Women of Empire: Nineteenth-Century Army Officers' Wives in India and the U.S. West by Verity McInnis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women of Empire: Nineteenth-Century Army Officers' Wives in India and the U.S. West by Verity McInnis Melody M. Miyamoto Walters Women of Empire: Nineteenth-Century Army Officers' Wives in India and the U.S. West. By Verity McInnis. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Pp. 296. Illustrations, table, notes, bibliography, index.) Verity McInnis's ambitious work, Women of Empire: Nineteenth-Century Army Officers' Wives in India and the U.S. West, examines both India and the American West as targets for empire building by Britain and the United States. Although not areas of the world that are commonly compared, McInnis makes a strong argument for the roles that women played as military wives and as agents of empire in both areas. She draws parallels between the women's responsibilities and reactions, social duties, and priorities as each represented their imperialistic countries. McInnis describes notable differences between empire building in India and the U.S. West, pointing out that the United States had less prescribed military and social conventions, British women understood their roles as part of the empire, and that American women did not see themselves as imperialists, but they, too, believed that they represented a distinct superior class. With that basis, she describes the ways that both British and American women served as parts of their husbands' units, created their own identities through military commitment, used their husbands' military rank to order their communities, displayed loyalty and imperial duty, elevated their homelands by judging indigenous peoples as inferior, and constructed their homes as symbols of imperialism. She uses lengthy excerpts from the officers' wives, as well as the work of numerous scholars, to show that women, too, created and sustained "an imperial class that upheld the nations' ambitions" (12). McInnis's book focuses on two continents and spans more than one hundred years. She writes about the nineteenth century, but her samples of women's experiences range as late as 1909. By that point, the Victorian Era in Britain had ended, and the United States was undergoing great change during the Progressive Era. That leaves one to wonder about comparing women's experiences across that much time, and if more contextualization of the events in the home countries would show an effect on the women's attitudes and experiences abroad. McInnis also admits that the small sample of women that she used for some generalizations "would not [End Page 358] be representative of a complete survey of officers' wives" (184), but her effective use of the women's own words, from letters, journals, and autobiographies, paints a vivid picture of the women's own notions of superiority based on their husband's rank, their citizenship, and their whiteness, and reads much more effectively than a quantitative history would. The specific mention of Texas or the Southwest is blended into an overall generalization of experiences of the American West. McInnis notes the forts from which the women wrote, and occasionally also identifies the state or territory in which the fort resided. Still, she is able to pull specific examples from women like Teresa Viele, who wrote from Brownsville, Texas; Mary Leefe Laurence, who wrote from Ringgold Barracks near the Mexican border; and Lydia Lane, who traveled from Fort Bliss to San Antonio, Texas. Those with little familiarity of India will not be able to contextualize the locations from which the women wrote and the experiences that McInnis analyzes. As risky as it may be to judge a book by its cover, one cannot help but appreciate the Emanuel Leutze painting, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, adorning the jacket of McInnis's book. Though the men look to the west with their hopes and dreams, this book does not fail in showing that women, from both Britain and the United States, also saw advancing their empire as their social duty as well. Melody M. Miyamoto Walters Collin College Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association