New Woman, New World: Maternal Feminism and the New Imperialism in the White Settler Colonies

PII S0277-5395(99)00005-9

NEW WOMAN, NEW WORLD: MATERNAL FEMINISM AND THE NEW IMPERIALISM IN THE WHITE SETTLER COLONIES

Cecily Devereux Department of English, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5 Canada

Synopsis — The New Woman, the figure of feminist rebellion who emerged in 1880s and 1890s in En- glish fiction and social commentary, became the focus of a good deal of anxious polemic. In the context of the massive wave of expansionism during these years of the Second British Empire, the New Woman—and feminism, as it appeared to undermine woman’s reproductive “duty”—came to be seen as a sign of imperial decline. It was in response to this view that suffragism undertook to transform the New Woman into the feminist image of the woman as “mother of the race.” In the white settler colonies, this image held a particular iconic value, since both the imperial mother and the “virgin” territories of the New World were configured as the last hope for the Empire. This article traces the analogy of New Woman and New World, and discusses how Anglo-colonial fictions of woman suffrage re-pre- sented the question of white women’s role in the progress of nation and Empire. © 1999 Elsevier Sci- ence Ltd. All rights reserved.

The New Woman, the figure of feminist rebel- British Empire rode in the final decades of the lion who emerged in the 1880s and 1890s in 19th century. The New Woman began to ap- English fiction and social commentary, bore pear in literature at exactly the same time that the brunt of a good deal of animosity. As Ann British immigrationist propaganda was busily Ardis points out in her recent study of the New re-presenting the freshly opened portions of Woman novel, the two biggest white settler colonies, Canada and Australia, as the “New World.” A tremendous amount of polemic was Although what was called the New World wielded against her for choosing not to pur- had been imagined for some four centuries sue the conventional bourgeois woman’s ca- prior to the 20th, the image was revived and reer of marriage and motherhood. Indeed, reconfigured for the purposes of pro-British for her transgressions against the sex, gen- expansionist propaganda in the 19th century. der, and class distinctions of Victorian En- Immigrationist prose of the period promoted gland, she was accused of instigating the sec- these colonial territories as the Empire’s final ond fall of man. (Ardis, 1990, p. 1) frontiers; in the case of the newest provinces in western Canada, as “The Last Best West,” Ardis’s suggestion that the New Woman was or, more pointedly, “The White Man’s Last seen to herald a modern fall is particularly Opportunity” (Seton, 1908, pp. 525–532). An- compelling when we consider the cultural con- nette Kolodny (1975) has shown, through her text within which the New Woman was consti- analysis of colonial representations of the tuted, for “she” appeared with the massive United States, that the idea of the New World wave of expansionism upon which the Second as new always required that it be a “virgin” land, an empty and unspoiled body, bearing, as Doug Owram (1980) has suggested of the The author wishes to acknowledge the generous support of Canadian west during the expansionist years, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of “the promise of Eden.” The New World has Canada. always served as a site for the potential real-

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ization of a fantasy of pastoral recovery for When feminism was defined only in relation the Old. The late Victorian version of this to the New Woman, as it so often was, it ap- fantasy differed from earlier Old World vi- peared to be anti-imperial. Although it would sions of the New only in being couched within be oversimplifying the case to position the the period’s imperialist discourses of race re- New Woman as the epitome of fin de siècle generation, social purity, and imperial re- feminism, it is clear that she did serve as a newal—what Bernard Semmel has called “im- focus for antifeminist sentiment precisely be- perial social reform” (Semmel, 1960), and cause, like the prostitute, she appeared to endan- what is often identified as the “New Imperi- ger the strength and security of the Anglo-Saxon alism.” race. The condition of “the race” was becom- It is because the New Woman and this New ing an article of considerable anxiety for Brit- World both, simultaneously, took shape within ons throughout the Empire. The birthrate re- the expansionist discourses of the New Imperi- corded amongst Anglo-Saxons, Anna Davin alism in the last two decades of the 19th cen- (1978) notes, had dropped significantly in ev- tury that Ardis’s (1990) comment is so signifi- ery census since 1881 (p. 10). Seeming epidem- cant. To configure the New Woman as a ics of tuberculosis and venereal disease, and harbinger of “the second fall of man” in the the related “racial poison” of alcohol, formed context of the construction of the New World an index of imperial decline. By the end of the as the Empire’s new Eden is to invoke what century, moreover, the concerns raised by the was by the 1880s a familiar rhetoric of imperial failure of so many young British recruits to degeneration seen to be caused by women. meet the standards necessary for enlistment in Since, as Lynda Nead (1988) has observed, the armed forces, and the subsequent loss of “[t]he moral condition of the nation . . . was the Boer War in 1902, fostered a climate of in- believed to derive from the moral standards of tense alarm throughout the Empire. Not only women” (p. 92), when women “fell,” they was “the race” apparently