Secresy

or, British feminism and the freedoms of whiteness

Aug 09, 2024

Is there anything more intimate than keeping vigil with someone in the last minutes of their life? It is London, 10^th September 1797, and Eliza Fenwick has been at the bedside of trailblazing British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft for 11 days. The birth went well but after four days Mary has plummeted into delirium and excruciating pain as infection takes hold from a ruptured placenta. A baby lies in the cot nearby, a girl named after her mother. She will be raised and educated by the radical philosopher Willia Godwin, her father. Baby Mary will herself suffer a series of losses in childbirth, go on to write the landmark novel Frankenstein, and marry the Romantic poet Percy Shelley at the age of 19.

Eliza looks on at Mary Wollstonecraft, the friend she stood by when other radicals condemned her liaison with Godwin, and allows her tears as the pulse of Mary’s heart peters to nothing. The last heat of Mary’s body rises and evaporates through the open window.

Godwin is devastated, writing to his friend “I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world.”[1] Mary is buried in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church in London. Eliza takes the baby home and keeps her for ten days until her father sends for her.

“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men but over themselves.”

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Any British-born female today who has an education and a living of her own has the likes of Eliza Fenwick and Mary Wollstonecraft to thank. For them, independence is the most valuable asset a woman can have and it is education which finds me in China, almost by accident, on my first overseas job of many. I am the first to go to university in my family; I’m energetic, curious and keen to grab opportunities before or in case they are taken away from me.

During the course of the first night that I arrive in Harbin, I receive an anonymous SMS on my Nokia 3310 that’s been fitted with a Chinese sim card – a series of crosses in the shape of a penis. The next night I’m sent a pair of women’s breasts made of crosses. There is fish head soup for breakfast (I’m vegetarian), heavy traffic and unbreathable air, restrictions on my movements as a foreigner. The spoken and written Mandarin all around renders in me a feeling of deaf-blindness – there is nothing familiar in the script or the sound of the language that I can key in to and decipher meaning - and I love it. There is freedom in my newfound otherness and disorientation.

My Chinese colleague Krystal likes taking me out to places, to show me to her friends. Unprompted, she tells me that white people smell of milk and are popularly known as ‘cow eyes.’ In the park by the Songhua River, she points out a varnished plastic cow standing on hind legs with a human face at a merry-go-round.

‘Look! It’s you – there you are,’ she laughs.

Educated as I had been to see things in linear terms, I look at the donkey-drawn cart selling dumplings next to the skyscraper and experience profound cognitive dissonance. I feel like I‘m looking back in time. I cannot compute the coexistence of the Chinese dragon’s turbo economy and those who are being left behind. My impulse is to want to do something practical about it, a naive desire that guides my next steps – and it is the freedom to move around the world, powered by a state-funded education, that enables me.

“Once it is demonstrated that man and woman are not, and should not be constituted the same, either in character or in temperament, it follows that they should not have the same education. In following the directions of nature, they must act together but they should not do the same things.’

Jean Jacques Rousseau Emile (1762).

The cover of a contemporary reprint of Eliza Fenwick’s *Secresy*

Eliza Fenwick becomes a children’s author, runs a school and continues to write about preoccupations of freedom and autonomy that so bound her in friendship and solidarity with Mary Wollstonecraft and their wider circle, some of the best thinkers and activists of their generation. And she does all of this as a single mother.

He ‘asserts that I am born to the exercise of no will; to the exercise of no duties but submission, that wisdom owns me not, knows me not, could not find in me a resting place.’

Sibella, Secresy

Eliza writes Secresy, a novel published in the same year as Wollstonecraft’s Vindication (1792), which plays out the potential scenarios of life for a woman who has been denied education. Though now mostly forgotten in mainstream literary history, at the time the book was a heavyweight political novel of ideas that showed a commitment to feminist ideals at a level not seen in the work of her contemporaries.

In the novel, women are property for exchange within the marital economy and prisoners in the confines of the domestic sphere. The protagonist Sibella complains she is ‘held in the bondage of slavery’ which her companion Caroline puts down to lack of education:

‘what is to become of the child who is taught never to think or act for himself? Can a creature thus formed ever arrive at the maturity of wisdom? How is he who has never reasoned be enabled in his turn to train his offspring otherwise than he himself was trained. Proud of sway and dominion, he gratifies every impulse of caprice, blindly commands while they blindly obey; and thus from one generation to another the world is peopled with slaves and the human mind degraded from the station which God had given to it.’

