FEMININITY AND COMMUNITY AT HOME AND AWAY: SHIPBOARD DIARIES BY SINGLE WOMEN EMIGRANTS TO NEW ZEALAND

Abstract

New Zealand experienced a massive influx of European immigrants in the 1870s and early 1880s after the introduction of Julius Vogel's assisted immigration programme. Single women under the age of thirty-five were a significant target group of recruitment schemes. They were expected to contribute to the colony's labour force as domestic servants and balance New Zealand's surplus of male settlers by becoming wives and mothers. Many of these young women had never been away from home until they embarked on their hazardous journey halfway around the world. Elizabeth Fairbairn, a single woman emigrant herself, was the matron in charge of the young women travelling to New Zealand on board the Oamaru in 1877–78. She narrates in her shipboard diary that Christmas Day made many of the single women homesick: “A great many of the girls grew downhearted last night and had such a good cry, poor things I was sorry for them, for the heart does feel things at a time like this and it is the first time a good many of them have been from home” (25 Dec. 1877). Jane Finlayson was one of these homesick “girls” on the same ship a year earlier. On 22 September 1876 she writes in her diary: “After parting with our friends at Greenock and thinking that ‘Whatever be our earthly lot, Wherever we may roam, Still to our heart the brightest spot, Is round the hearth at home’ we came with the tug on board this ship.” Having left their old home, the women emigrants spent three months crammed into an uncomfortable steerage compartment, honing domestic skills such as sewing and knitting. The ship became a temporary home in which the emigrants prepared for their future life in New Zealand. Metropolitan notions of femininity which located women in the private, domestic sphere had to be questioned and modified on board. While the single women's compartment was supposed both to become a home away from home and to represent a domestic setting, the transitional and public nature of shipboard space complicated both of these projects. This ambiguity relates to an image of single women which was similarly contradictory. The single woman emigrant was a figure at the centre of discourses of femininity and community: on her centred hope but also anxiety. Like in other settler colonies, it was imagined in New Zealand that women would exert beneficial moral and religious influence upon male-dominated colonial society. Women were thus expected to act as creators of community, both ideologically through their moral influence and physically by bearing children. However, until they got married, single women also represented a threat: they were often held responsible for the increase in prostitution in New Zealand (Macdonald 180). This illustrates the danger women could embody: again, both ideologically, since prostitution was seen as contaminating the moral character of society, and physically, since deviant sexual activity was often seen as undermining the biological purity of the community. How did such notions of femininity and community travel from Britain to New Zealand? How were they constructed and redefined during the transitional period of the voyage? In order to explore these questions this essay discusses two texts that also travelled, and narrate travelling: the two shipboard diaries by Elizabeth Fairbairn and Jane Finlayson referenced above, which look at single women's experience of emigration from the slightly different perspectives of a matron and a young woman under the care of a matron. The figure of the matron is an ambiguous one within the notion of women as representing both hope and anxiety: she is not married but nevertheless in a position of relative authority compared to the other single women on board. Elizabeth Fairbairn's diary represents her efforts to create unity among the women under her charge by submitting all of them to the same ideology of femininity. However, her text also has to deal with her own complicated status within the social structure of the ship. Jane Finlayson's text aims to contain anxiety and ambiguity by framing subversive and frightening events within the generic conventions of a shipboard diary. It negotiates the position of the single women on board while simultaneously reaffirming this position.