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BERNADETTE ANDREA
Islam, Women,
Bernadette Andrea
and Western Responses
1
For the foundational work on liberal feminism and its prospects, see Eisenstein, The
Radical Future of Liberal Feminism. Like Eisenstein, I am using “‘liberal’. . . in its more histor-
ical sense and not in the everyday usage suggesting open-minded or receptive to change.
Liberal ideas are the specific set of ideas that developed with the bourgeois revolution
asserting the importance and autonomy of the individual. These ideas, which originated
in seventeenth-century England and took root in the eighteenth century, are now the
dominant political ideology of twentieth-century Western society” (4). In later works, such
as Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century, Eisenstein begins to address
how anti-Islamic and colonialist prejudices have shaped the perception that Western
women are “free and liberated compared to the ‘orient’” (42).
Address correspondence to Bernadette Andrea, Department of English, University of Texas
at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249. E-mail: bernadette.andrea@utsa.edu
273
274 Bernadette Andrea
2
I thank Professor Hunt for sharing this article with me.
3
For an extended analysis of the genealogy of “feminist orientalism” and those early
feminists who contested this alliance, see Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English
Literature, 78–104. Also see Andrea, “English Women and Islam, 1610 to 1690.”
4
On this persistent fallacy, see Ahmed, “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of
the Harem,” and Andrea, “Passage through the Harem: Historicizing a Western Obsession
in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage.”
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 275
5
For the emergence and extent of this empire, see Lewis, The Oxford History of the
British Empire, particularly vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, and vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century.
6
Moryson cites “the Proverb, that England is the Hell of Horses, the Purgatory of
Servants, and the Paradise of Women” (4: 169). Cf. The Hardships of the English Laws in
Relation to Wives, 45–46, on this commonplace. I analyze this passage below.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 277
7
Cf. Imber, who specifies, “with regards to property, Islamic law is unusual, although
not unique [Imber cites medieval Welsh law], in keeping the wife’s property separate
from her husband’s and in requiring the husband to make a payment to his wife at the
time of the marriage” (81). Hence, because under Islamic law “a slave cannot own property,”
Muslim wives cannot be slaves (93).
8
Early modern typography has been modernized as follows: u/v and i/j.
9
Parker transcribes “huswies” as “housewives,” although its root also denotes “hussies,”
as per the etymology for “housewife” in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989).
278 Bernadette Andrea
wives “not far from the like servitude [i.e. of slaves]; for the men
by the Alcoran [Qur’an], are admitted to Marry as many women as
they will, or their ability can keepe” (sig. I3v; cf. Parker 155).
Lithgow thus offers another instance of the negative comparison
with the orientalized woman to keep English women in their
place.10
As virtually the sole exception to this unrelenting patriarchal
orientalism, Joseph Pitts, who documented his sixteen years of
enslavement in Muslim lands in A faithful account of the religion and
manners of the Mahometans (1731, 3rd ed.), roundly critiqued the
misrepresentation of Muslim gender mores by writers such as
Biddulph and Lithgow. As Pitts explains,
In fact, the Qur’anic injunction limits men to four wives, and only
insofar as they can treat all four wives equally–an impossibility
Islamic feminists argue renders this injunction moot (Women and
Gender 63). Hence, even Pitts’s defense relies on an orientalist
misconception. Barring this limited exception among English
male travel writers, the spurious image of Muslim wives as slaves
remained one Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who accompanied
her husband, the English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire
from 1716 to 1718, to Istanbul, felt compelled to correct. In her
Turkish Embassy Letters (published posthumously in 1763), she
corroborates, “’Tis true, their law permits them four wives, but
there is no instance of a man of quality that makes use of this
liberty, or of a woman of rank that would suffer it” (72). She like-
wise corrects the misconception that Greeks subjects of the sultan
were held as slaves (104; cf. 130). This passage indirectly counters
10
For a related discussion of Biddulph and Lithgow, see Matar, “The Representation
of Muslim Women in Renaissance England,” 52–55, although he does not consider En-
glish women’s writing.