weakening, it was would take the nation with them. The fallen threatening to die out altogether. As Davin woman thus carried the possibility of the points out, feminism—or, to be exact, New moral collapse of the nation, and, in conse- Womanhood—exacerbated these fears of ra- quence, of the Empire that made up the cial degeneration, since it appeared to repre- “Greater Britain.” “It is surely significant,” sent a widespread desire on the part of women Nead observes, “that the language of moral to forgo childbearing for careers and indepen- and dynastic degeneration is the same: decline dence, and the New Woman seemed set to and fall; the terms plot both a moral and an rend the social fabric from end to end by abdi- imperial narrative and a fall from virtue can cating her household cares and entering the symbolize the end of an empire” (Nead, 1988, workforce (Davin, 1978, pp. 20–21). p. 94). Although Nead is talking primarily Such a view is implicit in the arguments of about the prostitute as “fallen” woman, this one virulent antisuffragist, Sir Almroth Wright, paradigm for plotting decline through women who maintained in his polemical work, The can also be used to define the “problem” of Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage the New Woman, who likewise, by her sexual (Wright, 1913), that the stability of the Empire “transgressions,” appeared to threaten the sta- could only be ensured through the proper or- bility of the Empire. What Ardis (1990) fore- dering of the domestic microcosm. Implicit in grounds when she links the New Woman to Wright’s configuration is the model that John late Victorian rhetoric of the fall is the perva- Ruskin had articulated in the 1865 lecture “Of sive imperialist ideology of gender, which in- Queens’ Gardens.” “Now the man’s work for sisted that insubordinate “woman” would, his own home,” Ruskin asserted, “is . . . to se- once again, bear the blame for social ruin. cure its maintenance, progress, and defence; Only this time, she would take the British Em- the woman’s is to secure its order, comfort, pire with her, and in consequence would bring and loveliness.” He continued: down what was seen to be the apex of civilization, a Darwinian culmination of humanity’s Expand both these functions. The man’s natural selection, and what was touted as the duty, as a member of the commonwealth, is most righteous, benign, and moral empire ever to assist in the maintenance, in the advance, to dominate so much earthly territory. in the defence of the state. The woman’s

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duty, as a member of the commonwealth, is Thus, a writer like Nellie McClung (1873–1951), to assist in the ordering, in the comforting, the best-known of the English-Canadian suf- and in the beautiful adornment of the state. fragists, struggled to assure male readers of (Ruskin, 1900, p. 130) feminism’s commitment to empire. In her 1915 feminist manifesto, In Times Like These, Mc- Ruskin followed this summary of gendered du- Clung made this claim: ties in “the state” by admonishing women that “. . . [what] is true of the lower or household The woman movement, which has been dominion is equally true of the queenly domin- scoffed and jeered at and misunderstood ion [and] that highest dignity is open to [them], most of all by the people whom it is destined if [they] will also accept that highest duty” to help, is a spiritual revival of the best in- (Ruskin, 1900 p. 134). stincts of womanhood—the instinct to serve Ruskin may not have anticipated in 1865 and save the race. . . . The world needs the that he would be implicated in establishing the work and help of the women, and the women foundations not only of antifeminist rhetoric must work, if the race will survive. (McClung, like Wright’s, but of feminist rhetoric too. 1915, pp. 100–101) When the question of the condition of “the race” became so pressing, and when feminism What McClung’s comment highlights is how needed a positive image to counter negative the antifeminist imperialists to whom she is al- views of the New Woman, it was to the earlier luding failed—or refused—to see that their Victorian notion of woman in the common- own interests and those of white woman suf- wealth, galvanized by imperial and domestic fragists were almost always exactly the same. “duty,” that imperialists—feminist and anti- McClung’s comment also indicates that the feminist—all turned. Feminism and imperial- New Woman had become to her imperial con- ism, that is, both emerged from the growing temporaries such a potent figure of decline concern about the possible collapse of “the that the constitution of imperialist suffrage race” and the British Empire. In the context of rhetoric involved a representation not only of popular fears of degeneration, suffrage femi- “what woman wanted” within the context of nism had little choice but to oppose anti-New the Empire, but of what roles women were to Woman rhetoric with another “new” woman- play in the march of progress. As McClung’s centered discourse of liberation, one that dem- own arguments show, feminist representations onstrated a faith in the Empire at least as stal- of the New Woman entailed “her” reconfigu- wart as the official view, and that endorsed a ration as a proponent of women’s rights who similar concept of womanhood. Feminist writ- nonetheless remained within a strictly defined ers thus devoted considerable energy to assur- domestic framework, a more conventionally ing male readers of their own imperialist inter- womanly woman. This revised image repro- est in the expansion of England and the duced the standard Victorian ideology of the righteousness of the civilizing mission, as well woman as “the angel in the