“Mothers of the Daughters of Ceylon”: Marie Musaeus Higgins’ and Miranda Canavarro’s Theosophical Feminism

Presenter:

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Abstract

The issues of gender and feminism in their relation to Sri Lankan Buddhism are highly debated, in the scholarly field as well as in the political. Also, the impact of the Theosophical Society on Sinhalese reform Buddhism, in particular on Anagarika Dharmapala, is widely acknowledged. However, looking at the discourse of gender within Sinhalese reform Buddhism, scholarship does not take into account the influence of gender conceptions within Theosophy; despite the fact that Dharmapala and Theosophists founded Buddhist girls schools in order to “preserve an ideal Buddhist womanhood” which should not be corrupted by sending Buddhist girls to Christian missionary schools. The Sanghamitta Girls School, which provided a home for Buddhist girls in Colombo in the 1890s and 1900s, was successively led by the theosophical feminists Countess Miranda Canavarro, an American Theosophist, and Marie Musaeus Higgins, a German-American Theosophist. Higgins even founded her own school, the Musaeus College, which still exists today. Both saw themselves as “mothers of the daughters of Ceylon”, as well as the saviors of their “brown sisters”. This paper argues that their imperial and theosophical feminist ideas as well as their conceptions of gender highly influenced gender conceptions in Singhalese reform Buddhism. It maintains that the analysis of the imperial entanglement of theosophical feminism and Dharmapala’s reform Buddhism can illustrate how Victorian gender norms were adapted for the conceptualization of “the ideal Buddhist woman”; respectively, how these theosophical feminists legitimized their imperial feminism through creating a difference between them and their “brown sisters”.