Secresy is a call for the right of women to a rational, scientific education. The novel challenges the cult of female sensibility and accomplishments that condemned women to a life as emotional, sentimental creatures. Fenwick recognises the brutal injustices of patriarchy and colonisation, questioning those who accrue wealth in the colonies and tracing vice back to corrupted systems of domination and control. Eliza insists that earning an independent living is important for the individual and for society as a whole, and that girls and women’s education is not only possible but highly desirable. A moral imperative.

Oyibo!

Penara!

My whiteness is hailed daily as I go to work living on Akassa, a swamp island in the Niger Delta. My job is funded by a Brazilian NGO after a local women’s association requested technical assistance to set up a pre-primary school. I work with these women doing needs assessments, training teachers, setting up classrooms and making sure girls, in particular, get to school.

As a well-educated white woman, I’m treated as an honorary man and person of ceremonial status. I am coaching a male local ‘counterpart’ who shadows me in my work. Each night I swelter in my prestigious zinc roofed house which is unlike the houses of my neighbours which are built of timber frame and breathable raffia panels. I find myself called upon to comment in meetings with Ministers and welcomed to roundtables of key decision-makers in Bayelsa State. The local women outside of work seem embarrassed when I try to talk to them and instead of befriending them by going to church, I sit and smoke cigarettes at the waterside bar, staring at the horizon towards the next landfall, the West Indies. I drink a beer and chat to the migrant sex workers who follow the seismic survey wherever it goes looking for oil. They ask about my clothes and the potential means of escape available to them.

Collins, my next-door neighbour and another migrant worker here for the survey searching for oil, seems to find it hard to take no from me as an answer to his sexual advances. He comes over and sits on my step sometimes, commenting on the magazines that friends send me. One of them has Celine Dione on the cover in a cocktail dress - he asks, “is she not a prostitute?” I laugh at his remarks, seeing in them the traces of our cultural differences, an amusing misreading of signifiers – he’s a good guy, looks out for me and gets my trainers back when they are stolen from the steps of my house. I owe him.

Charles lives on the path halfway between Kongho and Buoama and rushes out to greet me each day. He follows me down the road, grabbing at my hand and telling me I must go and visit his family. One evening he won’t let go of my arm – he is very strong as he tries to hold me back on the path. Crews of men waiting for their survey boats in the morning call me ‘fine,’ ‘fly,’ ‘sweet,’ ‘beautiful’ or ‘ibibo,’ while holding their crotches as I pass on my way to work. I am constantly watched. Love Benson, the Police Officer, seeks me out at the office for endless chat. Nicholas, a hulking driller from Delta State, waits for me near the training centre and prefaces our conversations with ‘I always believed I should have been white.’ And Saigu, the entrepreneur expected to become Akassa’s first millionaire, hopes his flirtation with me will win him building contracts from my employer. Is this just honest-to-god friendliness and hospitality? I’m not sure.

It is a time of feeling not myself at all, but everyone else’s projection of what I should be as a professional white woman, with caveats – ‘Doctor Mrs or Doctor Miss?’ - an education ‘expert’ in the swamp. I am othered. I am not yet 30 years old.

‘Dr French: You’re just one step away from plain white trash aren’t you Jennifer? Your mother was a biology teacher in Cheshire. You used to sit there on your white pony and dream … of getting all the way to the BBC.’

‘The Silence of the Lambs’ sketch, French & Saunders (1993)

Left destitute by an alcoholic, penniless husband whom she pretends is dead to allow her to move freely in the world, Eliza Fenwick struggles to earn a living in early nineteenth century Britain. Ever the pragmatist, in late 1814 she weighs up her options and takes a boat across the Atlantic to join her daughter in Bridgetown, Barbados, where the latter has set up a school. As a working woman from the West Country striving to overcome women’s limited access to employment, the school offers a respectable and profitable means of providing education to the children of the colonial elite. She will remain there until 1822.

Steeped in the revolutionary politics of the late Enlightenment, Eliza’s work makes her self-reliant and gives her an independent income, built on the foundations of her own education. Her letters are a personal record of her experience as a single mother and entrepreneur in Barbados and an insight into her thoughts. Although relieved to have escaped the drudgery of England and the difficulties of having a husband who was constantly pursued by creditors, freedom is not without its drawbacks. In one letter, Eliza complains about her sense of strangeness:

‘I am glad to be constantly employed, for with all our good prospects, I must own to you, my dear friend, that I never feel as if I were stationery, that I do not like the Country, & that in every leisure moment when I turn to myself I have the painful feeling of a stranger wandering in a foreign land’.[2]

Again and again, Eliza’s letters speak of being out of place, of the otherness of the autonomous woman and her unusual role in colonial culture. And yet, her colonial venture grants her class mobility which allows her to overstep conventional codes of white femininity. The result is a fashionable, popular and prosperous school in Bridgetown. For a while anyway.