house,” but with a as of their own interest in the preservation of difference. Where mid-Victorian imperialist the race. rhetoric such as Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gar- Such a gesture should not be regarded as dens” configured the woman only inside the mere opportunism on the part of feminists: domestic microcosm, performing her duty to Anglo-Saxon suffrage feminists were certainly the “commonwealth” by taking care of hus- as motivated by imperial concerns as were band and family, late Victorian and turn-of- their antisuffrage opponents. Indeed, suffrage the-century feminist imperialism took this ma- feminism in the British Empire was, for the ternal icon of moral superiority, and sought to most part, a profoundly imperialist movement, extend her influence outside the home. She committed to the idea of “the race,” and galva- would have the same function and the same ef- nized by anxieties about degeneration and im- fect upon nation and empire, but on a wider, perial decline. Feminists’ handicap lay not in and much more political scale. their own opposition to the politics of empire, McClung, for example, defined women’s for they did not oppose them, but in the anti- work for the Empire as “housecleaning”: “[I]f suffragists’ perception of their politics—that is, women ever get into politics,” she wrote, “the those of the “New Woman”—as anti-imperial. sound of the political carpet-beater will be

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heard in the land” (McClung, 1915, p. 66). For These objectives were all brought together McClung, as for many other imperial feminists in the figure of the imperial mother—the of the period, the term women’s work itself de- “mother of the race”—the feminist icon into noted not only the childbearing “duty” of whom the New Woman was transformed. The women, but their related “duty” to care for the image of the imperial mother producing and race as a whole, to “expand,” in Ruskin’s phrase, raising healthy children as she also worked val- women’s work for the good of the Empire by iantly to make the nation and the Empire as mobilizing what were generally regarded as socially and morally hygienic as her own home natural maternal instincts for more than repro- quickly became the hallmark of Anglo-Saxon duction. As she put it in 1915, “[I]t is not so feminism and the basis of white feminists’ much a woman’s duty to bring children into claims to social and political power. If women the world, as to see what sort of a world she were indeed morally superior, naturally mater- is bringing them into” (McClung, 1915, p. 28). nal, biologically possessed of the only known In a similar vein, Anglo-Australian feminist way to reproduce the race, as some six decades Louisa Lawson (1848–1920) articulated the of Victorian gender ideology had maintained, importance of the womanly woman to imperial then the men ought to let them handle the “com- progress, observing in 1895 that, monwealth” as well as they did their homes. When Anglo-Saxon feminists, as Lucy On all sides, there is a growing sense of a Bland puts it, “appropriated” the arguments of woman’s influence in all departments of life, Victorian motherhood, social purity, and the and a realization that the qualities which pu- British civilizing mission, they invested in the rify and beautify a home are capable of a interests of the Empire even as they con- wider and fuller expansion beyond the nar- structed themselves as the standard bearers of rower limits to which they have hitherto racial purity in the empire-wide crusade against been confined. (Lawson, 1990, p. 356) dirt and disease and their moral and/or evolu- tionary counterparts, savagery and heathenism Lawson and McClung, when they constructed (Bland, 1995). They also significantly brought such arguments, produced an image of the the interests of women and the Empire to- feminist that fundamentally transformed the gether by arguing that imperial advancement transgressive New Woman into an icon of ma- and the effective dissemination of the ideals of ternal imperialism. This “new” woman is the the British civilizing mission were necessarily figure that came to be known as “the mother linked. True civilization, feminists held, could of the race.” She was not only to be a biologi- only be achieved when white women were cal mother, not to be limited to her own pri- freed from the shackles of disenfranchisement, vate, domestic sphere, but was to exercise her and empowered to vote upon laws that af- maternal skills upon the race at large. She de- fected the eugenical reproduction of the race. manded education, the vote, and a hand in the As Mariana Valverde has described the suf- running of nation and empire, not for the New frage feminist project, “the race” could only Woman’s putatively self-serving ends, but for advance “when the mother of the race [wa]s the good of “the race.” free” (Valverde, 1992). Or, as McClung The redefinition of motherhood, Anna claimed, “[T]he race can rise no higher than its Davin argues, is the key to understanding the women” (McClung, 1915, p. 97). To keep them convergence of imperialism and feminism in down was to hamper progress itself. England at the end of the 19th century (Davin, It was to make this point that, between the 1978, pp. 12–13). It is significant that suffrage 1880s and 1920s, there emerged a rhetoric of feminism is sometimes called imperial femi- feminist imperial alarmism parallel to—and, as nism and sometimes maternal feminism; both McClung and Lawson indicate, in response terms have equal validity for the project of the to—the mainly masculine concerns about the women’s movement between the 1880s and “race suicide,” which would result with the lib- the 1920s. What women wanted, suffrage femi- eration of women. Thus, Louisa Lawson ar- nism held, was to introduce such racially re- gued in 1892 that the refusal to enfranchise generative measures as temperance legislation woman is the greatest “stumbling-block . . . in and laws raising the age of consent, and to en- the way of the higher evolution of the race” gage white women in the “civilizing mission.” (Lawson, 1990, p. 119). “The race,” she wrote,

