that this document was one of the very first written specifically for what became this site by someone outside Brown University.

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Aristotle says that metaphor ‘carries a foreign word, something “alien” or “strange” across to a “home”, the “normal” way a word is used: its “original” sense. Metaphor involves a journey from the strange to the familiar. From home to the alien and back again. From a level-headed, horizontal view of home, to taking that unfamiliar 90 degree twist and getting a vertical view. It makes you see the world in a new way – like hanging upside down - turning our attention to that earth-sky axis. Images take us off balance, are meaningfully absorbed, negotiated and so re-balance us. Without them, if we are rigidly fixed in our meanings, we will fall over, fail to express ourselves. Metaphor is our meaning righting reflex, our linguistic balancing ability, constantly in motion, whether we are aware of it or not.

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Biography of Augusta Savage, Sculptor and Educator (thoughtco.com)

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Augusta Savage (born Augusta Christine Fells; February 29, 1892 - March 27, 1962), an African American sculptor, struggled to succeed as a sculptor despite barriers of race and sex. She is known for her sculptures of W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey; "Gamin," and others. She is considered part of the Harlem Renaissance arts and culture revival.

Fast Facts: Augusta Savage

Children: Irene Connie Moore

Augusta Savage was born Augusta Fells in Green Cove Springs, Florida to Edward Fells and Cornelia (Murphy) Fells. She was the seventh of fourteen children. As a young child, she made figures out of clay, despite religious objections of her father, a Methodist minister. When she began school in West Palm Beach, a teacher responded to her clear talent by engaging her in teaching classes in clay modeling. At college, she earned money selling animal figures at a county fair.

She married John T. Moore in 1907, and their daughter, Irene Connie Moore, was born the next year, shortly before John died. She married James Savage in 1915, keeping his name even after their 1920s divorce and her remarriage to Robert L. Poston in 1923 (Poston died in 1924).

Sculpting Career

In 1919 she won an award for her booth at the county fair in Palm Beach. The fair's superintendent encouraged her to go to New York to study art, and she was able to enroll at Cooper Union, a college without tuition, in 1921. When she lost the caretaking job that covered her other expenses, the school sponsored her.

A librarian found out about her financial problems, and arranged for her to sculpt a bust of African American leader, W.E.B. DuBois, for the 135th St. branch of the New York Public Library.

Commissions continued, including one for a bust of Marcus Garvey. During the Harlem Renaissance, Augusta Savage enjoyed growing success, though a 1923 rejection for a summer of study in Paris because of her race inspired her to get involved in politics as well as art.

In 1925, W.E.B. DuBois helped her get a scholarship to study in Italy, but she was unable to fund her additional expenses. Her piece Gamin brought attention, resulting in a scholarship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and this time she was able to raise money from other supporters, and in 1930 and 1931 she studied in Europe.

Savage sculpted busts of Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, W. C. Handy, and others. Succeeding in spite of the Depression, Augusta Savage began to spend more time teaching than sculpting. She became the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center in 1937 and worked with the Works Progress Administration (WPA). She opened a gallery in 1939, and won a commission for the 1939 New York World's Fair, basing her sculptures on James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing." The pieces were destroyed after the Fair, but some photos remain.

Education Overview

Florida State Normal School (now Florida A & M University)

Cooper Union (1921-24)

With sculptor Hermon MacNeil, Paris

Academie de la Chaumiere, and with Charles Despiau, 1930-31

Retirement

Augusta Savage retired to upstate New York and farm life in 1940, where she lived until shortly before her death when she moved back to New York to live with her daughter Irene.​

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Sculptor Augusta Savage Faced Barriers of Race and Sex

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Augusta Savage (born Augusta Christine Fells; February 29, 1892 - March 27, 1962), an African American sculptor, struggled to succeed as a sculptor despite barriers of race and sex. She is known for her sculptures of W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey; "Gamin," and others.

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Villa Vassilieff - 21, avenue du Maine 75015 Paris (France) - info[at]aware-art[.]org - +33 (0)1 55 26 90 29

© 2022 Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions.
Tous droits réservés dans tous pays/All rights reserved for all countries.

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Ana María Moncalvo - AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

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Ana María Moncalvo began her training as an engraver at the Escuela Profesional No. 5 Fernando Fader and continued her studies at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Cárcova (1941-1944), graduating with honours. During her student years her prints were shown at...

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Helen Allingham (née Paterson; 26 September 1848 - 28 September 1926) was a British watercolourist and illustrator of the Victorian era.

Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson was born on 26 September 1848, at Swadlincote in Derbyshire, the daughter of Alexander Henry Paterson, a medical doctor, and Mary Herford Paterson. Helen was the eldest of seven children. The year after her birth the family moved to Altrincham in Cheshire. In 1862 her father and her three-year-old sister Isabel died of diphtheria during an epidemic. The remaining family then moved to Birmingham, where some of Alexander Paterson's family lived.

Paterson showed a talent for art from an early age, drawing some of her inspiration from her maternal grandmother Sarah Smith Herford and aunt Laura Herford, both accomplished artists of their day. Her younger sister Caroline Paterson also became a noted artist. She initially studied art for three years at the Birmingham School of Design. She spent a year at the Royal Female School of Art in London, before following her aunt Laura Herford to the National Art Training School. In 1867 she enrolled in the Royal Academy School, which would later become the Royal College of Art.

While studying at the National Art Training School, Paterson worked as an illustrator, eventually deciding to give up her studies in favour of a full-time career in art. She painted for children's and adult books, as well as for periodicals, including The Graphic newspaper. One highlight was her commission to provide twelve illustrations for the 1874 serialisation of Thomas Hardy's novel Far from the Madding Crowd in Cornhill Magazine. Her illustrations from this era were signed either "H. Paterson" or "H. Allingham". She became a lifelong friend of Kate Greenaway whom she met at evening art classes at the Slade School of Fine Art.

While Vincent Van Gogh was developing as an artist by studying English illustrated journals he was struck by Paterson's work in The Graphic. Although females could not gain the same recognition as men at the time, Helen Allingham was one of the women artists who made a considerable impact, as artists like Van Gogh were influenced by her.

On 22 August 1874 she married William Allingham, Irish poet and editor of Fraser's Magazine, who was almost twice her age. After her marriage, she gave up her career as an illustrator and turned to watercolour painting. In 1881 the family moved from Chelsea to Witley in Surrey. Her first son, Gerald Carlyle, was born in November 1875. Her daughter was born on 21 February 1877 and her last son on 11 May 1882. Helen started to paint the countryside around her and particularly the picturesque farmhouses and cottages of Surrey and Sussex for which she became famous. However, her works were criticized as "overly sentimental, conservative vision of the area". She went on to paint rural scenes in other parts of the country - Middlesex, Kent, the Isle of Wight and the West Country - and abroad in Venice, Italy. As well as landscapes, she completed several portraits, including one of Thomas Carlyle. In 1890, she became the first woman to be admitted as a full member of the Royal Watercolour Society. Allingham exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

The Helen Allingham Society was founded in 2000. Her time in Altrincham is commemorated by blue plaques at 16 Market Street, Altrincham and at Levenhurst, St. John's Road, Bowdon.

Burgh House, Hampstead, has the world's largest archive and collection of her work.

Illustrated by Helen Allingham

Written by Helen Allingham

1. ^ Devereux, Joanna (2016). The making of women artists in Victorian England: the education and careers of six professionals. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. pp. 110, 162. ISBN 9780786494095. OCLC 948560997.

2. Allingham illustrated Juliana Ewing's ^ Six to Sixteen: a story for girls (1876) and A Flat Iron for a Farthing

3. ^ Allingham, Peter (15 November 2002). "Helen Allingham's Cornhill Magazine illustrations for Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd (1874)". victorianweb.org.

4. ^ Smith, Lucy Toulmin (May 1892). "Women in Contemporary Art. Mrs. Allingham". . 5: 455. The signature H. Paterson, afterwards so familiar, was seen for the first time in the number for April 16, 1870, ...

5. ^ Van Gogh, Vincent. "To Theo van Gogh. The Hague, Friday, 26 or Saturday, 27 January 1883". The Van Gogh Letters Project.

6. ^ Van Gogh, Vincent. "To Anthon van Rappard. The Hague, on or about Thursday, 8 February 1883". The Van Gogh Letters Project.

7. ^ Nichols, K. L. "Women's Art at the World's Columbian Fair & Exposition, Chicago 1893".

8. ^ "Museum Collections". Burgh House and Hampstead Museum. Archived from the original on 8 March 2014.

Helmreich, Anne (2001). "The marketing of Helen Allingham: the English cottage and national identity". In Adams, Steven; Robins, Anna Gruetzner (eds.). Gendering landscape art. Rutgers University Press. pp. 45-60. ISBN 0-8135-2974-3. A recent essay on Allingham and her art.

Lester, Anthony J. (1979). The Exhibited Works of Helen Allingham, 1848-1926. Oxfordshire: Wallingford. OCLC 16494169. See also The Exhibited Works of Helen Allingham, R. W. S., 1848-1926. Wallingford. 1979. OCLC 84054249.

