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Uneven Orientalisms: Burmese Women and the Feminist Imagination

In 1838, a memoir recording the travels of the Baptist missionary Ann Judson described Burmans as a lively people, oppressed by their ‘despotic rulers’, whose way of life was in sharp contrast to their ‘Hindoo’ neighbours. ‘They have none of the habitual indolence of the natives of Hindostan, nor are they addicted to that gloomy jealousy which prompts so many eastern nations to immure their females in the solitude of a harem. The sexes have equally free intercourse as in Europe . . . ’ Mrs Judson wrote to her American supporters that Burmese women ‘are on an equality with ourselves. Wives are allowed the privilege of eating with their husbands’. Nonetheless, she still stressed the need for strenuous action on their behalf: ‘Show us the situation of our tawny sisters the other side of the world, and though the disgusting picture breaks our hearts, it will . . . excite to stronger exertion on their behalf..’ She believed that Burmese women lacked education and were tyrannised by their male kin. In their adornment, the sexes were dangerously similar: ‘Both men and women color the teeth, and the edges of the eye-lids with black.’2 This ambivalent text, with its swings between assertions of conditions of equality and tyranny, disgust and respect, was an early example of a persistent commentary on Burmese gender equality by colonial administrators, travellers and missionaries. Occasionally, indigenous Burmese commentators also participated in these English-language debates. Most commentators foregrounded the unusual gender order they perceived in pre-colonial and colonial Burma. This article outlines the ways in which such claims and perceptions were influential upon debates about gender among metropolitan audiences in Britain. The form and operation of colonial knowledge about gender is investigated within Anglo-American feminist debates, public opinion and popular culture. In sum, I ask how it was possible to ‘think with’ an imagined site of gender equality during the midto late period of colonial rule. Ann Judson’s descriptions were intended to excite disgust and outrage on behalf of all ‘tawny sisters’, yet she depicted Burmese women as a foil to what she perceived as the utter degradation of Indian Hindu women. This was a belief that was widely held amongst American and European feminists, and continued to have purchase well into the twentieth century. Mrs Bayle Bernard, a widely travelled wife of a