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. . . has not yet reached its acme of develop- vasive and suggestive. Both white women and ment, its highest state of unfoldment. It is the white settler colonies were represented surely climbing upward, but it has now reached in imperial rhetoric as at once innately pure a point whence it can climb no higher until it and inherently purifying. Degenerating Anglo- makes more moral progress; until it throws Saxondom was to be rescued and restored off its burden of oppression of man against equally in the womb of the imperial mother man, and man against women. There can be and in the bosom of the “daughter” nations. no further advancement until . . . woman When expansionist rhetoric attempted to present take[s] her rightful place in the world as an image of the colonies as “virgin” territories, man’s recognised equal; a place that her de- the aim was to appeal both to the conquering velopment is rapidly preparing her to occupy instinct of “true” manliness, and to the super- with honour. (Lawson, 1990, pp. 118–119) stitious belief that union with such innocence and purity would have the effect of healing de- “One of the most potent factors” in that stage generacy and disease. (In the late 19th century, of social evolution seen to be rehearsed in the there was, as Deborah Gorham notes, a belief expansion of British civilization, Lawson went that intercourse with a virgin would cure vene- on to say, was “the part which woman is begin- real disease [Gorham, 1978, p. 371].) Like the ning to take in the movement; and which she is bodies of white women, the territories of the daily recognizing as her part, her duty in the white settler colonies were marked in expan- great work” (Lawson, 1990, p. 119). If Anglo- sionist propaganda with the potential of an un- Saxon woman were permitted to advance as tapped and unspoiled virgin fertility, which her “superior” morality and her indisputable would bring forth a new and stronger race in importance as a “mother of the race” indicated healthier climates. Such regeneration could she ought, “man,” Lawson argued, “will be only happen in the settler colonies, and it forced to advance . . . to keep pace with could only happen if sufficient numbers of [woman], for in morality woman will lead the white women went to the colonies to “breed” world . . .” (Lawson, 1990, p. 120). Lawson this improved race in what were represented thus, as McClung would also do in Canada a as inherently purer spaces. couple of decades later, neatly undercut the Women had been wooed to the settler colo- fundamental argument of antifeminist imperi- nies at least since the formation of the Female alism. Women, she maintained, far from hin- Middle-Class Emigration Society in England dering imperial progress, were crucial to the in the 1860s (Hammerton, 1977, 1979). By the preservation and forward movement of the end of the century, they were fully aware that Empire, and those who opposed woman suf- their presence and their reproductive organs frage—the key to woman’s advancement— were vital to the construction of the New put the entire imperial enterprise in peril. It World, itself essential to the continued growth was not, in other words, women who threat- of the Empire and “the race,” as a repository ened the stability of empire, but men, at least, for the unemployed and destitute whom so those men who resisted the enfranchisement many commentators claimed were crowding of “the mother of the race.” British cities. It should not be surprising, then, While the process of maternalizing and im- that the imperial mission was so acutely perializing the New Woman is the hallmark of present in the consciousness of Anglo-colonial suffrage feminism throughout the Empire, the women who were actually engaged in the ex- reconfiguration of the New Woman as an im- pansion of the Empire and who regarded perial mother is particularly noticeable in the themselves as struggling at the front lines of literature of the white settler colonies. The im- the imperial crusade. Indeed, it is arguably be- perial mother had a unique iconic value in cause white woman’s part in the imperial mis- these colonies, where her function as racial re- sion was so much more pronounced in the En- generator was made especially acute by the ex- glish settler colonies than in England, that igencies of empire-building, and by the imme- enfranchisement was won in the outposts of diate contest between the Anglo-Saxon race empire before it was achieved in the “mother and its colonized “others.” In this context, the country.” White women were first given the analogy between white colony and white woman vote in Australia in 1902 and in Canada in as sites for racial renewal was extremely per- 1916 (in the province of Manitoba), while