11
The 1704, first edition, reads, “It hath been reported that a Mohammetan may have
as many wives as he pleaseth, and I believe it is so . . .” (Vitkus 243), with the rest of the
quote continuing as in the 1731 edition. Clearly, Pitts had refined his views in this latter
edition, drawing on more accurate information about Islamic marriage laws.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 279
12
Erickson emphasizes the liabilities of coverture, even as she acknowledges some of
the means by which upper-class families sought to temper the common law (3–20).
280 Bernadette Andrea
were under no such disadvantage, as “those ladies that are rich hav-
ing all their money in their own hands, which they take with them
upon a divorce with an addition which he [the divorcing husband]
is obliged to give them.” On this basis, she deems “the Turkish [Mus-
lim] women as the only free people in the empire” because they
control their persons and property upon marriage (72).13 Regard-
ing women’s economic rights, then, Islamic law as applied in the
Ottoman Empire was far more advanced than England’s common
law for almost a century past the publication of Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which is considered “the
founding text of Western liberal feminism” (Zonana 599).
As “the first systematic feminist in England,” preceding Woll-
stonecraft by a century, Mary Astell stood at the forefront of those
writers from 1690 to 1710 who emphasized her countrywomen’s
oppression as wives (Rogers 71; cf. Perry 99). She sought to
provide alternatives to patriarchal marriage in her inaugural
manifesto, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I (1694, 1695,
1696), which presented a controversial blueprint for Protestant
England’s first female college. This treatise was followed by A Seri-
ous Proposal to the Ladies, Part II (1697, 1703, 1706, 1730) in
response to patriarchal resistance to her initial proposal. Astell’s
final feminist treatise, Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), devel-
oped her ongoing critique of the double standard structuring
English gender relations. Throughout her oeuvre, Astell especially
challenged the legal principle of coverture, whereby wives
remained under the “authority and protection” of their husbands.
Significantly, she remained unmarried.
Much admired by the younger Montagu, Astell was asked in
1724 to prepare a preface for the Turkish Embassy Letters. As she
records, “the noble Author had the goodness to lend me her M.S.
[manuscript] to satisfy my Curiosity in some enquirys I made
concerning her Travels.” Astell, in other words, had access to a
sound cross-cultural critique of English marriage customs, with
specific reference to the relative benefits of Islamic law. In her
preface, she condemns the malice and ignorance of “Male
Travels,” including the patriarchal orientalist writers surveyed
above (234). Against their aspersions, she urges her readers to
13
Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, traces women’s property rights in early Islamic
societies, including the Ottoman Empire (110–12).
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 281
“be better Christians than to look upon her [i.e., Montagu, and
by extension Astell] with an evil eye” (235). Although Astell
adheres to a Christian standard, set in opposition to the largely
eastern tradition of the “evil eye,” she refrains in this mature work
from establishing Islam as a negative foil.14 In addition, while in
her earlier polemics she equated English women’s oppression
under patriarchy with slavery, figured “strictly as a metaphor”
(Perry 8), she here refrains from casting Muslim wives as slaves,
unlike the patriarchal orientalist travel writers and their feminist
orientalist followers. This rhetorical choice is significant, as the
polemic Astell initiated at the end of the seventeenth century was
soon co-opted by the latter tendency.