Taylor, Ina (2000). Helen Allingham's England. Caxton Editions. ISBN 978-1840670875. OCLC 50055173. New edition of Helen Allingham's England : an idyllic view of rural life. Exeter, Devon: Webb & Bower. 1990. ISBN 9780863503962. OCLC 26721725. Taylor's recent biography of Allingham.

Watts, Annabel (2002). Helen Allingham's Cottage Homes - Revisited. ISBN 9780952388203. OCLC 228661464. Reproductions of Allingham's paintings of cottages along with contemporary photographs of the same structures.

Annabel Watts: article & bibliography in Studies in Illustration no.31/32 Winter 2005/Spring 2006 (Imaginative Book Illustration Society at www.bookillustration.org)

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Helen Allingham (née Paterson; 26 September 1848 - 28 September 1926) was a British watercolourist and illustrator of the Victorian era. Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson was born on 26 September 1848, at Swadlincote in Derbyshire, the daughter of Alexander Henry Paterson, a medical doctor, and Mary Herford Paterson.

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Millie-Christine

Although the British monarch was female, during the Victorian era it is much more difficult to trace African descent women than men. Some earlier pages on this site have identified Jane Rose Roberts (page 051) widow of Liberia's president, Sarah Bonetta who reached England from Africa in 1850 and married in Brighton in 1862 (page 020), the almost anonymous South Africans who were publicised because of their children (pages 086 and 087) and the two students from the Congo in North Wales in the 1890s (page 009).

There were African American women who had either escaped from slavery or, free born, sought a better life in Britain. Escaped slave Ellen Craft came with her husband in 1850 and left in 1869, having lived in Ockham (Surrey) and Hammersmith and raised five children; her husband ran a school in Benin (then Dahomey) for over three years. Their son William Jr returned to England where he died in 1927 (see page 059). The mother of Mercy and Sarah Powell was a Native American, their father a free born African American. With five sons they settled in Liverpool 1851-1861, where the eldest boy (William Jr) worked as a doctor in the hospital before serving as a doctor in the Union forces in the US Civil War. He and a brother died in Liverpool but what happened to Mercy (born 1840) and Sarah Powell (born 1842) is unclear (see page 081).

Sometimes a black woman is mentioned in the newspapers and then vanishes. "Josephine" escaped American slavery in 1856 and when smuggled into Liverpool was helped by the Powells. Mary Syson was reported in Cheltenham in 1864; a Yoruba interpreter in London in 1859 was a Miss M. B. Servano who had been educated in England, and Anne the wife of ex-king Pepple of Bonny lived in Tottenham from 1856. American sisters Henrietta Johnson and Issadorah (sic) Richardson are known because their husbands attended Spurgeon's College in London in 1876-1877 before working as Baptist Missionaries in Cameroon where Henrietta died.

Jamaican Mary Seacole is very well known these days through biographies and her own Wonderful Adventures of 1857. She died in London in 1881. An earlier author Olaudah Equiano had a daughter Joanna born in Soham, Cambridgeshire in 1795. She married a church minister and died in London in 1857. Her grave in Abney Park cemetery has recently been located but we lack details of her life let alone an image.

Human zoos and ethnic performers included women, such as the Somalis (61 men, women and children) who were on show at the Crystal Palace in the summer of 1895, and two Zulu/South African choirs which toured Britain from 1892. Sannie Koopman broke away from them and was in Chesterfield in 1892. Dahomey Warrior troupes were mainly female. Millie-Christine McKoy, born in slavery in America, for ever linked by a conjoined spine, worked as The African Twins 1855-1857 and returned to tour Europe when freed. There is an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Joanne Martell, Mill-Christine. Fearfully and Wonderfully Made was published in 2000 by John F. Blair in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. See top illustration.

Another free born American, Sarah Remond, toured Britain 1859-1866 explaining slavery, became a British national, then qualified as a doctor in Italy where she died. Anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells was in Britain in 1893 and again in 1894, and was aided by a Nigerian medical student and his friends in London. Amanda Smith went to India as a Christian missionary, visiting England 1878-1879, 1881, and touring from early 1895 to mid-1896. Her autobiography was published in London in 1894. Hallie Quinn Brown was a temperance lecturer who was active in Scotland from February 1896 for over a year, talking on "women and the drink question". Eliza Meyer, from Ghana (then the Gold Coast) was educated in England and Switzerland and married Dr Benjamin Quartey-Papafio in St Bartholomew's church, Smithfield (London) in October 1896.