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woman suffrage was not legislated in England onies as “the white man’s last opportunity,” until 1918. Anglo-colonial feminism positioned the impe- Anglo-colonial feminists prided themselves rial mother as the last best hope for the con- on having won the vote before their imperial trolled, enhanced, eugenically moderated re- sisters “at home,” as well as on having had to production of Saxondom. As McClung put it, use less violent strategies than those employed the women were “our last reserves” (McClung, by the militant suffragists in England. It is, 1915). Maternal feminists in the colonies poised however, evident that they did not need to, not themselves to usher in a new day of imperialism because men in the colonies held more notice- as they, assured of their moral superiority by ably enlightened perceptions of women, but nearly half a century of imperialist rhetoric, car- because white woman’s role in the colonies ried the light of British civilization into the “dark- was seen to be so crucial. A consciousness of est” corners of the Empire, and “raised” the their function in the progress of empire is ap- race as they did their own children. “Heaven’s parent in Anglo-colonial feminists’ use of a light our guide” was Britannia’s motto. Such a much more persuasive, race-based (and deeply credo also represents what Antoinette Burton racist) rhetoric than British women had occa- has called “the white woman’s burden” (Bur- sion to use. Women made a bid for the vote in ton, 1994, p. 10), the duty of the Anglo-colo- the settler colonies by arguing that they were nial “New Woman” to lead the Empire to a needed to swell the ranks of the white elector- “new day,” to lift the race, as Louisa Lawson ate. The need to “right the balance” between put it, to “its acme of development.” the white and the “foreign” vote, as Candace Anglo-Australian feminist Louisa Lawson Savage notes McClung had argued in 1916, was the founding editor of the women’s maga- was greater than in the more racially homoge- zine The Dawn, which her great-granddaugh- neous England (Savage, 1979, p. 134). Anglo- ter has characterized as “the first voice of Aus- Saxondom had to struggle to maintain its tralian feminism.” This periodical, which Olive dominance in Canada and Australia against Lawson tells us “was published monthly from increasing numbers of non-British immigrants May 1888 to July 1905 in Sydney” (Lawson, and the continued presence of indigenous peo- 1990, p. 1), promoted issues pertinent to “The ples. Thus, the white female vote, as Anglo- Woman Question” and in particular to the colonial feminists recognized, was of consider- question of white woman suffrage throughout able imperial importance, if only to prevent its 17-year run under Lawson’s leadership. It “foreigners” from installing non-British gov- differed from most other Anglo-Australian ernments in the self-governing colonies. women’s journals of the late 19th century, for While Imperial Federationists in Australia it was formed on a campaign for white women’s and organizations such as the “Canada First” rights, and it was produced by an entirely fe- group promoted a vision of the Empire given male staff (Lawson, 1990, p. 1). Nonetheless, fresh new power through the relocation of its stance vis-à-vis the roles of women in the power to the “youthful” colonies, women were “new” nation and in the Empire shows it to be making a case along similarly political lines, ar- positioned well within the boundaries of popu- guing that they would bring the Empire new lar maternalist ideology. The Dawn clearly life. Like the figure of Britannia, the colonial worked in the interests of imperialism that New Woman would light the way into the new were so significantly fostered by the figure of century, the standard-bearer of “Heaven’s the Anglo-Saxon “New Woman” as the “mother light,” the herald of the dawn of the new impe- of the race” and by the vision of the “new day,” rial day that colonial feminists claimed could which only she could usher in for the Empire. only break in the New World. Britain—the These convergent notions are powerfully sug- “Old” World—was crowded and degenerating; gested in the journal’s title and its politics of the “New” World could stem the flood of de- self-representation at the time of its first ap- cline, but only if the colonial territory main- pearance. tained its pristine condition. This could be Olive Lawson describes the cover of the achieved only if Britain sent only its best first issue of The Dawn in 1888: “stock” for reproduction, and if women maintained the conditions for reproducing the race. A young woman, in the manner of a herald Appropriating the idea of the white settler col- angel, levitates above Sydney Heads at day-

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break. She blows a clarion. The sun rises be- rehearsed not only in the generating of femi- neath her feet. In her left hand she holds a nist rhetoric through journals like The Dawn scroll which tells readers that The Dawn is and books like McClung’s (1915) In Times edited, printed and published by women. Like These, but in the imperial popular fiction The message is clear: a new day is dawning which so many women were producing around for women, and it’s happening in Sydney. the turn of the century in the settler colonies. (Lawson, 1990, p. 4) Louisa Lawson’s association of the New Woman with the imperial new day that was to Lawson’s reading of her great-grandmother’s break in the New World, and her engagement politics of representation is perceptive. The with issues of white woman suffrage—temper- symbolism of the New Woman as an angel ance, maternalism, and race regeneration— “herald[ing]” a new day that is breaking “in were re-emphasized in such fiction as Nellie Sydney” is entrenched not only in the message McClung produced in Canada, and her con- the latter-day Lawson suggests is “explicitly temporary, Miles Franklin, produced in Aus- feminist,” but in the implication that the “new tralia. A case in point is Franklin’s novel, Some day” will begin in the “new world.” “[I]t’s hap- Everyday Folk and Dawn. Although published pening in