Preliminary Programme

In the interwar years in Britain, white women’s relationships with men of colour, be they African, West Indian, East Indian, Arab, or Chinese, were widely viewed as undesirable. Many women who ‘consorted with men of colour’ were accused by the popular press and by various officials of having initiated the relationships, or at least of having been equal partners in their instigation. Such women were labelled ‘prostitutes’, ‘women of a low type’, ‘of a certain class’. Some women in inter-racial relationships however were viewed as victims, preyed upon by men of colour, especially Chinese men, who lured them through gambling and drugs. Here the scenario had marked parallels with white slave narratives. Debates on miscegenation in the interwar thus contained a tension between viewing women, on the one hand, as active agents who chose their ‘alien undesirables’, or, on the other, as passive victims who unwillingly succumbed.
I want to explore the ways in which miscegenation in Britain was conceptualised and problematized in the period of the war’s aftermath, including an examination of the representations of the women involved. I suggest that there were at least three dominant discourses, sometimes co-existing, which concerned these inter-racial relationships; each referenced innate biological/evolutionary tendencies as the moral arbiter. Firstly, miscegenation was seen in terms of leading inevitably to violence between white men and men of colour, due to white men’s ‘instinctive’ antipathy towards such relationships. The 1919 race riots will be analysed as an example of this conceptualisation. The white women involved were classified as ‘of a low type’, and were thought to have entered the relationships of their own free will. In the second discourse, miscegenation was said to entail sexual immorality, and frequently sexual violence, and here the women ‘drawn’ to men of colour were represented as either passive victims, the prey of licentious, immoral ‘aliens’, and/or active in their choice, due in part to their own sexual immorality and social marginality. As examples of this discourse on miscegenation, the heated debate in Britain as to the situating of French West African troops in the German Rhineland will be briefly examined, as well as a case involving a white woman, a Chinese man, and drugs, and a court trial involving an Arab man and his white wife. The third discourse on miscegenation, which came increasingly to the fore as the nineteen twenties progressed, was of miscegenation having ‘disastrous’ procreative consequences. The women were castigated as irresponsible and sluttish, while so-called ‘half-caste’ children, particularly girls, was deemed to inherit the worst features of both parents, namely immorality and laziness.
In some quarters there were calls in 1920s Britain for miscegenation’s legal prohibition. Although no such law was ever introduced into Britain (unlike the vast majority of the states of the USA, and of parts of the British Empire) women who chose inter-racial relationships were effectively criminalized: they were frequently assumed to be prostitutes, and their choice of such relationships was in itself seen by some as an act of sexual immorality, even of sexual perversity. Representations of female ‘victims’ were barely less negative: their passivity ‘necessitated’ intervention into their lives, whether through education or coercion. (Show less)

In 1928 the lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall gave an interview to the London Daily Mail, in which she declared provocatively: "Woman’s Place Is the Home." While such prominence in print—the "new mass media" symptomatic of modernity—was designed to stimulate interest in the writer’s status as a celebrity figure, and thereby generate sales, Hall’s readers may have been startled to find the popular and ultra-chic writer prescribing traditional cultural imperatives rather than celebrating more modern pleasures, such as automobile ownership or exotic travel. In this interview, Hall willingly abandoned feminism’s inclusivity in order to create a space for women such as herself, so-called "exceptional" women. Ironically, the interview appeared on the eve of the publication of The Well of Loneliness, a novel that would profoundly influence the public’s perception of female sexual inversion—or lesbianism. Rather than exploit the opportunity of an interview with a major London daily to amplify on the novel’s call for the sexual emancipation of a social outcast, Hall instead spoke of the importance of keeping most women in their place—a domestic space that the rare woman, such as herself, should enjoy as a recreation.
In recasting the feminine, domestic sphere of a past time as a pastime for a lesbian elite, Hall contributed to the undermining of feminism, which likely accounts in part for some of the hostility toward Hall’s groundbreaking novel in feminist publications. Hall’s strategy to link ideologically with antifeminist conservative forces suggests that some lesbians at this time conceived of the entry into modernity as a project of exclusivity. In yoking the majority of women to the "tyranny of the past," to borrow critic Rita Felski’s terms, and by reserving modernity’s "liberation" for the few, Hall hoped to engineer a final destination to a new and better world for an elite minority, namely, the superior invert. For Hall, 1920s Sapphic modernity constitutes achievement—a movement away from the traditional feminine sphere (private and domestic) to an alignment with the masculine world of work or public life. Hall’s formulation of modified domesticity and her complicity with conservative religious ideologies, represent one sort of negotiated settlement with a postwar world undergoing radical change. (Show less)