There was a fashion for African American singers and recitalists, and several had the patronage of the very wealthy Duchess of Sutherland in London. Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was in England 1853-1854; Marie Selika in 1882-1883, and Sissieretta Jones (known as the Black Patti) in the 1880s and 1890s. Other female entertainers included actress Amy Height (1866-1913) who was in England from 1883 and died in London, and several who worked in Uncle Tom's Cabin shows. There were four in a Cabin show in Belfast in January 1879. Cassandra Walmer born in London in 1888 of a black actor father was in Cabin shows at the age of three (Leicester, 1891) whereas Birmingham-born Esther "Hettie" Johnson joined one in her twenties. She died aged 102 in Fareham in 1973. The Poland-born acrobat Olga Kaira was "Miss Lala" and appeared at the London Aquarium in March 1879.

There were women in the Fisk Jubilee Singers and in the Wilmington Jubilee Singers, which criss-crossed Britain and the continent from the late 1870s. The Wilmingtons are named on page 085. The Fisk Jubilee Singers first reached Britain in 1873 and their successes in gathering financial support by presenting Spirituals was detailed in The Story of the Jubilee Singers with Their Songs published many times (the London, 1876 edition had the above photograph) and in Andrew Ward Dark Midnight When I Rise (New York: 2000). Thomas Rutling (top right) died in Yorkshire in 1915. The charismatic Jennie Jackson (left) born a slave, died in 1910, having toured with slave-born Maggie Porter (top left) and her independent choir as well as that run by Frederick Loudin (next to Rutling) who is credited with introducing British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to the music. Porter refused to step foot in the South, and kept that vow until 1931; she died aged 89 in 1942. Mabel Lewis (seated, 2nd from left) also founded her own troupe and died in 1935. Ella Sheppard (left elbow on table) died following an operation in 1914; Maggie Carnes with Porter and Jackson toured round the world including many months in Australia in Loudin's troupe before reaching England again in the late 1890s. America Robinson was also born in slavery, and had been one of the first to study at Fisk University in 1866 aged eleven and was the only Jubilee Singer to received a B.A. from Fisk. The Fisks were neat and polite, sang very well, and made good impressions all over Britain and the continent. Other women who toured with the Fisks over the years included Georgia Gordon, Minnie Tate and Julia Jackson. Photographs of the groups and the individuals were taken in Edinburgh in 1873, Birmingham and Manchester in 1874, Carlisle in 1876. Their recitals were always reviewed in the local press. Loudin's troupe benefited from the financial wisdom of his wife Harriet who welcomed Coleridge-Taylor to their home in Ohio in 1904, not long after her husband's death. There were spin off groups using the Fisk name, such as the Fisk Trio which was active in Britain in the 1900s and 1910s (see page 049) and had two female members.

A Jamaican named Agnes Foster spent forty years in England and returned to Jamaica where, in the 1880s, she was one of the two pioneers establishing the Salvation Army on the island. See page 156 of this site, written in November 2015, which shows she died in Eccles, England in 1910.

Since writing the above more detailed information led to more pages, also relating to other black women in 19th century Britain: pages 099, 120, 129, 131 and 143. And in mid-2015 pages 149 and 152. And 156.
I am indebted to David Killingray for suggesting this topic

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Millie-Christine Although the British monarch was female, during the Victorian era it is much more difficult to trace African descent women than men. Some earlier pages on this site have identified Jane Rose Roberts (page 051) widow of Liberia's president, Sarah Bonetta who reached England from Africa in 1850 and married in Brighton in 1862...

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The release of Suffragette has reopened a conversation about diversity in feminism, the whitewashing of the film industry, and attitudes to race in the women's suffrage movement.

When Time Out interviewed the cast of Suffragette this week, it photographed Meryl Streep, Carey Mulligan, Romola Garai and Anne-Marie Duff in T-shirts emblazoned with an Emmeline Pankhurst quote: "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave." Many commented on the racial insensitivity of this, emphasising that comparing white women's oppression to slavery, or implying that the slavery could be a choice, betrays an lack of concern for the experiences of non-white women. (Pankhurst's use of the term "rebel" also translates particularly badly to an American audience: the Confederate flag is often called the "rebel flag".)

The slogan on this T-shirt is not okay. I'm saying it again because lots of white film women tweeting this in my TL. pic.twitter.com/48om1FobTS

- Lexi Alexander (@Lexialex) October 5, 2015

"It was very insensitive, I thought," says Dr Paula Bartley, a historian focusing on women in history and the suffrage movement and biographer of Emmeline Pankhurst. "Although though she said it, I don't think even Emmeline Pankhurst would have been so crass as to wear that T-shirt if she were around now. It was a different time."

The photoshoot has formed just one part of the controversy surrounding Suffragette 's release. The all-white cast have faced accusations of erasing the role of people of colour in securing the vote. But what did the suffragettes actually look like at the time?