Sydney” because it is in the New in 1909, this novel foregrounds the enfran- World that the Empire was to find its resources chisement of white women in Australia earlier for the renewal and regeneration of the Anglo- in the decade in its story of the first female Saxon race. The woman who “heralds” the dawn vote in the small town of Noonoon, a name in Sydney carries more than a suggestive asso- which resounds with intimations of a new day. ciation with Britannia. Indeed, she embodies Franklin pointedly draws attention to Austra- Britannia in the colonies, and thus signals civi- lia’s leadership in white woman suffrage, dedi- lization at the “acme” that was only to be cating the novel to the “English Men who be- achieved when white women were “set free” lieve in votes for Women” (Franklin, 1909/ to perform their “highest duty.” “The Dawn,” 1986). The heroine of this novel, which fiction- wrote Lawson in 1889, referring simultaneously alizes the effects of suffrage feminism upon to her magazine and to the vision of the new small-town Anglo-colonial Australia, is the ti- imperial day towards which it looked, “will rise tle’s “Dawn,” and her weightily symbolic name or set with the cause . . .” (Lawson, 1990, p. 28). identifies her as the figure who will light the By 1892, Lawson saw the light of “the cause” way into the new imperial century. making considerable headway into the dark- Dawn is so named because she was born at ness of imperial degeneracy, which feminism the beginning of the day, but she is also en- represented as the result of what McClung de- dowed with considerable iconic value as the fined as “too much masculinity” (McClung, young Anglo-Australian manifestation of a 1915, p. 153). “When we first opened our col- New Woman who is certain of her rights, but umns to the discussion of questions vitally af- whose demonstrated accomplishments are in fecting our own sex,” Lawson announced, the domestic sphere. In this, she differs consid- erably from Franklin’s better-known heroine, . . . the clouds of early morning still shrouded Sybylla Melvyn, who, unlike Dawn, does not the horizon, but we have watched the mists see her “brilliant career” including marriage of prejudice gradually dissolving, and the (Franklin, 1901/1980). Dawn is an imperial sunlight is already penetrating many dark mother-to-be. She is an excellent housekeeper, corners. The shadows of night are passing she is beautiful, pure, intelligent, and edu- away, and as we enter the last lustre of the cated. Moreover, although we subsequently nineteenth century, we can see the dawning learn that she belongs to the class designated of a new and brighter day. (Lawson, 1990, in the novel as “the swells” (the picturesque p. 357) family name of her deadbeat upper-middle- class father is Mudeheepe), she is identified For Anglo-Australian women, that day throughout the narrative as a “real” Austra- would begin—or would seem to begin—with lian girl. Dawn’s salt-of-the-earth character is white woman suffrage in 1902. intimated not by the hierarchical figure in the The part played by Anglo-colonial women family name, but by her mother’s even more in the discourses of the New Imperialism was earthy patronym, which is Clay. As far as

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Franklin’s narrative is concerned, it is women That women shall compete equally with men like Dawn, developed from Anglo-colonial pi- in the utilitarian industrialism of every walk oneers like her grandmother Clay, in the puta- of life is not the ultimate ideal of universal tively better environment of the settler colo- adult franchise. Such emancipation is sought nies, who hold all the hope for Anglo-Saxon as the most condensed and direct method of civilization. Significantly, therefore, when Dawn abolishing the female sex disability which in marries at the end of the novel, she refuses to time shall bring the human intelligence, re- be given away by her lately recovered father, gardless of sex, to an understanding of the insisting instead that her grandmother perform superiority of the mother sex as it concerns this duty. “For the sake of the race I maintain the race . . . (Franklin, 1909/1986, p. 259) this ground,” she informs her father (Franklin, (emphasis added) 1909/1986, p. 337), echoing a rhetoric she has learned from feminists in Noonoon, but also This “emancipation” happened first in Austra- affirming her commitment to the ideals of lia, as Franklin reminds her readers. Thus, the white feminism as it purports, in McClung’s new imperial day Louisa Lawson envisioned words, “to serve and save the race” (1915, p. on the first cover of The Dawn did indeed 100). seem to be breaking over—or at least on the Dawn’s marriage to a young and supremely same continent as—Sydney Heads, while the fit example of white middle-class Anglo-colo- “darkness” of the day prior to female suffrage nial Australian manhood positions her as the in the “mother country” still prevailed. imminent mother of a colonially produced An- If Louisa Lawson is “the first voice of [An- glo-Saxon race that is identifiably English, but glo-]Australian feminism,” suffrage and tem- which also demonstrates the superior health perance fighter Nellie McClung holds that and fitness that New World discourses attrib- oracular status for English-Canadian femi- uted to Australians over their British-born nism. Although McClung began writing just as counterparts in the late 19th and early 20th Lawson shut up shop at The Dawn in 1905, and centuries. As is also the case in many English- although she probably never saw a copy of Canadian novels of the period, British men in Lawson’s journal, her rhetoric and her feminist Franklin’s novel tend toward what she calls the politics are virtually indistinguishable from her “effete,” the less-than-desirable “failures,” as Anglo-Australian counterpart’s. Like Law- English-Canadian novelist Sara Jeannette Dun- son, she saw the “real empire-builders” at can’s imperialist hero Lorne Murchison puts it, work in the white settler colonies, and women who were so often sent out to the colonies the driving force amongst those empire-build- (Duncan, 1904/1996; Franklin, 1909/1986, p. ers. I have already drawn attention to Mc- 229). The sturdiness and physical beauty of Clung’s influential feminist manifesto, which, both Dawn and her athletic husband are juxta- perhaps surprisingly, remains in print in Can- posed with the obvious degeneracy of the ada after more than 80 years. But McClung drunk and lazy, although aristocratic, British was also, like Miles Franklin, an extremely emigré, Rooney-Molyneux, and even of the popular writer of fiction, and, like her Austra- English narrator’s own chronic and rather lian contemporary, McClung fictionalized the mysterious heart disease. The foregrounding “history” of white women’s enfranchisement. in the narrative of Dawn’s shift from the ex- The story of her suffrage heroine, Pearlie Wat- pressed desire to marry an “Englishman who’d son, and her salutary effects upon her home, take [her] home to England” (Franklin, 1909/ her community, her country, and her Empire is 1986, p. 145) to her union with Anglo-Austra- told over three novels. lian football hero Ernest Breslaw is crucial. It In the manner of Franklin’s Dawn, Pearl is marks her own awakening to the understand- a figure whose essential purity is conveyed in her ing of her function in the nation, the Empire, name. From the pubescent girl we meet in the and in the interests of “the race.” This “awak- first novel, Sowing Seeds in Danny (McClung, ening” is the key to understanding the text’s 1908), through the idealistic and missionary- engagement with the ideology of maternal and minded adolescent of The Second Chance imperial feminism. As we are told against the (McClung, 1910), to her final incarnation as a backdrop of the scene of the first female vote teacher and suffragist in the last installment, in the little town of Noonoon, Purple Springs (McClung, 1921), Pearl is a

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pearl. She stands for personal and social hy- remains close to home in the first novel, her giene, equal rights for women, and educated purifying influence operates in progressively motherhood. Like Dawn, her name and her wider circles as she moves away from home in superior function both separate her from the the second and third. What her widening ma- “everyday folk” by whom she is surrounded, ternal influence achieves by the end of the se- and for whom she is so much a beacon of what ries is configured not only in the happy mar- Mariana Valverde has noted as the primary in- riages she helps to bring about (her own terests of the Anglo-Saxon civilizing mission in included), but also, more importantly, in terms English Canada: “light, soap, and water” (Val- of her role in the opening of a profoundly sym- verde, 1991). Indeed, when we first meet Pearl bolic site named “Purple Springs,” a veritable she is washing her younger siblings as she si- fountain of youth that restores health. The multaneously instructs them in morality and suggestion is made that it can cure, among personal cleanliness. She is, we are told repeat- other things, tuberculosis, frequently repre- edly, instinctively maternal. sented in late-19th- and early 20th-century While the Watson family’s poverty is very writing as a scourge of the imperial race, com- much evident in the first and second novels, so monly characterized as “The Great White are their fiercely Protestant work ethic and Plague.” The invigorating and renewing prop- their desire to “improve” themselves in this erties of this Canadian spa are offered to “the New World context, which McClung repre- race” at large, and with this gesture McClung sents here as in her feminist polemic, as “the shows how Canada, guided by New Women Land of the Second Chance” for hard-working like Pearl, can physically renew the Empire, emigrants (McClung, 1915, pp. 158–159). Peo- and, literally, cure its ills. The interrelation of ple such as the Watsons, McClung asserts, are the name “Purple Springs” with the women in “the real empire-builders” because they repre- the novel and with the value of the settler col- sent the best of “the race” in bringing together ony itself to the Empire should alert us to the Anglo-Saxon heredity, Christianity, hard-work- way the novel is engaged in producing a dis- ingness, and a sturdy faith in England and the course which affirms the convergence of the value of the “civilizing mission,” without the (new) New Woman in and with the (new) New fatal weaknesses of the outcast British upper- World as regenerative figures. Both, according class sons so often seen to be foisted on the to McClung’s narrative, offer cures for degen- colonies. (McClung frequently highlights this eracy and decline; both offer virgin purifica- difference, by including characters not unlike tion and renewal. Franklin’s Rooney-Molyneux in her fiction.) The series ends with Pearlie finally united Pearl represents the cream of the superior with her young doctor—whose name, like group, because she recognizes and fights for Franklin’s heroine’s, is Clay—watching a rain- the goal that McClung always maintained bow spread across the dark sky. The morrow, ought to be the first objective of imperialism— we are to see, will bring the rosy future that the allocation of the vote to white women, and could only be produced by the marriage of their concomitant empowerment to improve Pearlie, representative of both suffrage femi- the conditions of reproduction as they simulta- nism and the pioneering values of the Watson neously preserve the condition of the New family, with the principles of social and moral World. In the final novel, Pearl fights for and is hygiene represented here, as in so many turn- extremely influential in achieving suffrage for of-the-century Anglo-colonial novels, by a white women in her home province Manitoba doctor who is also a prime example of Anglo- (and it has often been pointed out that Pearl’s colonial manhood. Pearlie and Horace Clay, story is largely a retelling of McClung’s own and the promise of the healthy and hardwork- involvement in winning the vote for white ing Anglo-Saxon offspring they will produce in women in Manitoba in 1916, the first Canadian Canada, thus direct us toward the new day that province to enfranchise women). She also helps McClung so frequently invokes in her feminist to reposition “the Land of Beginning Again” writing in terms of the promise of “The Last (McClung, 1915, p. 159) at the forefront of im- Best West.” perial race regeneration. Imperial visions of Anglo-Saxon racial he- Where Pearl’s “home mission” work takes gemony underlie both the transformation of place on a small and intimate scale while she the New Woman into the imperial mother, and

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the reconstruction in the same period of the idea of childhood in late-Victorian England. Victorian most potent image of the Second British Em- Studies, Spring 1978, 353–379. Hammerton, A. James. (1977). Feminism and female emi- pire: the New World. Between the 1880s and gration, 1861–1886. In Martha Vicinus (Ed.), A widen- the 1920s, the New World and the New ing sphere: Changing roles of Victorian women (pp. 52– Woman were equally constructed as sites of 71). Bloomington, IN and London: Indiana University Anglo-Saxon race regeneration in the same Press. discourses of the New Imperialism. Their al- Hammerton, A. James. (1979). Emigrant gentlewomen: Genteel poverty and female emigration, 1830–1914. most interchangeable value in the narrative of London: Croom Helm. the new day that was to break upon the Em- Kolodny, Annette. (1975). The lay of the land: Metaphor as pire from its own outposts marks a crucial con- experience and history in American life and letters. vergence that should not simply attest to the Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Lawson, Olive. (Ed.). (1990). The first voice of Australian contemporaneity of these concepts, but also to feminism: Excerpts from Louisa Lawson’s The Dawn, their mutual investment in the ideology of em- 1888–1895. Brookvale, Australia: Simon and Schuster. pire-building as it was mobilized in the white McClung, Nellie L. (1908). Sowing seeds in Danny. Tor- settler colonies. It is not difficult to see how, in onto, Canada: William Briggs. this context, white women who already re- McClung, Nellie L. (1910). The second chance. Toronto, Canada: Ryerson. garded themselves as pioneers working with McClung, Nellie L. (1915). In times like these. Toronto, white men on behalf of the Empire in Austra- Canada: McLeod and Allen. lia and Canada, came to regard themselves as McClung, Nellie L. (1921). Purple Springs. Toronto, Can- leaders in the feminist movement and as her- ada: Thomas Allen. Nead, Lynda. (1988). Myths of sexuality: Representations of alds of a new day of imperial civilization and women in Victorian Britain. Oxford, England: Basil advanced women’s rights. Blackwell. Owram, Doug. (1980). Promise of Eden: The Canadian expansionist movement and the idea of the West, 1856– REFERENCES 1900. Toronto, Canada; Buffalo, NY; and London: Uni- versity of Toronto Press. Ardis, Ann L. (1990). New women, new novels: Feminism Ruskin, John. (1900). Of queens’ gardens. In John Ruskin and early modernism. New Brunswick and London: (Ed.), Sesame and lilies: Three lectures by John Ruskin Rutgers University Press. (pp. 87–143). London: George Allen. Bland, Lucy. (1995). Banishing the beast: English feminism Savage, Candace. (1979). Our Nell: A scrapbook biography and sexual morality, 1885–1914. London: Penguin. of Nellie L. McClung. Halifax, Canada: Goodread. Burton, Antoinette. (1994). Burdens of history: British fem- Semmel, Bernard. (1960). Imperialism and social reform: inists, Indian women, and imperial culture, 1865–1915. English socialimperial thought, 1895–1914. Cambridge, Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North MA: Harvard University Press. Carolina Press. Seton, Ernest Thompson. (1908). The White Man’s Last Davin, Anna. (1978). Imperialism and motherhood. His- Opportunity. Canada West, 3(6), 525–532. tory Workshop Journal, 5, 9–65. Valverde, Mariana. (1992). “When the mother of the race Duncan, Sara Jeannette. (1996). The Imperialist. Thomas is free”: Race, reproduction, and sexuality in first-wave E. Tausky (Ed.). Ottawa, Canada: Tecumseh. (Original feminism. In Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde work published 1904) (Eds.), Gender conflicts: New essays in women’s history Franklin, Miles. (1980). My brilliant career. London: (pp. 3–26). Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Virago. (Original work published 1901) Valverde, Mariana. (1991). The age of light, soap, and Franklin, Miles. (1986). Some everyday folk and Dawn. water: Moral reform in English Canada, 1885–1925. London: Virago. (Original work published 1909) Toronto, Canada: McClelland and Stewart. Gorham, Deborah. (1978). The “Maiden Tribute of Mod- Wright, Sir Almroth. (1913). The unexpurgated case against ern Babylon” re-examined: Child prostitution and the woman suffrage. London: Constable.