One morning after a run through the forest, I am drying myself off in the bedroom and Collins lets himself into my house. He comes through my kitchen and living room, then into my bedroom where I am standing naked and launches himself at me, trying to force me down onto the bed. I am taller, but he is stronger, and I struggle to push him away as he presses his face against mine and tries to hold down my arms.

I shout with everything I have -

‘Get off me!’

- and I somehow summon the energy to bundle him out of the house. He falls down the steps onto the dirt and looks up at me, eyes wide and visibly shocked. I am so pissed off. It isn’t the reaction he was expecting.

My neighbours have come to their windows. This is already not my story.

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‘The tears of white women are subject to specific scrutiny, because their weaponization has so often meant violence toward people of color, and black people in particular… whether they exist on the face or in the mind, the tears of a white woman can shift a room’s gravity.’

Heather Christle The Crying Book (2019)

At first, Collins is severely scolded by the community and told not to disturb me again. As rumour spreads and indignation grows, Collins is threatened with knives and having his ears cut off. I offend my neighbours when I speak to work colleagues about the incident first, not them. The finance manager wants Collins publicly flogged and thrown out of town. I think that taking a run will reassure everyone that I feel safe, but when I do, some conclude this is indecent and I’m reprimanded. The case becomes a catalyst for the venting of private frustrations, especially for young men. Collins is an outsider working on the seismic survey and his mistake is an opportunity for locals to express their resentment of those they think have stolen their jobs. At one point, 35 angry young men storm our compound equipped to batter him. He isn’t there - I haven’t seen him for days.

It feels like this is happening to someone else, in some parallel universe. Horrified at how out of hand the situation is getting, I beg for clemency. Work is going badly – all the schools are shutting down as families migrate for crayfish season so I can’t do any visits. I take a fast boat to the mainland to collect books from the Ministry only to find the Director has gone home and forgotten about our appointment. I feel sick. Not once am I asked directly to tell my story or for any ‘evidence’ about the incident with Collins. I beg again and the village council meet. Collins is fined 5000 Naira, ordered to leave within three days and has to pay for everyone’s drinks, a further 2000.

When I return to my house, three local women Felicia, Ebinabo and Grace, came to my door. I speak so little Ijaw and they don’t speak English. But they smile at me, then sweep and wash my porch as I stand by. I try to reach for one of the brushes but they refuse and hold them close and I don’t want to offend them. This is a cleansing, a washing away of bad feeling and I know then that I am welcome - but only on terms that are not of our making. We’re still held by the patterns history has made for us.

Eliza’s personal and economic freedom in Barbados is enabled by the labour of enslaved people. Slaves keep the school running, cook the food, do the laundry, run the errands and sustain the entire enterprise. These enslaved people represent the most telling contradiction between Eliza’s public rhetoric as a radical British feminist abolitionist and the circumstances that lead to a private life as a slave owner in Barbados, her most shocking compromise.

Whiteness is a socially constructed idea, always defined by what it is not. Invented as a concept in the colonial encounter, before the 17^th century white people didn’t consider themselves as ‘raced.’ Many still do not do so now. British feminism developed alongside the expansion of the Empire and Eliza’s identity as a white feminist individual overseas is consolidated by the presence of black African slaves whom she hires from their owners – and later buys. At the time of her residence in Bridgetown, 50 per cent of slave owners on properties holding less than ten slaves are women. As a whole, women constitute the greatest number of slave holders in the capital. While white women can’t be enslaved, the status of children is predetermined by that of their (black – however that was construed) mothers. Womanhood in Barbados is represented by two extreme social conditions – white freedom versus black slavery. Individual versus mass.

‘On Easter Sunday, 14^th April 1816, Barbados experienced its only slave rebellion … more than half the island was engulfed by the insurrection …[it] was quickly suppressed, but the process of rebellion continued.’