"Britain was a white society in the main," Dr Bartley tells me, "and the movement reflected that." Dr Sumita Mukherjee, a fellow at King's College London researching Indian suffragettes, notes that the women's suffrage movement in Britain was "very different from the American case or the Australian case or the New Zealand case, because although there were ethnic minorities in Britain at that time, there wasn't the same scale or the same questions of citizenship as there were in other countries".

Dr Bartley agrees. "The American women's suffrage movement was very different, and was in some respects very racist: they often refused to have black women included in it. Race was a much bigger issue in the United States, and you can't compare the two movements, because of that issue."

Anita Anand, author of Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, tells me that there were women of colour working alongside more famous white suffragettes, most notably the subject of her book, the Indian princess Sophia Duleep Singh. "There were many overlaps between the Indian suffrage movement and the British suffrage movement. Sophia Duleep Singh had every reason to hate the British. They had taken everything from her: her father's kindgom, wealth, future, everything. But she believed in this sisterhood, and she sacrificed everything to fight for British women's vote, and also then fought for Indian women's emancipation as well."

"I would have loved her to be in the film," Anand admits. "I'd love her to be all over the place, I've spent the last five years of my life righting that wrong and trying to put her back in history. But Suffragette focuses on one woman's story, and you can't involve everyone in that."

The involvement of Indian women in the British women's suffrage movement extended beyond just Princess Sophia, Anand tells me: "Herabai Tata and her daughter Mithan Lam came to know the suffragette movement through Sophia, and they were absolutely tireless in bringing the organisation and the means of putting pressure on government bodies to India."

Dr Mukherjee adds: "There's a popular image of Indian women in 1911 involved in a suffragette procession [see above]: they were Indian women living in Britain at the time living with their families. What's interesting about that photo is that they're part of a procession campaigning for the vote for British women, but in that procession they had an Empire section with Australian women, New Zealand women and Indian women. British suffragettes tried to convince women from other areas of the British Empire that if they got the vote, they could look after Indian women and other women in the other communes of Britain.

"There's an implication that white women felt they were more able to speak for Indian women than Indian women themselves. So although I'm not sure I'd say it's overtly racist, it is imperialist."

Anand adds: "British suffragettes were fighting for the rights of women in India: for example, Millicent Fawcett led the campaign against the horrific abuse of Indian sex workers outside British cantonments. But it's also true to say that some suffragettes had a real passion for Empire, and Emmeline Pankhurst was one of them. You can't get away from that. There were some who were outright fascists: Norah Elam, who earlier in her life happily worked alongside Sophia Duleep Singh, turned into a Blackshirt later." Suffragettes like Mary Richardson followed this same pattern from women's suffrage to fascism. "Like other organisations at that time, some people involved held racist opinions," Anand tells me. "That was a strain that ran through society."

There were also members of the suffragette movement who resisted this. Earlier, in the 1880s, a suffragette named Catherine Impey founded Anti-Caste, sometimes described as Britain's first anti-racist journal, which attempted to speak "with" rather than "about" people of colour, highlighting racism in the US and the British Empire. Its letters page was a space in which diverse voices from Australia, Africa, the US and Europe could be in dialogue, and the journal suggests there were Asian, black and white activists working together to form an anti-racist community in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s. Sadly, this journal failed to become an orgainised movement after Impey and her fellow activist Isabelle Mayo fell out (reportedly out over the disputed affections of one of their male readers).

Although the nuances of the Suffragettes' relationship with race are not addressed by the film, Dr Mukherjee tells me that she is pleased that Suffragette focuses on the story of a working class woman. "The diverse nature of class backgrounds in the suffragette movement isn't usually taught. In terms of the British movement, it was very diverse, in that it involved people of all social backgrounds."

Dr Bartley agrees. "If you look at any political movement, whether its the the Bolsheviks or the Labour party, it is often led by the middle class, and the members are often working class. The Suffragettes were largely no different. That was incredibly important and shouldn't be overlooked, because how does an organisation continue without a vast membership? Certainly, at grassroots level and local levels you see the movement has a very heterogenous composition."

The suffragettes did have working class women in their leadership: most notably Annie and Jessie Kenney, activists from a poor family in Oldham. Annie was the only working class woman to become part of the senior hierarchy of the Women's Social and Political Union, becoming deputy in 1912. "She did play a huge role in the Suffragette campaign," Bartley says.

The story of Annie Kenney is also interesting when discussing diversity, as she seems to have been involved in several lesbian relationships within the movement. Although she eventually married a man after women won the vote, in the activist Mary Blathwayt's diary she "appears frequently and with different women", according to Professor Martin Pugh. "Mary writes matter-of-fact lines such as, 'Annie slept with someone else again last night,' or 'There was someone else in Annie's bed this morning.'" Pugh's research shows that her name can now be linked to up to ten other suffragettes.

