The Role Of Women In Alison Blunt's Mutiny

While Britain had control over India, there was a Great Rebellion by the Indian public in 1857. Even though this rebellion was quickly and ruthlessly stopped, the British people were left feeling as if their power over India was diminished. This vulnerable feeling can be seen in their representation of British women as symbols of honor during this tumultuous period, as they used this ideology to justify their own merciless rebuttal of the rebellion. This justification is studied in Alison Blunt’s essay, Embodying war: British women and domestic defilement in the Indian ‘Mutiny’, 1857-8, as she examines the representation of British women at both Cawnpore and Lucknow. During and after this tumultuous period, the British feminist movement used this feminine symbolism to gain agency and validity within their own …show more content…
The power that the symbolism of honor gave to the feminist movement in Britain and the subsequent harm that it caused upon Indian women can be seen in Antoinette M. Burton’s essay, The White Women’s Burden: British Feminists and “The Indian Woman,” 1865-1915, as she examines the British feminists’ fight against the Contagious Diseases Acts. Throughout this piece of Britain’s history, feminine honor was contrastingly used as a symbol of suppression and of agency for British women, but overall, the group that this imperialist ideology negatively affected the most were the Indian people. During the Great Rebellion of 1857, the British woman in India became a domestic symbol of honor and power. They were representations of imperialist Britain’s greatness, as “the presence of a defenseless British wife and mother [embodied] the