Home and Away

Abstract

This article conceptualizes the British Empire as a spatial arrangement created and sustained in the everyday activities of women. Focusing on the work of Jane Waterston – a missionary and doctor working in South Africa – and Mary Kingsley – a traveller and political lobbyist – it argues that women played an important part in fabricating the social relationships and practical activities of empire in their daily lives. Women also contributed to the spatial configuration of empire in their journeys back and forth between Britain and various parts of the empire. It argues that women's routes and journeys connected parts of the empire with each other and with Britain as they, along with sailors, traders and adventurers, wove the diasporas of privilege. In making places and the connections between them, women also made themselves and their lives in new terms. In making use of the maps of territorial expansion in making themselves and their lives, the women featured in this article also contributed to forging versions of white (female) British subjectivities which bear the imprint of empire.