There are many other suggestions of gay relationships within the movement, including Mary Blathwayt herself, Christabel Pankhurst, and Dame Ethel Smythe. "Dame Ethel had realised early on in life that she loved women, not men, and was fairly bold about things," Pugh adds.

As Anand points out, Suffragette does not claim to be a comprehensive exploration of every activist who falls under that broad term, but instead "revolves around one working class woman's story". Ultimately, it is unsurprising that full detail and nuance of a mass movement has been lost in the transition to the big screen.

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What did the suffragette movement in Britain really look like?

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The release of Suffragette has reopened a conversation about diversity in feminism, the whitewashing of the film industry, and attitudes to race in the women's suffrage movement. When Time Out interviewed the cast of Suffragette this week, it photographed Meryl Streep, Carey Mulligan, Romola Garai and Anne-Marie Duff in T-shirts emblazoned with an Emmeline Pankhurst quote: "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave."

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I am Vundiquette the Queen of Vegetinites. We are here to save the world from imminent disaster. We are here to destroy -to kill.

Now we are walking through a forest. We have been here for many days – hunting for food. Hunting for people.

Moments before we picked up on a scent from a young one. An adolescent? A ‘scurrier ‘. Relied upon by a group of the civilised to bring news or word of us-should we be close.

We are excited because we are close.

Our hearts are beat with adrenaline and our mouths are with a wet with anticipation.

Today, we feast on the blood of the ‘civilised’.

So close-I can hear the sound of the animal, the man-the young man. We are so close to him.  Theordora let’s out a large shout. We have found him. The chase is on. Like a feeble deer he springs up.

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Victorian Women and their fight for arts

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Victorian Women and their fight for arts

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International Women's Day series

19th-century women faced an uphill struggle to get equal access to training at the Royal Academy Schools. Here, we delve into the RA Archive to learn more about women's fight for equality.

An earlier version of this article was published in 2015.

While the founders of the Academy had accepted two women into their fold, the issue of women's exclusion from arts education was not addressed at the Royal Academy until 1860, when Laura Herford was admitted by accident to the RA Schools after submitting drawings with only her initials, L.H.

Whether or not this was a strategic move as part of a larger feminist campaign against the Academy is unclear. However, before this, her involvement in art classes outside of the Academy organised by artist Eliza Fox (which also formed as meeting places for feminists from the late 1840s onwards) suggests she was linked with the public petition appearing in Athenaeum magazine in 1859, requesting the Academy to open its doors to women.

Laura Herford's admission was later referred to as "The invasion" in G. D. Leslie's The Inner Life of the Royal Academy (1914), but in the following ten years after her admittance in 1860, an additional 34 female students were admitted into the RA Schools. Once in place, female students had to fight for the right to have the same training and facilities as their male counterparts, who by this time were benefitting from the pioneering integration of life drawing into arts education, as modelled by the European academies during the 17th century.

The very idea that women could even be artists was being hotly debated by John Ruskin and other critics in a number of journals at that time. Women's place in society was still perceived as passive and their behaviour governed by emotion. They had been excluded from the practice of drawing from the nude figure since the time of the founding Academicians, as we can see in Johann Zoffany's The Royal Academy of Arts, 1771-2, where Moser and Kauffman are depicted as paintings on the wall rather than physically attending the life class.

The RA Archive offers a rich and compelling insight into the students' fight for equality through a series of petitions written to the President requesting the right "to study from the figure". Beginning in 1878, a petition was written and signed by 35 signatories.
"We the undersigned lady students of your Academy fully recognise and appreciate the very great advantages and opportunity of study afforded us. At the same we cannot but feel conscious that at the present time one material want remains and that without the knowledge which the supply of that want can alone give we cannot hope to rise above mediocrity at any rate in the highest branch of our art. We venture therefore knowing that you have ever been our true friend very respectfully to ask you to take into consideration the practicability of making some arrangement for which we might be enabled to study from the figure [semi draped].
If you can make such an arrangement we assure you that we shall be very grateful for the favour conferred upon us, that we shall diligently and consciously avail ourselves of the help thus given to our striving after excellence."

Tracing back the committee meeting minutes from the same year, I discovered that on March 26 1878, the petition was read to the Council (the governing body of the RA, entirely made up of artists) and that its consideration was postponed. A week later on 3 April, the notes from the meeting state that the "petition of the female students read at the meeting of March 26 was considered, when it was resolved that the council are not prepared to comply with the request of the petition". It was the first of many rejections throughout the late 1870s and early 1880s when female students petitioned in vain for their own life classes.

