‘The right sort of woman’: female emigrators and emigration to the British Empire, 1890-1910

Abstract

Abstract This article explores white British women's efforts to appropriate their share of the Empire through the propaganda of female emigration societies. Female emigration rejoiced in growing government recognition of their work, but sustained a style of female leadership and activism that deserves evaluation alongside other Victorian and Edwardian women's movements. The article analyses the views of the emigration on key issues related to female emigration: prospects for work and for marriage; the possibilities of a freer lifestyle for women in the colonies; the class issues surrounding servants’ emigration, and their assumed need for moral surveillance; the links (both biological and symbolic) between imperialism and motherhood. Debate surrounded these issues within the female emigration movement as well as outside it. As the female emigrators carved a space for women in the Empire, they confronted contradictions in their own lives and in gendered British society.