Hilary Beckles A History of Barbados (1990)

Eliza’s freedom is deeply connected to wealth, private property, ideas of individualism and geographical and class mobility, all of which consolidate white identity in plantation society. Whiteness is also a deeply unstable signifier, in need of perpetual justification and recalibration. Eliza’s identity as a free individual is one which she pursues as a feminist ideal but which she also tries to deny, portraying herself repeatedly as a slave in her letters and offering glimpses of the daily insurrections of enslaved people in her household who refuse to follow her instructions fully:

‘if you knew the slavery of managing a family in the West Indies with Negro Domestics (& we have seven of them), you would wonder how I support the toil.’
‘I can do nothing more than live … for no slave that digs in the field under a strict driver ever felt more fatigue & lassitude than I do when school closes at 4 in the afternoon.’[3]

Eliza’s reactionary compromise of her radical politics and the conflation of her experience with that of enslaved people is offensive to us now. The relativists will shrug, that was how it was back then, but let it not be forgotten that the trans-Atlantic trade in people from Africa had been eradicated 12 years prior to Eliza’s arrival in Barbados and the debate over abolition was a very live one, fuelled by the revolts in Barbados (1816), Demerera (1822) and later Jamaica (1831).

‘… we should not be surprised that the Enlightenment could accommodate slavery; we should be surprised if it had not. The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom – if it did not in fact create it – like slavery.’

Toni Morrison, Playing the Dark: whiteness and the literary imagination (1992)

After a 20-year career working in global development and human rights – I am questioning my position and wondering what the point is of deconstructing whiteness anyway – I once believed it essential to the work of disrupting a kind of Eurocentric hegemony, but is it simply a liberal dead end? Or worse, does the re-centering of whiteness repeat the epistemic violence of the past? I’ve been writing and publishing poetry and I am trying to write something about another white colonial woman, a planter who introduced indigo to South Carolina and stimulated an economic boom. But I can’t. I skid to a stop in the gravel of my own uncertainty.

~ from my collection *Red Handed* (Broken Sleep Books, 2024)

It is the summer of 2020 and George Floyd is brutally murdered by police. As Black Lives Matter gains momentum, a family member is sending me racist WhatsApp messages, like the one about how if only doctor’s receptionists were on the UK border, nobody would get through. Brexit is driving the rise in race-related hate crime. I fall out with one of my best and oldest friends who thinks poor whites like her are missing out on public services because of migration. At the same time, record numbers of refugees are arriving in dinghies on the Kent coast – more than six hundred souls in a day. These are the people our Home Secretary calls ‘unviable.’ In my mind’s eye, I trace a geopolitical line of expansionism and exploitation connecting historical and current catastrophes in the global south to the north, as if it were the wake of a boat.

It’s a Saturday morning in summer 2021 and I am sitting on the bed with one of my closest friends, a British born Trinidadian-Scot who’s come down from the city to spend a few days at my place in the West Country. We are hungover and happy, raking over the events of the night before while our kids play in the other room.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ I say, ‘this might be awkward,’ I say.

She nods.

‘Honestly … do you think my bathroom is racist?’

The bathroom is painted matt black and hung with three Maasai collars from Kenya, a large mask from the Democratic Republic of Congo, three more from Sierra Leone, a small hand painted sign from a hairdresser in Benin, a triptych of Imigongo paintings from Rwanda. I bought all of these items when I either lived or worked in these countries – and deliberately paid over the odds for them with my tax-free income, knowing I was putting money into the local economy and into the hands of impoverished artisans. But lately I’ve started to feel uncomfortable about them, as if they signify some kind of exploitative exoticism, a performance of my worldly whiteness.

My friend starts to answer my question and I interrupt her without thinking, and then I make a joke of interrupting her.

‘No! Let me tell you what I think!’ I laugh.

And she looks at me without skipping a beat and says, ‘That’s structural racism right there.’

Which is awkward. And true.

I have placed the burden of analysis on her. Again.

We talk about whether buying those things in the bathroom is the same as buying a keyring or a bum-bag, say, from a shopkeeper in Ibiza. Our conversation turns to the myriad ways she is asked to do the labour of diversity screening (for free), to act as judge and jury on matters of identity and representation at the (predominantly white) university where she works. She tells me that she has been dying to write a blog post on this but that she has no more bandwidth for the burden this would place on her intellectually and emotionally. Nor for the risk this might place on her job security, her fears of being criticised for speaking out. Somewhere the responsibility for the work of these difficult conversations needs to shift, needs to be shared with others.

It always felt disappointing that Eliza Fenwick turned out to be a slaveowner after all she had done to campaign for self-determination and the rights of everyone to an education, particularly women and girls. But it shouldn’t be surprising. Is disappointment or disgust the only conclusion we can land?