Later in 1883, another petition demonstrates their growing strength. This one included a total of 90 signatories, 64 from female students and 26 letters of support. In it, they make an economic case for the right to study from the partially draped figure, considering, as the Academy promoted, that the study of the figure was integral to an artist's professional success and livelihood.

"To the president and the council, we the undersigned students of the Royal Academy do hereby respectfully and earnestly petition that rearranging the schools of this institution you will reconsider the question of granting us a life class for the study of the partially draped figure. We beg to lay it before your notice that almost all of us rely on the profession we have chosen as our future means of livelihood. Therefore a class which is considered so essential to the training success of male students must be equally so to us. We venture to hope that the separation of male and female students in the upper schools of the Academy may have removed an important objection against the granting of our request."

In response, the Council meeting minutes from 11 December 1883 report that after "considerable discussion", it was resolved by eight votes to two that the RA Schools would provide a life class "for the study of the partially draped figure" for the female students.

But unfortunately this wasn't the final decision on the matter, and in the following meeting on 31 December 1883, after a new Council had been formed, the minutes report that the decision had been reached by the casting vote of the President and was required now to be submitted to the General Assembly - the whole body of artists and architects elected to be Royal Academicians - which in 1883 featured no women in its membership. In addition to the students' requests, the Council recommended that not only should the figure be partially draped, but clothed with "a pair of bathing draws and a loin cloth".

So in January 1884, the matter went before the General Assembly. The minutes report that "The petition having been read and discussion having ensued, the resolution was put to the vote and not carried nine against 24". This was to be the start of a further nine year battle, until the provision was made for women to study the partially draped model in 1893, 20 years after their first petition.

By now, life classes for women were becoming more widely available across the country, and the Academy's resistance to sexual equality was beginning to be perceived as old-fashioned and deeply ingrained in the values of what was by now a declining Victorian society.

Amy Bluett is the RA's Events and Lectures Co-ordinator. With special thanks to the RA's Archivist, Mark Pomeroy.

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Victorian women and the fight for arts training | Blog | Royal Academy of Arts

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19th-century women faced an uphill struggle to get equal access to training at the Royal Academy Schools. Here, we delve into the RA Archive to learn more about women's fight for equality. An earlier version of this article was published in 2015.

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The release of Suffragette has reopened a conversation about diversity in feminism, the whitewashing of the film industry, and attitudes to race in the women's suffrage movement.

When Time Out interviewed the cast of Suffragette this week, it photographed Meryl Streep, Carey Mulligan, Romola Garai and Anne-Marie Duff in T-shirts emblazoned with an Emmeline Pankhurst quote: "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave." Many commented on the racial insensitivity of this, emphasising that comparing white women's oppression to slavery, or implying that the slavery could be a choice, betrays an lack of concern for the experiences of non-white women. (Pankhurst's use of the term "rebel" also translates particularly badly to an American audience: the Confederate flag is often called the "rebel flag".)

The slogan on this T-shirt is not okay. I'm saying it again because lots of white film women tweeting this in my TL. pic.twitter.com/48om1FobTS

- Lexi Alexander (@Lexialex) October 5, 2015

"It was very insensitive, I thought," says Dr Paula Bartley, a historian focusing on women in history and the suffrage movement and biographer of Emmeline Pankhurst. "Although though she said it, I don't think even Emmeline Pankhurst would have been so crass as to wear that T-shirt if she were around now. It was a different time."

The photoshoot has formed just one part of the controversy surrounding Suffragette 's release. The all-white cast have faced accusations of erasing the role of people of colour in securing the vote. But what did the suffragettes actually look like at the time?

"Britain was a white society in the main," Dr Bartley tells me, "and the movement reflected that." Dr Sumita Mukherjee, a fellow at King's College London researching Indian suffragettes, notes that the women's suffrage movement in Britain was "very different from the American case or the Australian case or the New Zealand case, because although there were ethnic minorities in Britain at that time, there wasn't the same scale or the same questions of citizenship as there were in other countries".

Dr Bartley agrees. "The American women's suffrage movement was very different, and was in some respects very racist: they often refused to have black women included in it. Race was a much bigger issue in the United States, and you can't compare the two movements, because of that issue."

Anita Anand, author of Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, tells me that there were women of colour working alongside more famous white suffragettes, most notably the subject of her book, the Indian princess Sophia Duleep Singh. "There were many overlaps between the Indian suffrage movement and the British suffrage movement. Sophia Duleep Singh had every reason to hate the British. They had taken everything from her: her father's kindgom, wealth, future, everything. But she believed in this sisterhood, and she sacrificed everything to fight for British women's vote, and also then fought for Indian women's emancipation as well."