An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex . . . Written by a Lady (1696)
complicates the retrospective view of a feminist consensus in early
modern England. Although wrongly ascribed to Astell in some
sources, the pamphlet clearly counters her conservative Tory
feminism, based on a “Christian Platonist belief,” with “the language
of political libertarianism,” characteristic of the 1688 Whig Revolu-
tion (Jones 193). It thereby positions English feminism on the foun-
dations of “liberal individualism” in the tradition of John Locke
(Radical Future, 5; cf. 33–54). In tracing this shift from hierarchical
patriarchal privilege to horizontal individual rights, a “fraternal”
model that continues to exclude women (Pateman 3), its anony-
mous author (probably Judith Drake) determines,
As the World grew more Populous, and Mens Necessities whetted their
Inventions, so it increas’d their Jealousie, and sharpen’d their Tyranny
over us, till by degrees, it came to that height of Severity, I may say Cruelty,
it is now at in all the Eastern parts of the World, where the Women, like
our Negroes, in our Western Plantations, are born slaves, and live Prisoners
all their Lives. (21–22; cf. Jones 210)
14
Astell’s juvenilia includes a poem linking her nascent feminism to Christian prosely-
tizing: “How shall I be a Peter or a Paul?/ That to the Turk and Infidel,/ I might the
joyfull tydings tell,/ And spare no labour to convert them all:/ But ah my Sex denies me
this” (Perry 61).
282 Bernadette Andrea
15
Ferguson’s epigraph to Subject to Others—“Slaves speak ‘through and by virtue of the
European imagination’”—quotes Said’s Orientalism, 56, but elides the original subject of the
sentence, which was “Asia” as represented in the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus’s The
Persians (472 BCE).
16
Ferguson distinguishes between what she calls “Barbary Coast slavery” and “British co-
lonial slavery” (Subject 11; cf. 14–15), although her sources are all from the mid-eighteenth
century and later (15–18). Her intervention into the study of British women and slavery
was innovative and remains crucial. My critique of the limits of her analysis thus consti-
tutes an extension of her groundbreaking work.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 283
Thus Milton describes our first frail mother; though when he tells us that
women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot
comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan strain, he
meant to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we were beings only
designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify
the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation.
(19; cf. 10, 29)
17
For a record (and a refutation) of the popular view that persisted in the West for
millennia that women have no souls, see Nolan.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 285
With this twist, the author suggests that polygamy in the Ottoman
sultan’s harem might give some wives a respite from husbandly
despotism, whereas English women receive the brunt of their
husband’s capriciousness in their monogamous marriages. Still,
the Muslim woman is assumed to be the benchmark for oppres-
sion of wives, with the English woman’s condition a deviation
from what should be her liberty as a “Free-born English wife” (11).
But the cases this treatise adduces show that “the Estate of Wives
is more disadvantagious than Slavery itself” under English
common law (4; cf. Jones 218), where they lack privacy, property,
and other fundamental civil rights.
In addition to recognizing Muslim women’s inalienable
right to maintain and manage their own property, whether as
18
Ç0rakman locates the emergence of the “oriental despot” stereotype at the turn of
the eighteenth century; Peirce details the realities, versus the western fantasies, of the
Ottoman imperial harem established in the sixteenth century.
286 Bernadette Andrea
19
For an astute analysis of Centlivre’s articulation of liberalism and feminism, see
Kreis-Schinck 71–82, 179–86.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 287
20
As Erickson details, “In the twentieth century all overt legal restrictions have been
removed, and yet women as a group remain at a profound economic, social and political
disadvantage. Women today predominate among those receiving income support or
welfare from the state—at the identical rate that they predominated in the seventeenth
century among those in receipt of parish poor relief. And an equivalent proportion of the
poor then and now are single mothers, although the causes of their singleness have shifted.
Women today earn only about two thirds of what men earn. But women have earned
approximately two thirds of men’s wages for the last seven centuries” (3).
288 Bernadette Andrea
21
I thank Professor Kirsten Gardner, Department of History, University of Texas at
San Antonio, for inviting me to speak to her class in March 2004. I also thank Professor
Bindu Malieckal for inviting me to present a version of this article at the Center for
Religion and Public Life, Saint Anselm College, February 2008.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 289
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For corroboration, see “Women Revel in Taste of Freedom.”
23
For further details, see Eisenstein, Sexual Decoys, 120–21.
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