Eliza herself died alone from cancer in Rhode Island in 1840, having witnessed the deaths of both her children and their offspring. Early white British feminists did raise themselves up through the subjugation of others, especially black and brown people. Eliza doesn't seem to have any hesitations about referring to herself as a slave in her letters, although she does delay telling Mary Hays about her slaves for as long as she possibly can, hinting at Eliza’s awareness of her own hypocrisy. The challenge that drove Eliza to so completely compromise her radical beliefs was economic - the lack of an independent income, her lower-middle class status, her abandonment and separation from her charming and dynamic but alcoholic husband all contributed to the parlous circumstances that nudged her inexorably into supporting the colonial economy and becoming a slave owner. These apparently inconsistent ways of being-in-the-world can and did (do) co-exist. Our realities, our power, our sense of ourselves are constantly shifting and slippery.

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‘What is the first measurement of time? A heartbeat, or the silence before? … We are connected. Time has dissolved. We are brought as close together as yesterday and tomorrow, just a breath separating us.’

Tishani Doshi ‘Time is an egg or the night or forever,’ Writers Mosaic (2023)

The contradictions between Eliza’s rhetoric as a novelist and the reality of her life as a school manager in Barbados are difficult for modern readers to come to terms with. There is challenge in this recognition and the paradox of trying to unpack privilege by giving it more focus which may be impossible to surmount. Fenwick’s Secresy is still taught in universities around the world as an important radical proto-feminist text. Why have scholars not made more of Eliza’s experience in Barbados and the difficulties it presents, a perfect locus for debate on feminism, power and race? How to write about the toxicity of whiteness and its histories in an expansive way that allows us to regain sight after the blindness of favour? Is it even possible for white people speak up about whiteness from the quietness of freedom, without simply swinging the pendulum of selfhood back our way, for our benefit?

We rethink our identities, the places from which we have grown, all the time. Feminism has recognised for some time now that our identities are intersectional, based around the many facets of our experience – of gender, sexuality, economics, ethnicity, race, parenthood/family, geography and so on. These threads are messy, inextricably entangled and complex, they make up the very fibre of the worlds we live in. I decide to stay with the trouble and keep my bathroom the way it is. To throw all the artefacts away feels like desecration and a whitewashing of my own personal history. To begin with, I had bought them in a transactional relationship with the artisan-seller. And isn’t building relationships the best and only way to begin? But I am also mindful that as an educated white woman who has had the privilege of working around the world and gathering these objects along the way, I can trace a direct line back to Fenwick and Wollstonecraft for those freedoms. Decolonising white British feminism is my job to do.

We live in times governed by conflict and culture wars. Simran Jeet Singh has argued that encountering the harms of the past and engaging with them is a powerful way of reducing further conflict.[4] Recognising our relationality and radical inter-connectedness, not focusing on our oppositions, is a form of resistance. As I write this now (August 2024) in the midst of a week of white supremacist violence on the streets of our towns and cities, I feel more urgently than ever the necessity of unpacking the complexities of whiteness and confronting our complicities, whether they are conscious or not.

Jessica Gaitán Johannesson has written that we have to meet across the abyss between self and other, knowing that we meet on unequal terms with differing levels of vulnerability and forbearance.[5] We will want to run away. We will want to stay and talk it out, raw and bleeding. But as we look to a dangerous, uncertain future which has been created precisely by a past of rabid nationalist acquisition, the possibility for change lies in crossing that abyss with all its messy contradiction and risk. What other choice do we have?

Postscript

On a recent research foray to a West Country museum, looking for a headdress I've written and thought about a lot for my work on textiles, I find some shoulder bags made with Gloucestershire trade cloth - but the headdress isn’t there. It turns out it had been returned in the summer during a ceremony, when people from Blackfoot nation came to collect some pieces previously owned by the museum.

The display I do see makes me think of my own family – for I come from a family of thieves - who were given land in Canada around the same time these items would've been worn. I wonder briefly if they had had any contact.

The curator tells me that the dynamic is changing, that the museum has developed relationships with communities from whom the museum had historically ‘collected’ items, who now offer artefacts to display as gifts. In other museums such as the Pitt Rivers in Oxford, steps are being taken to engage deeply with their colonial legacy in ways that embrace hope, reconciliation and redress. The museum I visited displays the gifts they have been given with blessings and in good faith, a beautiful way to begin to decolonise a relationship.

Source Material

Secresy

or, British feminism and the freedoms of whiteness

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