"I would have loved her to be in the film," Anand admits. "I'd love her to be all over the place, I've spent the last five years of my life righting that wrong and trying to put her back in history. But Suffragette focuses on one woman's story, and you can't involve everyone in that."

The involvement of Indian women in the British women's suffrage movement extended beyond just Princess Sophia, Anand tells me: "Herabai Tata and her daughter Mithan Lam came to know the suffragette movement through Sophia, and they were absolutely tireless in bringing the organisation and the means of putting pressure on government bodies to India."

Dr Mukherjee adds: "There's a popular image of Indian women in 1911 involved in a suffragette procession [see above]: they were Indian women living in Britain at the time living with their families. What's interesting about that photo is that they're part of a procession campaigning for the vote for British women, but in that procession they had an Empire section with Australian women, New Zealand women and Indian women. British suffragettes tried to convince women from other areas of the British Empire that if they got the vote, they could look after Indian women and other women in the other communes of Britain.

"There's an implication that white women felt they were more able to speak for Indian women than Indian women themselves. So although I'm not sure I'd say it's overtly racist, it is imperialist."

Anand adds: "British suffragettes were fighting for the rights of women in India: for example, Millicent Fawcett led the campaign against the horrific abuse of Indian sex workers outside British cantonments. But it's also true to say that some suffragettes had a real passion for Empire, and Emmeline Pankhurst was one of them. You can't get away from that. There were some who were outright fascists: Norah Elam, who earlier in her life happily worked alongside Sophia Duleep Singh, turned into a Blackshirt later." Suffragettes like Mary Richardson followed this same pattern from women's suffrage to fascism. "Like other organisations at that time, some people involved held racist opinions," Anand tells me. "That was a strain that ran through society."

There were also members of the suffragette movement who resisted this. Earlier, in the 1880s, a suffragette named Catherine Impey founded Anti-Caste, sometimes described as Britain's first anti-racist journal, which attempted to speak "with" rather than "about" people of colour, highlighting racism in the US and the British Empire. Its letters page was a space in which diverse voices from Australia, Africa, the US and Europe could be in dialogue, and the journal suggests there were Asian, black and white activists working together to form an anti-racist community in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s. Sadly, this journal failed to become an orgainised movement after Impey and her fellow activist Isabelle Mayo fell out (reportedly out over the disputed affections of one of their male readers).

Although the nuances of the Suffragettes' relationship with race are not addressed by the film, Dr Mukherjee tells me that she is pleased that Suffragette focuses on the story of a working class woman. "The diverse nature of class backgrounds in the suffragette movement isn't usually taught. In terms of the British movement, it was very diverse, in that it involved people of all social backgrounds."

Dr Bartley agrees. "If you look at any political movement, whether its the the Bolsheviks or the Labour party, it is often led by the middle class, and the members are often working class. The Suffragettes were largely no different. That was incredibly important and shouldn't be overlooked, because how does an organisation continue without a vast membership? Certainly, at grassroots level and local levels you see the movement has a very heterogenous composition."

The suffragettes did have working class women in their leadership: most notably Annie and Jessie Kenney, activists from a poor family in Oldham. Annie was the only working class woman to become part of the senior hierarchy of the Women's Social and Political Union, becoming deputy in 1912. "She did play a huge role in the Suffragette campaign," Bartley says.

The story of Annie Kenney is also interesting when discussing diversity, as she seems to have been involved in several lesbian relationships within the movement. Although she eventually married a man after women won the vote, in the activist Mary Blathwayt's diary she "appears frequently and with different women", according to Professor Martin Pugh. "Mary writes matter-of-fact lines such as, 'Annie slept with someone else again last night,' or 'There was someone else in Annie's bed this morning.'" Pugh's research shows that her name can now be linked to up to ten other suffragettes.

There are many other suggestions of gay relationships within the movement, including Mary Blathwayt herself, Christabel Pankhurst, and Dame Ethel Smythe. "Dame Ethel had realised early on in life that she loved women, not men, and was fairly bold about things," Pugh adds.

As Anand points out, Suffragette does not claim to be a comprehensive exploration of every activist who falls under that broad term, but instead "revolves around one working class woman's story". Ultimately, it is unsurprising that full detail and nuance of a mass movement has been lost in the transition to the big screen.

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What did the suffragette movement in Britain really look like?

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The release of Suffragette has reopened a conversation about diversity in feminism, the whitewashing of the film industry, and attitudes to race in the women's suffrage movement. When Time Out interviewed the cast of Suffragette this week, it photographed Meryl Streep, Carey Mulligan, Romola Garai and Anne-Marie Duff in T-shirts emblazoned with an Emmeline Pankhurst quote: "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave."