Languages of Female Colonial Authority: The educational network of the Ladies Committee of the British and Foreign School Society, 1813-1837

Abstract

This article focuses on the way women in the network surrounding the British and Foreign School Society Ladies Committee used constitutional, familial, religious and educational languages to claim an authoritative role for themselves in the development of education for non-Western women and girls. It highlights some of the ambiguities of colonial power for British women educators, which were implicit in women's self-representation of themselves as authoritative and their depictions of the non-Western female 'other'. It argues that in the two-way relation of metropole and periphery, the notion of the universal 'rational' mother employed within the network constituted an early 'professionalisation' of motherhood in relation to non-Western women, which worked to confirm the authority, responsibility and the 'Britishness' of British women themselves.