Constructing and Contesting “the Girlhood of Our Empire”: Girls’ Culture, Labor, and Mobility in Britain, South Africa, and New Zealand, c. 1830-1930

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY

Elizabeth Ann Dillenburg

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Anna Clark, Mary Jo Maynes

April 2019

© Elizabeth Ann Dillenburg 2019

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To call this my dissertation seems like a misnomer, because in reality it is the product of so many people’s time, energy, ideas, and sacrifices. My journey to the completion of this PhD has been a long, often challenging one, and I could not have done it without the support of the people around me.

I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with scholars whose work I so greatly admire. My advisers, Anna Clark and Mary Jo Maynes, spent countless hours reading my work, providing constructive feedback, supporting me at conferences, writing letters of recommendation, and giving me advice from my first days as a graduate student. They challenged me and saw potential in my work that I could not even see.

Their ideas and insights can be found throughout this dissertation. My work is stronger because of their guidance. My committee members—Ann Waltner, Patricia Lorcin, and

Andrew Elfenbein—provided me with insightful comments and comparative perspectives that enhanced my work and gave me ideas for future directions for my research. I am also grateful to Evan Roberts, who trusted me his books and guided me through New

Zealand history and historiography.

My time as an undergraduate and MA student at Marquette University was formative to this dissertation and my career as a historian. Monica Gallamore’s early encouragement was key in my decision to major in history and later go to grad school.

Chima Korieh and Philip Naylor cultivated my interest in global history. Lezlie Knox provided some of the best advice I received as a graduate student.

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Portions of this dissertation have been presented at various conferences and workshops, where I received feedback that helped me strengthen and refine my writing.

The participants of the Youth as Subject, Object, Agent research collaborative; Workshop for the Comparative History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality; and Graduate Workshop in Modern History gave me advice on early iterations of various chapters and helped me think about my project in new ways. Attendants at the Social Science History

Association, Society for the Childhood and Youth, and Children’s History Society conferences helped me develop my arguments. Parts of the various chapters appear in the edited collections, New Perspectives on Gender and Empire and International

Migrations in the Victorian Era. I am grateful to the reviewers and editors of those collections and especially Ulrike Lindner, Dörte Lerp, and the participants of the gender and empire conference in Cologne for their insights.

Research for this dissertation has been generously supported by the Hella Mears

Graduate Fellowship in European Studies, the University of Minnesota Graduate School

Thesis Research Travel Grant, the University of Minnesota Graduate Research

Partnership Program Fellowship, and the University of Minnesota History Department.

Many archivists assisted me in my research, including those at the Women’s Library,

Derbyshire Record Office, the Keep in Brighton, the Modern Records Centre at the

University of Warwick, the John Rylands Library, Lambeth Palace Library, Church of

England Record Centre, London Metropolitan Archives, University of Liverpool

Department of Special Collections and Archives, the British Library, the National

Archives, and North London Collegiate School. I am especially grateful Martine King at

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Barnardo’s and Isobel Laing at Cheltenham Ladies’ College who were so welcoming and accommodating and took time out of their busy schedules to talk with me personally.

I am lucky to have been surrounded by many good friends and colleagues during my time at the University of Minnesota. I will always be grateful for the support, guidance, and generosity of Emily Bruce, Kelly Condit-Shrestha, Eric Dahlman, Ruchen

Gao, Hui-Han Jin, Kate Krieg, Kan Li, Ellen Manovich, Silke Antje Niklas, Leslie

Nightingale, Sharon Park, Jan Volek, and Marie Wu. I feel like I won the lottery to have spent the last three years working with wonderful colleagues at the Center of Austrian

Studies. Jennifer Hammer’s positivity and warmth made the office an inviting place to be. Howard P. Louthan has been an incredible friend and mentor whose advice and encouragement have been invaluable.

Last but certainly not least, my greatest thanks go to my family. My nephew Ben has brought so much laughter and love into my life. He is a constant reminder of the need to stop doing “school work” all the time and appreciate the little joys in life. I will always be “regular Auntie” to him and promise that my next project will include more trains. My niece Emma arrived five days after I defended my dissertation on October 17,

2018 and has filled my life with so much happiness. I look forward to watching her grow and many adventures with her. My sister, Jessica, has been my friend and role model throughout my life and also gets the credit (or perhaps blame) for starting me on this path to being a British historian. From a young age, her love of British literature and culture was infectious, and when she took me to England for the first time, she ignited a lifelong interest in British history that led me here. My mom and dad nurtured my love of history,

iii taught me the value of education, and, through their example, instilled in me the importance of hard work and perseverance. Their countless sacrifices enabled me to get a good education and pursue a PhD. Mom, Dad, and Jessica were my cheerleaders and my partners on every step of this journey, believing in me and giving me the strength, courage, and confidence to keep going when it seemed impossible. It is because of them and their unwavering love and support that I reached the finish line.

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DEDICATION

For my family

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ABSTRACT

“Constructing and Contesting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’” studies girls’ complex, often paradoxical roles in the British Empire and analyzes how discussions about the education, employment, and emigration of girls both reflected and shaped broader political, economic, and social debates. Although girls are marginalized in studies of colonialism, concerted efforts to educate and emigrate girls reveal how the project of empire building depended on the mobility and labor of girls and young women. This dissertation begins by considering the ways in which youth organizations sought to transform girls into “empire builders” and girls’ roles as migrants, settlers, laborers, and creators and transmitters of colonial knowledge. Girls supported the empire, but they also challenged systems of colonial power and resisted prescribed roles in various ways, from penning criticisms of false imperial propaganda to absconding from exploitative situations.

While most histories of childhood focus on one region, “Constructing and

Contesting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’” employs a multi-sited framework that examines girlhood in different areas of the empire—concentrating specifically on Britain,

New Zealand, and South Africa—to elucidate variations within broader colonial processes. As explored in the second part of the dissertation, emigration programs for

British girls to New Zealand and South Africa faced innumerable obstacles, and their limited success exposed fault lines within the colonial project. The third part of the dissertation focuses debates over the employment of African and Māori girls as domestic servants in British colonial households and how these debates reveal the ways in which vi ideas of girlhood and girls’ lives were intertwined with conceptualizations of the nation, empire, and race. The nature of the colonial archive means that girls’ experiences rarely appear in the traditional sources, but their voices do emerge in letters they wrote to family and friends, articles they composed for children’s periodicals, scrapbooks they crafted, and photographs and artwork they created. Utilizing these myriad sources, “Constructing and Contesting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’” provides new insights into girls’ roles in the empire and more nuanced understandings of how class, race, and geography mediated girls’ experiences of and engagement with colonialism.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements i

Dedication v

Abstract vi

List of Tables and Figures x

List of Abbreviations xii

Introduction Imperial Citizens, Good Servants, and Model Mothers of New Empires: Constructing, Performing, and Contesting Girlhood in the British Empire 1

Chapter One “The Foundation of British Home Life”: Domestic and Imperial Crises and the Evolution of Emigration Programs for Girls to South Africa and New Zealand, c. 1830-1900 41

Chapter Two “The Opportunity for Empire Building”: The Girls’ Friendly Society, Migration, and the Fashioning of a Colonial Girlhood 84

Chapter Three “To Be a Girl Here is Much More Difficult”: Girls’ Cultural and Emotional Labor and the (De)Construction of Girlhood 122

Chapter Four “Trouble with the Girl”: Race, Class, and Competing Imperial Projects in South Africa and New Zealand 161

Chapter Five “Where the Home Life is White”: Domestic Servant Debates in South Africa, c. 1912-1913 215

Chapter Six “The Girlhood of Māori Girls”: Domestic Servant Debates in New Zealand, c. 1907-1908 248

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Conclusion Constructing and Contesting “the Girlhood of Our Empire” 285

Bibliography 296

Appendix Girls’ Friendly Society Candidates’ Central Examination 324

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LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Tables

Table 1: Population of South Africa by Race and Gender, 1904 77

Figures

Figure 1: “The Children’s Friend Society” Cartoon 50

Figure 2: GFS Branches in the Empire 102

Figure 3: Durban Lodge, 1935 112

Figure 4: GFS Garden Party 127

Figure 5: Members’ Drilling Class 128

Figure 6: “Wingham Candidates as ‘Caravaners’ in the Isle of Wight Pageant” 129

Figure 7: “Indian Tableaux at Endon” 129

Figure 8: “North Indian Tableaux” 130

Figure 9: Avonside Branch in Christchurch, New Zealand 135

Figure 10: “Some of the candidates with three Candidate workers (senior members) from St. Bartholomew’s Branch, East Perth” 139

Figure 11: GFS Picnic 139

Figure 12: South Beach—“Brighton of the West” 140

Figure 13: Mundaring Weir—“The Greatest Scheme in the World” 142

Figure 14: “Miss Whatley and Junior St. Andrews at picnic” 143

Figure 15: Girls Attending Ascension Day Services 144

Figure 16: Page of Church Photographs 144

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Figure 17: “Candidates’ Sewing” 145

Figure 18: An African Man and Women outside Their Home 147

Figure 19: Photograph of an African Man and Woman 148

Figure 20: Stuart Barnardo’s Drawing of a Proposed Institution for Girls 168

Figure 21: Zealandia Resisting Australia 268

Figure 22: “The Yellow Peril” 272

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BWEA British Women’s Emigration Association

CFS Children’s Friend Society

FMCES Female Middle-Class Emigration Society

GFS Girls’ Friendly Society

SACS South African Colonisation Society

SANNC South African Native National Congress

YWCA Young Women’s Christian Association

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INTRODUCTION

IMPERIAL CITIZENS, GOOD SERVANTS, AND MODEL MOTHERS OF NEW EMPIRES: CONSTRUCTING, PERFORMING, AND CONTESTING GIRLHOOD IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

In 1907, Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World published a recurring column entitled “Stories of Brave Girls.” The first installment of the series relates the story of Joan of Arc. It begins by recounting Joan’s childhood and how she was “Strong, brave, and merry above all her playmates” and “a very good little girl, very careful about saying her prayers and going to church.” It then proceeds to discuss her military feats and describes how she exhibited both traditionally feminine characteristics, like piety and duty, as well as masculine qualities of bravery, strength, and military skill, providing an unconventional model for the article’s girl readers.1 Even though Joan was a French heroine, the article emphasizes how her example can serve as model for all girls—and particularly girls of the British Empire—who should emulate Joan in their lives, noting:

“we can carry into our lives her spirit, the spirit of patriotism, of love and pride for

England, and an earnest desire to serve her.” The last lines of the story encourage readers to remember the “duty of every English girl” to the empire and transform their knowledge and appreciation about the empire into meaningful action that would support the British imperial project: “Perhaps, too, when you are older, you will be the more

1 For a greater exploration of the portrayal of girls in literature in the imperial context, see Michelle Smith’s Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls 1880-1915 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). As Smith argues, imperial settings provided a space and opportunity for the reconfiguration of femininity, illustrated by representations of girls participating in dangerous or heroic activities. For another study of shifting notions of femininity in this period and the complex representation of girls in popular literature around the turn of the century, see Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880-1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 1 ready to go and build new homes in the ‘British Dominions beyond the seas,’ and make some real sacrifice, do some real service, for the empire which at present is to you but patches of red in the map on the schoolroom wall.” It closes by encouraging its readers to observe the upcoming Empire Day holiday so they “will then learn a little of the duties and privileges of a citizen of the British Empire.”2

As this story reveals, although often considered peripheral figures in the empire, girls were seen play a distinct yet integral role in the British colonial project. Emigration societies and youth organizations—like the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS), which produced Our Letter—encouraged girls to envision themselves as imperial citizens, good servants, and model mothers of new empires.3 While stories like the one in Our Letter paint a straightforward picture of how girls could support the colonial project, this dissertation explores how girls’ involvement in the empire was actually much more varied and paradoxical. While girls did travel to “British dominions beyond the seas,” their motives were not necessarily rooted in “the spirit of patriotism” and “love and pride for England,” as envisioned by the GFS, and the charge to “build new homes” was complicated by a variety of factors, including that girls found themselves “plunged into an utterly different life” in the colonies.4 The following chapters explore this tension and

2 Edith Brunette, “Stories of Brave Girls I.—Maids of War,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (Easter 1907), 3-4. 3 On girls as “imperial citizens,” see Letter to Mrs. Orde, June 1927, 5/GFS/2/223, Overseas-Empire Scrapbook Competitions, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library; and, “Conference at the Mansion House on Empire Citizenship for Girls,” The G.F.S. Worker’s Journal (December 1918), 200-201. On girls as “good servants,” see The Bishop of Wakefield, “Discontented with their Situations,” The Girls’ Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the Girls’ Friendly Society 10 (April 1897), 121. On girls as “model mothers,” see Adelaide Ross, “Emigration for Women,” Macmillan’s Magazine 45 (February 1882), 312. 4 “The India ‘At Home,’” 1, 5/GFS/2/235, Minutes and Papers of Overseas—India, Burma and Ceylon: Various, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 2 how various factors—especially race, class, and geography—mediated girls’ experiences of and engagement with colonialism and how the lines between supporting and resisting the systems of colonial power were not simple nor clear cut.

Constructing and Contesting Definitions of Childhood and Girlhood

Over the course of the nineteenth century, myriad social, political, economic, and cultural changes in Britain and the empire increased the state’s intervention in children’s lives and sought to define and standardize the amorphous and variable concepts of children and childhood. Previously viewed as the property of their parents and under their purview, children gained the status of future citizens and Britain’s “greatest asset” by the end of the nineteenth century and consequently became the object of governmental expertise.5

Shifting social, political, and economic landscapes—marked by new employment opportunities and various women’s campaigns—led to a renewed interest in youth and the increased gendering of youth in the nineteenth century.6 Concerns about the effects of industrialization and urbanization gave new visibility to issues of child labor and child poverty and led to the development of child rescue discourses.7 Legislation, like the

5 Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada, and Australia, 1850-1915 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), 3, 35, 72; Office of Special Enquiries and Reports of the Board of Education, Report of the Imperial Education Conference, 1911 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd., 1911), 199. 6 “Introduction,” Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750-1960, eds. Mary Jo Maynes, Birgitte Søland, and Christina Benninghaus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 4. 7 Caroline Rowan, “Child Welfare and the Working-Class Family,” in Crises in the British State, 1880- 1930, eds. Mary Langan and Bill Schwarz (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 226-39; Seth Koven, “Borderlands: Women, Voluntary Action, and Child Welfare in Britain, 1840 to 1914,” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare State, eds. Seth Koven and Sonya Michael (New York: Routledge, 1993), 94-135; and Hugh Cunningham, “Saving the Children, c. 1830-1920,” in Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (New York: Longman, 1995), 134-62. 3

Factory Act of 1833 and the Education Act of 1870, established age parameters for child labor and education and reflected efforts to construct more rigid boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Such legislation effectively consolidated childhood as a distinct stage of life and imposed notions of the “cult of the child” on the working classes, even though such ideals remained impractical for poorer families who relied upon children as an important source of labor and income.8

Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, childhood remained a privilege of the upper and middle classes, who adhered to the Romantic “cult of the child” and conceptualized childhood as a time of innocence and happiness. For upper-class and middle-class girls in Britain, childhood could extend into the late teens and sometimes the mid-twenties. While marriage had marked the boundary between girlhood and adulthood, over the course of the nineteenth century, schooling became a significant marker in the transition from childhood to adulthood.9 The realities and necessities of poverty meant that childhood for working classes greatly diverged from this ideal and was a less differentiated experience from adulthood.10 For working-class girls, childhood ended earlier, typically around the age of thirteen, when they assumed more adult responsibilities, like working and helping to provide for their families.11

At the same time as notions of childhood were becoming more defined, Social

Darwinism and growing international competition from the United States, Germany, and

8 Anna Davin, “What is a Child?,” in Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State, eds. Stephen Hussey and Anthony Fletcher (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 16; Peter Stearns, Childhood in World History, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 74. 9 “Introduction,” Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills, 3. 10 Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop Journal 5, no. 1 (1978): 36. 11 Mitchell, The New Girl, 7; “Introduction,” Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills, 5, 7. 4 other European states reinforced concerns about social order and national and racial degeneration and its consequences for British national and imperial prestige. The health and strength of children—the future citizens and empire builders—was viewed as indicative of the health and strength of the nation and the empire. The South African

War at the turn of the century called into question beliefs about imperial security and racial supremacy not just in South Africa but throughout the empire and made apparent the imperial consequences of poverty.12 Low birthrates and the unfitness of soldiers and future solders substantiated concerns about racial degeneration. Consequently, child welfare and alleviating poverty became central to maintaining Britain’s prosperity, stability, prestige, and imperial power. The late Victorian era simultaneously marked the age of high imperialism, when British imperial fervor and support for the empire seemed to be at its height, and also a moment of imperial crisis when ideas of empire, nation, and national identities were being sharply contested throughout the empire. The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed rising anti-colonialism and nationalism and shifting colonial relations. As explored in the following chapters, especially during times of imperial anxiety and uncertainty, girls became an important means to reinforce social boundaries and reassert class, gender, and racial hierarchies.

Race, like class, shaped definitions of childhood and children’s experiences.

Postcolonial scholars, like Ann Laura Stoler and Satadru Sen, have drawn attention to how racial anxieties and concerns over the future of the white race extended beyond white children and shaped perceptions of and policies towards indigenous and mixed-race

12 Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood.” 5 populations in the colonies. In her studies on the French and Dutch East Indies, Ann

Stoler illustrates how wider political fears of degradation and social anxieties about native “others” led to new ideas about what constituted proper schooling and upbringing in the colonies. Stoler draws particular attention to schools as key institutions of colonial governance and crucial sites in the “the learning of place and race.”13 Colonial schools— like schools in Britain—taught white European children how to be future citizens and empire builders and reaffirmed racial hierarchies and privilege.14

Like Stoler, Satadru Sen highlights the importance of the interaction between colonies and metropole and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the construction of childhood in his study of childhood in colonial India. Sen challenges the perception that “modern childhood has been constructed as a European archipelago” and instead emphasizes the “plasticity of childhood” and its relational nature.15 He emphasizes the contingent but nevertheless reified nature of childhood, observing: “European assumptions about age and childhood appeared unsuited to the task of identifying children in India: Indians did not become ‘children’ or ‘adults’ at the ages at which

Europeans did…This did not mean that age lost its significance…If anything, age became all the more important as an area of investigation, experimentation and productive failure.”16 By turning their focus to the experiences of children in the colonies, Stoler,

13 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 112. 14 Ibid. For more on the construction of racial hierarchies in British schools, see Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 15 Satadru Sen, Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1850-1945 (New York: Anthem, 2005), 5. See also Satadru Sen, “The Savage Family: Colonialism and Female Infanticide in Nineteenth- Century India,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 3 (2002): 53-79 16 Sen, Colonial Childhoods, 59. 6

Sen, and other postcolonial scholars have valuably demonstrated how colonial powers used children to construct and maintain boundaries and how children served as sites of competition and negotiation between colonial powers and indigenous societies.17 The perceived malleability of children and particularly girls made them central to the colonial project. This dissertation builds upon the work and observations of these scholars by investigating to the instability and contested nature of girlhood. Attempts to construct an ideal, universal definition of “the child” brought into focus the class, racial, and gendered disparities inherent in the conceptualization and experiences of childhood, a theme explored throughout this dissertation.

My dissertation focuses on girls primarily between the ages of ten and twenty, a period that Sally Mitchell describes as the “provisional free space” between childhood and adulthood.18 Neither a child nor an adult, girls occupied a liminal position, which made them sources of anxiety and targets of reform.19 Despite efforts to attach definitions and parameters to girlhood, its constructed nature makes the term ambiguous,

17 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa 1895-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 18 Mitchell, The New Girl, 3. This transitional period between childhood and adulthood is today encompassed by the terms “adolescents” and “teenagers.” G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904). For more on the origins of these terms, see Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), esp. 252-53. 19 See “Introduction,” Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills; Mitchell, The New Girl; The Modern Girl around the World Research Group, The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Kristine Moruzi and Michelle Smith, “Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls,” Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950, eds. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1-11. 7 contested, and difficult to define.20 This malleability of the term girlhood serves not as a hindrance in my analysis but as a starting point. Since girlhood is historically and culturally constructed, conceptions and experiences of girlhood are shaped by a variety of factors in different ways. As Steven Mintz has observed “these definitions [of childhood] can become the source of cultural conflict.”21 The construction of girlhood did not occur in a vacuum, and my dissertation explores the process of negotiation among different conceptions of girlhood and how such processes were also a product of broader social, economic, and political changes during this time period.

Situating Girls in the Study of Colonialism and Children’s Culture

Because children were viewed as embodiments of Britain’s future, studying youth culture provides singular insights into how the British understood their empire and especially their imperial visions and ambitions. John MacKenzie and J.A. Mangan were among the

20 My research follows in the footsteps of Phillipe Ariès and subsequent scholars who have interrogated and explored the formation and meaning of childhood and shown how understanding the different circumstances that shaped childhood can provide insights into how societies, economies, and political structures change over time. First published in 1960, Phillipe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life established the study of childhood as a new and significant field of historical inquiry. Ariès’s work challenged previous assumptions that childhood is a fixed and universal category and instead traced how the idea of childhood changed over time. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). There have been many points of criticism about Centuries of Childhood, including its relativism, reliance on iconography, its elite bias, and its focus on Western cultures. Although numerous scholars have challenged aspects of Ariès’s work, his overall contention—that childhood is a social construction, not simply a biological category—continues to serve as a starting point for research on the history of childhood. For informative assessments of Ariès, see Colin Heywood, “Centuries of Childhood: An Anniversary—and an Epitaph?” The Journal of Childhood and Youth 3, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 341-65; and Adrian Wilson, “The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Ariès,” History and Theory 19, no. 2 (1980): 132-53. 21 Stephen Mintz, “Reflections on Age as a Category of Analysis,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 91-92. See also Jean Comoroff and John L. Comaroff, “Reflections on Youth, from the Past to the Postcolony,” Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, eds. Melissa Fisher and Greg Downey (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 267-81. 8 first scholars to draw attention to the pervasive influence of colonial ideas on British childhood.22 In their numerous studies on cultural imperialism, MacKenzie and Mangan focus on the centripetal rather than purely centrifugal forces of imperialism and reveal the ways that the empire permeated everyday life.23 While schools acted as a central site where imperial and racial identities and ideas were formed and reformed, the influence of empire spread beyond the classroom, and their works, along with the work of subsequent scholars, draw special attention to how sports, youth organizations, and popular literature cultivated imperial ideals and values in children.24 My study of the GFS builds upon this foundational work of Mangan and MacKenzie by drawing attention to the ways that youth organizations, namely the GFS, sought to mold girls into “empire builders” and cultivate an imperial ethos through newsletters and a range of activities, from imperial stamp clubs to essay competitions.

22 See for example, John M. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986); and John M. MacKenzie Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). See also J. A. Mangan, Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); and Benefits Bestowed: Education and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). 23 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 2. 24 See for example, MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, esp. ch. 9, “Imperial propaganda and extra- curricular activities,” 228-52. On sports, see for instance, J. A. Mangan Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (New York: Viking, 1986); J. A. Mangan, ed., The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society (London: Frank Cass, 1992). On youth organizations and specifically scouting, see Michelle Smith, “Be(ing) Prepared: Girl Guides, Colonial Life, and National Strength,” Limina 12 (2006): 52-63; Kristine Alexander, Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017); and Allen Warren, “Citizens of the Empire: Baden Powell, Scouts and Guides, and an Imperial Ideal,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, 232-56. 9

While historians of childhood have long appreciated age as an important category of analysis, childhood is still often viewed as a “gender neutral” term.25 Existing scholarship remains limited in its examinations of the gendered experiences of childhood, meaning that the history of childhood becomes de facto the history of boyhood, with boy’s experiences taken as the normative experience of childhood. Girlhood and the experiences of girls are in turn relegated to a footnote or paragraph in broader studies of childhood, especially in studies of colonial childhoods.26 My dissertation aims to reorient analyses of colonial childhood around the intersections of age and gender and, in doing so, builds upon the long tradition of feminist scholarship about British colonialism that has sought to recover women, their voices, and their experiences from the margins of colonial histories and demonstrate how gender is a key analytic for understanding colonialism.27

Only within the past decade have scholars considered the ways colonialism shaped girls’ lives and their centrality to the colonial project. Led by scholars in literary

25 Giorgia Dona and Andrea Veale, “Mobility-in-Migration in an Era of Globalization: Key Themes and Future Directions,” in Child and Youth Migration: Mobility-in-Migration in an Era of Globalization, eds. Giorgia Dona and Andrea Veale (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 239. 26 For example, despite his title of Colonial Childhoods, Sen principally focuses on boyhood and devotes one chapter, “Gendering the Reformatory,” to the unique constructions and experiences of girlhood. 27 This scholarship includes, but is not limited to, Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Durham: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Julia Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (London: Continuum, 1999); Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood”; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003); Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Clare Midgley Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790- 1865 (London: Routledge, 2007); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The Effeminate Bengali and the Manly Englishman (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1995); and, Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003). 10 and cultural studies, like Michelle Smith and Kristine Moruzi, initial works on colonial girlhood focused on representations of girls in British and colonial texts.28 For instance, in Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture, Smith shows not only how girls’ culture reinforced imperial values but also broadens understandings about girls’ various functions within the empire and imperial discourse. While previous scholars, like J.S.

Bratton, focused on girls within the domestic sphere, Smith shows that girl characters also occupied roles as explorers, colonists, nurses, and castaways.29 Colonial Girlhood in

Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950, edited by Smith and Moruzi, similarly draws attention to the diversity of girls’ experiences under colonialism and demonstrates how girlhoods serve as a lens to see patterns in colonialism and equally how colonialism functions as a lens through which to see variations among historical and fictional girlhoods. As Moruzi and Smith note in their introduction, “[t]elling the stories of colonial girls can help us to see aspects of colonialism that might not otherwise be

28 See for instance, Moruzi and Smith, “Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls”; Kristine Moruzi and Michelle Smith, “Education and Work in Service of the Nation Canadian and Australian Girls’ Fiction, 1908-1921,” in Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950, eds. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 180-94; Kristine Moruzi, “Feminine Bravery: The Girls Realm (1898-1915) and the Second Boer War,” Literature Association Quarterly 34 (2009): 241-54; Kristine Moruzi, “‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies,” in Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth Century Literature, ed. Tamara S. Wagner (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 177-91; Kristine Moruzi, “‘I am content with Canada’: Canadian Girls at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4 (2012): 119-31; Smith, Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture; Michelle Smith, “Wild Australian Girls?: The Mythology of Colonial Femininity in British Print Culture, 1885-1916,” in Girls, Texts, Cultures, eds. Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer, Studies in Childhood and Family in Canada (Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015), 237-60; and, Michelle Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford, From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 29 J.S. Bratton, “British Imperialism and the Reproduction of Femininity in Girls’ Fiction, 1900-1930,” in Imperialism and Juvenile Literature, ed. Jeffrey Richards (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 195-215. 11 visible.”30 It draws attention to the operation of colonialism on a microlevel and re- orientates analyses of colonial power away from the political institutions or battlefields— the traditional sites of power—to the domestic sphere, although as the following chapters will explore these domains were never self-contained.31 In doing so, the study of girls’ culture can challenge traditional narratives of colonialism by exposing the fragility of colonial power and illuminating deeply rooted anxieties about the stability and security of the British Empire.

As Smith, Moruzi, and other scholars have explored, the figure of the girl played a significant symbolic role in colonial discourses, which cast them as allegories of the nation and empire, potential mothers and guardians of the future, or as victims in need of saving. The following chapters explores these last two themes in particular by examining how the British framed their imperial duty in terms of protecting girls and improving their welfare. In her study of girlhood in colonial India, Ruby Lal examines how the rhetoric of child rescue served as a means to extend colonial influence and reinforce colonial legitimacy and modernity. In Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India, Lal traces why and how girls occupied a central place in both British and Indian reformist discourse.32 Focusing in particular on debates over sati, female infanticide, and child-

30 Moruzi and Smith, “Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls,” 4. 31 On domesticity and colonialism, see for instance, Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); and, Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

32 Ruby Lal, Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 43. See also the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg 12 brides, Lal demonstrates how discourses rendered girls and young women static and non- agential figures but challenges this narrative by uncovering spaces available to girls and women for the expression of their subjectivity. This dissertation similarly foregrounds how girls acted as agents with their own views who actively shaped their environment and how ideas of girlhood were used to reinforce social, racial, and colonial power structures.33 My work draws upon literary scholarship that has analyzed representations of girls but concentrates on the intersections of policies about and the experiences of girls.

Placing Girls in Colonial Migration Scholarship

Studying girls’ migration provides a lens in which to examine and better understand the development and changing exigencies of British colonialism. The earliest child migration programs in the British Empire emerged shortly after the establishment of the first permanent British settlements in North America. In 1618, the first group of child migrants, composed of around one hundred “vagrant” children from the London area, were sent to Virginia. Over the course of the next two centuries, various state institutions coordinated the forced emigration of children, the majority of which were convicted criminals, initially to North America and then to the Australian colonies until the transportation of children was ended in 1853. In the nineteenth century, emigration

(Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 271-313; and, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 247-72 33 For a greater exploration of child agency, see Mary Jo Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency, and Narratives of Childhood,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 114-24. 13 efforts received renewed attention and expanded beyond the purview of the state to private enterprises and religious groups. As will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, by the mid-nineteenth century and especially in the latter half of the century, child emigration emerged as a singular solution to a myriad of problems both in Britain and the colonies. The emigration of children to colonial frontiers was viewed as a remedy to the physical and moral deficiencies associated with poverty and urban life in

Britain and a way to temper growing working-class militancy and relieve some of the strain of the crowded labor market.34 In the colonies, girl emigrants not only performed necessary labor, specifically domestic labor, but in their future roles as wives and mothers, were seen as necessary to building up British settler societies in the colonies.

Girls were cast as strategic, defensive bulwarks and also cultural safeguards. Defeat in the American Revolution and victory in the Napoleonic Wars led Britain to shift its efforts from North America to other parts of the empire, including building up settler societies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Southern Africa. Although programs in the first half of the nineteenth century, like the Children’s Friend Society, were short- lived and comparatively small-scale endeavors, the 1860s and 1870s marked the proliferation of more centralized, systematic child migration programs, first by the

Ragged Schools in 1849 followed by Annie Macpherson’s Home Children, Thomas

Barnardo’s Homes, William Booth’s Salvation Army, and John Middlemore’s Children’s

Emigration Homes and, in the early twentieth century, by the Catholic Emigration

34 See Julia Bush, “Emigration,” in Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power, 146-169; Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, “Children of the Poor: Child and Juvenile Migration,” in Empire and Migration, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 247- 76. 14

Association and Kingsley Fairbridge’s Child Emigration Society (later the Fairbridge

Society).35 To give a sense of the quick rate of expansion of the programs during this era,

Maria Rye organized the emigration of her first party of emigrants of seventy-six children to Canada in 1869, and by 1875, Rye’s Home for the Emigration of Destitute Little Girls had arranged for the emigration 600 children—98 percent of whom were girls—to “Our

Western Home” in Niagara, Canada.36 By 1895, when Rye effectively retired, her organization had sent 4,000 children to Canada.37 Thomas Barnardo sent the first party of emigrants to Canada in 1882, and by 1900, approximately 11,100 of “Barnardo’s children” had emigrated to Canada.38 As discussed more in chapter four, Rye and

Barnardo had an interest in extending their programs to New Zealand and South Africa but their cursory efforts ultimately did not succeed.

Scholars of child migration have studied the emigration of both boys and girls, but by focusing specifically on the movement of girls, my dissertation studies the distinctly

35 Gillian Wagner, Barnardo (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1979); Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982); Phyllis Harrison, The Home Children: Their Personal Stories (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1979); Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869-1924 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); Kenneth Bagnell, The Little Immigrants: The Orphans Who Came to Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1980); Gail Corbett, Nation Builders: Barnardo Children in Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1997); Alan Gill, Orphans of the Empire: The Shocking Story of Child Migration to Australia (New York: Vintage, 1998); Janet Sacks and Roger Kershaw, New Lives for Old: The Story of Britain’s Home Children (Kew: The National Archives, 2008); Chris Jeffery and Geoffrey Sherington, Fairbridge: Empire and Child Migration (London: Woburn Press, 1998); Geoff Blackburn, The Children’s Friend Society: Juvenile Emigrants to Western Australia, South Africa and Canada, 1834-1842 (Northbridge: Access Press, 1993). The Children’s Friend Society and its short-lived programs will be discussed in chapter one. 36 “Miss Rye’s Emigration Home for Destitute Girls,” 1875, D630/1/19, Papers relating to Maria Rye’s Emigration Home for Little Girls—Annual Reports and Statistics, University of Liverpool Department of Special Collections and Archives. 37 Report for 1895 of Miss Rye’s Emigration Home for Destitute Little Girls, D630/1/19, Papers relating to Maria Rye’s Emigration Home for Little Girls—Annual Reports and Statistics, University of Liverpool Department of Special Collections and Archives. 38 “Our Emigrants,” For God and Country 46 (1911), 31. 15 gendered experiences of child migration. Moreover, while the majority of scholarship on child migration has focused on key organizations like Barnardo’s and Fairbridge, my work draws attention to other organizations involved in the movement of children, specifically the GFS. As a hybrid youth organization and emigration society, the GFS functioned differently than these mainstream emigration organizations in that their programs did not institutionalize and force girls to migrate, but they nevertheless employed a variety of means—and many of them not dissimilar to methods used by these other organization— to persuade girls to migrate. These differences in the operation of the GFS expand and complicate our understandings of children’s migration in the British

Empire and children’s agency and mobility.

The nineteenth century also marked the growth of concerted efforts to encourage women’s emigration. As with child emigration, the government took an early interest in female emigration, with the Colonial Office sponsoring programs in the 1830s, but as the nineteenth century progressed, it was aided by the development of numerous organizations devoted to assisting women emigrate from Britain to other parts of the empire, including Maria Rye’s Female Middle-Class Emigration Society (FMCES), founded in 1862, and later the British Women’s Emigration Association (1884), South

African Colonisation Society (1902), and Colonial Intelligence League (1912). Like child emigration, female emigration was driven by the need for labor in the colonies and also by the desire to build up settler societies through marriages, a matter that became increasingly important due to the disproportion of male to female settlers and the problem of “redundant” or “surplus” women in Britain. William Rathbone Greg provided perhaps

16 the most famous articulation of this “problem” in his 1862 pamphlet, “Why Are Women

Redundant?” Citing the 1851 census, Greg observed that nearly “1,248,00 women in the prime of their life, i.e. between the ages of twenty and forty years…were unmarried, out of a total number of rather less than 3,000,000” and predicted that, without the security of marriage, these women would be condemned to lives of “celibacy, struggle and privation.”39 To correct this demographic discrepancy, Greg suggested sending women to the colonies and “[t]o transport the half million from where they are redundant to where they are wanted.”40 With “surplus women” in Britain and a disproportionate number of men in the colonies, emigration of women to the colonies appeared to be an obvious solution. Such discourses continued into the twentieth century. For instance, a

1911 pamphlet by the Empire Emigration Society branded the perceived problem of

“surplus women” as “a menace to the Empire” and reported: “The nation would lose nothing by the transfer of our Oversea possessions of our surplus population...There are thousands of industrious men and women anxious to proceed to the wider fields of

Empire Overseas.”41 Similarly, Lady Maud Selborne wrote about how “one of the primary needs of Britain, Great and Greater, is a readjustment of the sexes. The present state of things is bad—rankly bad—bad alike for the overwomaned and underwomaned parts of our World-Empire.”42 While quantitative evidence of gender imbalances played

39 William Rathbone Greg, Why Are Women Redundant? (London: Trübner, 1869), 12. 40 Ibid., 15. 41 “Emigration—Canada,” February 23, 1911, Papers Relating to the Scheme of Miss Wileman for Sending English Servant Girls to Manitoba, LAB 2/1523/LE7780/1911, Records of departments responsible for labor and employment matters and related bodies—Labour Exchange and Unemployment Insurance Department: Correspondence withteh Empire Emigration Society concerning particulars of the organisation of the Canadian Emigration Bureau for Women and Girls, The National Archives. 42 Lady Maud Selborne, “Light under a Bushel. South Africa Neglected. Women and Empire,” The Bulawayo Chronicle, December 12, 1913, 3. Selborne was the wife of Lord Selborne, who served as the 17 a key role in justifying emigration, such concerns also reflected broader anxieties about national strength and especially social stability during a period of rapid industrialization and sharpening class divisions. As Kathrin Levitan observes in her study of the problem of women’s redundancy, when earlier anxieties about overcrowding and overpopulation waned by the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of “surplus women” became “about quality more than quantity” and served as a way to describe those who fell outside the ideal society.43 Emigration served as a way to deal with these problematic members of society who did not fulfill their “natural” roles as wives and mothers.

Thus, unlike child emigration societies, which primarily sent poor, working-class children to the colonies, women’s emigration societies concentrated their efforts on emigrating “educated,” middle-class women. These “emigrant gentlewomen” form the focus A. James Hammerton’s groundbreaking study of the distinct experiences of single women migrants from Britain. Published in 1979, Hammerton focused in particular on the emigration of middle-class women as well as the women who assisted them, especially the FMCES. While Hammerton studied primarily middle-class and upper- class women, more recent studies have sought to uncover the experiences of female

high commissioner of South Africa and governor of the Transvaal and Orange River colonies until the Union of South Africa in 1910. 43 Kathrin Levitan, “Redundancy, the ‘Surplus Woman’ Problem, and the British Census, 1851–1861,” Women’s History Review 17, no. 3 (2008): 359-376. This “problem” was a distinctly British phenomenon. As Levitan describes, “While other countries certainly dealt with urban poverty and the possibility of working‐class revolt, no other nineteenth‐century census was associated with prolonged discussions of overpopulation” (372). For more on the problem of “surplus women” and specifically how it was connected to broader social shifts and debates about women’s place in society, see Judith Worsnop, “A Reevaluation of ‘the Problem of Surplus Women’ in 19th-century England: The Case of the 1851 Census,” Women’s Studies International Forum 13, no. 1 (1990): 21; and, Julia Bush, “‘The Right Sort of Women’: Female Emigrators and Emigration to the British Empire, 1890-1910,” Women’s History Review 3 (1994): 388–89. 18 migrants across classes.44 For instance, Charlotte Macdonald’s A Woman of Good

Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand presents a “collective biography” of the thousands of young single women who came to

New Zealand from Britain and Ireland between the 1840s and 1880s. Observing that

“these women have been overshadowed by the figures of gold diggers, pastoralists, soldiers, adventurers and agricultural labourers,” Macdonald details the varied experiences of female migrants, focusing in particular on servants and laborers, and integrates them into the broader immigrant narratives of New Zealand history.45 Like

Hammerton, she challenges the relegation of women to a “secondary position” in emigration and portrayals of female emigrants as simply followers of husbands or fathers

44 A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830-1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979). In a retrospective to his pioneering work, Hammerton observes that the nature of the colonial archive and the availability of sources mean that studies of female migration still tend to be dominated by middle-class and upper-class women and often on the institutional structures behind emigration programs. See “‘Out of Their Natural Station’: Empire and Empowerment in the Emigration of Lower Middle-Class Women,” in Imperial Objects: Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), 143-69. See for example Lisa Chilton’s Agents of Empire, which provides a transnational study of women’s imperial emigration experiences in Britain, Canada, and Australia but focuses on women “emigrators” and imperialists who promoted and managed imperial migration programs. Lisa Chilton, Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). See also Julia Bush’s Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power, which does not focus solely on migration but is more broadly interested in upper-middle-class and aristocratic British women’s engagement with imperialism. 45 Charlotte Macdonald, A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth- Century New Zealand (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1990), iv. See also Frances Porter, Charlotte Macdonald, and Tui MacDonald, My Hand Will Write what My Heart Dictates: The Unsettled Lives of Women in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand as Revealed to Sisters, Family and Friends (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1996). Other works on New Zealand emigration include Lyndon Fraser and Katie Pickles, Shifting Centres: Women and Migration in New Zealand History (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002); Lyndon Fraser and Angela McCarthy Far from Home: The English in New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2012); Jock Philips and Terry Hearn, Settlers: New Zealand Immigrants from England, Ireland and Scotland 1800-1945, AUP Studies in Cultural and Social History Series (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008); Angela McCarthy, “Migration and Ethnic Identities in the Nineteenth Century,” in The New Oxford History of New Zealand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 173-96; Jeanine Graham, “Settler Society,” in The Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. Geoffrey W. Rice, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 112-39. 19 and instead examines their complex motives in deciding to emigrate.46 Cecillie

Swaisland also examines the range of experiences and motives behind women’s decisions to emigrate in Servants and Gentlewomen to a Golden Land: The Emigration of Single

Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820-1939. Swaisland primarily discusses middle-class migrants to South Africa who were employed as governesses, children’s nurses, teachers, and in the medical professions, but she also discusses working-class women who emigrated to work in shops or factories and as domestic servants. Swaisland concludes that for both middle-class and working-class women, social mobility was a strong motive in their decision to emigrate, but they sought to accomplish it in different ways.47 For middle-class women, fears of downward mobility within Britain and seemingly better professional opportunities provided a powerful incentive, while working-class women were attracted by the possibilities of an advantageous marriage.

While the prewar years marked the peak of both female and child emigration programs, the outbreak of World War I temporarily suspended migration programs, and following the conclusion of the war, the aims and methods of emigration programs as well as the nature of the British Empire shifted.48 Although new emigration schemes were pioneered, they did not receive the same level of enthusiasm as prewar programs.

46 Macdonald, A Woman of Good Character, esp. “Conclusion.” 47 Cecillie Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to a Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820-1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), esp. “Conclusion.” 48 See for instance Katie Pickle’s “Empire Settlement and Single British Women as New Zealand Domestic Servants during the 1920s,” New Zealand Journal of History 35, no. 1 (2001): 22-44. Pickles discusses the 1919 Overseas Settlement Scheme, which provided free passages to ex-service men and women. Under this scheme, 12,890 went to New Zealand and 5,960 went to South Africa. The Overseas Settlement Scheme of 1922, also known as the Empire Settlement Act, also provided free passages to married couples, single farm laborers, and male teenagers between the ages of 14 to 17. Women between 18 and 40 who were “bona fide” domestics were also given free passage. 20

This interwar and post-World War II period forms the focus of Ellen Boucher’s Empire’s

Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869-1967, which traces how the regulation and eventual turn away from British child emigration were bound up with the decline of Greater Britain, or a sense of shared culture and racial identity, and this in turn led to the articulation of Canadian, Australian, and Rhodesian national identity as well as for a new definition of Britishness.49 Canada suspended its emigration programs for children by 1932, and although programs to Australia continued until 1967 through organizations like Barnardo’s, Fairbridge, and the Christian Brothers, the numbers declined with the onset of the Depression in the 1930s and then the Second

World War. The 1960s also marked the end of organized emigration for women, with the termination of funding for the Society for Overseas Settlement of British Women in

1964.50 My dissertation broadly covers the period between the development of early child emigration programs in the 1830s through the interwar years but primarily focuses on the period around the turn of the century, when interest about emigrating girls to New

49 Ellen Boucher, Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 19. 50 On the limited success of imperial migration, specifically female migration in the interwar era, see Brian L. Blakely, “The Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women and the Problems of Empire Settlement, 1917-1936,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 20, no. 3 (1988): 421-44. Two decades after the cessation of these programs, the experiences of child migrants received renewed scholarly and public interest following the investigative work of Margaret Humphreys’s Empty Cradles (1986, repr. London: Corgi, 2011) and Philip Bean and Joy Melville’s Lost Children of the Empire (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), which drew attention to the plight of child migrants, particularly in Australia and Canada, and their mistreatment. More recent scholarship, while not minimizing the exploitative and abusive nature of child migration programs, have analyzed the broader institutions, processes, and politics of child emigration. See for instance Gordon Lynch’s Remembering Child Migration: Faith, Nation-Building and the Wounds of Charity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), which provides a comparative study of orphan trains in the United States and British migration schemes to Canada and Australia to examine shifting ideas of humanitarianism and welfare. 21

Zealand and South Africa was at its peak and organizations like the GFS reached the height of its popularity.

By focusing on the distinct experiences of girl migrants and drawing attention to the gendered experiences of child migrants, my project is situated at the nexus between these two fields of child migration and female migration. Girl migrants differed from women migrants in two significant ways: their perceived malleability and lack of agency.

The story at the opening of this chapter and the emphasis on “build[ing] new homes” illustrates the ways in which girls’ roles in the empire were intricately tied to domesticity and their future roles as wives and mothers and that part of their value to the colonial project was that they were still in the process of “becoming.” As the first two chapters in particular explore, girls were considered ideal emigrants, who could assimilate more quickly and were more adaptable, easier to train, and a better investment, since women would likely not stay in a position for a long period of time. Nevertheless, this malleability also made girls the focus of anxieties, which were used by emigration societies to argue that girls needed special protection and closer control and management.

Organizers saw girls as passive figures in the process of emigration and ones who did not need to have a say in their own future. However, as explored throughout this dissertation and specifically in chapters three and four, this blind spot meant that organizers failed to take into account the ways that girls would resist the conditions of colonial life and the broader project of migration.

Histories of colonial migration, and particularly child migration, focus on

Australia and Canada, in large part because they are the two areas where the most

22 migrants were sent.51 It is estimated that around 150,000 British child and juvenile migrants travelled to destinations in the empire without a parent or guardian between

1618 and 1967.52 The majority, around 80,000, are estimated to have gone to Canada between 1869 and 1924.53 Approximately 30,000 went to Australia in the twentieth century.54 Efforts to quantify the number of migrants remains notoriously difficult for a variety of reasons, including the changing and ambiguous definition of “child” and “child migrant” as well as incomplete records from emigration societies. GFS emigration reports, for instance, often use the vague phrasing of “some hundreds” when referring to girls who emigrated. A Report for the Department of Members Emigrating from 1897 gives more precise figures, relaying that the GFS assisted in the emigration of 1,935 girls and young women since the Department was established in 1886, which would mean that the GFS assisted in the emigration of 150-200 girls a year.55 However, they do not provide detailed information about the destination of the girl emigrants. Moreover, the

GFS also arranged for girls to emigrate through informal means, like travelling with other families, which is not reflected in recorded number of emigrants. Additionally,

51 This is noted by many scholars, including Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1981). 52 Bean and Melville, Lost Children of Empire, 1. As Harper and Constantine note in their chapter on “Child and Juvenile Migration,” this number is of uncertain origin and doubtful reliability (248). Other scholars, like Alan Gill, places the number between 100,000 and 180,000 in Orphans of Empire, 85. Boucher also puts the number around 95,000 in Empire’s Children, 3. 53 Parr, Labouring Children, 39-40. 54 Gill, Orphans of Empire, 86. Other scholars, focusing on the post-World War I period, place the number lower, usually around 6,000-7,000. See Table 4.1 “Numbers of child migrants sent to Australia” in Appendix 4 “Figures on Child Migration during the twentieth century,” Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs, Lost Innocents: Righting the Record—Report on Child Migration, August 30, 2001, https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/Completed_inqui ries/1999-02/child_migrat/report/e04. 55 Ellen Joyce, ed. “Department for Members Emigrating,” 1898, 1, D3287/68/1/7/4, Pamphlets regarding emigrating to South Africa, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 23 emigration societies were keen to emphasize the success and value of their endeavors and therefore sometimes inflated their success rate. For instance, Thomas Barnardo—who founded one of the most famous emigration societies for orphaned and poor children and whose programs will be discussed more in chapter four—claimed that his emigration programs had a 98 percent success rate, despite other evidence of the hostility with which emigrant children were received in the colonies, the abuses suffered by children, emigrants’ difficulties adapting to life in the colonies, and broader criticisms of his methods.56 Despite the difficulties of ascertaining precise migration figures, it is clear that child migration programs to South Africa and New Zealand were short lived and involved comparatively fewer children.

South Africa and New Zealand as Case Studies

In discussing the higher rates of emigration to Canada and Australia versus South Africa and New Zealand, scholars have cited relatively clear-cut explanations, like how the distance and the cost of voyages to New Zealand and South Africa made such programs impractical. Yet, despite these practical obstacles, emigration reports, government documents, and correspondences reveal concerted efforts to emigrate girls to these

56 “Dr. Barnardo’s Homes,” Pall Mall Gazette 51 (1913), xxv. Barnardo addresses criticisms of his work in various articles published in his reports. See for instance, “Hostile Critics,” 30th Annual Report of the Institutions Known as “Dr. Barnarndo’s Homes” for Orphan and Destitute Children Annual Report, 1895, 16-17, A3/1/30, Dr. Barnardo’s Papers—Publications: Annual Reports, 1867-1995, Barnardo’s. This inflated success rate may cause one to overlook Barnardo’s assessment of emigration schemes entirely, but as Stoler argues, these sources should not necessarily be viewed as sites of misrepresentation but as transitory configurations of epistemological and political anxieties at a certain moment in time. Stoler’s work draws attention to the “fault lines and ragged edges of colonialism’s archival genres” and demonstrates that colonial powers were ambiguous, contingent, and uncertain and never fully omniscient or secure. See Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 53. 24 colonies.57 Therefore, I reexamine the question of why programs to emigrate girls to

South Africa and New Zealand did not succeed and, in chapter four, argue that emigration proponents in Britain, organizers on the ground in the colonies, British settlers, and the girl emigrants themselves all had different objectives and visions of emigration, which reflected and were shaped by the specific context and distinct racial, class, and gender anxieties in South Africa, New Zealand, and Britain, and ultimately could not be reconciled.

At first glance, the situations in South Africa and New Zealand seem to have few points of intersection and therefore might seem to be peculiar choices for comparative case studies. European, or Pākehā, New Zealanders prided themselves as “the best

British” and having the “best race relations” in the world, and Pākehā settlers made up around 95 percent of New Zealand’s population by the turn of the century, while conflicts and racial tensions plagued South Africa.58 However, as chapters five and six examine, despite being separated by over 7,000 miles and their different histories, societies, and racial dynamics, the situations in South Africa and New Zealand bear notable similarities and demonstrate the ways in which imperial and local discourses intersected. The emergence of servant debates occurred at particularly crucial times for both South Africa

57 For instance, Barnardo mentions sending a few children to New Zealand and South Africa in “Something Attempted Something Done” Being the Twenty-Second Annual Report of “Dr. Barnardos Homes,” 1888, 183, A3/1/21, Dr. Barnardo’s Papers—Publications: Annual Reports, 1867-1995, Barnardo’s. 58 On New Zealand’s identity as the “best British,” see especially James Belich’s Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880’s to the Year 2000 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). See also David Thomson, “Marriage and Family on the Colonial Frontier,” in Disputed Histories: Imagining New Zealand’s Past, eds. Tony Ballantyne and Brian Moloughney (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006), 140. Barbara Brookes, Annabel Cooper and Robin Law, “Situating Gender,” in Sites of Gender: Women, Men and Modernity in Southern Dunedin, 1890-1939, eds. Barbara Brookes, Annabel Cooper, and Robin Law (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), 3; Phillips and Hearn, Settler. 25 and New Zealand—economically, socially, and geopolitically—and when imperial relations and ideas of national identities were undergoing a transition. Both colonies used servants as part of their attempts to construct social boundaries and reassert class, gender, and specifically racial hierarchies, which were integral to their respective visions of colonial societies. British settlers sought to create a “pure” and “white” “little Britain” within colonial homes, but the operation of British colonial households simultaneously required the employment of outside, foreign help.

In choosing to concentrate on South Africa and New Zealand, this dissertation builds upon the growing scholarship about the history of childhood in these areas.

Historians of Africa have long taken youth as a valuable category of analysis. Although the majority of scholarship, especially about South Africa, focuses on youth in the second half of the twentieth century, recent studies have extended their analyses to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and focused on how the colonial context in particular shaped childhood.59 Edna Bradlow and S. E. Duff have written most extensively about childhood in South Africa during the colonial period. In their respective studies, Bradlow and Duff draw attention to the discrepancies between the Victorian ideal of childhood

59 On youth in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, see Sandra Burman and Pamela Reynolds, eds., Growing Up in a Divided Society (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1986) and Monica Eileen Patterson, “Constructions of Childhood in Apartheid’s Last Decades” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2009). Another study that does not solely focus on South Africa but is worth mentioning is Elodie Razy and Marie Rodet, eds., Children on the Move in Africa: Past and Present Experiences of Migration (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), which provides an interdisciplinary study of the experiences of child migrants in various African countries, including South Africa. On girlhood in colonial Nigeria, see Abosede George’s Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014). She demonstrates how the experiences of girls adds a new perspective to understandings of European rule, knowledge production, and citizenship building in colonial Nigeria. Focusing on working-class girls, namely girl hawkers, George examines children as colonial subjects and their interactions with the colonial state. 26 and the realities of children’s experiences in the Cape Colony and especially how race and class shaped children’s lives.60 Duff’s Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony reveals how shifting ideas of childhood and how the emergence of new ideas about

“white” childhood reflected anxieties over the future stability of the industrializing Cape

Colony.61 Like Bradlow’s and Duff’s works, this dissertation draws attention to the multiplicity of experiences of girlhood that existed alongside each other in South Africa and how they were shaped by a variety of factors, including location, class, and race. I also explore how the process of exporting a European idea of girlhood to other parts of the empire through emigration and education was rarely straightforward and instead revealed girlhood’s constructed, particularized nature. While the first three chapters of my dissertation explore efforts to create a singular “Girlhood of our Empire,” chapter

60 Edna Bradlow, “Children and Childhood at the Cape in the 19th Century,” Kleio 20, no. 1 (1988): 8–27. See also Edna Bradlow, “The Children’s Friend Society at the Cape of Good Hope,” Victorian Studies 27, no. 2 (1984): 155–77. See also Simon Dagut, whose work has examined rural settler children’s socialization into the racial order in the mid to late nineteenth century: “‘Strangely Hard Natures Were Bred in the South Africa of That Day’. Rural Settler Childhood, 1850s‐1880s,” African Studies 58, no. 1 (1999): 33–53. On the socialization of children in South Africa, see also Charles Van Onselen New Babylon New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1982), esp. 223-25; and Jacklyn Cock, Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980); and Jacklyn Cock, “Domestic Service and Education for Domesticity: The Incorporation of Xhosa Women in Colonial Society,” in Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. Cherryl Walker (Cape Town: David Philip, 1990), 76-96. 61 S. E. Duff, Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860-1895, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). See also S. E. Duff, “‘Capture the Children’: Writing Children into the South African War, 1899-1902,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7, no. 3 (2014): 355–76; and S. E. Duff, “The Jam and Matchsticks Problem: Working-Class Girlhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Cape Town,” in Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950, eds. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 124-37. 27 four will examine how the observations and experiences of girls in the colonies underscored its complexity and multiplicity.62

Although Bradlow and Duff discuss the experiences of African children, their primary focus is on British and Dutch children respectively. With the exception of scholarship by Deborah Gaitskell, the experiences of African children, and girls in particular, in colonial South Africa has received less attention from scholars.63 In her work, Gaitskell examines how schools sought to train African girls as domestic servants and more broadly in the qualities of “Christian girlhood” and the ways in which girls resisted these lessons.64 Corrie Decker, like Gaitskell, also explores the responses of

African girls and women to educational efforts but in the context of colonial East Africa.

She analyzes how the gender specificity of colonial education reinforced Western gender norms that relegated women to the domestic sphere and complicated girls’ transition to womanhood. Mothers in particular expressed concerns that girls’ Western education could potentially weaken the social fabric of the community.65 Building on the work of

62 The phrase “Girlhood of Our Empire” is used in “Appeal for £20,000 for the Lodges and Homes of Rest of the Girls’ Friendly Society,” 1907, Davidson 143, ff. 215, Administration of Girls’ Friendly Society, Lambeth Palace Library. 63 Deborah Gaitskell, “‘Christian Compounds for Girls’: Church Hostels for African Women in Johannesburg, 1907-1970,” Journal of Southern African Studies 6, no. 1 (1979): 44–69. See also Deborah Gaitskell, Judy Kimble, Moira Maconachie, and Elaine Unterhalter, “Class, Race and Gender: Domestic Workers in South Africa.” Review of African Political Economy, no. 27/28 (1983): 86–108. 64 Deborah Gaitskell, “Leadership (with fun and games) instead of domestic service: Changing African girlhood in a Johannesburg mission, 1907-1940,” in Creating Religious Childhoods in Anglo-World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800-1950, eds. Hugh Morrison and Mary Clare Martin (London: Routledge, 2017), 122-41. 65 Corrie Decker, Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). See also Corrie Decker, “Fathers, Daughters, and Institutions: Coming of Age in Mombasa’s Colonial Schools,” in Girlhood: A Global History, ed. Jennifer Helgren (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 268-88. On girlhood and womanhood in East Africa, and specifically Kenya, although in a later time period, see Lynn Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003). She also has written about the “modern girl” in South Africa in The Modern Girl Around the 28 scholars like Gaitskell and Decker, chapters five and six discuss how women were at the forefront of resisting efforts to train girls in European domesticity, recognizing the implications such training would have on African and Māori communities.

Like the South African historiography, studies of childhood in New Zealand have primarily focused on European childhood and children, although more recent work has sought to recover the experiences of Māori children.66 Most works about New Zealand

World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization: “The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa,” 96-119. Paul Ocobock also examines childhood in colonial Kenya, but he focuses on boyhood. See for instance, “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Colony: Corporal Punishment, Colonial Violence and Generational Authority in Kenya, 1897-1952,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, 45, no. 1 (2012): 29-56; and “Joy Rides for Juveniles: Vagrant Youth and Colonial Control in Nairobi, Kenya, 1901-1952,” Social History, 31, no. 1 (2006): 39-59. 66 For an overview of the scholarship on New Zealand, see Jeanine Graham, “Editorial Introduction,” New Zealand Journal of History 40, no. 1 (2006): 1-6. For an older historiographical assessment, see Mary McDougall Gordon, “Australia and New Zealand,” in Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective: An International Handbook and Research Guide, eds. N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991), 97–146. One of the earliest works on childhood in New Zealand was done by a sociologist, Dugald J. McDonald, who traced changing ideas of childhood in “Children and Young Persons in New Zealand Society,” in Families in New Zealand Society, ed. Peggy Koopman-Boyden (Wellington: Methuen, 1978), 44-56. In this article, he outlines four distinct stages of childhood, beginning with “Child is Chattel” in the 1840s to “The Child as Social Capital” in 1900 and then “Child as Psychological Being in 1945” and finally “The Child as Citizens” from the 1970s. In the same collection, see also Erik Olssen and Andree Levesque, “Towards a History of the European Family in New Zealand,” 1-25, and Margaret Orbell, “The Traditional Maori Family,” Families in New Zealand Society, ed. Peggy G. Koopman-Boyden (Wellington: Methuen, 1978), 104-19. See also Erik Olssen’s chapter, “Towards a New Society,” in The Oxford History of New Zealand, eds. W. H. Oliver and B. R. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 250-78. His study draws attention to changing attitudes and policies toward the family and, by extension, children and examines how children assumed a new importance in New Zealand society between 1890 and 1920. Other studies about childhood in New Zealand include Brian Sutton-Smith, The Games of New Zealand Children (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959) and A History of Children’s Play: New Zealand,1840–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); R. D. Arnold, “The Country Child in Later Victorian New Zealand,” Australasian Victorian Studies Association: Conference Papers 1982, eds. H. Debenham and W. Slinn (Christchurch: University of Canterbury Press, 1983), 1-15; Charlotte Bennett, “‘Now the war is over, we have something else to worry us’: New Zealand Children’s Responses to Crises, 1914-1918,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7, no. 1 (2014): 19- 41; Clare Bradford “‘My blarsted greenstone throne!’: Māori Princesses and Nationhood in New Zealand Fiction for Girls,” in Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950, eds. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 95-109; and most recently Chris Brickell, Teenagers: The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand (Auckland: The University of Auckland Press, 2017). Hugh Morrison has written numerous works on the history of childhood and education in New Zealand, focusing in particular on the Protestant missionary movement and settler children’s religious identity and formation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See Hugh Morrison, “Service, sacrifice and responsibility: Religion and Protestant 29 childhood focus on the period from the 1890s through the First World War, when children acquired a new importance in New Zealand society, symbolized by the passage of the Education Act of 1877, which instituted free, compulsory, secular education, and the passage of the Children’s Protection Act of 1890, which limited the employment of children.67 As Bronwyn Dalley, Jeanine Graham, Melanie Nolan, and Margaret Tennant have examined in their respective studies, this new conceptualization of children reflected broader concerns about racial fitness and purity, new ideas about the welfare state, and the growth and success of the women’s movement. As chapter six discusses in greater depth, during this time, girls increasingly became the focus of reform efforts to solve wide-ranging social, national, colonial, and racial problems.68 Jeanine Graham has

settler childhood in New Zealand and Canada, c. 1860-1940,” in Creating Religious Childhoods in Anglo- World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800-1950, eds. Hugh Morrison and Mary Clare Martin (London: Routledge, 2017), 241-60; Hugh Morrison, “Settler Childhood, Protestant Christianity and Emotions in Colonial New Zealand, 1880s-1920s,” in Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives, ed. Stephanie Olsen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 76-94; Hugh Morrison, “Empire, Nation, and Religion in Canadian and New Zealand Protestant Juvenile Missionary Periodicals, c. 1890-1930s: ‘Men and women the King would wish you to be,’” in Missions and Media: The Politics of Missionary Periodicals in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Felicity Jensz and Hanna Acke (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2013), 19-37; Hugh Morrison, “Representations of Māori in Presbyterian Children’s Missionary Literature, 1909-1939,” in Mana Māori and Christianity, eds. Hugh Morrison, Lachy Paterson, Brett Knowles, and Murray Rae (Wellington: Huia, 2012), 159-78. 67 Bronwyn Dalley, Family Matters: Child Welfare in Twentieth-Century New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998); Jeanine Graham, “Child Employment in Colonial New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of History 21 (1987): 62-78; Melanie Nolan, Breadwinning: New Zealand Women and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 1, “‘Women’s Work and Destiny’ and the New Zealand State”; and Margaret Tennant, Children’s Health, The Nation’s Wealth: A History of Children’s Health Camps (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, Ltd., 1994). 68 For studies on girls’ education, see for instance, Kay Morris Matthews, In Their Own Right: Women and Higher Education in New Zealand before 1945 (Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 2008). See also Margaret Tennant, “Natural Directions: Education and the Formalization of Sexual Differences in the Education System,” in Women in History: Essays on European Women in New Zealand, eds. Barbara Brookes, Charlotte Macdonald, and Margaret Tennant (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 87-100. Girls, their experiences, and shifting social constructions of womanhood, femininity, and girlhood are also discussed in Sandra Coney’s history of women in twentieth-century New Zealand: Standing in the Sunshine: A History of New Zealand Women since They Won the Vote (Auckland: Viking Penguin Books, 1993). 30 written the most extensively about children and their experiences in New Zealand and draws attention to the distinct experiences of Māori children and the enduring and diverse impact of colonization on childhood experiences in New Zealand.69 Like Graham, Lachy

Paterson and Angela Wanhalla reveal the multiplicity and complexity of Māori women’s and girls’ experiences of colonialism in He Reo Wahine: Māori Women’s Voices from the

Nineteenth Century, which brings together speeches, memoirs, petitions, letters, and testimonies of Māori women and girls.70 This dissertation, especially the sixth chapter, seeks to continue this project of recovering the experiences of Māori women and girls by highlighting their resistance to efforts to educate Māori girls and train them as domestic servants.

This plethora of scholarship on colonial childhoods and girlhoods has expanded our conception of how girls interacted with colonial power structures and, in the process, enriched our understandings of both colonialism and girlhood. However, one shortcoming of these studies is that they largely remain confined to a singular

69 Jeanine Graham, “‘My Brother and I…’: Glimpses of Childhood in our Colonial Past,” Hocken Lecture 1991 (Dunedin: University of Otago, 1992); Jeanine Graham, “‘They Were No Different…’: Probing Childhood Perceptions of Cultural Encounter in Edwardian New Zealand,” British Review of New Zealand Studies 5 (1992): 51-76; Jeanine Graham, “Looking Back over the Harbour: Reminiscences of Childhood 1900-1940,” British Review of New Zealand Studies 10 (1997): 63-88; Jeanine Graham, “Towards a History of New Zealand Childhoods,” Historical Review 48, no. 1 (2000): 89–102; and Jeanine Graham, “New Zealand,” in Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, 3 vols. (New York: Gale, 2004), 623–25. In “My Brother and I” and “They Were No Different,” Graham uses the Colonial Childhoods Oral History Project (CCOHP), which includes recorded interviews with 165 New Zealanders, the majority of whom were born before 1903, and primarily focus on the period before an individual’s fifteenth birthday. For a description of the CCOHP, see Graham, “Looking Back over the Harbour,” specifically p. 65. Participants discussed a wide range of topics relating to the culture of childhood, including home life, sibling influences, school and church activities, leisure, chores, friends, hobbies, values, clothes, parents, favorite foods, and special occasions. 70 Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla, He Reo Wāhine: Māori Women’s Voices from the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017). See also Arapera Blank, “The Role and Status of Māori Women in New Zealand Society,” in Women in New Zealand Society, eds. Phillida Bunkle and Beryl Hughes (Auckland: George Allen and Unwin, 1980), 34-51. 31 geographical area, precluding broader comparative analyses about the changes and continuities of childhood and the diverse effects of families, politics, race, gender, economics, and education on the construction and experiences of childhood.71 The history of childhood—like the broader field of history—remains largely circumscribed by national boundaries. As postcolonial scholars—like Stoler, Sen, Tony Ballantyne,

Antoinette Burton, Catherine Hall, and Frederick Cooper—have demonstrated, the relationship between Europe and its empires were mutually constitutive. Thus, the

British metropole and the colonies cannot be studied as discrete entities but must be considered more holistically as parts of integrated processes.72 This dissertation builds upon the insights of these scholars and examines girlhood in different areas of the British

Empire. Ideas and discourses about girlhood were influenced by events and debates in other parts of the empire. For example, the effects of the South African War reverberated beyond the region and generated concerns about the strength and stability of the empire, leading Britons to take a renewed interest in the education and welfare of children and

Pākehā New Zealanders to reconsider their relationships with Britain and neighboring

71 Two notable exceptions are David Pomfret’s Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015) and Kristine Alexander’s Guiding Modern Girls, which studies girl guides in different parts of the empire, namely India, Canada, and Britain. By focusing on the guide organization in both imperial and local contexts, Alexander traces how girlhood travelled across borders and reveals how factors like race, class, and religion complicated girlhood. In addition to Pomfret’s and Alexander’s works, there are edited collections, like Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History and Girlhood: A Global History, that provide transnational studies of girlhood. See also Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods (London: Routledge, 2016). 72 Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism and the British Empire (London: Palgrave, 2001); Burton, Burdens of History; Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: On the Inadequacy and Indispensability of the Nation,” After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1-26; Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1-56; and, Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects. 32

Australia, their place in the empire, and their identity as the “best British.” By employing a multi-sited framework, this dissertation draws broader comparative analyses about the diverse experiences of colonial girlhood to elucidate variations within broader processes of colonialism and better understand how class, race, and geography mediated girls’ specific roles in the colonial project and experiences of colonialism.73

The Challenges of Sources, Methodology, and Terminology

Issues of sources is one of the great challenges in the study of childhood and colonialism due to the nature of the colonial archive, which continues to reflect colonial power relations and privilege European, male, and adult voices over indigenous, female, and youth voices.74 Because of the nature of the colonial archive, works on colonial childhoods focus on the motives and operations of the colonial state and overlook the

73 In writing a “multi-sited history of the empire,” I follow in the footsteps of scholars like Tony Ballantyne. See “Introduction: Arynaism and the Web of Empire,” in Orientalism and Race: Aryanism and the British Empire (London: Palgrave, 2001), 14. See also Alexander, Guiding Modern Girls, 11. 74 For more on the difficulty of finding girls’ voices in the colonial archive, see Corinne T. Field, Tammy- Charelle Owens, Marcia Chatelain, Lakisha Simmons, Abosede George, and Rhian Keyse, “The History of Black Girlhood: Recent Innovations and Future Directions,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9, no. 3 (2016): 383–401; and, Kristine Alexander, “Can the Girl Guide Speak?: The Perils and Pleasures of Looking for Children’s Voices in Archival Research,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4, no. 1 (2012): 132-45. On the colonial archive, see Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Tony Ballantyne, “Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond),” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 102-21; Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women, Writing, House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Antoinette Burton, ed. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Liz Conor and Jane Lydon, “Double Take: Reappraising the Colonial Archive,” Journal of Australian Studies 35, no. 2 (June 2011): 137-43; Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla, “Introduction: Voice, Text and the Colonial Archive,” He Reo Wāhine: Māori Women’s Voices from the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017), 11-35; Thomas Richards, Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1996); Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives”; Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87–109; and Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. 33 experiences of children themselves, rendering children—and girls in particular—silent.

However, children were not passive in the process of colonialism but instead agents with their own views who actively shaped their environment. Therefore, while my dissertation does examine discourses about girlhood, its primary focus is on how girls understood and experienced the empire.

While the nature of the colonial archive poses a challenge to my dissertation, historians have also valuably demonstrated the need to rethink traditional research methodologies and analytical categories and to employ new sources. To overcome these inherent challenges, this dissertation employs a wide range of sources, including newspapers, colonial government records, reports of emigration societies, memoirs, correspondences, newsletters, and scrapbooks. Using a variety of sources can illuminate the multiplicity of girls’ experiences as different—and often contradictory—narratives emerge. Although girls leave few records, their voices do emerge in correspondences, in articles they wrote for children’s periodicals, and in scrapbooks. While all these sources must be approached with caution, since they are mediated by adults, genre conventions, and archiving practices, they nonetheless show how girls appropriated and reproduced wider discourses about the empire and acted as creators and transmitters of colonial knowledge. For instance, chapter three discusses scrapbooks created by members of the

GFS, and even though adult associates were involved in the creation of the scrapbooks, girls assisted with the writing of essays and in taking photographs and making the drawings for the scrapbooks, which in turn provided girls with a rare forum where they acted as experts about colonial life and instructed others about colonial history and

34 geography and everyday life. While girls contributed to the broader project of empire building, they also resisted it. Although emigration propaganda portrayed the colonies as a paradisiacal “Great Garden,” girls’ writings and actions undercut this view and instead highlighted the dangers and difficulties of colonial life. For example, chapter four discusses the cases of Eliza Hobbs and Eliza Cook, two emigrant servants in Bulawayo who, disillusioned with their working conditions and colonial life, absconded from their situations. Their letters to emigration organizers and court testimonies paint a very different picture of emigrant life than the one that appears in propaganda and expose the inconsistencies and disparities inherent in emigration programs.

Researching colonial girlhood reinforces scholars’ call to read “against the archival grain” by exploring the gaps and contradictions within the archive as well as the value of reading “along the archival grain” and, following Stoler’s suggestion, to consider what erasures or misrepresentations within the archive might reveal about the aspirations, anxieties, and epistemologies of colonial administrators.75 Although girls’ experiences rarely appear in the traditional sources of the British Empire, postcolonial and gender scholars have demonstrated the need to appreciate and investigate the moments when girls do appear in the colonial archive as holding important clues about the role and importance of girls in the imperial project. This dissertation compares the different narratives that emerge in “official” sources and private sources and interrogates these moments of disconnect and misrepresentation. For instance, as explored in chapters three and four, the narratives found in official emigration reports, which often exaggerated the

75 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 86-89. 35 success and value of their enterprise, contrast with the accounts in personal correspondences, which paint a very different picture of colonial life and the outcomes of emigration programs. Looking beyond the surface of claims in reports suggests that knowledge about and confidence in emigration programs was not as absolute as they appear at first glance and turns attention to the diffusion of information across the empire and the mobility of colonial knowledge. Through reading “along the archival grain,” these inconsistencies should not be dismissed simply as misrepresentations but as symptomatic of class, racial, and gender anxieties within the organization, suggesting that these hierarchies that seemingly underpinned the British Empire were more fragile and precarious than emigration organizers wanted to admit.

Racial identities and terminology are difficult and complex, particularly in the case of South Africa, given the diversity of racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identities and the problematic construction and employment of these terms during the colonial period. Unless a person’s ethnicity is specified, I use the term “African” to refer to people described as “native” or “Kaffir” in sources and “Coloured” to refer to multiracial people. Although South Africa as a political entity did not exist until 1910, I use the term South Africa throughout the dissertation, more as a geographic designation than a political one. This decision stems in part from the nature of the sources, which often used the term South Africa broadly, at times using it to refer to areas in Rhodesia

(present-day Zimbabwe). When it is significant and the sources do use more precise terms, I refer to the specific regions of South Africa: Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, and the Orange Free State.

36

Chapter Overview

Although the period between 1890s and 1910s marked the high point of girls’ emigration within the British Empire, these emigration efforts had a longer genealogy, and the first chapter of the dissertation traces the development of different emigration programs for girls from the first half of the nineteenth century through the opening decade of the twentieth century. It begins by examining early efforts by the Children’s Friend Society to emigrate girls to work as domestic servants in South Africa and subsequent efforts to facilitate emigration to New Zealand between the 1840s and 1860s and the shifting rationales of these programs and how they provided important precedents for later efforts.

The second part of the chapter focuses on how local circumstances within South Africa and New Zealand and broader imperial concerns led to renew attention and energy for emigration to these regions during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. By tracing the development of emigration programs over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, this chapter delineates how the evolving rationales and nature of emigration programs reflected shifting social, economic, and political concerns in the British Empire.

The second and third chapters examine efforts in Britain to transform girls into

“empire builders” and encourage emigration to the colonies. It focuses in particular on the GFS, an organization involved in the education and emigration of girls, in order to better understand how girls were taught about their role in the empire. Chapter two studies how and why the GFS became increasingly involved in the empire and the

37 development of its programs to encourage the emigration of girls. The chapter begins by situating the ideology and activities of the GFS within wider discourses about social reform, child rescue, and emigration in Britain and then proceeds to analyze the operations of the GFS and the methods it employed to facilitate the emigration of its members, who organizers hoped would work as domestic servants in settler households, thereby helping both to solve the chronic shortage of servants and also ensure a stable, self-producing British population in the empire. The third chapter explores how the GFS used various means and activities, like newsletters, “penfriend” programs, scrapbooks, and pageants, to generate interest about the empire in its members and to train them to possess the “right character.”

While organizations like the GFS has a specific vision of the role girls should play in the colonial project, girls did always adhere to prescribed scripts. This theme is explored in chapters two and three in relation to the GFS as well as chapter four, which analyzes the challenges faced by emigration programs to South Africa and New Zealand.

As chapter four details, the challenges of emigration were seemingly interminable. Lack of funding and resources, insufficient infrastructure and accommodations, and an insatiable demand for new servants were only some of the logistical problems facing organizations, and while these all posed challenges to emigration, chapter four argues that what ultimately doomed emigration programs for girls to South Africa and New Zealand were contrary goals and visions of emigration, reflected in conflicts between organizers in Britain and South Africa and New Zealand, debates over the selection of servants, disputes between organizers and employers, and strained relationships between

38 mistresses and their servants. To understand these contradictions, chapter four focuses in particular on the failed plans of two “pioneers of emigration,” Thomas Barnardo and

Maria Rye, to understand the role of girls in the colonial project and the inherent contradictions within emigration ideology and the limitations of imperial ideals.76

The lack of success of emigration programs and consequent shortage of servants in South Africa and New Zealand presented not only practical difficulties—by leaving households without servants to perform domestic labor—but also created an identity crisis among British settlers, who viewed domestic servants as necessary to preserving notions of domesticity and by extension respectability and morality. For settlers, servants were not just fulfilling a domestic responsibility but an imperial one by helping to solidify notions of Britishness and reinforce colonists’ professed social and racial superiority. Faced with a chronic servant shortage in the early twentieth century, settlers turned to training African and Māori girls to work as servants. Yet, like the plans to emigrate servant girls from Britain, these proposals also failed, and the last two chapters analyze debates over the training of African and Māori girls as servants brought racial, class, sexual, and gender anxieties to the forefront in Britain, South Africa, New Zealand, and the wider empire.

Although the “servant crisis” was the product of broader social and economic forces within the British Empire, the problem and the response to it were also shaped by local conditions. The fifth chapter focuses on the South African context and why issues

76 For this description of Barnardo, see “Migration,” For God and Country: The 66th Annual Report of Dr. Barnardo’s Homes: National Incorporated Association for the Year 1931, 28. Maria Rye was hailed as “the most successful of the priestesses of emigration.” See “Litle Emigrants,” The Times, October 29, 1869, 10. 39 of domesticity, service, masculinity, femininity, and race came to the forefront of public discourse in the wake of “black peril” scares during the early twentieth century and the consequent 1912 Commission on Assaults on Women and how these debates were intertwined with the “servant girl problem.” The sixth chapter examines contemporaneous debates in New Zealand following a proposal at the Māori Congress in

1908 to train Māori girls as domestic servants. Māori communities, particularly Māori women, opposed these efforts, recognizing that domestic service would break Māori girls’ ties with their homes and suppress their language and culture. Significantly, they articulated their opposition to these efforts by emphasizing the differences between Māori and European girlhoods and challenging the myth that the British were bearers of civilization.

These chapters return to themes examined throughout the dissertation, namely why issues surrounding girlhood and domesticity became particularly critical at certain key moments, how these discourses intersected with broader political, economic, and social debates, and the ways in which both local and imperial contexts shaped the nature of these debates. The conclusion reflects on major themes of the dissertation and their contemporary resonances as well as directions for future research. It considers parallels between the discourses about girlhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and contemporary discussions about girls’ education, child labor, and child migration and how legacies of colonialism continue to shape girls’ lives and frame the contemporary politics of girlhood.

40

CHAPTER ONE

“THE FOUNDATION OF BRITISH HOME LIFE”: DOMESTIC AND IMPERIAL CRISES AND THE EVOLUTION OF EMIGRATION PROGRAMS FOR GIRLS TO SOUTH AFRICA AND NEW ZEALAND, C. 1830-1900

In 1902, The Imperial Colonist—the official publication of the British Women’s

Emigration Association—published an article on “Child Life in South Africa,” written by

John Campbell, the son-in-law of Queen Victoria. A key proponent of child emigration,

Campbell addressed the article to “[f]riends at home, knowing how important African emigration is” and emphasized the important role of emigrant girls in fortifying British settler society in South Africa. He implored readers: “Can we do nothing in regard to girl children? There are so many here who might help to regenerate Africa, and grow up there to be powerful contributors to the welfare of that country in the future.” He envisioned children, and particularly girls, using their acquired skills not only in their positions as domestic servants but also in their future roles as wives in British settlements and mothers to white children. He saw this enterprise as advantageous not only to the empire but to children themselves and emphasized how children would benefit from the freedom and independence of the colonies, away from the squalor of British cities: “Why should not English children brought up under better conditions in Africa learn to love the open country?” Campbell concluded with the entreaty of “Send us more!”1

1 The Duke of Argyll, “Child Life in South Africa,” The Imperial Colonist 1, no. 4 (April 1902): 29-30. See also Lorne, “Planting Out State Children in South Africa,” The Nineteenth Century 47, no. 278 (April 1900): 609-11, in which he makes a similar plea and uses his experiences as Governor General of Canada (1878-83) to advocate for a comparable plan of emigration to be implemented in Southern Africa.

41

In crafting his plea for the increased emigration of girls to South Africa, Campbell used discursive tropes, most notably an emphasis on the mutual benefits of emigration for both the empire and the children themselves, that had been employed and reworked by various emigration proponents over the course of the nineteenth century. While the period in which Campbell wrote this article, broadly between the 1890s through the First

World War, marked the high point of girls’ emigration within the British Empire, these emigration efforts had a longer genealogy. This chapter traces the development of different emigration programs for girls from the first half of the nineteenth century through the opening decade of the twentieth century. It begins with a study of the

Children’s Friend Society’s emigration program to South Africa in the 1830s and subsequent efforts to facilitate emigration to New Zealand between the 1840s and 1860s and considers how these efforts provided important precedents to later programs. The chapter concludes by examining the renewed emigration efforts in the 1870s and then around the turn of the century following the conclusion of the South African War.

Demand for domestic servants in the colonies drove emigration programs for girls, but while there was a continual demand for domestic servants throughout the nineteenth century, it became a “problem” and “crisis” at key times. By tracing the development of emigration programs over the course of the nineteenth century, this chapter investigates why the emigration of girls appeared more critical at certain moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how the evolving rationales and nature of emigration programs reflected shifting social, economic, and political exigencies in the British

Empire.

42

The “White-Flesh Exportation Company”: The Children’s Friend Society and Early Emigration Efforts to the South Africa

Following the Napoleonic Wars, the British government sought to extend its military control over the recently acquired Cape Colony through large-scale British settlement.

The inauspicious results of its first attempt in 1820 would in many ways portend the challenges faced by later emigration programs. At that time, the government organized the free passage of nearly 5,000 British to Algoa in the eastern Cape, where they were given plots of land for farming. In addition to relieving some of the social and economic strain caused by unemployment and the depression in the postwar period, this program, like later efforts, sought to use emigrants—primarily young men but also a small number of women and children—as a defensive bulwark in the region and “to make the homes of

British settlers into the ramparts of an empire.”2 Emigrants would also help anglicize the region, where the 4,800 British settlers composed a minority of the approximately 42,000

European settlers, which were primarily of Dutch descent, and the African population.3

However, these emigrants found life more difficult than they anticipated. They faced poor farming conditions, including droughts, and many of the plots of land given to them were too small to live on and farm effectively. Such circumstances would pose a challenge to even the most experienced farmers, but the situation was exacerbated by the fact that nearly one-third of the settlers came from trading backgrounds and thus lacked agricultural skills. By 1823, only 438 of the settlers remained on the land given to them,

2 Isobel Eirlys Edwards, The 1820 Settlers to South Africa: A Study in British Colonial Policy (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1934), 144. See also Arthur Keppel-Jones, Philipps, 1820 Settler, His Letters (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter, 1960), 48; Margery Harper and Stephen Constantine, “Africa South of Sahara,” in Migration and Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 124. 3 William Burchell, Hints on Emigration to the Cape of Good Hope (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1819), 9 and 20.

43 with most of the settlers leaving the rural areas for towns in the region, like Port

Elizabeth, Grahamstown, and East London. This unsuccessful program caused the

British government to doubt the efficacy of emigrating settlers to anglicize the Cape and thus were more reticent to support similar programs in the subsequent decades. Instead, emigration that did occur resulted from smaller, privately financed efforts, like the

Children’s Friend Society (CFS), which orchestrated the emigration of 1,135 children to work as servants and farm laborers in South Africa, Canada, Mauritius, and Australia, with the majority—over 750 boys and girls—sent to the Cape Colony.4

The CFS emerged in the 1830s at a time when issues of child labor and child poverty acquired a new visibility and became the target of governmental intervention, both within Britain and the wider empire. The Factory Act of 1833, which prohibited the employment of children younger than nine years of age and limited the hours that children between nine and thirteen, along with the abolition of slavery transformed labor relations in Britain and South Africa respectively. Neither the Factory Acts nor the

4 The number of emigrants to South Africa is taken from G. Longmore, “Children’s Friend Society. Copy of a Report from the Governor of the Cape of Good Hope to the Secretary of the Colonies, Relative to the Condition and Treatment of the Children Sent out by the Children’s Friend Society,” 6, House of Commons Sessional Papers XXXIII.339 (1840). The number of total emigrants to all colonies is taken from The Times, November 13, 1840, 6. There are varying figures regarding the number of emigrants. In The Children’s Friend Society: Juvenile Emigrants to Western Australia, South Africa and Canada, 1834-1842 (Northbridge: Access Press, 1993), Geoff Blackburn states that 1,135 boys and girls were sent overseas by the CFS between 1832 and 1841 and that 820 went to the Cape, 232 to the Canadian Colonies, 72 to Western Australia, 2 to South Australia, and at least 5 to Mauritius (239). The Champion and Weekly Herald reported that “no less than 7800 children had been transported” in “The Children’s Friend Society and Pauper Emigration,” The Champion and Weekly Herald, February 24, 1839, 3. Elaine Hadley and Ellen Boucher estimate that the number of emigrants was 1,300. See Elaine Hadley, “Natives in a Strange Land: The Philanthropic Discourse of Juvenile Emigration in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England,” Victorian Studies 33, no. 3 (1990): 411; and Ellen Boucher, Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 44. However, most of the numbers I have found in both primary and secondary literature place the number of emigrants to South Africa more closely to 750. The majority of the emigrants were boys, since there was a greater demand for farm laborers at this time and servant positions for girls were scarcer. See Longmore, “Children’s Friend Society,” 8. To take an annual sample, it was reported that 213 boys and 37 girls emigrated in 1835 according to the “Children’s Friend Society,” The Times, March 27, 1835, 3.

44 abolition of slavery ended child labor—and there was not the expectation that it would— but instead limited a specific type of child labor and aimed to mitigate the presence of children on the streets. Such legislation sought to ensure that child, and specifically girls’, labor remained within the home. The founder of the CFS, Edward Pelham

Brenton, drew on contemporary child rescue discourses to justify the necessity and methods of the CFS’s work. Brenton details the history and purpose of the CFS in the book, The Bible and the Spade; or Captain Brenton’s Account of the Children’s Friend

Society, the title of which was an abbreviated version of Brenton’s slogan—“The Bible and spade for the boy; the Bible, broom and needle for the girl”—that reflected the cornerstones of his training program for children.5 In the book, Brenton recounts how he was compelled to establish the society in 1827 after reading about the murder of two

“little female apprentices” by a cruel and tyrannical mistress.6 For Brenton, this story highlighted not only the vulnerability of poor children but also the need to remove them from the physical and moral deficiencies associated with poverty and urban life.7 He founded the CFS’s forerunner, the Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy, as a means to improve the working classes by “training poor and destitute or partially depraved children, to such habits as would fit them for useful service in this country.”8 In

The Bible and the Spade, he emphasizes the importance of removing children before they acquired bad habits so that they were “uncontaminated by vice, not full-grown felons,

5 Jahleel Brenton, Memoir of Captain Edward Pelham Brenton, R. N., C. B. with Sketches of His Professional Life, and Exertions in the Cause of Humanity, as Connected with the “Children’s Friend Society” (London: J. Nisbet and Co., 1842), 112. 6 Edward Pelham Brenton, The Bible and Spade; Or, Captain Brenton’s Account of the ... Children’s Friend Society (London: J. Nisbet and Co, 1837), 15. This is also repeated in Jahleel Brenton, Memoir of Captain Edward Pelham Brenton, 46. 7 Edward Pelham Brenton, The Bible and Spade, 16. This is also discussed in The Times, April 16, 1835, 3. 8 Jahleel Brenton, Memoir of Captain Edward Pelham Brenton, 49.

45 disgraced with every crime” and then ensuring that they were “transplanted to a virgin soil, where they will take a deep and permanent root.”9 He characterizes poor mothers and fathers as drunken and immoral parents who neglected and abused their children and regarded them as commodities to be bought, sold, and exploited for profit. By removing children to the colonial frontiers, Brenton viewed the emigration of children as a preventative measure that would curb juvenile delinquency and consequently reduce the need for transportation, which The Times described as “one of the greatest evils the mother country or its colonies could suffer.”10 The irony of Brenton’s plan of course is that the CFS in fact treated children as commodities to be exploited and that emigration paralleled transportation in many respects, effectively forcing undesirable members of society from their home country into service in the colonies for a number of years. This fact was not lost on contemporary commentators. The London-based radical newspaper

The Champion and Weekly Herald criticized the CFS’s emigration program, describing it as just a “flowery name” for transportation.11

Organizers of the CFS initially thought of emigration from a primarily national— not imperial—viewpoint. Brenton would later claim that he originally intended to apprentice children at home in Britain but the “increase of population” in Britain made this plan impossible, so he resorted to emigration.12 However, these claims likely emerged in reaction to criticisms of the CFS’s emigration program in the late 1830s, since Brenton and his supporters had previously argued for the advantages of transporting

9 Edward Pelham Brenton, The Bible and Spade, 30. 10 The Times, November 13, 1840, 6. 11 “The Children’s Friend Society and Pauper Emigration,” The Champion and Weekly Herald, February 24, 1839, 3. See also The Times, November 13, 1840, 6. 12 “The Children’s Friend Society—Meeting at the London Tavern,” The Times, May 19, 1839, 8. See also Jahleel Brenton, Memoir of Captain Edward Pelham Brenton, 110.

46 children in the early phases of the CFS’s formation. Around the time of the CFS’s foundation in 1830, William Frend, an English clergyman and social reformer, wrote to

Lady Noel Byron, who had established an agricultural school for the poor and was the wife of George Gordon Byron, about the Brenton’s proposed emigration plans, noting:

“The idea of collecting these vagrants on board a ship and shipping them off to the colonies is by no means a bad one, for it is better that they should be there, whether instructed or not, than that they should run, as they do now, wild about the streets.”13 As revealed in Frend’s correspondence and Brenton’s writing, members of the CFS viewed emigration as a mechanism of reforming British society largely by removing potentially problematic members and negative influences.

While a variety of factors influenced the decision to emigrate children to the

Cape as opposed to other areas of the empire, the changing social and economic landscape of the region following the abolition of slavery played a decisive role.

Throughout the empire, Brenton observed that “female servants are much wanted,” and this demand only increased in the Cape with the abolition of slavery in 1834.14 Brenton’s emigration plans received support in the Cape Colony, since working-class children were seen as an inexpensive source of labor that could replace slaves and thus ease the social and economic transitions following abolition.15 Consequently, the emigration of children from Britain to the Cape Colony was seen as mutually beneficial, simultaneously relieving pressures from the growing population in British cities and fulfilling the

13 Letter from William Frend to Lady Noel Byron from Stoke Newington, December 1830, reprinted in Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan and Mary A. De Morgan, Threescore Years and Ten: Reminiscences of the Late Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan: To Which Are Added Letters to and from Her Husband, the Late Augustus De Morgan, and Others (London: R. Bentley, 1895), 195. 14 Edward Pelham Brenton, The Bible and Spade, 34-35. 15 For more on this point, see Elaine Hadley, “Natives in a Strange Land,” 413; and Edna Bradlow, “The Children’s Friend Society at the Cape of Good Hope,” Victorian Studies 27, no. 2 (1984): 155–77.

47 colony’s need for more labor.16 The Cape Colony’s other advantages included a more favorable climate than Canada—although the CFS did emigrate around 141 children to

Canada—and that it was a more efficient, less expensive alternative to the long journey to

Australia.17 Moreover, in contrast to Australia, South Africa was considered, according to Brenton, to be one of “the healthy (not penal) British colonies.”18 The region was also important to Britain’s empire. According to Brenton, “The Cape of Good Hope is our half-way house and our key to India, Colony of immense importance in every point of view.”19 Its strategic position heightened the need for control of the region and thus

British settlement.

Despite some initial support, public opinion turned against the CFS within a couple of years, as a series of cases about the mistreatment and abuse suffered by the emigrant children gained international attention. One of the most high-profile cases was that of Edward Trubshaw, a twelve-year-old boy, whose parents had consented to the send him to Stellenbosch because “they were continually being robbed by him” and also because “of his associations with bad characters.” Mistreated by his employer, Gerrit de

Wet, Trubshaw escaped after about two years in the Cape and worked his way back to

England onboard a ship. He was subsequently arrested in connection with a robbery in

16 Cape Town historian George McCall Theal described it as “one of the best schemes ever devised for benefiting alike poor English children and Cape colonists.” See Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (London: Bloomsburg Academic, 2004), 127. 17 See Thomas E. Jordan, “‘Stay and Starve, or Go and Prosper!’ Juvenile Emigration from Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century,” Social Science History 9, no. 2 (1985): 148. Charlotte Neff focuses on the CFS’s smaller-scale emigration program to Canada in “The Children’s Friend Society in Upper Canada, 1833- 1837,” Journal of Family History 32, no. 3 (July 1, 2007): 234–58. Neff estimates that around 141 children were sent to Canada between 1833 and 1836. See also Katrina Honeyman, “The Export of Children? The Children’s Friend Society and the London Parishes, 1830–42,” Childhood in the Past 5, no. 1 (2012): 96– 114. 18 Edward Brenton, “Children’s Friend Society and Parish of St. Pancras,” The Times, December 7m 1838, 6. 19 Jahleel Brenton, Memoir of Captain Edward Pelham Brenton, 110.

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London and, when brought before the magistrate, revealed his mistreatment in the Cape.

He testified about “the hardships imposed upon him by a Dutchman, to whom he and a great many others were disposed of like so many sheep at Smithfield.”20 He elaborated on how children were treated as slaves and effectively imprisoned through arrangements made by the CFS, stating that he “was half starved, and knocked about shameful” and

“worse than that…they sold me, and a good many more” for “10 guineas a piece.”21

Trubshaw’s testimony cast suspicion on the organization and undercut the CFS’s contention that the colonies provided a redemptive space full of edifying influences. In the wake of the Trubshaw case, British newspapers drew comparisons between the actions of the CFS and slavery. One article in The Times described emigration as a “new slave trade” that “was transporting them [children] into slavery solely on account of their poverty” and referred to the CFS committee members as “slave dealers” and employers as “slave-holders.”22 Cartoons, such as the Figure 1 below featuring starving, emaciated child emigrants with a Guy Fawkes figure and Dutch farmer, reinforced the perceived cruelty of the organization. The CFS also gained the notorious nomenclatures of the

“White-flesh Exportation Company” and “Children’s Kidnapping Society.”23

20 “Police,” The Times, April 2, 1839, 7. 21 “Children’s Friend Society; or, the Hackney Kidnappers,” The Champion and Weekly Herald, April 7, 1839, 5. 22 “Meeting Of The Vestry Of St. Pancras,” The Times, December 6, 1838, 6. Another comparison to CFS practices to slavery is seen in “Poor Man’s Guardian Society—Reformation of Juvenile Offenders,” The Times, April 7, 1846, 6. “Children’s Friend Society; or, the Hackney Kidnappers,” 5; “The Children’s Friend Society—Meeting at the London Tavern,” The Times, May 17, 1839, 5. The Times, November 13, 1840, 6. 23 The Times, April 29, 1839, 5; The Times, April 5, 1839, 4.

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Figure 1: “The Children’s Friend Society” Cartoon24

The CFS defended itself by claiming it was the victim of unfair, unwarranted attacks. In response to Trubshaw’s allegations, Brenton and other members of the CFS, including the Secretary of the CFS J. Sparkes, attacked Trubshaw, describing how he

“was notoriously addicted to lying and theft” and how even his mother considered him as a “a very wicked boy.”25 In her memoir, Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, a member of the managing committee of the CFS girls’ school in Chiswick, wrote disparagingly of the attacks and criticism endured by the CFS. She in particular faults parents, describing

24 “The Children’s Friend Society,” The Odd Fellow, May 11, 1839, 1. The meaning of the Guy Fawkes figure in this cartoon is not clear. In the nineteenth century, the Guy Fawkes mask was viewed a menacing figure known to scare children. For instance, in 1847, The Lancet reported a case of a two-year-old girl, “Elizabeth S.,” being scared to death after seeing a boy in a Guy Fawkes mask. See Frederick Manson, M.D., “Notes of a Case of Death from Fright,” The Lancet: A Journal of British and Foreign Medical and Chemical Science, Criticism, Literature and News 5, no. 1 (January 1847): 37. Given this context, one might surmise that the incorporation of the Guy Fawkes figure underscored the idea that the CFS was a dangerous, terrifying organization for children. 25 E. P. Brenton, “To the Secretary Of The Children’s Friend Society,” The Times, April 8, 1839, 7.

50 them as “worthless,” and the anti-aristocratic bias of politicians “who always descried a bad motive in every effort made to help the poor by persons who had a prefix to their names.”26 De Morgan, along with Brenton, would often deride parents and by extension urban working-class culture and familial structures to justify the CFS’s actions.

Although Trubshaw had no evidence to support his claims and De Morgan,

Sparkes, and Brenton tried to portray him as a figure with little credibility, his story nevertheless marked a turn in the tide of public opinion. The revelation of other cases of abuse and neglect suggested that Trubshaw’s claims were not as baseless or atypical as the CFS intimated.27 In 1839, Mary Croker alerted local magistrates that her daughter,

Louisa, had been sent to the Cape without her consent. In response, the CFS argued that they had made every attempt to find Louisa’s mother. Like in the Trubshaw case, the

CFS focused on attacking the characters of both the mother and child. Sparkes described

Louisa as “a nice little girl, although not very intelligent.”28 The CFS also claimed that

Mary, a servant, was employed at a brothel, a charge she denied. As in the case of

Trubshaw, members of the CFS defended their actions by portraying Louisa’s situation as an anomaly and also by arguing that the well-being of the child was the first priority, stating that “they had acted with the best intentions in sending the latter to the Cape of

Good Hope, where she would be far more happy and better provided for than if she remained in this country.”29 At an inquiry into the case, Brenton continued to emphasize the altruistic nature of his work, emphasizing that he acted not only in the best interests of

26 De Morgan and De Morgan, Threescore Years and Ten, 200 and 202. 27 The Times also reported on the cases of Henry Wright, Samuel Palmer, and a boy by the name of Carr. See also the case of fifteen-year-old Sarah Piper in Longmore, “Children’s Friend Society,” 15. 28 “Police,” The Times, January 21, 1839, 7. 29 “Parish Of St. Martin-In-The-Fields,” The Times, February 22, 1839, 6. See also “Police, The Times, January 18, 1839, 7.

51 the girl but in the best interests of the poor relief system, describing Louisa as a drain on the poor law system and posing the question: “Was it to be endured that the rate payers were continually to be burdened with her?”30 In the wake of negative publicity, the CFS offered to emigrate Mary Croker to the Cape to be reunited with her daughter free of expense, but Mary refused stating that she would not leave the country where she “was bred and born” and would not be “transported.”31 It was reported that Louisa was ultimately restored to her mother.32 Like in the Trubshaw case, CFS organizers resorted to attacking the lifestyles of the working class to justify their tactics and the necessity of removing and emigrating children to other parts of the empire.

Like Trubshaw and Croker, twelve-year-old Harriet Polack was sent to the Cape by the CFS, in her case to work as a servant in the household of Lieutenant Charles

Peshall of the Cape Mounted Rifle Corps and his wife. Sent without the consent of her mother, Polack sustained extensive physical and sexual abuse during her time in the

Cape.33 Polack was handcuffed, flogged, imprisoned in the Corps guardroom, and then forced to march thirteen miles to the gaol in Grahamstown for allegedly stealing a pound and a half of salt. An investigation into the incident in 1840 shed light on the Polack’s sustained abuse by her master and mistress, which included being starved, forced to walk outside without shoes and proper clothing, locked in the outhouse for a day, tied to a post, having her hair shaved, and enduring multiple floggings daily.34 The investigation also

30 “Police,” The Times, January 21, 1839, 7. 31 Ibid. 32 “Conduct of Parish Officers,” The Champion and Weekly Herald, February 24, 1839, 3. 33 “The Children’s Friend Society,” The Times, June 4, 1840, 3. Harriet’s surname is spelled both Polack and Pollack. The Graham’s Town Journal, which reported most extensively on the trial, used Polack, while The Times spelled the last name Pollack. 34 “Resident Magistrate’s Court,” Graham’s Town Journal, February 31, 1840, 3. See also “Reply of Colonel Somerset,” Graham’s Town Journal, March 12, 1840, 3.

52 uncovered sexual assault by an acquaintance of the Peshalls, George Darley Lardner.35

Polack’s experiences revealed how girls’ positions as servants left them vulnerable to attacks, sexual and physical, by their employers.36 Unlike Trubshaw, who had little evidence to support his claims about mistreatment, Polack and her testimony was corroborated by a range of witnesses, including soldiers, the Peshalls’ neighbors, a doctor, and fellow servants. One of these servants, a “Hottentot” man, described how he was ordered to flog her or would be flogged himself.37 The CFS responded to the report by employing the usual strategy of emphasizing how Polack’s abuse was a rare anomaly and that “they used every human means to guard against evils.”38 In a report at the annual meeting of the CFS, the chairman Earl Grosvenor described the Peshalls’ conduct as “most reprehensible” but assured its members that “the lieutenant had been prosecuted for his cruelty and the child rescued” and was moved to a new home where she was

“doing well.”39 Following this report, Earl Grosvenor proceeded to explain how the conclusion of Polack’s case meant that “[t]he gloom which had shadowed the society was over, and he rejoiced that the atmosphere was clear.”40 His comments regarding Polack’s treatment revealed that the chief concern for the CFS was not the welfare of its emigrants but the reputation of the organization.

35 “Resident Magistrate’s Court,” Graham’s Town Journal, February 13, 1840, 3. 36 The precarious position of emigrant servants is also highlighted in the experiences of Jane Green, a sixteen-year-old orphan who was sent to Western Australia in December 1837 and apprenticed as a domestic servant at the home of Captain Whitfield and his wife. In July 1840, Jane was charged with murder following the death of her illegitimate child. Whitfield, who was one of twenty-eight CFS commissioners to look after the interests of the juvenile emigrants in the area, was named as the child’s father. Although found not guilty of murder, Jane was sentenced to two years imprisonment for concealing the birth of a child. This case is detailed in “The Trial of the Girl Jane Green,” in Blackburn’s The Children’s Friend Society, 153-79. 37 “Resident Magistrate’s Court, Graham’s Town” Graham’s Town Journal, January 30, 1840, 3; and “Resident Magistrate’s Court,” Graham’s Town Journal, February 6, 1840, 3. 38 “The Children’s Friend Society,” The Times, June 4, 1840, 3. 39 Ibid. Peshall was fined £50. 40 Ibid.

53

The case of Harriet Polack drew attention not only to her horrible treatment, which the Graham’s Town Journal described as “most scandalous,” but also to her exposure to “contamination” in the colonies.41 Unlike Trubshaw, whose character was impugned by the CFS, Polack was portrayed as a model servant and girl by witnesses at the Peshalls’ trial. According to the witnesses, Polack “did everything she [was] told” and was “trustworthy” and a “good worker.”42 The CFS had claimed that emigration to the colonies had “beneficial effects,” relieving the suffering of caused by poverty and crime, and gave emigrants the opportunity “to secure their future successes in life,” but

Polack’s experiences undercut this ennobling rhetoric.43 At the CFS’s annual meeting in

1839, a year before Polack’s mistreatment came to light, members agreed that

“paramount care should be taken in all cases, and particularly in colonies where slavery exists, that there should not be the remotest possibility that any of them should be consigned to a state of captivity.”44 Despite stressing the necessity for careful supervision of children at the Cape, Polack’s experiences seemed to substantiate criticisms that the CFS a “slave-dealer” in the “new slave trade,” with a cook employed at the Peshalls’ house observed that “[s]he had never seen a black child treated as Harriet was.”45 While Brenton had initially argued that the colonies could have a redeeming influence on the young emigrants by removing them from the damaging influences of

41 “The Small Pox,” Graham’s Town Journal, February 6, 1840, 2; “Resident Magistrate’s Court,” Graham’s Town Journal, January 16, 1840, 3. 42 “Resident Magistrate’s Court, Graham’s Town” Graham’s Town Journal, January 30, 1840, 3; “Resident Magistrate’s Court,” Graham’s Town Journal, February 13, 1840, 3. 43 “Children’s Friend Society,” The Times, April 16, 1835, 3; Edward Pelham Brenton, The Bible and Spade, 103. 44 “The Children’s Friend Society—Meeting at the London Tavern,” The Times, May 19, 1839, 8. 45 “Resident Magistrate’s Court, Graham’s Town” Graham’s Town Journal, January 30, 1840, 3.

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British urban life, Polack’s experience instead demonstrated the opposite case and seemed to confirm fears of an “evil contagion” that corrupted children in the colonies.46

The treatment of Polack heightened anxieties about the de facto enslavement of children and also raised concerns about the disruption of racial and gender boundaries. In recounting Polack’s ordeal, The Graham’s Town Journal noted her close proximity to

“Hottentot” servants and, during her imprisonment, how she was guarded by “five or six men of the 91st Regiment, and some Hottentot Soldiers. There was no other female but herself there,” commenting that “[n]othing whatever could warrant her exposure to the contamination of the guardroom.” 47 This anxiety about Polack’s time in the guardroom in part reflected concerns about the transgression of the separate spheres with the removal of Polack from the feminine domestic sphere to the hyper-masculine sphere of the military camp, with the presence of African soldiers further underscoring the danger of this transgression. Coverage of Polack’s case coincided with a growing number of reports about relationships between British girls and African men. For instance, the report of an official inquiry by Sir George Napier, the Cape Governor, into the CFS and allegations of its mistreatment of children, published in 1840, addressed concerns about the children interacting with African servants by arguing that the emancipation of slaves had mitigated the problem and effectively re-established racial boundaries since children no longer “associated” with them and “thereby became unsettled and perhaps demoralized.”48 Similar fears were echoed in an article in The Times, which reported that

“[t]hese children are fast losing both their religion and language, and gradually, I fear,

46 The Times, April 2, 1842, 4. 47 “Resident Magistrate’s Court,” Graham’s Town Journal, January 16, 1840, 3. 48 Longmore, “Children’s Friend Society,” 8.

55 falling into the immoral habits and customs of the coloured population.”49 When the CFS eventually disbanded in 1841, The Times reported that one of the factors behind the dissolution was that “young English girls at the Cape are found to have formed the most improper connexion with male negroes.”50 As discussed in chapters four and five, this fear over the demoralization of child emigrants and the forgetting of their racial privilege would emerge again with emigration programs around the turn of the century.

Polack’s case brought to light concerns about the intermixing of British children not only with African communities but also with Dutch settlers. Over the course of the

Peshalls’ trial, it was revealed that Polack spoke Dutch, a reference that reflected broader concerns that emigrant children were losing their British national and racial identity.51

Anxiety about children’s identities also emerges in the report into the CFS commissioned by Napier, which contains a frequent references to failures to provide emigrants with proper education and religious and moral instruction, finding that many emigrants rarely attended church or went to a Dutch, not English church, and were unable to read or write and in some cases lost “all knowledge of English,” even the ability to speak the language.52 Napier’s report reflected problems inherent in the emigration program.

Instead of the emigrants “civilizing” the colony and making it more British, a process of reverse colonization occurred with children absorbing the “undesirable” qualities of the

Dutch and African communities and, in the eyes of the British, becoming more uncivilized. Polack’s trial revealed deeply rooted anxieties about emigrants’ British

49 The Times, February 18, 1842, 4. 50 The Times, April 2, 1842, 4. 51 “Resident Magistrate’s Court, Graham’s Town” Graham’s Town Journal, January 30, 1840, 3. 52 Longmore, “Children’s Friend Society,” 13.

56 identity and its potential loss in the colonies, which would continue to trouble emigration organizers through the twentieth century, without ever being fully resolved.53

In May 1841, the members of the CFS voted unanimously to end the organization.54 Brenton’s unexpected death in 1839, which the CFS blamed on the barrage of public attacks that equated Brenton to a kidnapper, left the organization without a leader.55 Moreover, revelations about the treatment of Trubshaw, Croker, and

Polack had turned tide of public opinion against the CFS and its emigration programs.56

Following the dissolution of the CFS, attempts to encourage emigration to South Africa continued, although on a more limited scale. The Colonial Land and Emigration

Commission restricted the emigration of girls to the Cape by stipulating that no single women under eighteen would be accepted unless traveling with family, a relative, or an employer.57 Renewed attempts to emigrate girls and young women in the late 1850s and

1860s suffered further setbacks due to limited resources, including the lack of financial assistance programs and accommodations for newly arrived emigrants, as well as instability due to conflicts, including the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879 and the two South

African Wars in 1880-81 and 1899-1902.58

53 See Ellen Boucher, Empire’s Children. 54 The Times, May 26, 1841, 5. 55 “The Children’s Friend Society—Meeting at the London Tavern,” The Champion and Weekly Herald, May 19, 1839, 8. 56 “Police,” The Times, May 7, 1839, 7. See also The Times, December 9, 1841, 4. 57 Harriet Ward, The Cape and the Kaffirs: A Diary of Five Years’ Residence in Kaffirland (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851), 18. See also Cecille Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820-1839 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 75. It is not clear if this stipulation was a direct reaction to the CFS’s abuses, but such precedents likely played a role. 58 In Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land, Cecille Swaisland notes that Sir George Grey sought to increase “stream of immigration” that would contribute “to the development of the resources of the colony and to the promotion of its material prosperity” (80).

57

Despite its limited success in achieving its objective and its relatively short lifespan, the CFS provided an important blueprint for subsequent programs, including Dr.

Barnardo’s Homes, William Booth’s Salvation Army, Dr. Stephenson’s Children’s

Homes, Kingsley Fairbridge’s Child Emigration Society (later the Fairbridge Society), the Catholic Emigration Association, Maria Rye’s Home for the Emigration of Destitute

Little Girls, and the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS).59 As the next sections discuss, these later emigration organizations and proponents employed similar discourses as the CFS.

Like the CFS, later programs employed child rescue discourses to justify the removal and emigration of children, contrasting poverty and urban life with the supposedly more wholesome environment of the colonies, placing blame on parental neglect, and emphasizing that such actions were done in the best interests of the child. These later programs would also build upon the methods used by the CFS, including the establishment of institutions, or “homes,” in Britain to train children “in the habits of obedience” and the necessary domestic and agricultural skills and then sending the children in parties under the supervision of adults to colonies, where members of the society would arrange their placements.60 Although these later attempts at emigrating children tried to improve upon the CFS’s work and avoid some of the same pitfalls that doomed its efforts, they continued to face similar challenges in enacting their programs, as discussed in more detail in chapter four. The CFS’s demise demonstrated the power of public opinion, and later emigration societies, including the GFS and especially

Barnardo’s, became skilled at using textual and visual media to garner support and

59 Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada, and Australia, 1850-1915 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), 112. 60 See De Morgan and De Morgan, Threescore Years and Ten, 198.

58 portray their work in a positive light, but despite such efforts, they still faced criticism following high-profile cases of abuse, neglect, and “philanthropic kidnapping.”61 These later programs attempted to implement more thorough vetting processes for both emigrants and prospective employers to prevent situations like those that occurred to

Trubshaw, Croker, and Polack from recurring, but these safeguards did not stop children from being placed in abusive, exploitative positions or prevent “undesirable” children being sent to the colonies. In developing the CFS, Brenton struggled to balance various personal, national, and imperial objectives, and the tension between these different objectives continued to plague later programs.

“If Only Men Emigrate, There is No Colonization”: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Emigration Efforts to New Zealand

While interest in child emigration to South Africa waned in the 1840s, the idea gained new currency with respect to New Zealand during this period. Like programs in South

Africa, early emigration programs for children in New Zealand emerged from both local

61 On Barnardo’s use of media, see Chapter 1 “‘A Little Waif of London, Rescued from the Streets’: Melodrama and Popular Representations of Poor Children,” in Lydia Murdoch’s Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London, Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006). See also Valerie Lloyd and Gillian Wagner, The Camera and Dr. Barnardo (London: The National Portrait Gallery, 1974); and Seth Koven, “Dr Barnardo’s ‘Artistic Fictions’: Photography, Sexuality and the Ragged Child in Victorian London,” Radical History Review 69 (1997): 6-45. On the court cases, see for instance Letter from Mrs Giles as to Departure of Her Daughter (Mary Ann Giles) to Canada, Dr. Barnardo’s, October 30, 1893, HO 144/310/B6159, Home Office: Registered Papers, Supplementary, The National Archives; “The Queen v. Barnardo Gossage’s Case,” January 25, 1890, HO 144/310/B6159, Home Office: Registered Papers, Supplementary, The National Archives; “Dr. Barnardo Again,” The Personal Rights Journal, October 1889, 70; “‘Before My Judges:’ Being a Verbatim Report of Dr. Barnardo’s Speech on the Gossage Case, Delivered on Friday, 24th, and Monday, 27th January, 1890, Before Lord Esher, Master of the Rolls, and Lord Justice Fry, Judges of the Court of Appeal, with Summary of Their Lordships’ Decision, as Given by the Timer” (London: John F. Shaw & Co., n.d.), A/FWA/C/DIO/7, Dr. Barnardo’s Homes: Correspondences and Papers, Family Welfare Archive (Formerly Charity Organisation Society), London Metropolitan Archives. On “philanthropic kidnapping,” see “Philanthropic Kidnapping,” The Journal, February 15, 1886, 9-10.

59 and broader imperial circumstances. John Sinclair, the Archdeacon of Middlesex and

Chairman of the Kensington Poor Law Board, put forward a plan for the emigration of orphans and other destitute children to New Zealand, which in many ways echoed

Brenton’s plans. Sinclair, like Brenton, argued emigration would help remedy problems caused by poverty. Writing to the Colonial Secretary, Henry Grey, Earl Grey, Sinclair emphasized the mutual benefits of the system and argued that his plan of “parish colonization” would prevent children from continually returning to the poor house and

“would promote the welfare not only of this country and of the colonies, but of the young

Emigrants themselves.”62 Like the CFS, this proposed plan intended to establish an industrial school for children from the ages of nine to twelve who would be given board and lodging and an education until they were old enough to work and provide for themselves.63 Once children were deemed ready, usually around the age of fifteen, they would be employed as laborers. Girls would either marry or go into service, doing “the duties of the dairy” or making clothes for the “other inmates.”64 In his letter to Grey,

Sinclair argued that this training and careful supervision would remedy any dangers caused by long voyage and help make young emigrants good future citizens: “It appears to me indispensable that a fit place should be provided in the Colony for the reception of the young Emigrants, that the unavoidable contamination of the long voyage should be removed by subsequent religious teaching and moral discipline.”65 At these institutions,

62 John Sinclair to Sir, 29 October 1849, MH 19/22, Ministry of Health—Local Government Board and Predecessors: Correspondence with Government Offices. Emigration, The National Archives. 63 John Sinclair to Sir, 27 December 1849, MH 19/22, Ministry of Health—Local Government Board and Predecessors: Correspondence with Government Offices. Emigration, The National Archives. 64 “Archdeacon Sinclair on Parish Colonization,” Sidney’s Emigrant’s Journal 1, no. 3 (October 19, 1848), 18. 65 John Sinclair to Sir, December 27, 1849.

60 young emigrants would receive not only practical training but also—and perhaps more importantly—a moral education to ensure that they retained a sense of Britishness.

As in the case of South Africa, interest in emigration to New Zealand reflected the region’s changing position and importance within the British Empire. Two factors influenced this shift: first, the New Zealand Company, formed in 1839, sought to attract migrants to build up English settlement in the region using a variety of methods; and second, the Treaty of Waitangi asserted British sovereignty over New Zealand and gave

British emigrants legal rights as citizens of New Zealand.66 These developments increased New Zealand’s strategic importance and led to more concerted efforts to facilitate emigration and settlement. At the time of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, the Māori population, estimated to be around 80,000, vastly outnumbered the approximately 2,000 European settlers.67 Colonial officials worried about this imbalance, but the nature of the population distribution intensified concerns. In Colonial Policy of

Lord John Russell’s Administration, Grey expresses concerns over the relatively small number of settlers and notes that their scattered nature made them harder to defend against any attacks by the Māori. Writing in 1853, Grey estimated that there were around

20,000 European settlers and that “[t]he wide intervals between these European Colonies are occupied by a native race, estimated to consist of one hundred and twenty (120,000) souls, a very large proportion of whom are males, capable of bearing arms.”68 As

66 See for instance the New Zealand Company Poster, Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed September 19, 2018, http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/ephemera/2096/new-zealand-company-poster. 67 “Māori and European population numbers, 1840–1881,” Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, published June 20, 2012, https://teara.govt.nz/en/graph/36364/Maori-and-european-population-numbers- 1840-1881. As discussed in chapter six, despite this alarm, the Māori population was in reality rapidly declining by the mid-century, and by 1858, the European population would outnumber the Māori. 68 Henry George Grey, The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration, vol. 2 (London: R. Bentley, 1853), 117.

61 reflected in Grey’s writing, the scattered nature of the population hindered communication and made it more difficult to protect settlers. Moreover, the Māori had a distinct military advantage over the settlers, the majority of whom had not been trained in the use of arms. The Treaty and subsequent New Zealand Wars intensified these anxieties about settlers’ security.69 Fears about the threat of Māori rebellion and attacks on settlers coincided with general fears of rebellion in the British Empire during the

1840s and 1850s. In Colonial Policy, Grey alludes to this broader context and describes how a chief concern governing colonial policy was the avoidance of a situation like the long-running Cape Frontier Wars (also known as the Xhosa Wars) in South Africa. He describes how a conflict with the Māoris had the potential to be “more arduous, since the

New Zealanders would have been yet more formidable enemies than the Kafirs, and the scene of contest so much more remote.”70 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who served as director of the New Zealand Company between 1840 and 1849, expressed similar concerns about the tactical challenges of controlling New Zealand, declaring it “a miserable mess” and “the seat of a deadly feud between colonist and native, of a costly military occupation in order to maintain British authority at all, and of the wildest experiments in colonial government.”71 Given these concerns about the precariousness of

British settlements, the building up of British communities, particularly through the

69 The New Zealand Wars was a series of conflicts between New Zealand government forces and the Māori that took place from the 1840s and the 1870s over land. British settlers wanted to expand their settlement, especially in the North Island, but faced resistance from the Māori, who refused to sell their land. It is estimated that around 500 members of the British and colonial forces and 2,000 Māori died in the conflict. For more on the New Zealand Wars, see James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Penguin, 1986); Matthew Wright, Two Peoples, One Land: The New Zealand Wars (Auckland: Reed, 2006); and, Vincent O’Malley, The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000 (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2016). 70 Ibid., 137. 71 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization (London: J. Parker, 1849), 7.

62 migration of women and children, became a central tenet in colonial defense policies.

Migration acted as the most efficient way to build up the population, because as historian

James Belich has observed, “the ship beat the womb as a route of entry.”72 For this reason, colonial officials, like Wakefield, favored the emigration of families and young women.

This idea of female emigrants as a defensive bulwark would frequently re-emerge, especially during the South African War and the First World War. The emigration of young women and children fulfilled both a strategic function and had demographic, social, cultural, and economic implications. The centrality of female emigration to colonial societies and the economy forms a key theme in Wakefield’s A View of the Art of

Colonization, in which he famously wrote “A Colony that is not attractive to women, is an unattractive colony.”73 In his treatise, Wakefield alludes to widespread unease over population imbalances throughout the empire and how emigration was viewed as a way to redress these gender disparities:

[I]n colonization, women have a part so important that all depends on their participation in the work. If only men emigrate, there is no colonization; if only a few women emigrate in proportion to the men, the colonization is slow and most unsatisfactory in other respects: an equal emigration of the sexes is one essential condition of the best colonization.74

As reflected by Wakefield, migration served as a key way for women to contribute to the empire. As discussed in the introduction, this notion of “surplus” women and emigration

72 James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 278. 73 Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization, 58 and 156. 74 Ibid., 155.

63 as an effective remedy to deal with this perceived problem proved remarkably durable throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.75

Through migration, women helped not only to redress population imbalances within colonial settlements but also to ensure the continuation and maintenance of

Britishness in the colonies. Wakefield articulates this point in the same section in A View of the Art of Colonization:

In colonizing, the woman’s participation must begin with the man’s first thought about emigrating, and must extend to nearly all arrangements he has to make, and the things he has to do, from the moment of contemplating a departure from the family home till the domestic party shall be comfortably housed in the new country. The influence of women in this matter is even greater, one may say, than that of the men.76

Colonization necessitated the creation of British communities, which could not occur without British women and the establishment of British homes. He advocated a system of family colonization, since family groups and women would help ensure the stability and respectability of British settlements. The necessity of creating British communities forms a persistent concern for Wakefield. Earlier in A View of the Colonization, he describes the influence of community life on an individual and how disconnection from a one’s home threatens a person’s identity. He explains how “[y]oung gentlemen who go out there [to the colonies], are apt to forget their home manners, or to prefer those of the colony,” which Wakefield viewed as causing “people to fall to a state of barbarism.”77

75 For more on the myth of redundant women and migration, see Katie Pickles, “Pink Cheeked and Surplus: Single British Women’s Inter-War Migration to New Zealand,” in Shifting Centres: Women and Migration in New Zealand History, eds. Lyndon Fraser and Katie Pickles (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002), 64. See also Charlotte Macdonald, A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1990), 13; and, Carmen Faymonville, “‘Waste Not, Want Not’: Even Redundant Women Have Their Uses,” in Imperial Objects: Essays on Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience, ed. Rita S. Krandis (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), 64-84. 76 Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization, 155. 77 Ibid., 152, 433.

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Through emigration, a person “must adapt his habits of thinking and acting to the change; and in do this he ceases to be an Englishman.”78 Employing a child-parent metaphor,

Wakefield observes that “[o]ur colonies are not only slow in growing to maturity, but grow up unlike the mother-country, and acquire a national character almost necessarily opposed to that of the parent state.”79 As discussed earlier in relation to Harriet Polack and the CFS, Wakefield was not alone in this concern about the loss of emigrants’ British identity in the colonies and the potential deleterious effect of colonial life. For Wakefield and others, the solution to these myriad problems was the emigration of young women, who would help populate New Zealand and create a civilized “home,” helping to ensure the maintenance of British identity in the colonies.

The discourses and strategems employed by Wakefield and Grey, which echoed those of the CFS, proved remarkably adaptable and resilient over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Emigration continued to be seen as an effective means of strengthening imperial bonds. Speaking in 1908, the Bishop of

Auckland espoused the mutual benefits of emigration, emphasizing that its advantages extended beyond Britain to the colonies:

the real solution [to poverty] is to get the young people to go from England to the Colonies, where all can make a living, and their individuality can have a chance of expressing itself. The constant influx of fresh blood into the young nations is good for the British Empire, and good for old England too. No bond is so strong as the bond of sentiment…The ties of sentiment are in no danger of being broken.80

His speech presents a holistic view of the empire, in which the needs of the metropole and the needs of the colonies were one and the same and in which all—Britain, the

78 Ibid., 111-12. 79 Ibid., 116. 80 “Annual Meeting of the BWEA,” The Imperial Colonist 6, no 77 (May 1908): 5.

65 colonies, and the emigrants themselves—equally benefited from emigration. The use of terms like “bond” and “ties of sentiment” evoked feelings of a shared identity and created an image of the empire as a family, with emigration as a means of cementing relationships within this large, disparate community.

By describing the colonies and particularly New Zealand as a place “where all can make a living, and their individuality can have a chance of expressing itself,” the Bishop of Auckland built upon a common trope in emigration propaganda, and one that was employed by Brenton eighty years earlier, specifically that the colonies provided a better place for children to develop. Changing children’s surroundings was seen as having the power to undo any defects associated with poverty. Such ideas are captured in an article in the New Zealand newspaper, Daily Southern Cross, which described both the long- term and short-term effects of moving to the colonies: “One of the many inducements that a father has to emigrate is that he will benefit his children. And so he does. What a glorious change for the town child.” The article proceeds to compare the advantages of city and country life: “He is, of the country, less subject to influences both of good and evil; he has not to the same extent the changes of education, neither has he of temptation.

He has not the opportunity of so great an association with others; but often this is to his benefit.” The article proceeds to compare colonial children to children of the “old country” and argues that colonial children have “more moral courage.”81 The article suggests that the colonies provided a place where emigrants could more fully realize their potential. Such rationales were of course not unique to New Zealand. For instance, Mrs.

Johnston, a British woman living in Salisbury, Rhodesia, wrote about her new servant

81 “Colonial Sketches. Colonial Childhoods.,” Daily Southern Cross, December 16, 1864, 5.

66 and observed that the girl “has been trained in household matters and cooking on purpose to give her such knowledge as will fit her for Colonial Life—which seems such a much happier one for a young girl, than the more cramped life of a poor girl in England.”82

Like the Bishop of Auckland and the Daily Southern Cross, Johnston portrayed the colonies as a more wholesome environment, free from the problems and potential contamination of urban life in Britain.

As examined below and in the next chapters, despite shifting imperial demands and changing social conditions, organizations would continue to frame women’s contribution to the empire in terms of their domestic and maternal roles and use similar tropes about the strategic necessity of creating British homes and communities, rebalancing population disparities, and the benefits of colonial life to underline the necessity of female emigration. As the next section discusses, the need to emigrate young women and children would receive a new urgency in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially as more girls and young women would shun domestic service for new job opportunities, which in turn would intensify the demand for servants.

“The Paradise of Servants”: Uppity Servants, the Servant Crisis, and Emigration to New Zealand, 1870s-1880s

The 1870s marked a period of “great migration” to New Zealand. Emigration during this period increased due to a variety of circumstances, some that affected the empire generally and some singular to New Zealand. New Zealand provincial governments, specifically those in Otago and Canterbury, devised different assisted passage schemes to

82 Mrs. Johnston to Miss Henderson, February 26 [1903], D3287/67/11/61, Correspondence to, from and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

67 attract more settlers, and especially female settlers, to balance the large number of men arriving following the discovery of gold in the 1860s. In the early 1860s the Otago provincial government offered assisted passages to “eligible SINGLE FEMALES above

Twelve and not exceeding Thirty-Five Years of Age; who must be sober, industrious and of good moral character.”83 More than half of the 190,827 emigrants who arrived in New

Zealand in the 1870s received assistance from the New Zealand government.84 The economic depression in the 1870s gave a new impetus to child rescue efforts in Britain and the view that emigration could relieve some of the social strain caused by unemployment and poverty.85 Technological advancements, especially transportation and communication improvements, facilitated emigration and drew disparate parts of the empire closer together. The invention of steam-powered ships made voyages faster, so that by 1903, the average journey to New Zealand and Australia was about fifty days, half of the length of the voyage around the mid-nineteenth century.86 As the Māori population declined and Māori-Pākehā conflicts subsided, emigrants were no longer cast primarily as strategic, defensive bulwarks but instead as cultural safeguards.

83 Macdonald, A Woman of Good Character, 1. Emphasis in the original. 84 “Annual immigration, 1871-99,” Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated August 1, 2015, https://teara.govt.nz/en/graph/2114/annual-immigration-1871-99. 100,679 emigrants received assistance according to Margery Harper and Stephen Constantine, “New Zealand,” in Migration and Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 86. See also Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1981). See also Jock Phillips and Terry Hearn, Settlers: New Zealand Immigrants from England, Ireland & Scotland 1880-1945 (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 2008). 85 Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 47. 86 Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners to Poor Law Commissioners, March 14, 1848, MH 19/22, Ministry of Health—Local Government Board and Predecessors: Correspondence with Government Offices. Emigration, The National Archives. “Combined Circulars on Canada, Australasia, and the South African Colonies” (Emigrants’ Information Office, July 1903), D3287/94/8/1-1, Printed Reports of the British Women’s Emigration Association, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

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Emigration discourses during this period used similar tropes as earlier periods, specifically the notion of emigration as a means to redress the problems of poverty and population imbalances, but there was a greater emphasis on emigration as a way to supply the colonies with much needed labor. The attraction of better paying, less labor- intensive, and more respectable jobs for girls and women made a good servant hard to find and even harder to keep and created a servant crisis that affected all parts of the

British Empire and the settler colonies in particular.87 In addition to new employment opportunities, increasing education and literacy rates led more girls and women to leave domestic service and at a faster rate than the number entering service, creating a constant demand for servants and a strain on emigration societies. This situation led the Hawera

& Normanby Star to quip that New Zealand women “have to keep a continual watch on the ‘want’ column in the newspapers, for fear your hired girl will leave you suddenly.”88

Like in Britain, girls in New Zealand eschewed the menial status and long hours of service for employmen in hotels, shops, and factories, especially following the development of the dress-making and woolen industries in New Zealand.89 Edward

Tregear, the secretary of the Department of Labour in New Zealand, lamented this trend, stating: “the absorption of too large a proportion of the female population into factories and workshops is fatal to our future domestic comfort.” He expressed concern not only

87 To give some quantitative perspective on this problem, Night and Day, the official newsletter of Barnardo’s Homes, stated that there were forty applications for every child in their care to be a domestic servant. See “‘The Bane of My Life’: The Servant Girl Problem,” Night and Day 26, no. 224 (April 1903), 34. 88 “Chinese Servants,” Hawera & Normanby Star, April 27, 1906, 2. 89 There was a stronger movement for union formation among New Zealand servants. See for instance, “Mary Ann’s Demands. New Zealand Servants’ Union. Ultimatum to the Employers,” Rand Daily Mail, February 19, 1907, 7; “Mistress and Maid. The Domestic Workers’ Union.,” Free Lance, September 29, 1906, 6. See also Charlotte Macdonald, “Why Was There No Answer to the ‘Servant Problem’? Paid Domestic Work and the Making of a White New Zealand, 1840s-1950s,” The New Zealand Journal of History 51, no. 1 (April 2017): 18.

69 for middle-class and upper-class homes left without domestic servants but also for working-class households, since women would no longer have the opportunity to receive domestic training and gain the proper skills and experience to manage a home: “A woman who has from the age of fourteen years closely applied herself to some particular branch of manufacture cannot acquire the experience necessary for a housewife, nor be able to manage a home with satisfactory results to her husband or safety to the health of little children.” Factory girls further threatened to upset the social and domestic conventions by continuing to work in factories even after they were married, since “her knowledge of a handicraft would induce or compel her to persevere in working at it after marriage.”90 As evidenced by Tregear’s testimony, the dearth of domestic servants reflected broader economic and social shifts and had widespread ramifications that extended beyond the home.

For these reasons, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, New Zealand struggled to keep up with the high demand for domestic servants. In the 1870s alone, approximately 20,000 girls and young women arrived in New Zealand to work as domestic servants. Writing in 1880, Elizabeth

Long—who had travelled to New Zealand to find a position as a governess—described the immense demand for servants, referring to it as “the paradise of servants.”91

90 “Domestic Servants,” Report of the Department of Labour, New Zealand, Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives of New Zealand, Session II—1897, ix. Tregear also wrote The Aryan Māori, which is discussed more in chapter six. 91 Quoted in Patricia Clarke, “Following Miss Rye to New Zealand,” in The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies, 1862-1882 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 172. This echoed Anthony Trollope, who wrote the following during his 1872 visit to New Zealand: “In such a town as Christchurch, a girl of 20 or 23 can earn from 30 to 40 pounds a year and a comfortable home with no oppressive hard work; and if she be well conducted and of decent appearance she is sure to get a husband who can keep a house over her head. For such persons New Zealand is a paradise.” See Australia and New Zealand, vol. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1876), 87-88.

70

Advertisements regularly appeared in British newspapers with the proclamation that

“New Zealand wants thousands of Domestic Servants.”92 The demand for servants was so extreme that it was frequently commented on by observers from outside of New

Zealand. For instance, The Bulawayo Chronicle observed that “[o]wing to the acuteness of the domestic servant problem in New Zealand, the Labour Department, it is stated, is besieged with inquiries whenever a Home steamer is reported, and if there are any possible servants on board they are snapped up before they have time to land.”93

Similarly, The Imperial Colonist commented on the “great and increasing demand” for domestic servants, adding “[i]f it is thought that there is a servant difficulty in England, that feeling is twenty times greater in New Zealand.”94

Settlers attempted to meet the demand by employing working-class girls in New

Zealand but found them unamenable and thus expressed a preference for servants “back

Home.” The high demand for servants, the possibilities of other employment, and the more flexible class structure in New Zealand gave servants greater leverage, much to the consternation of settler women. For example, Jessie Campbell, writing from Wanganui, confessed to her sister that “[s]ervants are a great curse here…Once here she found out her own value. I can assure you I have enough to do with her, she neither can nor will work, the best I can say of her is that she is kind to the children.”95 Louisa Rose also found it difficult to adapt to the more mobile social structure and the differences in the

92 “New Zealand Domestic Servants,” Illustrated London News, July 31, 1915, 157. 93 “Servant Problem in New Zealand,” The Bulawayo Chronicle, May 26, 1906. 94 W. R. Cowey, “Impressions Formed on a Tour Round the World,” The Imperial Colonist 3, no. 34 (October 1904): 111. 95 Jessie Campbell to her sister Isabella, Wanganui, September 9, 1845. Reprinted in My Heart Writes What My Heart Dictates: The Unsettled Lives of Women in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand as Revealed to Sisters, Family and Friends, eds. Frances Porter and Charlotte MacDonald with Tui MacDonald (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996), 156.

71 status and treatment of domestic servants, writing to her sister: “they are on such a different footing here with their masters and mistresses to what they are at home.”96

Frustrations with the perceived incompetence and impertinence of servants form a constant theme in the writings of Lady Mary Ann Broome, a journalist who wrote extensively about her experiences living South Africa, New Zealand, and other parts of the empire in various works, including Colonial Memories, A Year’s Housekeeping in

South Africa, and Station Life in New Zealand. She portrays servants as unreliable, emotionally unstable, immature, ignorant, and lovesick. For instance, in Colonial

Memories, she writes: “These girls, as well as their predecessors and successors, were a continual mystery to me, and I never could understand why they became servants at all.

Not one of them ever had the faintest idea of what duties she had to perform or how to perform them.”97 She details how problems posed by servants were especially acute in

New Zealand, referring to her maids as “the chief, if not the only, real worry of my happy

New Zealand life.”98 The figure of the “uppity servant” with their unreasonable expectations and perceived self-importance, independence, pretentiousness, and impertinence was the frequent subject of social commentary and satire.99

96 Louisa Rose to her sister Constance, Christchurch, December 1, 1855. Reprinted in My Hand Writes What My Heart Dictates, 92. 97 Lady Broome, Colonial Memories (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1904), 7. Born in Jamaica, Lady Mary Anne Broome married Frederick Broome, a colonial administrator who served as the Colonial Secretary of Natal (1875-1878), and spent time in India, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, the West Indies, and Britain. She was a correspondent for The Times and published numerous works about her life in the colonies. 98 Lady Broome, Colonial Memories, 6. 99 See for instance the cartoon, “Colonial Servant-galism,” Punch, or the Wellington Charivari, 1868, Ref: J-065-001. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, accessed September 19, 2018, https://natlib.govt.nz/records/22355923. See also “Out of the Mouth of Servants,” Bulawayo Chronicle, March 18, 1922, 12. This article claimed that girls looked for any reason to leave service and listed some of the more ludicrous reasons, including that a bookish servant left because she was upset her mistress did not know book information.

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Despite the great need for servants in New Zealand, especially ones from “back

Home,” initiatives to emigrate domestic servants faced financial and logistical difficulties. An economic depression during the 1870s and 1880s led to a slowdown in migration and reduced government support for migration programs. Between 1891 and

1903, the government offered no assistance for emigrant servants.100 As discussed below and in chapter six, the government would renew assisted emigration programs following the South African War due to a confluence of circumstances, including a stronger economy but also growing racial anxieties, especially about Asian immigrants, and a desire to strengthen imperial ties.

“The Weakest Link in the Imperial Chain”: Renewed Emigration Efforts at the Turn of the Century

Demand for domestic servants also remained high in South Africa, particularly in the

1880s and 1890s. Like in New Zealand, the increased demand was in part driven by the reconfiguration of the economic and social relations following the discovery of gold in

Witwaterand in 1886. The development of the mining industries led to greater settlement, the growth of urban areas, and a new wealthy elite made up of mine owners and managers, all of which in turn created a greater demand for domestic servants. No longer viewed as simply a rest stop on the route to India, South Africa gained a new prominence in the British Empire, with gold and mining supporting the imperial economy. Although conflicts in the 1880s and 1890s posed an obstacle to enacting more systematic emigration plans, the conclusion of the South African War led to the

100 Macdonald, A Woman of Good Character, v.

73 resumption of these plans and more concerted and organized efforts to encourage the emigration of girls and young women.

The South African War not only led to dramatic social and political changes in the region but throughout the empire. An imperial conflict, the war involved troops from throughout the empire, including nearly 6,500 soldiers from New Zealand.101 Tellingly, despite a willingness to fight for the British, Māori solders were forbidden from enlisting by the British government on the grounds that “native” troops should not partake in a

“white man’s war.” Māori soldiers did find a way to participate in the conflict, often by enlisting under anglicized names, but the British prohibition reflected fears that the inclusion of non-white troops would undermine notions of British prestige and civilization.102 The involvement of troops from various parts of the empire strengthened the bonds of empire, making abstract notions of an imperial family and community more tangible. The South African War marked the first time New Zealand soldiers participated in an oversees conflict, and the experience made New Zealanders more cognizant of its place in the broader British imperial system, a theme discussed in more depth in chapter six. On the one hand, the war marked the height of imperial fervor, leading to an outpouring of imperial patriotism, expressed in celebrations, songs, and literature.103 On the other hand, the prolonged nature of the conflict led to disillusionment and called into question ideas about British supremacy, not only in South Africa but throughout the

101 John Crawford and Ian McGibbon, eds., One Flag, One Queen, One Tongue: New Zealand, the British Empire and the South African War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003). 102 Such opposition to their inclusion was expressed for instance by the editor of the Evening Post wrote: “If the white races of the world are to employ yellow and black troops in their wars with one another, the end of European civilisation would be within measurable distance.” See “Maoris at the Front,” Evening Post, December 27, 1900, 4. 103 See for example John M. MacKenzie Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); and Popular Imperialism and the Military: 1850-1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).

74 empire. In Britain, the war shone a light on the unfitness of soldiers, with over a third of recruits being rejected on physical grounds.104 The declining fertility rate among white women in Britain, South Africa, and New Zealand seemed to substantiate concerns about racial decline and degeneration. The brutalities of the war—epitomized in the establishment of British concentration camps for Dutch women and children—called into question the “civilizing mission” of imperialism and the colonists’ self-professed identities as bearers of civilization and in turn highlighted the need for the “civilizing influence” of women.105 The conflict exacerbated racial tensions and reshaped race relations in South Africa and also in New Zealand, which grew increasingly apprehensive of the seeming threat posed by Asian immigrants. Building up settler societies, especially through emigration, gained a new urgency, since emigrants would serve as both a defensive and racial bulwark.

In South Africa, the period following the end of the war in 1902 and the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 represented a crucial period when the people of

South Africa were going through a process of recovery, reconciliation, and redefinition.

For political figures in South Africa and Britain, the conclusion of the South African War marked a singular moment to remake South African society, and the emigration of girls formed the cornerstone of postwar reconstruction plans. Alfred Milner, the High

Commissioner in South Africa (1897-1905)—along with Cecil Rhodes, the Prime

Minister of the Cape Colony (1890-96), and Joseph Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for the Colonies (1895-1903)—initiated a plan to stabilize and anglicize the region,

104 Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop Journal 5, no. 1 (1978): 15. 105 See S. E. Duff’s conclusion of Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860-1895, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 138-44.

75 particularly the Dutch-controlled Transvaal, and sought to transform South Africa into “a self-governing white community” that was supported by—but not dependent on—a

“governed black labour force.”106 To achieve this vision, Milner pioneered different schemes and incentives to encourage the emigration of girls, young women, and families to South Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century. The conclusion of the South

African War thus represented a unique opportunity to implement and extend emigration programs in the region. Milner created departments, like the “Women’s Immigration

Department” in the Transvaal, and worked with organizations, including the United

British Women’s Emigration Association (UWBEA), that already had systems of free passage and accommodations in place.107

As in earlier periods, racial anxieties drove these renewed emigration efforts. The goal of settlers in Southern Africa was to produce a stable, self-producing, and secure

British population in the region, but the demographic imbalances betrayed a different reality. Viewing Southern Africa as “the weakest link in the Imperial chain,” Milner believed that the region would not be secure for Britain’s empire unless British settlers outnumbered the Chinese and Indian immigrants and especially the Dutch, who

106 Quoted in Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, “Lord Milner and the South African State,” History Workshop 8 (Autumn 1979): 52. Marks and Trapido focus on contextualizing Milner and placing him within the pervasive ideology of social imperialism. For more extensive on Milner’s emigration policies, see Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land, 41; and, Charles van Onselen, “The Witches of Suburbia: Domestic service on the Witwatersrand, 1890-1914,” Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914, Vol. 2: New Nineveh (New York: Longman, 1982), 11 and 33. As van Onselen notes, demand for domestic servants was highest under Milner’s reconstruction plan. 107 The names of emigration societies frequently changed. In 1901, the UBWEA became the British Women’s Emigration Association (BWEA). The South African Colonisation Society (SACS), an offshoot of the UWBEA, was formed in 1902 with the purpose of assisting emigration to South Africa in particular. The forerunner of the SACS was the South African Expansion Scheme Committee (SAX). Following the First World War in December 1919, the BWEA, the Colonial Intelligence League (founded in 1912), and the SACS amalgamated to become the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women (SOSBW).

76 composed approximately three-fifths of the European population in South Africa.108

According to the census (see table 1), the African population outnumbered white settlers nearly four to one.109 The need for British girl emigrants was especially acute in South

Africa, a region where the African population outnumbered European settlers nearly four to one. In addition to this ethnic and racial imbalance, European men outnumbered

European women by a ratio of nearly three to two, and the declining birth rate among white women in Southern Africa and the rising numbers of mixed-race children—which

Milner feared would only increase after the war since, due to the lack of British women, ex-servicemen would marry Afrikaner or African women—further increased anxieties about British society in colony.110

Male Female Total Percentage European or White 635,117 481,689 1,116,806 21.6% African 1,739,277 1,755,827 3,495,104 67.5% Mixed/Other Races 307,841 256,073 563,914 10.9% Total 2,682,235 2,493,589 5,175,824 100%

Table 1: Population of South Africa by Race and Gender, 1904111

108 Stanley H. Palmer, “The Power of Numbers: Settler and Native in Ireland, America, and South Africa, 1600-1900,” Transatlantic History, eds. Steven G. Reinhardt, Dennis Reinhartz, and William Hardy MacNeil (Arlington: University of Texas, 2006), 130. 109 As numerous scholars have demonstrated, these census categories are highly problematic. These categories were constantly changing and being redefined and in the process becoming more racialized. The census of South Africa in the early twentieth century perfectly demonstrates this point. In later censuses, Indians and Asians formed a separate racial category in the census but are classified as “Coloured” in the 1911 census. For a greater discussion of the employment of racial classifications in the South African census, see Akil Kokayi Khalfani, Tukufu Zuberi, Sulaiman Bah, and Pali J. Lehohla, “Population Statistics,” in The Demography of South Africa, eds. Amson Sibanda, Tukufu Zuberi, and Eric O Udjo (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), 9-17. The census and racial classifications served a key part of colonial governance and a technology of colonial rule. Benedict Anderson analyzes the census and its relation to colonial ordering and imagining in the South Asian context in “Census, Map, Museum,” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 164-70. For a discussion of the colonial census in the African context, see Karl Ittmann, Dennis D. Cordell, and Gregory H. Maddox, eds., The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). 110 Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land, 41. 111 These numbers are from Census 1911: Preliminary Returns of Census Taken on 7th May 1911 (Pretoria: The Government Printers and Stationary Office, 1911), 2.

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These racial anxieties form a pervasive theme in the extensive correspondence between Milner and his friend, Philip Lyttleton Gell, who served as director (1899-1917) and later chairman (1917-20) and president (1920-23) of the British South Africa

Company, which acquired and administered territory in Southern Africa. Gell shared

Milner’s fears about the growing number of mixed-race children, writing to him: “There will be no stable settlement on the land without women-kind, and if we do not provide the women, our British settlers will either fail or breed half-castes or half-Boers.”112 He reiterated these anxieties in another letter, underscoring about the necessity to “secure the immigration of their womankind. There will be a big surplus of Boer women, and if we don’t look to it, our soldiers will marry them, and breed traitors.”113 These heightened fears about British ethnic and racial supremacy and by extension imperial security provided a persuasive rationale for the necessity of greater emigration to counterbalance these demographic trends. Like Wakefield and Sinclair a half a century earlier, Gell and

Milner feared that distance would weaken colonists’ bonds with Britain, causing them to lose their British identity. In one letter to Milner, Gell expressed this concern and how the emigration of girls and young women could provide a potential remedy: “We do not want to stimulate a population which is not British in sentiment and traditions, and whoever begets the children, the mother settles their Religion and principles and sentiments.”114 As reflected in Gell’s letter, women were seen to provide a vital link

112 P. L. Gell to Alfred Milner, June 1, 1900, D3287/MIL/1/561-2, Correspondence mostly between P.L. Gell and Alfred Milner (cr. Viscount Milner), Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 113 P. L. Gell, to Alfred Milner, May 4, 1900, D3287/MIL/1/556, Correspondence mostly between P.L. Gell and Alfred Milner (cr. Viscount Milner), Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. Emphasis in the original. 114 Gell to Milner, June 1, 1900.

78 between Britain and South Africa.115 The emigration of women and girls could reinforce the bond through their maternal influence and by re-creating British society abroad. In a later letter to Milner, Gell further elaborated on the importance of the emigration of girls and young women and described how they would provide “the foundation of British homelife and the establishment of the British race upon the soil.”116 This correspondence and its emphasis on the “establishment of the British race” underscores how girl emigrants were increasingly viewed as a means to recreate British society in the colonies.

The re-making of South Africa required not just people and political, social, or economic changes but a reformation of “the homelife.”

As in earlier periods, emigration was framed as a woman’s duty and one of the utmost importance. The South African War—and specifically the prolonged nature of the conflict and its brutalities—created anxieties over the morality and supremacy of the

British in South Africa and demonstrated the need for the “civilizing influence” of women. Emigration propaganda called upon “women of every class…to take their part in the work of restoration and consolidation” of South Africa and emphasized the importance of domesticity and domestic life in this undertaking.117 This civilizing

115 Gell was not alone in this view. See also the article “Soldiers’ Wives and South Africa,” which places women’s emigration on a comparable level with men’s efforts during the South African War: “Our men have won South Africa for the Empire…Our women must help in no less important work of linking the old country and the new colony together.” See Violet Brooke-Hunt, “Soldiers’ Wives and South Africa,” The Imperial Colonist, 1, no. 3 (March 1902): 20, D3287/74/4/1-4, Correspondence from and to Miss Bickmore in Salisbury, South Africa regarding reports back to South Africa Colonisation Society, Rhodesian Committee, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 116 P. L. Gell to Alfred Milner, January 23, 1903, D3287/MIL/1/597-1, Correspondence mostly between P.L. Gell and Alfred Milner (cr. Viscount Milner), Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 117 Louisa M. Knightley et. al., “Women Settlers in South Africa,” pamphlet by the United Britishwomen’s Emigration Association on the South African Emigration Expansion Scheme, [c. 1901], 1, D3287/74/1/1, Correspondence to Mrs Lyttelton Gell regarding South African Expansion Committee, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. See also “Rhodesia for the Settler,” The Imperial Colonist 6, no. 76 (April 1908): 4; Mrs. Chapin, “The Ethics of Emigration,” The Imperial Colonist 2, no. 8 (August

79 influence would reverberate beyond British society to indigenous populations, a point noted in a speech delivered at the South African Colonization Society by journalist

Richard Jebb and reprinted in The Imperial Colonist:

More important still is the consideration that the native population in South Africa, a population emerging from barbarism, is much influenced by the type of European civilization and the type of European settler with which they come in contact. The desire of this Society is that the ideas and habits of the native population shall be moulded, as far as possible, by contact with the very best type of our race and of our civilization.118

Two important themes emerge in Jebb’s speech. The first is how servants were viewed as guards of the “interior frontiers” of the home, protecting British settlers from

“barbarism” and regulating any interaction with the African population.119 The second theme, and one that will be discussed in more detail in chapters five and six, is how

British colonizers blamed indigenous communities’ lack of domesticity as the cause of their degraded, immoral state, which in turn served as a powerful justification for imperial intervention. As reflected in these articles, the remaking of South African society required not only increased settlement and building up the colonies physically through the movement of people, but a broader social reformation that began with the home and through the transference of British ways of life, making the home an integral site of the “civilizing mission.”120 These articles reflect the belief that reforming

1903): 88-92. Chapin argued that “bearers to England’s best spirit” were needed in “Africa to quicken the nation” (91). This speech was read at the Emigration Conference for the Girls’ Friendly Society. 118 “Annual Meeting of the South African Colonization Society” The Imperial Colonist 7 no. 91 (July 1909): 101. Jebb wrote extensively on imperial matters, including Studies in Colonial Nationalism (1905), The Imperial Conference (1911), The Britannic Question (1913), The Empire in Eclipse (1926), and His Britannic Majesty (1935). 119 See Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (1992): 514-51; see also Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 120 As Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel observe in Child, Nation, Race, and Empire, “child rescue, as an imperial endeavor, involved the transportation of ideas as well as children” (124).

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“homelife” functioned as the first step to reforming South African society and an integral part of the “civilizing mission.” The home served as a microcosm of the state and society. Therefore, reaffirming British identity within wider South Africa began in the home with the reassertion of the domestic virtues of purity, order, cleanliness,

Christianity, and respectability. The idea that women’s most effective means to participate in empire building was through their maternal and domestic roles remained firmly entrenched at the turn of the twentieth century. As wives, mothers, and servants, girls and women provided a necessary contribution to the colonial project and a bulwark against threats to British imperial security and sovereignty. Girls’ feminine “civilizing influence” counteracted the potentially contaminating and degenerative effects of colonial environments. Women and girls, especially servants, would help maintain a well-ordered household and uphold notions of cleanliness, purity, and virtue, both within the home and in the wider colonial society. Servants in particular were seen as vital to recreating British domesticity—and by extension British society—in the colonies. For settlers, servants—and specifically white servants—were not just fulfilling a domestic responsibility but an imperial one by helping fortify notions of Britishness and colonists’ professed racial superiority.

Conclusion

The rhetoric and structures of emigration programs remained durable over the course of the century, as did the problems faced by emigration organizations. Many of the problems that plagued early programs, like the CFS, would reemerge in later iterations, a theme explored in greater depth in the fourth chapter. Despite efforts to implement more

81 thorough selection processes, “undesirable” girls were still sent to the colonies, and girls continued to be placed in abusive, exploitative positions. Debates over the “right type” of emigrant and tensions among personal, national, and imperial objectives of emigration persisted. As explored in the next chapters, emigration efforts by the GFS attempted to avert some of these issues by shifting away from more institutionally based emigration programs, like the CFS and Barnardo’s, but it nonetheless struggled to overcome the inherent tensions and problems within emigration ideology.

As this chapter has traced, over the course of the nineteenth century, the rationales driving emigration programs shifted between an emphasis on the economic imperative of emigration to its military, strategic function, but these various justifications were similarly rooted in racial anxieties and concerns about the futurity of British settler societies and the British Empire more broadly. The evolving rationales reflected changing national and imperial exigencies, and the perceived need became more pronounced at key times—specifically in the wake of economic and social changes following the abolition of slavery in Southern Africa in the 1830s; the consolidation of

British sovereignty in New Zealand during the mid-century; the “great migration” period in New Zealand during the 1870s; and in the context of reconstruction efforts following the South African War at the turn of the century, a theme returned to in chapter four. The reverberations of the South African War extended beyond the region, and the next chapter analyzes the evolution of emigration discourses in Britain during this period.

Emigrant girls had an important function in the colonial project by assisting in the reformation of colonial home life, strengthening the bonds of empire, fulfilling labor needs, and building up British settler societies. Having established the tremendous need

82 for girl emigrants, the question then became how to fill this need. How could one transform girls into “bricks for empire building” and convince them to emigrate?121 The next two chapters investigate these questions by focusing on one organization involved in the education and emigration of girls in the British Empire, the GFS, and how it sought to teach girls about the empire and their roles in the colonial project.

121 Wagner, Children of the Empire, 165.

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CHAPTER TWO

“THE OPPORTUNITY FOR EMPIRE BUILDING”: THE GIRLS’ FRIENDLY SOCIETY, MIGRATION, AND THE FASHIONING OF A COLONIAL GIRLHOOD

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, The Girls’ Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the

Girls’ Friendly Society published an obituary to the late monarch. The obituary describes how the Queen was mourned by her worldwide empire and even “simple natives,” but it contains few references to the diplomatic or political accomplishments of Queen Victoria, whose sixty-three-year reign saw the expansion of the British Empire and the transformation of Britain into a global power as well as significant social, economic, and technological changes. Instead, the obituary focuses on her role as a mother and a model of virtue and morality for girls to emulate. In particular, it emphasizes Victoria’s “purity of family life” and the “purity of her court” and notes that her “innocency” provides a

“message to all the girls of her land.”1 The obituary also highlights Victoria’s

“whiteness,” both in racial and moral terms, describing “the white stainlessness of her life” and referring to her as “their Great White Mother.” 2 This obituary not only provides a revealing glimpse into the iconography surrounding Queen Victoria and

Victorian ideals of femininity and morality but also encapsulates the foundational principles of the organization behind The Girls’ Quarterly’s obituary—the Girls’

Friendly Society (GFS).

1 L. M., “Queen Victoria,” The Girls’ Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the Girls’ Friendly Society 26 (April 1901), 122-23. 2 Ibid., 122.

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In studies of imperial youth culture and emigration, the GFS represents something of an anomaly, in that it cannot neatly be categorized as either an imperial youth organization or an emigration society. Instead it functioned as a hybrid of both, and this expansive purpose in turn makes the organization an especially valuable subject for understanding the construction and experiences of girlhood in the British Empire. The foundation of the GFS in 1875 coincided with the growth of child rescue and emigration societies. However, as discussed in more detail below, the GFS sought to distinguish itself from other emigration societies and operated differently than traditional programs, notably in that it did not target workhouse or orphan girls and institutionalize them, as

Rye and Barnardo did, but instead acted more as a youth organization with middle-class women providing guidance and instruction to working-class girls.3 Nevertheless, the

GFS did employ many of the same techniques and discourses used by other child rescue and emigration organizations, including emphasizing the need to remove girls from the perceived dangers of poverty and urban life to the more wholesome environment of the colonies. As discussed in the previous chapter, such justifications received a new impetus at the turn of the century, especially in the wake of the South African War, which called into question beliefs about imperial security and racial supremacy and underscored the need for greater emigration to build up settler societies.

The expansion of the GFS in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and its growing interest in the empire and emigration coincided with growth of the popular

3 A child was often considered an orphan even if one parent was alive. For more on the definitions of orphans, particularly in relation to child rescue and Barnardo’s, see Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London, Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), specifically chapter 3, “The Parents of ‘Nobody’s Children’: Family Backgrounds and the Causes of Poverty.”

85 imperialism, and the activities of GFS in many ways mirrored those of other popular imperial organizations of the period, including the Girl Guides, the Victoria League, and the Primrose League. Although rich scholarship exists about organizations, relatively little research has been done on the GFS. Exceptions include the work of Brian Harrison and Julia Bush, who have examined the GFS in relation to the revival of conservativism in late nineteenth-century Britain and women’s philanthropic and entrepreneurial participation in the empire respectively.4 While their studies primarily focus on the organization’s operations in Britain and examine it within the context of women’s growing social and political involvement in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, this chapter and the following one examine the GFS’s engagement with and activities in the empire in greater depth to illuminate how youth organizations and emigration societies sought to mold girls into fulfilling certain roles in the colonial project. This chapter begins by situating the GFS within broader social purity, child rescue, maternalist, and imperialist movements in the late Victorian era. It then proceeds to examine why the

GFS expanded its vision and outreach beyond Britain to the empire and the implementation of its migration programs. The following chapter describes its various

4 Brian Harrison wrote one of the first scholarly studies about the GFS. See “For Church, Queen, and Family: The Girls’ Friendly Society 1874-1920,” Past and Present 61 (November 1972): 107-38. Julia Bush has examined the GFS in a more imperial context and specifically written about the organization in relation to the growth of women’s imperial involvement and its connection to other female imperial societies. See Bush, “Edwardian Ladies and the ‘Race’ Dimensions of British Imperialism,” Women’s Studies International Forum 21, no. 3 (1998): 277-89. She also discusses the GFS in Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (London: Continuum, 1999). Another article that focuses on the GFS in Britain and specifically its relationship to social purity movements is Vivienne Richmond, “‘It Is Not a Society for Human Beings but for Virgins’: The Girls’ Friendly Society Membership Eligibility Dispute 1875-1936,” Journal of Historical Sociology 20, no. 3 (September 2007): 304-27. Ray Fabes and Alison Skinner also examine the GFS’s work in Britain through a more focused study of its activities in the parish of Spilsby in Lincolnshire to consider what the GFS can elucidate about the work of young women and girls in rural areas in the latter half of the nineteenth century. See “The Girls’ Friendly Society and the Development of Rural Youth Work 1850-1900,” in Essays in the History of Community and Youth Work, eds. Ruth Gilchrist, Tony Jeffs, and Jean Spence (Leicester: Youth Work Press, 2001), 64-73.

86 imperial education initiatives and the challenges faced by the organization in the colonies.

“To Reform the Habits of Our Working Classes”: Discourses of Child Rescue and Imperial Motherhood in Victorian Britain and the Formation of the GFS

Mary Elizabeth Townsend founded the GFS to assist unmarried girls who moved from rural areas to cities and large towns, usually for the purposes of work. Townsend and her fellow seventy-five “founding associates” envisioned the GFS as an “organisation to hold out a friendly hand” to girls by providing transient girls with accommodations and fulfilling the supportive, educative, and protective roles of families for girls separated from their homes and communities.5 As mentioned in the introduction and first chapter, the rise of juvenile delinquency, poverty, and working-class unrest combined with the growth of Social Darwinism and the emergence of new imperial competitors in the late nineteenth century generated anxieties not only about social order but civilizational and racial degeneration.6 These anxieties led to greater intervention into children’s lives, embodied in the Education Act of 1870. The institution of compulsory schooling

5 Kathleen M. Townsend, Some Memories of Mrs. Townsend: Foundress of the Girls’ Friendly Society (London: GFS Central Council, 1923), 10. Some Memories of Mrs. Townsend, specifically the chapters on “Work for Children” and “Shedfield Lodge and Honington Hall,” provides information about the impetus of the organization. According to the memoir, Townsend’s decision to for the GFS stemmed from deeply religious nature as well as her experiences as a young orphan and childless wife. Although she lost both parents by the age of six, Townsend lived relatively comfortably and was cared for by her two aunts. However, she developed an interest in the working-class girls after observing girls from her village travel to London who “never returned nor were heard of again” (10). 6 For more on child welfare and child rescue efforts, see Caroline Rowan, “Child Welfare and the Working-Class Family,” in Crises in the British State, 1880-1930, eds. Mary Langan and Bill Schwarz (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 226-39; Seth Koven, “Borderlands: Women, Voluntary Action, and Child Welfare in Britain, 1840 to 1914” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare State, eds. Seth Koven and Sonya Michael (New York: Routledge, 1993), 94-135; and Hugh Cunningham, “Saving the Children, c. 1830-1920” in Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (New York: Longman, 1995), 134-62.

87 stipulated in the Education Act aimed to both “civilize” children, particularly poor children, and teach them the necessary skills to keep Britain internationally competitive.

Schools acted as the primary vehicle for the transmission of patriotism and pro-imperial ideologies and values and reinforced gender, racial, and class hierarchies and socialized children to fulfill certain roles according to their social status, by emphasizing middle- class ideals and instilling the values of punctuality, discipline, and obedience.7 Yet these lessons did not stop in the classroom, as the messages were reinforced by youth organizations, like the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and the GFS. The decades around the turn of the century witnessed the proliferation of youth organizations that aimed to transform children into future empire builders by teaching boys military skills, improving both boys’ and girls’ physical fitness, and teaching girls homecraft and mothercraft skills.8 In imparting these skills, youth organizations, like schools, sought to instill middle-class values in working-class children. Like other youth organizations, the GFS reinforced class hierarchies, which was reflected in the structure and membership categories of the organization. Upper-class and middle-class women served as

“associates” and supervised working-class girls, who were categorized as either

7 Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), especially p. 26. 8 Sandra Coney, “‘Our Best Always’: The Girl Citizen Movement in the 1920s,” in Standing in the Sunshine: A History of New Zealand Women since They Won the Vote (Auckland: Viking, 1993), 12. John O. Springhall, “The Boy Scouts, Class and Militarism in Relation to British Youth Movements, 1908- 1930.” International Review of Social History 16 (1971): 125-58. J. O. Springhall, “Lord Meath, Youth, and Empire,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 4 (1970): 97-111. Kristine Alexander, Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017). Michelle Smith, “Be(ing) Prepared: Girl Guides, Colonial Life, and National Strength,” in Limina 12 (2006): 52-63. Tammy M. Proctor, “(Uni)Forming Youth: Girl Guides and Boy Scouts in Britain, 1908- 1939,” History Workshop Journal 45 (Spring 1998): 103-34. John M. MacKenzie, “Imperial Propaganda and Extra-Curricular Activities,” in Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 228-52; Allen Warren, “Citizens of the Empire: Baden-Powell, Scouts and Guides, and an imperial ideal,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 232-56.

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“candidates”—if younger than twelve years old—or “members”—after reaching twelve to fourteen years of age.9 As discussed more below, the GFS justified their work by claiming that city life and working conditions left girls exposed to a range of dangers, but this rationale was used to control working-class girls’ actions and behaviors and helped strengthen middle-class women’s own position and power.10

Schools and youth organizations not only sought to affirm class and racial hierarchies but also to impart gendered behavioral prescriptions and, as exemplified in the obituary to Queen Victoria, encourage girls to become models of domestic efficiency by emphasizing their “natural biological” and maternal roles.11 As Anna Davin argues in

“Imperialism and Motherhood,” women—and specifically their maternal ignorance and neglect—were held responsible for low birth rates and children’s poor health, leading to a new focus on “mothercraft” and efforts to teach women proper maternal and domestic skills.12 Britons increasingly viewed women, in their capacities as mothers, as a safeguard against degeneration and vital to the defense of the empire, nation, and race.

For instance, in the GFS newsletter, The Empire and Beyond, an article on “The Future

9 For more on the membership categories and structure of the GFS, see “The G.F.S. and Its Candidates,” in The Book of the GFS: What It Is and What It Does (June 1920), 47–52. Girls could remain members of the GFS until they married or until the age of twenty-five or twenty-six. Once girls married, they were no longer allowed to be “members” but could potentially continue to participate in the GFS as “married helpers” or “associates.” 10 For more on this point, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Durham: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). See also Margaret Tennant, “‘Magdalens and Moral Imbeciles’: Women’s Homes in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand,” Women’s Studies International Forum 9, no. 5 (1986): 492. 11 Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race, 174; For more information on girls’ education, see Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Boston: Broadway House, 1981); Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1982); Joan N. Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (London: Croom Helm, 1980); Joyce Senders Pedersen, “Schoolmistresses and Headmistresses: Elites and Education in Nineteenth- Century England,” Journal of British Studies 15, no. 1 (1975): 135-162. 12 Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop Journal 5, no. 1 (1978): 26. As Davin notes, blaming mothers provided an easy solution to the complex issues raised by the unfitness of soldiers and allowed the government to avoid addressing more systemic problems, like poverty.

89 and Unity of Empire” reprinted a speech by George Parkin—a self-described “evangelist of Empire”—that “explain[ed] how women and girls can influence the history of our

British Empire.” Encouraging girls to go out to the colonies, Parkin entreated: “These vast spaces are to be filled up with homes. You cannot have a real home without a woman in it, and it is the quality of woman who goes into their homes which will settle the future of these countries…The Christian character of women is the greatest security they can have, not only for themselves, but for our nation and race.”13 Like Parkin and other emigration proponents, including Edward Wakefield and Alfred Milner, GFS organizers framed domesticity and motherhood as the primary means for women to participate in the empire.

Through its various activities and newsletters, the GFS aimed to instill girls with domestic and moral virtues, including a sense of duty and responsibility. The emphasis on these values is starkly illustrated in an installment of “Stories of Brave Girls” that recounted the story of Alice Ayres, a servant who awoke on the night of April 24, 1885 to find that her employers’ house was on fire.14 Alice alerted the family, and even though

“[s]afety was then within Alice’s reach,” “duty came first.” Instead of escaping the fire, she remained in the house where “the flames were leaping” and rescued three girls under

13 Edith Marion Welch, “The Future and Unity of Empire,” The Empire and Beyond (Anniversary Week 1916), 8. On his claim to be an “evangelist of Empire,” see G. R. Parkin, “Empire Day,” Cheltenham Ladies’ College Magazine, no. 60 (Spring 1909), 173. The Earl of Meath, founder of the Empire Day Movement, described the importance of women’s maternal role to the imperial project in a speech, declaring, “My appeal to British mothers is to consider themselves the trustees of the Empire in training of their children.” See Earl of Meath, Brabazon Potpourri (London: Hutchinson, 1928), 68-69. 14 The article in Our Letter does not mention that Ayres’s employers were also her sister and brother-in-law and the children she saved were her nieces. As John Price notes in his study of the legacy of Ayers, this detail was often selectively excluded in retellings of the story. For more on the various iterations of her story, see John Price, “Heroism in Everyday Life: The Watts Memorial for Heroic Self Sacrifice,” History Workshop Journal 63 (2007): 254–278; and John Price, Everyday Heroism: Victorian Constructions of the Heroic Civilian (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

90 her care.15 When it came “to save herself,” the “strain and exhaustion had done their work” and she fell while trying to leap out of the window and later died. Instead of commenting on the horrific aspects of the situation, the article praises Alice’s “unselfish courage” and “calm dutifulness” and encourages its readers to follow the “wonderful” example of Alice, advising its readers: “For girls are not only meant to be pure, gentle, obedient, and orderly. They are to be brave and honourable as well, content to prove their courage with the little things in life.”16 Like Joan of Arc, who was the subject of the first installment of “Stories of Brave Girls” and discussed in the introduction, Ayres functioned as an ideal model for girls to emulate. On the one hand, these figures embody quintessential Victorian values of duty and courage, but on the other hand, they also challenge traditional Victorian ideas of femininity and domesticity. Although girls, and particularly working-class girls and servants, are often rendered passive figures and relegated to secondary roles, the articles in GFS newsletters portray girls as active, central figures who have the ability to effect great change. However, the story of Ayres, like Joan of Arc, in many ways provided girls with not only an unrealistic but also a dangerous model, implicitly conveying the idea that working-class girls’ lives were more expendable and less valuable than those of middle-class girls.

The differentiated roles of working-class girls and middle-class and upper-class girls in the empire is reflected in the types of subjects they were taught. While schools for upper-class and middle-class girls, like Cheltenham Ladies’ College and North

15 The master, mistress, and a son died in the fire. One of the girls Ayres rescued also later died from her injuries. The two surviving girls were sent to the Orphan Working School in Kentish Town and trained as domestic servants. 16 Edith Brunette, “Stories of Brave Girls III.—Heroines of Storm and Fire,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (September 1907), 4.

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London Collegiate School, incorporated the “boys’ subjects” of mathematics and science to prepare girls for roles as teachers, nurses, doctors, and missionaries abroad, schools and organizations for working-class girls instituted classes on caring for children and hygiene to supplement the traditional female curriculum of sewing and cooking and emphasized more traditional domestic and mothercraft skills with the aim of making them good servants.17 This emphasis on domestic education not only preordained working-class girls to more subservient roles in the empire but also reflected a broader critique of the domesticity of the poor, which child rescue organizations often employed to justify the necessity of removing children from their homes.18 The GFS’s provision of domestic classes suggests that working-class parents did not provide girls with the proper training at home. As a result, the GFS saw its purpose was “to revolutionise the opinions and to reform the habits of our working classes upon the moral question.”19 Like schools, the GFS provided classes to teach girls homecraft skills, including needlework, basket- making, and cookery, and also provided religious instruction and offered recreational activities. This provision of supervised, recreational activities for girls fulfilled not only an educative purpose but also a moral one, since the GFS sought to fill “the leisure hours of her life with wholesome and innocent interests” and thereby prevent girls from engaging in morally dubious behavior during their free time.20 As discussed in more

17 Dorothea Beale, “Address to the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science,” in The Education Papers: Women’s Quest for Equality in Britain, 1850-1912, ed. Dale Spender (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 123. 18 For more on this point, see Murdoch’s Imagined Orphans, especially chapter 2, “From Barrack Schools to Family Cottages.” 19 “Some Remarks on the Present Crisis in the Girls’ Friendly Society, By One of its Earliest Associates and Member of a Diocesan Council,” 1880, Tait 268 ff. 234, Correspondence and Papers of the GFS, Lambeth Palace Library. 20 The Girls’ Friendly Society, London Diocesan Report, 1904, 5/GFS/6/106, London Diocesan Reports Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library; “From Seventeen to Twenty-Seven,” The Girls’ Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the Girls’ Friendly Society 22 (April 1900), 29; “Girls,” The

92 detail below, such activities sought both to control girls and to make up for the perceived deficiencies of working-class life by presenting itself as a pseudo-family and socializing them with the middle-class values of self-control, piety, domesticity, and, above all, purity.

The GFS hoped that girls would apply these domestic skills and training not only in their own homes and in their eventual roles as wives and mothers but first as domestic servants. The organization emerged in the context of the “servant problem” or “servant crisis,” which formed a persistent concern especially for middle-class British women. As discussed in the first chapter, despite the continued demand for domestic labor, the supply of servants was diminishing, as more girls shunned service for new job opportunities in shops and factories. GFS organizers, many of whom had a personal interest in increasing the number of servants, attempted to solve the problem by not only training girls but also raising the reputation of service. For example, an organizational handbook, The Book of the GFS: What It Is and What It Does, sought to challenge ideas that other forms of work were more respectable: “The question of domestic service has been a difficult one for some years. It ought to be an honourable and much sought-after profession; but at the present time, many girls would rather do much more monotonous work in offices and shops than help in the household.”21 The Book of the GFS proceeded to describe its efforts “to raise that status of Domestic Service” so that more girls would

Girls’ Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the Girls’ Friendly Society 14 (April 1898), 36; Sister Henrietta, “Women’s Work in South Africa,” D3287/60/1/6, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 21 “The G.F.S. and Work,” chapter 3 in The Book of the GFS: What It Is and What It Does, 29.

93 take an interest and even developed a subcommittee on domestic service to help solve the problem.22

Although the organization was deeply invested in increasing both the quality and quantity of domestic servants, it also struggled at times with its identity being closely intertwined with that of domestic service. Despite its attempts to be “an agency by which all classes of working women may be effectively reached,” domestic service remained the dominant occupation of girls in the GFS, composing 57 percent of the total members of the GFS who were employed in 1891, though it did include girls from other occupations, including shop assistants, clerks, factory workers, and mill girls, as well as daughters of tradesmen and farmers.23 Consequently, people outside of the organization tended to perceive the organization as only for domestic servants. Especially in the interwar years when the organization’s numbers declined, associates blamed this misapprehension for limiting its membership and girls’ interest in joining the organization, although, as the next chapter will discuss, the reasons for its decline were

22 “Minutes of a Meeting of the Aid and Reference Department for Registry Work, Held at the G.F.S. Central Employment Office, 14 Victoria Street, S.W. on Tuesday, November 3rd, 1914 at 2:30 P.M.,” 5/GFS/1/39, Education Committee—Minute Book No. 1, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 23 “Some Remarks on the Present Crisis in the Girls’ Friendly Society.” Emphasis in the original. Brian Harrison discusses the class dynamics and servant composition of the GFS in greater depth in “For Church, Queen, and Family,” 117. In 1881, servants, both male and female, represented one person in twenty-two. In 1891, there were 1,386,167 servants in Britain. 39 percent of female domestic servants were under 20. These statistics come from Leonore Davidoff, “Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England,” in Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (New York: Routledge, 1995), 22. According to the Census of the British Empire, taken in 1901, 1,690,722 women in England and Wales, 174,475 women in Scotland, and 197,576 women in Ireland were engaged in domestic service. With a total of 21,356,313 women in the UK and Ireland, this meant that 9.65% women worked as domestic servants. “Table 6 – Occupations of Males and Females in those Colonies, &, for which returns are available,” Census of the British Empire 1901: Report with Summary and Detailed Tables for the Several Colonies, &, Area, Houses, and Population; and Population Classified by Ages, Condition as to Marriage, Occupations, Birthplaces, Religions, Degrees of Education, and Infirmities (London: Darling & Son, 1906), 36.

94 more complicated and reflected problems inherent in the structure and ideology of the

GFS.24

“That Most Critical Period of their Lives”: Social Purity Reforms and Purity Debates within the GFS

The work of the GFS intersected not only with child rescue and maternalist organizations but also with social purity movements. Rooted in concerns about British racial degeneration, social purity reforms targeted working-class girls and domestic servants, since reformers believed that the conditions of servant life, which required girls to work long hours for relatively low pay and live away from their own families, easily led to prostitution. This perceived connection between prostitution and domestic service led to the formation ofa variety of reform groups that focused on assisting or “befriending” domestic servants, including the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young

Servants, which sought to teach servants or girls from the workhouse or industrial schools qualities like self-control and self-discipline.25 The GFS’s development took place within the broader context of these efforts, and the GFS allied its work with various vigilance societies.26

24 See for instance Margaret Antrim, “Minutes of a Meeting of the Employment and Migration Committee Held at Townsend House, Greycoat Place, S.W. 1 on Thursday, October 4th 1935 at 11 A.M.,” 5/GFS/1/6, Central Council Minute Book No. 2, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library; “Some Ideas and a Little News,” The Girls’ Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the Girls’ Friendly Society (January 1897), 119. 25 Deborah Gorham, “The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re-Examined: Child Prostitution and Childhood in Late-Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 21, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 375. 26 Ellen Joyce, ed. “Reports from 1887,” in Reports of the Department for Members Emigrating, 1883-1897 (Girls’ Friendly Society, 1897), 24, D3287/68/1/3, Girls Friendly Society: Reports of the department for members emigrating, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

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The growth of the GFS also coincided with a heightened awareness of children’s developmental stages during the late Victorian era and the emergence of the idea of adolescence. In his landmark 1904 book, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, G. Stanley

Hall identified adolescence as a distinct time characterized by “storm and stress” that required carefully controlled, adult-monitored environments and activities to ensure healthy adjustment to adulthood.27 Given this precariousness of this stage of life, the

GFS focused on recruiting girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen, when it was believed that girls were most impressionable and susceptible to negative influences. In the words of one of the founding associates, the organization sought to “befriend girls in that most critical period of their lives, when after leaving school, they either remain idle at home or drift from one small situation to another.”28 However, there existed considerable debate within the GFS about the ideal age of members. Townsend and other founding associates contended that the organization should primarily be composed of younger girls, believing that “a girl’s connexion with the GFS thus early formed would underlie all her after life, and unbroken membership would be the most conclusive guarantee of character possible.”29 Other organizers argued for the importance of incorporating older members, envisioning them as “guardian angels” who could assist the spiritual life of younger girls of the organization.30 In the late 1890s, associates debated changing the name of the organization to the Young Woman’s Friendly Society in an

27 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904), 306. 28 “Some Remarks on the Present Crisis in the Girls’ Friendly Society.” 29 Ibid. 30 “How Can Elder Members Help the Spiritual Life of Younger Girls?” The Girls’ Quarterly 12 (October 1897), 12.

96 effort to recruit older girls. However, the proposal experienced resistance from some of the most influential associates, including Agnes Money, one of the “founding associates” of the organization and a longtime friend of Townsend, who argued that the GFS “was formed for the sake of the girlhood of England.”31 GFS associates like Money opposed admitting older girls, fearing they would have a detrimental effect on younger members.

Debates within the GFS about the age and qualifications of its members reflect broader social anxieties about youth. Underlying these debates was the GFS’s commitment to purity, which acted as the cornerstone of its social and imperial policies.32

The primacy of this ideal is reflected in the organization’s “central object”: to “uphold

Purity in Thought, Word, and Deed.”33 The reputation of the organization became closely entwined with this ideal of purity. For instance, Randall Davidson, the

Archbishop of Canterbury from 1903 to 1928, described the work of the GFS as “this great effort to preserve and protect the purity of the Girlhood of our Empire.”34 Central

Rule III of the GFS made the requirement of purity for members explicit: “No girl who has not borne a virtuous character to be admitted as a Member; such character being lost,

31 Agnes L. Money, “Elder Members’ Page,” The Girls’ Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the Girls’ Friendly Society 13 (October 1897), 177. 32 For more on the relationship between the GFS and social purity movements, see Richmond, “‘It Is Not a Society for Human Beings but for Virgins.” Social purity movements in Victorian and Edwardian England and the idea of purity as a means of uplifting and reforming society has been examined by numerous scholars. See for instance, Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment, and Victorian Medicine, Studies in Gender History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Gorham, “The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re- Examined,” specifically p. 375; Edward Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977); and, Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (New York: Routledge, 2002). 33 “Object of the Society,” Girls’ Friendly Society Leaflet for India and the Far East 2, no. 3 (January 1930), i. 34 “Appeal for £20,000 for the Lodges and Homes of Rest of the Girls’ Friendly Society,” 1907, Davidson 143, ff. 215, Administration of Girls’ Friendly Society, Lambeth Palace Library.

97 the Member to forfeit her card.”35 Consequently, the GFS worked to ensure that it admitted only respectable and honorable girls.36 However, the Rule provoked extensive controversy as associates debated not only the Rule’s necessity and purpose but how to define such an ambiguous term, which was ultimately equated with sexual purity and virginity, and relatedly the process of ensuring the purity and virtue of a member. If the

GFS recruited younger girls before they reached sexual maturity and became sexually active, as Money and Townsend advocated, their purity—and by extension the purity of the organization—could be guaranteed. Conversely, the purity of older girls could not be assured, meaning that the GFS would have to take “their characters and history, as must necessarily be the case, more or less, on trust.”37 Yet relying on girls’ own testimony did not provide a definitive safeguard, meaning that their inclusion “admits an element of uncertainty into the character of its Society, which must derogate from its value, and in the long run mar its work.”38 As reflected by the obituary to Queen Victoria at the beginning of this chapter, the GFS centered its reputation and work on ideas of purity, the possible admittance of an “impure” girl was seen as contaminating other girls and

35 For more on this Rule and its controversy, see Richmond, “It Is Not a Society for Human Beings but for Virgins.” 36 Other contemporary youth organizations, like the Girl Guides, Boy Scouts, and Camp Fire Girls, also emphasized purity. For instance, Camp Fire Girls were encouraged to take the “maiden’s vow” that included “the vow of purity—my duty to myself; the pledge of service—my duty to others.” For the Boy Scouts, “purity” was often coded as “cleanliness.” The Eleventh Law stipulated that a good Scout “keeps clean in body and thought, stands for clean speech, clean sport, clean habits, and travels with a clean crowd.” For more on this point, see Mischa Honeck, Our Front Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendency (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2018); Benjamin René Jordan, Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race, and the Environment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); and, Scott Johnston, “‘Only Send Boys of the Good Type’: Child Migration and the Boy Scout Movement, 1921-1959,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7, no. 3 (2014): 377–97. 37 “Some Remarks on the Present Crisis in the Girls’ Friendly Society.” 38 Ibid. A similar fear about the contaminating effects of “impure” elements is also present in Archbishop William Temple’s letter to the editor of The Girls’ Friendly Society Review. See Temple, “The Standards of Purity,” October 1935, W. Temple 25 f. 246, Letter from Archbishop Temple to the editor of the Girls’ Friendly Society Review on the standard of purity required for membership, Lambeth Palace Library.

98 potentially ruinous to the organization.39 However, as the next chapter explores, this unwavering allegiance to purity, especially in the face of changing social and cultural mores, is ironically what led to the organization’s decline.

This zealous commitment to purity reveals that the GFS viewed itself as a key agent not only in social reform in Britain but also in the “civilizing mission” of imperialism. In her History of The Girls’ Friendly Society, Agnes Money stated that one of the key goals of the GFS was “not only to be pure, but to purify.” 40 The importance of purity even emerges in games for girls created by the GFS. For instance, in a game entitled “The GFS Who Knows: A Game for Candidates,” girls preparing for membership were tested on their knowledge of GFS ideals. One of the questions players asked players: “What do you mean by Purity?” The prescribed answer is: “Trying to be like Christ, white and clean and straight. It means fighting against all that is bad, and helping to make our Empire full of good homes.”41 This answer reflects how purification included the extension of British home life and associated standards of domesticity, respectability, and morality to the colonies, which in turn reflected the “civilizing mission” of imperialism. As Antoinette Burton has argued, the imperial ethic of moral improvement and the ideal of imperial purification was incredibly powerful and helped to emphasize women’s place in the British Empire.42 By cleansing corruption, vice, and degeneracy in the empire, purification could both improve the operation of the empire

39 This anxiety about the corrupting influence of “fallen” girls on “unfallen” females and the need to rigidly classify and separate “fallen” from “unfallen” girls and women was a common theme in social purity movements. For more on this point, see Gorham, “The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re- Examined,” 371. 40 Agnes L. Money, History of The Girls’ Friendly Society, 2nd ed. (London: Wells, Garner, Darton & Co., Ltd., 1911), 95. 41 Question 50, “The GFS Who Knows: A Game for Candidates,” 2nd series, 5/GFS/05/17, GFS in Picture and Pageant, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 42 Burton, Burdens of History, 152.

99 and elevate colonial subjects and thus served as a persuasive justification for the GFS to extend their “spheres of influence” beyond Britain.43

“The Very Best Imperial Work”: Ellen Joyce and the Development of the GFS’s Emigration Programs

This charge of “to be pure” and “to purify” provided an impetus to the GFS’s imperial work, especially its emigration programs. Unlike other contemporary organizations— including the British Women’s Emigration Association (BWEA), Colonial Intelligence

League, Primrose League, Girl Guides, South African Colonisation Society (SACS), and the Victoria League—the GFS was not ostensibly an imperial organization.

Nevertheless, imperial matters fundamentally shaped the organization and its development. As Brian Harrison notes in his study of the GFS, “the Empire was the

Society’s first love.”44 Even before the GFS was formally founded, Townsend imagined it as a “vast organization” spread “throughout the world.”45 The GFS viewed its connection with the empire as mutually beneficial. While the empire served as a way for

43 There is a rich scholarship of scholarship on the ideology of purity in the imperial context and its connection to the civilizing mission of imperialism. See for instance, Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2013); Burton, Burdens of History; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Ann L. Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th- Century Colonial Cultures,” American Ethnologist 16 (November 1989): 634-52; Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (New York: Verso, 1992); Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, “A Civilizing Influence? The Female Migrant,” in Empire and Migration, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 212-46; Tennant, “Magdalens and Moral Imbeciles,” 491-92; and Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia 1880-1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 44 Harrison, “For Church, Queen, and Family,” 126. 45 Townsend, “Shedfield Lodge and Honington Hall,” in Some Memories of Mrs. Townsend, 10. See also Lily Frere, “Personal Friends and Recollections,” in Some Memories of Mrs. Townsend, 60–61.

100 the GFS to grow and extend its “spheres of influence,” the GFS also saw its role as integral to the empire’s continuation.46 It helped to unify the empire by providing “a link of Empire” that could “band together women and girls of all classes, not only in the home country, but all over the world.”47 The establishment of colonial branches within a few years after the organization’s foundation in 1875 solidified its involvement in the empire.

The GFS established its first branches in the settler colonies of Canada, New Zealand,

Australia, and South Africa and later founded branches in other parts of the empire, including India, Ceylon, and Malta.48 By the commencement of the twentieth century, the GFS had transformed into a worldwide organization with 1,359 branches throughout the British Empire and included over 240,000 girls and women.49 This global span was a point of pride for the organization, as indicated by the cover of one of its newsletters

(Figure 2), which shows the locations of various branches and gives a sense of the organization’s scope.

In articulating the relationship among these disparate branches, the GFS used familial terminology to cultivate a sense of inclusivity yet the structure of the organization also replicated imperial and familial hierarchies and power relations. In

1882, the GFS Central Council drew up a treaty that formally united the overseas branches—or “Colonial Daughters”—with the branches of the “Mother Country.”50

46 “Annual Rally,” 5/GFS/2/246, Overseas—New Zealand, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 47 Money, History of The Girls’ Friendly Society, 95, 139. 48 Ibid., 97. 49 These numbers include all categories of membership—members, candidates, associates, married helpers, and branch workers—for 1901. They are taken from Money, History of The Girls’ Friendly Society, 128. In the “G.F.S. Calendar,” Money provides a breakdown of membership from the Society’s foundation in 1874 until 1909. This number remained generally consistent from the mid-1890s until the outbreak of the First World War, when the organization experienced a perpetual decline in membership. For more on the rise and decline of GFS membership, see Harrison, “For Church, Queen, and Family.” 50 Money, History of The Girls’ Friendly Society, 97.

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Figure 2: GFS Branches in the Empire51

The Central Council expected its “Colonial Daughters” to adhere to its rules and guidelines, even when the variances and realties of colonial life made such observance impossible. These familial dynamics of course were not unique to the organization of

GFS but reproduced in the wider empire. Britain as the “Mother Country” or

“Motherland,” personified in the figure of “their Great White Mother” Queen Victoria, acted as the supreme and authoritative head of the empire family, with the colonies assuming the role of subservient children.52 However, as chapter three discusses in more

51 The Girls’ Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the Girls’ Friendly Society (January 1900). 52 For more on how the language of childhood and family reinforced colonial hierarchies and paternalism, see Ashis Nandy, “Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood,” in Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (London: Oxford University Press, 1987), 56-

102 detail, the inequity and inflexibility of these hierarchical power dynamics generated highly contentious—and in some cases ruinous—debates between the Central Council and colonial branches.

Within ten years of its foundation, the GFS established the “very important”

Department for Members Emigrating. The objectives and methods of the GFS overlapped with the work of other emigration societies. Perhaps because of the criticisms of these organizations, discussed in detail in chapter one, the GFS sought to distinguish itself from other emigration societies, which it made clear in the 1885 Report of the

Department for Members Emigrating: “the G.F.S. is not an Emigration Society; it merely provides advice and direction, and the greatest possible supervision and protection, with reception on landing by Associates of its own body.”53 Despite these disavowals, the

GFS collaborated with other emigration societies and saw their missions as compatible.

Barnardo’s annual reports would often contain updates about the work of the GFS.54

More significantly, key figures in the GFS’s emigration programs were also involved in other emigration organizations. For instance, Ellen Joyce, a “founding associate” who instituted and led the “Department for GFS Members Emigrating,” applied the lessons from her work with the GFS when she later served as the president of the BWEA from

1901 to 1919.55 A memorial to Joyce in Winchester Cathedral paid tribute to her as “a

76. For another essay on the operation of familial metaphors in colonialism, see Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, “Orientalism and the Rhetoric of the Family: Javanese Servants in European Household Manuals and Children’s Fiction,” Indonesia 58 (October 1994): 19-39. 53 Ellen Joyce, “Report for 1885,” in Reports of the Department for Members Emigrating, 1883-1897 (Girls’ Friendly Society, 1897), 14, D3287/68/1/3, Girls Friendly Society: Reports of the department for members emigrating, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. Emphasis in the original. 54 See for instance, “The World of Childhood,” Night and Day: A Record of Christian Missions and Practical Philanthropy (December 1892), 120. 55 For more on Joyce, see Lisa Chilton, Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 29-30.

103 pioneer/Of protected emigration” and “her devoted work/On behalf of the women and girls/Of the Empire.”56 Joyce—like Edward Brenton, Edward Wakefield, and John

Sinclair—viewed emigration as a mechanism for social reform and argued that the GFS’s emigration programs compensated for the deficiencies of working-class homes by instilling girls with values and removing them from the contamination of the city.

Describing the benefits of emigration, Joyce wrote: “All are removed from that pressure of poverty which makes life in England sometimes so oppressive and dangerous to the classes from which many of our GFS Members are drawn.”57 Joyce viewed the movement of children to colonial frontiers as a remedy to the physical and moral deficiencies associated with poverty and urban life in Britain, describing emigration as

“the wisest solution for our home troubles.”58 Joyce’s observation built upon emigration discourses that emphasized the importance of environmental change and removal from

“darkest England” in order to make children good citizens as well as Social Darwinist ideas.59 In a speech at a GFS Diocesan Conference in Winchester, Joyce explained:

“Emigration is just one of those things in which the doctrine of the ‘selection of the fittest’ must be accepted, and this selection should come from the God-implanted

56 “Mrs. Joyce,” The Times, May 23, 1924, 16. 57 Joyce, “Report for 1885,” 12. Joyce was chiefly concerned with emigrating women of the “right character” to be a civilizing influence in colonial societies and became one of the most prominent champions of female emigration. 58 Ellen Joyce, “Report of Department for G.F.S. Members Emigrating,” 1898, 6, D3287/68/1/3, Girls Friendly Society: Reports of the department for members emigrating, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 59 In his book, In Darkest England, and the Way Out (London: International Headquarters of the Salvation Army, 1890), William Booth connects his journey through the East End of London to Henry Morton Stanley’s journeys through Africa, and by drawing comparisons between the “savages” and “heathens” of “darkest Africa” and “darkest England,” reflecting contemporary concerns over the fear of civilization degeneracy. Booth founded the Salvation Army and proposed the establishment of farm colonies in Britain to train men to go overseas and establish their own farm in the colonies. This idea is explored in more depth in Lydia Murdoch’s Imagined Orphans, especially Chapter 1 “‘A Little Waif of London, Rescued from the Streets’: Melodrama and Popular Representations of Poor Children.”

104 instincts of adventure and enterprise.”60 Although working-class girls were marginalized members of British society, Joyce viewed them—by virtue of their British identity—as potential empire builders integral to the construction of settler colonies.61

Like other emigration proponents, Joyce believed that emigration had the opportunity to benefit not just Britain but the entire empire. In addition to easing social problems in Britain, emigration could girls with the opportunity for a better life with higher wages and more job opportunities and also help ensure the futurity of the British

Empire through the building up colonial settlements. In a speech about emigration to the

Girls Friendly Society Imperial Conference in 1912, Joyce highlights this ripple effect of social reform among working-class girls:

The GFS has done the very best Imperial work that has been done, in sending women who have been under the highest influences from cultural, refined, religious women; to become the mothers of a race, not dwarfed by poverty; or cramped by pressure as in the Nest and Nursery of the Mother-Land; but free, contented, God-fearing women in the Great Garden of the British Empire.62

In this speech, Joyce employs common tropes used in emigration propaganda about the strategic necessity of creating British homes and communities and the power of environmental change and the benefits of colonial life to underline the necessity of female emigration as well as the importance of women’s domestic and maternal roles in building up the empire. The Bishop of Wakefield similarly wrote about the mutual benefits of emigration and the critical role it played in both social reform and building up the empire in an article for The Girls’ Quarterly: “But if a poor young girl finds she has

60 Ellen Joyce, Emigration: A Paper read at the GFS Winchester Diocesan Conference Southampton, 25 October 1883 (London, 1884), 1-2. 61 For more on this point, see Julia Bush, “Emigration,” in Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), 146-69. 62 Ellen Joyce, Thirty years of Girls Friendly Society work (London: The Girls’ Friendly Society, 1912), 1.

105 gone to a place where she can learn no good ways, where there is no fear of God, and no encouragement to go to God’s house or live a godly life, is it so wicked to befriend the poor girl and to help her to remove to a better place?”63 Through imagery like “Great

Garden,” Joyce and the Bishop of Wakefield portrayed the colonies as restorative and redemptive spaces where girls could “live a godly life.” This contrast between the

“cramped” metropole and “free” colonies formed a frequent theme within emigration propaganda.64

The GFS envisioned girls as conduits of Britishness and trained them to become ideal emigrants who ensure a stable, self-producing, and secure British population in the colonies. Girls’ importance in this task of empire building is expressed in the biography

Some Memories of Mrs. Townsend: Foundress of the Girls’ Friendly Society, which states that, in forming the GFS, “Mrs. Townsend saw the opportunity for Empire building, because if any nation or Dominion was dependent for its prosperity on the character of these homes, how necessary that the girls going out into new lands should be the best home-makers.”65 To this end, GFS programs sought girls to be “good servants” who were “more content, more obedient, and more obliging.”66 These “good servants”

63 The Bishop of Wakefield, “Discontented with Their Situations,” The Girls’ Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the Girls’ Friendly Society (April 1897), 122. 64 See for instance, an annual report of Dr. Barnardo’s Homes: “Even to a child of the slums with inherited capacities for evil, the forces of which are difficult to estimate and allow for, the shaping hand of timely influence will transfigure the whole future. I have myself proved over and over again that a new and healthy environment is more powerful to transform and renovate than even hereditary has been in planning and evolving taint. Change and purify the former early enough and the latter will disappear in a generation.” See “‘Something Attempted Something Done’ Being the Twenty-Second Annual Report of ‘Dr. Barnardos Homes,’” 1888, A3/1/21, Dr. Barnardo’s Papers—Publications: Annual Reports, 1867- 1995, Barnardo’s. Emphasis in the original. In addition to articles, Barnardo’s annual reports regularly printed images that drew contrasts between the squalor of the British cities and the openness and independence of the colonies. 65 Townsend, “Vision and Fulfillment,” in Some Memories of Mrs. Townsend, 35. 66 The Bishop of Wakefield, “Discontented with their Situations,” The Girls’ Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the Girls’ Friendly Society 10 (April 1897), 121.

106 would in turn act as the “right type” of emigrant that would help build up British society in the colonies.67 The GFS hoped that girls would use their acquired domestic skills not only in their positions as servants in the colonies but also in their future roles as wives in

British settlements and “mothers of a race,” in Joyce’s words.

“Maintaining and Fostering the Most Valued Traditions of Home Life”: Mediating the Dangers of Voyages and Colonial Life

Emigration may not have been the original or sole undertaking of the GFS, as it was for other organizations, like those of Kingsley Fairbridge, Thomas Barnardo, and Maria Rye, but it increasingly became a more central facet of the GFS’s work. The Department for

Members Emigrating focused on securing the safe passage of girls and young women travelling between various parts of the empire.68 The organization worked on “making their journeys across the seas safe as well as comfortable, and ensuring for them a friendly reception on the other side.”69 They secured “responsible matrons” to accompany “protected parties” of girls on the voyages who also provided supervised recreation for girls on the long voyages. GFS associates feared that girls would be subject to sexual harassment and lose their virginity, and thus their purity, during the duration of the voyage. This risk was particularly acute, since working-class girls were seen as more susceptible to such influences, a point noted in a report by the Colonial

67 For more on this emphasis on the “right character” and “right type” of emigrant, see Lisa Chilton, “A New Class of Women for the Colonies: The Imperial Colonist and the Construction of Empire,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 2 (2003): 36-56; Charlotte MacDonald, A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1990); and, Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power, specifically her chapter on “Emigration.” 68 Money, History of The Girls’ Friendly Society, 44. 69 Townsend, “Beginnings of the G.F.S.,” in Some Memories of Mrs. Townsend, 19.

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Office, which stated “emigrants are necessarily selected from the class most exposed to the risks of seduction.”70

Observations by colonists about the changes in girls upon their arrival in the colonies appeared to substantiate concerns about the potential corruptive influence of the voyage and particularly the negative influence of other passengers.71 The GFS Diocesan

Secretary in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mrs. Wood, wrote to the Department for

Members Emigrating about how “[g]irls [sic] heads are turned on voyage out.”72 She, like others, feared that these negative influences would have a contagious effect, spreading amongst other girls, and that such undesirable connections would continue after the girls landed.73 Wood was not alone in her observations. Lady Hely-Hutchinson, the wife of the Cape Governor, argued that by the time emigrants landed, they had become “bold, brazen-faced, self-asserting young women who had acquired on a three week voyage the experience in effrontery of a lifetime.”74 Similarly, in her memoir

Colonial Memories, Lady Mary Anne Broome observed a change in her servants when travelling to South Africa, writing that she had “three English servants, whom I had to get rid of as soon as possible after my arrival. They had all been with me some time in

70 S. Walcott to Sir, April 30, 1857, CO 386/129/194, Colonial Office: Land and Emigration Commission, etc. Land and Emigration Commission. Entry Books of Correspondence, etc.: Letters to Emigration Agents, Colonial Secretaries, etc. Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, The National Archives. 71 For more on this point, see Cecillie Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820-1839 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 77. 72 “A Meeting of the Aid and Reference Committee for the Emigration Department Held at the GFS Central Office, 39 Victoria Street London SW on Thursday 6th May 1915 at 11:30am,” 5/GFS/1/44, Employment Committee—Emigration Department Agenda Book, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 73 See also for instance Una Monk, New Horizons: A Hundred Years of Women’s Emigration (London: HMSO, 1963), 103. She states: “even girls who started out of good character might suffer the sort of damage in transit which was considered to make them unfit for service…sometimes a whole shipload of girls might suffer rejection for the faults of a few.” 74 Mary Hely-Hutchinson, “Female Emigration to South Africa,” Nineteenth Century 51 (March 1902), 71- 87.

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England, and I thought I knew them perfectly; but the voyage evidently ‘wrought a sea change’ on them, for they were quite different people by the time Durban was reached.”75

What is revealing about the concerns from emigration organizers and settlers is that they reflect little concern for girls’ comfort or well-being during the voyage but instead focus on how the changes in the girls would endanger the broader colonial project of emigration, namely sending “good servants” to work in colonial households. While girls were certainly placed in vulnerable positions during the long voyages to the colonies, the greater source of anxiety was girls acting with a degree of autonomy, freedom, independence, and agency outside the jurisdiction of their families or prospective employers. For the GFS and other emigration societies, voyages represented a liminal space where anything could happen. These anxieties about what happened during the voyages ultimately helped to reaffirm the purpose of the GFS.

This protective function continued when girls landed in the colonies. While propaganda sought to portray the colonies as a “Great Garden” without the problems of urban life in Britain, emigration organizers also expressed fears about the dangers of colonial cities and the climate. Ellen Joyce wrote about the widespread dangers facing girls and how the Department for Members Emigrating needed “to warn and rescue young women who are in the greatest danger from having been induced by false representations about service, to trust themselves to strangers in that town.”76 It was feared that girls—and particularly domestic servants—could easily slip into prostitution

75 Lady Broome, Colonial Memories (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1904), 195. She returns to the dangers of voyages in her other works. Broome noted that these internal changes even affected the physical appearance and characteristics of girls, writing in her memoir, Station Life in New Zealand, “The look and bearing of the immigrants appear to alter soon after they reach the colony.” See Lady Barker, Station Life in New Zealand (London: Macmillan and Co., 1871). 76 Ellen Joyce, ed. “Report for 1887,” 24.

109 or fall victim to the “white slave trade.” Such fears were particularly acute in South

Africa, where the Mineral Revolution brought an influx of young men to work in the mines who reputedly engaged in drunk and violent behavior. Cities, especially

Johannesburg and Cape Town, developed reputations as uncivilized centers full of social disorder. In a report to the GFS’s Department for Members Emigrating, Miss Robinson, the GFS Secretary at Cape Town, referred to “Cape Town as one of the very worst cities in the world” and referenced “the great risks run by any girl landing there without protection.”77 A brochure on South Africa by the Emigrants’ Information Office similarly described Johannesburg as “full of temptations to women who are without friends or relations to go to.”78 These fears increased in both Southern Africa and New

77 Ellen Joyce, ed. “Report for 1890,” in Reports of the Department for Members Emigrating, 1883-1897 (Girls’ Friendly Society, 1897), 39, D3287/68/1/3, Girls Friendly Society: Reports of the department for members emigrating, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. During his tour of South Africa, which is detailed in the fourth chapter, Stuart Barnardo repeatedly advised his father, Thomas, about the potential dangers of sending girls to urban areas. Quoting the mayor of Cape Town, Stuart related to his father that “population is so mixed that he thinks you would be unable to keep any control over them [children].” Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902, A2/53/173, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. For more information on Cape Town during this period, see Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Vivian Bickford-Smith, “The Search for Order, 1870-1899,” in Cape Town: The Making of a City (Cape Town: New Africa Books, 2004), 219-64; Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town: Group Identity and Social Practice, 1875-1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and S.E. Duff, “The Jam and Matchsticks Problem: Working-Class Girlhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Cape Town,” in Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950, eds. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 124-40. 78 Emigrants’ Information Office, “South African Republic (Transvaal),” June 1898, 26, D3287/68/12, Printed booklet: South Africa Republic Transvaal information handbook, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. Stuart Barnardo commented that Johannesburg was an “immoral” city without “Christian houses” and “not a proper place to send young girls to.” See Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902, A2/52/13, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. A similar opinion about the “objectionable cosmopolitan element” in Johannesburg is also expressed in Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, October 6, 1902, A2/52/75, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. He also reiterated this view in a later letter to his father, writing: “Jo’burg is, and is always likely to be, a large town with a very mixed and cosmopolitan population which is not altogether the best place to place girls. South Africa as I have already said seems to have a demoralizing effect on girl emigrants and even under the most favourable circumstances and in Johannesburg all these temptations would be increased tenfold.” Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902, A2/53/183, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. He similarly referred to Durban as dangerous for children, stating that “Durban, being a sea-port, was in many ways unsuitable for young boys or girls.” Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 15, 1902, A2/53/120, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s.

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Zealand with the onset of the Depression in the 1880s, with organizers fearing that the poor economy would lead more girls to prostitution.79

To help obviate these problems, the GFS’s emigration department ensured that girls had a place to stay upon arrival in the colonies by making “introductions from branch to branch, and from one country to another” for girls with people, primarily clergymen or GFS associates, in the colonies.80 As the organization grew, its efforts went beyond making introductions and focused on constructing lodges and hostels for girls at key ports, including Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town in South Africa and

Wellington, Wanganui, and Auckland in New Zealand (see figure 3).81 The hostels sought to “provide friends for the friendless” and ensure “the comfort of strangers in a strange land” by offering accommodations, amusements, and “companionship and support” for newly arrived emigrants.82 A settler woman in Salisbury articulated the importance and necessity of hostels, writing: “I think the life here for a servant is lonely, and one of great temptation, but I am trying to get to know all the servant girls here and let them feel they can come to me at any time. I think it helps them to know there is a

79 See Muriel Dayrell Browning, “Extract from the private letter of a young married woman to Mrs. Lyttelton Gell,” D3287/76/2/2/88, Bundle of Papers, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire County Record Office. Dayrell Browning discusses how men in South Africa are drunk, disgusting, and “impossible” morally. 80 Money, History of The Girls’ Friendly Society, 99. 81 “Combined Circulars on Canada, Australasia, and the South African Colonies” (Emigrants’ Information Office, July 1903), D3287/94/8/1-1, Printed Reports of the British Women’s Emigration Association, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. New Zealand lacked immigration depots, so the three main GFS lodges were seen as especially important in protecting girls from “perilous” social life. See C. A. Younge, “Maori Education. The Native School Teacher.,” Taranaki Herald, January 20, 1909. 82 “Appeal for £20,000 for the Lodges and Homes of Rest of the Girls’ Friendly Society”; Ellen Joyce, ed., “Report of Department for G.F.S. Members Emigrating,” 1898, 4. E. Lyttleton Gell, “Letter to the Bishop of Mashonaland,” 16 March 1902, D3287/93/3/39, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. Joyce, “Report of Department for G.F.S. Members Emigrating,” 1898, 4. “The G.F.S. and the Lonely Girl,” in The Book of the GFS: What It Is and What It Does (June 1920), 22-35, 5/GFS/4/100, The Book of the GFS No. 139, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

111 house independent of their situations where they can come for help or advice.”83 Hostels engendered a sense of community for girls and acted as a resource that could mediate potential problems between girls and their employers and an employment agency, where girls could go to find out about job openings and obtain advice about necessary training.84

Figure 3: Durban GFS Lodge, 193585

The hostels provided girls with a “home away from home” and, more importantly, a “British home away from home” and a way to ensure that girls would not lose touch

83 “Mrs. Owen,” December 29, 1903, D3287/76/2/2/181, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 84 The GFS used its network of registry offices, which numbered forty-eight in 1883, to help find thousands of girls work. Harrison, “For Church, Queen, and Family,” 124. 85 “Durban GFS Lodge,” 1935, 5/GFS/02/358, India, Barbados, South Africa, Records of the Girls. Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

112 with their British roots. Describing the importance of hostels in building up English life in the colonies, Ellen Joyce wrote that GFS hostels “carried the traditions of old

England…to the Colonies.”86 Edith Gell, an ardent proponent of emigration and the chair of the SACS and a member of the BWEA, reiterated this point in an article for The

Imperial Colonist, referring to hostels as “potent factors in Colonial life.” She noted that

“it is a great relief to their relations in England to know that they will start their new life from an English home surrounded by friendly sympathy.”87 As alluded to in Gell’s article, hostels not only provided shelter but also formed part of a broader support network for emigrants who lacked the familial and kinship ties they enjoyed in Britain.88

In a letter to Gell, the Bishop of Mashonaland described how hostels were a

“fundamental” part of emigration schemes: “A house like the Hostel with a motherly woman at the head is both a preservative and a preventative force in the social life of the country.”89 Led by lady superintendents—who were required to be “women of high character”—hostels ensured that emigrant girls fell under the right influences, or as Gell articulated in an article, “the presence and welfare of good women is of incalculable

86 Ellen Joyce, ed., “Preface” and “Report for 1887,” Reports of the Department for Members Emigrating, 1883-1897 (Girls’ Friendly Society, 1897), 1 and 24, D3287/68/1/3, Girls Friendly Society: Reports of the department for members emigrating, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 87 Edith Lyttleton Gell, “Rhodesia, Contribution to Imperial Colonist,” January 1903, 2, D3287/94/16/51, Reports and correspondence from women emigrants Hostels in Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire County Record Office. Gell was a prolific writer on behalf of the cause of female emigration to South Africa, writing numerous articles for publications like The Imperial Colonist and voluminous correspondences to leading figures in South Africa, including William Thomas Gaul, who served as the Bishop of Mashonaland from 1895 to 1907, and Alfred Milner. She was married to Phillip Gell, and her brother—William St John Fremantle Brodrick, 1st Earl Midleton (1856-1942)—served as Secretary of State for War from 1900-1903 and Secretary of State for India from 1903-5. 88 Edith Lyttleton Gell, “Report for B.W.E.A. & S.A.X.,” March 1903, 2, D3287/94/16/68 (iii), Reports and correspondence from women emigrants Hostels in Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire County Record Office. 89 Bishop of Mashonaland to Mrs. Gell, November 16, 1903, D3287/93/3/19, Letters to Edith Lyttelton Gell regarding Rhodes Hostel, Bulawayo, Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

113 importance in maintaining and fostering the most valued traditions of home life.”90

While GFS organizers framed the purpose of hostels in terms of girls’ interests and their protection, these institutions also reflected anxieties about the potential loss of girls’

British identity, their susceptibility to negative, degenerative influences in the colonies, and their operation outside the purview of adults.91

Consequently, while hostels fulfilled an important supportive role for girls, they also functioned as a way to further control girls’ behavior and mobility. Paternalistic employers and GFS associates expressed unease about how girls spent their rare moments of leisure time and that girls wasted their limited earnings and free time on frivolous things, such as visits to fortune-tellers, reading novels, and dresses.92 To mitigate these concerns, the GFS organized supervised entertainment and activities, like field trips, parties, plays, and Bible study groups. These activities also attempted to ease the difficulties of transitioning to life in the colonies and alleviate girls’ sense of loneliness.

The GFS branch in Durban, for instance, sponsored lectures on “Native life” for its members to help acquaint them with the country.93 However, GFS efforts were complicated by the challenges posed by the rural environment and diffuse nature of the population in the colonies. The distance between branches, girls’ long working hours, and the relative lack of transportation and communication infrastructure hindered girls’

90 “Hostels for Women in Rhodesia,” D3287/74/7/5/16, Correspondence and papers regarding finances to South Africa Expansion Rhodesian committee, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 91 For more on hostels, see Deborah Gaitskell, “‘Christian Compounds for Girls’: Church Hostels for African Women in Johannesburg, 1907-1970,” Journal of Southern African Studies 6, no. 1 (1979): 44–69. 92 Charles van Onselen, “The Witches of Suburbia: Domestic service on the Witwatersrand, 1890-1914,” Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914, Vol. 2: New Nineveh (New York: Longman, 1982), 24. 93 “Girls’ Friendly Society, Durban, Natal, 1937,” 5/GFS/2/262, South Africa and Rhodesia, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

114 mobility and ability to attend GFS meetings and events in the colonies.94 Such problems persisted even into the interwar years. During a tour of New Zealand in 1939, Winifred

Preston, a GFS associate, wrote back to the GFS in Britain about the difficulties faced by branches in New Zealand due to slow and expensive trains, unreliable mail, and the relative lack of population to support the activities of the GFS.95 Citing these challenges as well as the lack of resources, GFS organizers in the colonies frequently wrote to the

Central Branch in Britain bemoaning the pitiable state of GFS activity and interest in the country.

“Not at All Unlike English Life”: Evaluating the GFS’s Emigration Programs

Assessing the effectiveness of the GFS’s emigration efforts presents a variety of challenges, but quantitative and qualitative data does provide some sense of the extent and impact of its emigration programs. GFS emigration reports often use the vague phrasing of “some hundreds” when referring to the number of girls who emigrated.

However, in the 1897 “Report for Members Emigrating,” Ellen Joyce provides a more precise figure, reporting that “[o]ne thousand nine hundred and thirty-five young women have all been safely met and welcomed, and experienced the advantages and support of finding their Girls’ Friendly Society in their new homes. The ties between the Mother

94 Lily Frere, “Sectional Committee for South Africa Minutes of a Meeting held on Friday Nov. 17th 1905,” 143, 5/GFS/1/97, Imperial, Colonial, and Overseas Committee Minute Book No. 1, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. Frere was an emigration proponent and the daughter of Sir Bartle Frere, who was the High Commissioner for Southern Africa from 1877-80. The South African War also led to decreased activity among the GFS branches. See the letter to Ellen Joyce, January 17, 1900, GB/106/BWE/B/4/4, South Africa Committee, Records of the British Women’s Emigration Association, The Women’s Library. 95 Winifred Preston to Miss Angus, May 1, 1939, 2 and 4, 5/GFS/2/248, Overseas—New Zealand, Miss Winifred Preston’s tour, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. Preston’s travels in New Zealand are discussed more in the conclusion.

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Country and the Colonies have been strengthened by the care taken of the daughters of the Home land.”96 Given that the Department was established in 1886, the number of emigrants quoted by Joyce—1,935—would mean that the GFS assisted in the emigration of 150-200 girls a year. These numbers are comparable to the number of girls sent out by

Barnardo’s, which reported in the Annual Report for 1898 that the organization emigrated

910 girls between 1892 and 1898, an average of 130 girls a year.97 However, there are caveats with these figures, since the GFS sometimes assisted girls more informally. For instance, some girls who did not travel in protected parties arranged by the GFS but benefited from introductions made by GFS associates. Through figures like Joyce, the

GFS was allied with other emigration societies, including the BWEA and the SACS, to send out some girls. Therefore, it is possible that the GFS assisted in the emigration of more girls than reflected in the reported number. Moreover, as discussed in the introduction, the self-reported numbers of emigration societies must be approached with caution, since they were eager to emphasize the success and value of their endeavors and therefore sometimes inflated their success rate and, in the case of the GFS, there is little corroborating evidence to support these figures.

Written accounts by emigrants suggest that girls did find promising positions as servants and enjoyed their new life in the colonies. For instance, a letter from one emigrant, Madeline Skeels, spoke positively about her long voyage to South Africa, observing that “belonging to the GFS seems to make travelling so easy.”98 She also wrote

96 Joyce, “Preface,” 1. 97 “Table AA: A Seven Years’ Record of Village Home Girls,” 33rd Annual Report of the Institutions known as “Dr. Barnardo’s Homes” for Orphan & Waif Children,”1898, 104, A3/1/33, Dr. Barnardo’s Papers—Publications: Annual Reports, 1867-1995, Barnardo’s. 98 Madeline Skeels to Ellen Joyce, December 12, 1899, 2, GB/106/BWE/4/4, South Africa Committee, Records of the British Women’s Emigration Association, The Women’s Library.

116 enthusiastically about life in the colony, which she found “not at all unlike English life, in some ways perhaps a little freer.”99 Another emigrant, Annie Caines, similarly expressed her satisfaction with life in South Africa in a letter to Joyce, writing “I do not think I would like to return to England to settle in service after been [sic] here for we get such lovely sunshine it makes one so happy.”100 Ruth Rudd also emigrated to South Africa and similarly commented on the “lovely” weather of the region. Rudd wrote to the GFS about her life as a servant on a farm owned by “a very charming very English family.”101

She described her situation as “most happy and comfortable” with the “only regret being that I am not nearer to the town.”102 A GFS member in Dunedin reported that “her mistress treated her like a relation, and made her birthday quite a fete day, and that she cleans the books herself, so that the girl may go out.”103 Such correspondences seemed to validate the purpose and promises of the GFS’s emigration programs, confirming that girls effectively became extended members of their employers’ families and that life in the colonies was similar to life in Britain but “freer.” However, as the next chapter discusses, girls’ experiences in the colonies varied widely; while some emigrants embraced the freedom and job opportunities offered by the colonies, others found it hard to adjust to the hardships of colonial life and experienced frustration at their lack of preparation and the exaggerated promises of the GFS’s emigration propaganda.

99 Ibid. 100 Annie Caines to Ellen Joyce, November 17, 1899, GB/106/BWE/4/4, South Africa Committee, Records of the British Women’s Emigration Association, The Women’s Library. 101 Ruth M. Rudd to Miss Angus, October 24, 1938, 5/GFS/2/262, South Africa and Rhodesia, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. Emphasis in the original. 102 Ibid. 103 Ellen Joyce, ed., “Report for 1886,” in Reports of the Department for Members Emigrating, 1883-1897 (Girls’ Friendly Society, 1897), 17, D3287/68/1/3, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

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“To Safeguard Her Welfare”: Violet Paul and the Subversion of Class and Racial Hierarchies

While the GFS employed various means to fashion imperially minded girls, these lessons did not always succeed. The GFS had a clear view of how society should be structured and the role that girls should have in it, but girls did not always adhere to these prescribed scripts. This is cogently illustrated in the case of Violet Paul, a twenty-five-year-old

British woman and a member of the Mill Hill branch of the GFS in London who travelled to India to marry a man named W. E. Davis. A friend of Paul’s alerted the GFS associates at Mill Hill to her plan and expressed concern, since she believed that the man

Paul intended on marrying was a “half-caste” and that “his mother was the native.”104

Alarmed by the prospect of one of their members travelling to India to marry an Anglo-

Indian man, one of the associates of the Mill Hill branch, Mabel Sisley, wrote to GFS members in Rawal Pindi, asking them to investigate Davis and determine if he was

“desirable.”105 In making this request, Sisley emphasized the “need to safeguard her welfare in case the man proves to be a rogue or even an agent of the white slave traffic.”106 Within a month, Mrs. Marshall, a GFS associate in Rawal Pindi, wrote back to Sisley, describing the man as “Undesirable” since he was an “Indian man with

Christian name, not Anglo-Indian.”107 In a subsequent letter, Marshall elaborated on her verdict and explained that Davis was “extremely black” and reflected on the damaging consequences of such a relationship: “I cannot believe that any decent English girl would

104 Mabel C. Sisley to Caroline Mytton, January 26, 1929, 1, 5/GFS/2/235, Minutes and Papers of Overseas—India, Burma and Ceylon: Various, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 105 Mabel C. Sisley to Mrs. Marshall, January 31, 1929, 5/GFS/2/235, Minutes and Papers of Overseas— India, Burma and Ceylon: Various, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 106 Sisley to Mytton, January 26, 1929, 4. 107 Marshall, Telegram re W. E. Davis, February 20, 1929, 5/GFS/2/235, Minutes and Papers of Overseas— India, Burma and Ceylon: Various, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

118 be happy if she married a very black man like this decent fellow though he is. She would find herself cut off from English people and her only company would be Anglo Indians of the lower sort and Indians—also of the lower sort.”108 While the initial correspondences between the GFS—written when the they believed Davis was an Anglo-

Indian or Eurasian—convey suspicion about Davis and the prospect of his marriage to

Paul, there was still the possibility of the situation being tolerable. As indicated by the repeated emphasis on Davis as “very black” and “extremely black,” the color of his skin and his Indianness put the situation beyond the pale for the GFS associates. Despite

Marshall’s concern that Paul’s marriage to an Indian man would likely have had an adverse effect on her social status, correspondences between the London and Rawal Pindi branches also suggest that Davis was relatively affluent and could provide a comfortable life for Paul, including a home in which she “will be waited on by servants.”109

However, this prospect did not ease the fears of GFS associates who wrote that “her early home life and education have not fitted her to play the role of hostess.”110 This letter suggests that relationship between Paul and Davis violated not only racial hierarchies but class ones as well. By eloping with an Indian man, Paul subverted the goal of GFS emigration programs: to create “good homes” that were “white.”

Despite trying to convince Paul that her decision to travel to India to marry Davis would “wreck her life,” correspondences between GFS associates indicate that Paul remained committed in her choice. The conclusion of the case is not clear from the

108 Norman E. Marshall to Caroline Mytton, February 18, 1929, 1 and 2, 5/GFS/2/235, Minutes and Papers of Overseas—India, Burma and Ceylon: Various, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 109 Sisley to Mytton, January 26, 1929, 4. 110 Ibid., 2, 4.

119 archival records of the GFS, but the available evidence suggests that Paul did go to India, since the last correspondence regarding Paul’s case is from Caroline Mytton, the GFS

Secretary in India, who wrote that they have done “everything possible” and “if the girl persists in going out, she will only have herself to blame.”111 In addition to elucidating racial and class anxieties within the GFS and in broader British and colonial societies, the case of Paul and Davis reflects the GFS’s great anxiety over girls and women who exercised their agency and acted outside the supervision of GFS associates.112 GFS organizers frequently framed emigration in terms of imperial duty, but as the case of Paul illustrates, emigrants had little interest in these broader imperial objectives and instead viewed emigration as a means to achieving their personal goals and in terms of their own interests.

Conclusion

Studying the GFS expands and complicates our understanding of girls’ roles—both tangible and hidden—in the colonial project and draws attention to the various types of labor girls performed and consequently encourages a rethinking of traditional narratives of colonial migration that exclude girls or define their movement as contingent on men’s mobility by The organization’s concerted efforts to educate and emigrate girls reveal how

111 Mrs. Bruce to Caroline Mytton, March 22, 1929, 5/GFS/2/235, Minutes and Papers of Overseas—India, Burma and Ceylon: Various, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. Searches of newspaper archives for references to Paul and Davis did not provide any further information about Paul, Davis, or their marriage. 112 Concerns about girls’ marriages emerge frequently in the writings of GFS associates. For example, in a speech on the topic of “Women’s Work in South Africa” at the Conference of the Emigration Department of the GFS in 1894, Sister Henrietta observed that “I do not think generally the English servant does well or feels happy and comfortable. She is taken out of her place, becomes conceited and extravagant, seldom saves money, and often makes a miserable marriage,” before concluding “I do not myself think that the class of English domestic servants should be sent to Africa.” See “Women’s Work in South Africa,” 4.

120 the project of empire building depended upon not just the mobility and labor of girls and young women but also their cultural work and emotional labor. Girls participated in the empire as migrants and settlers and, also as creators and transmitters of colonial knowledge that contributed to broader project of migration, a theme explored in more depth in the next chapter. As the case of Violet Paul illustrates, the GFS intended for its members to reinforce class and racial hierarchies in the colonies, but girls did not always follow the prescribed scripts. The next chapter further examines this tension and how the unique dynamics and exigencies of the colonies called into question the durability and meaning of class, racial, and gender hierarchies that seemingly underpinned not only the

GFS and British society in the colonies but Britain’s empire.

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CHAPTER THREE

“TO BE A GIRL HERE IS MUCH MORE DIFFICULT”: GIRLS’ CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL LABOR AND THE (DE)CONSTRUCTION OF GIRLHOOD

In 1913, Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World published a story entitled

“The Banner over us is Love,” which related the story of Georgina and Patricia, two sisters who are proud members of the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS). They love attending the Society’s meetings and are especially interested in the lectures given by the GFS’s

Emigration Department, which feature “vivid description[s]” of the colonies and in particular Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. At the meetings, the girls learn “that we in the Home Country must have a great self-sacrificing love for all the countries which form our great Empire” and that “even little girls could help their Empire…[b]y trying to advance the work of the GFS abroad” and “do something for the great Empire of India or our Colonies—something that would cost some sacrifice.” Georgina and Patricia leave the meetings “burning with zeal to do their share for the good of our great Empire.”

Their opportunity comes after they learn that their father, a farm laborer, has been given notice to leave because “farming had been bad for so many years.” Georgina and Patricia tell their father what they learn at the GFS meetings about emigration. Following the girls’ recommendation, the family decides to depart for Alberta, and although Georgina and Patricia are sad about leaving their “home country,” they are excited about going forth into their new life and do so “with the same bright ideals of a beautiful home-life, a strong sense of duty, and a great love for our Empire.”1

1 “The Banner over Us Is Love,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (March 1913), 2-3.

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The story of Georgina and Patricia represents just one of these various efforts to educate girls about the empire and make them good “empire builders.” It also epitomizes the anticipated synergy between the GFS’s education and emigration programs, with the

GFS’s various, concerted education efforts generating interest in the empire that would then translate into girls—and even perhaps their families—settling abroad. While the previous chapter focused on the development of the GFS’s interest in the empire and its migration program, this chapter analyzes the methods employed by the GFS to generate interest in the empire among its members and the challenges the organization faced in the colonies. Although the GFS intended for branches in the colonies to replicate the organization in Britain, the unique circumstances of the colonies created unanticipated challenges and complicated the GFS’s seemingly straightforward commitment to “the care of the girlhood of the empire.”2 The GFS presented itself as a “a very large family” and encouraged its members to think of themselves as belonging to an “Imperial sisterhood,” but as this chapter examines, not all girls were welcome or equal members in this sisterhood, and issues over race and the organization’s central rule on purity created ruinous fractures within the GFS community.

“A Very Large Family”: The GFS’s Imperial Education Programs

Recognizing the key role girls had in the empire building project, the GFS developed various concerted efforts to educate girls about the empire, to ensure that they were the

“right type” of emigrant, and to encourage them to emigrate to the colonies and “build

2 This phrase appears in “Appeal for £20,000 for the Lodges and Homes of Rest of the Girls’ Friendly Society,” 1907, Davidson 143, ff. 215, Administration of Girls’ Friendly Society, Lambeth Palace Library.

123 new homes.”3 The educational work of the GFS mirrored the organization’s growing interest and investment in the empire. From its early years, the empire formed a central part of the GFS’s educational work, and these efforts became more pronounced and coordinated in the early decades of the twentieth century, culminating with the establishment of an Empire Education Committee in 1924.4 One of the primary goals in the formation of the Empire Education Committee was “to bring forward the question of migration.”5 In outlining its purpose, the Empire Education Committee stated: “The great object of this movement is to teach young people everything we can about the Empire.”6

Through “the study of the history and economic development of the Empire,” the

Committee aimed to not only enhance girls’ knowledge of the empire but also to increase their sense of patriotism and duty by “bringing home to them their responsibilities as citizens of the Empire.”7 GFS organizers viewed the interests of the GFS and the empire as interdependent, and to this end, lessons sought “to interweave with an interest in the

Empire a knowledge of GFS in the Empire.”8 The importance of imperial knowledge to the work of the GFS is evident in the “Candidates’ Central Examination,” a series of question administered for girls around the age of twelve to fourteen who wished to become full members of the GFS. Questions about “The G.F.S. in the Colonies” formed

3 Edith Brunette, “Stories of Brave Girls I.—Maids of War,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (Easter 1907), 3. 4 Agnes L. Money, History of The Girls’ Friendly Society, 2nd ed. (London: Wells, Garner, Darton & Co., Ltd., 1911), 99. 5 Letter from the Diocesan Imperial Correspondent to Empire Education Committee, 1924, 5/GFS/2/223, Overseas—Empire Scrapbook Competition, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 6 GFS Empire Education Committee, “Conference at the Mansion House on Empire Citizenship for Girls,” 5/GFS/2/225, Overseas—Empire Education Committee—suggested schemes of work, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 7 Letter from the Diocesan Imperial Correspondent to Empire Education Committee. 8 W. Searth, “Report on GFS Empire Education Committee,” Minutes of a Meeting of the Imperial & Overseas Committee held at Townsend House, Greycoat Place SW on Monday, March 19th 1928 at 2:30 PM, 45, 5/GFS/1/98, GFS Minute Book Imperial & Overseas No. 3, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

124 one of only three sections of the exam, indicating the centrality of the empire to the organization.9 These questions focused on girls’ knowledge of imperial geography and the GFS’s work in the colonies. For example, a question on the 1907 Central

Examination instructed girls to draw a map of one colony and “mark on it any places where you know the G.F.S. is at work.”10 Another question asked candidates: “How does the work in South Australia show the advantage of belonging to the G.F.S.?”11 As these questions reveal, in addition to increasing girls’ interest in the empire, education about the empire also acted as propaganda for the GFS and its work in the colonies.

To enhance girls’ knowledge and appreciation of the empire, the GFS organized various activities, including essay and scrapbook competitions, Empire Day celebrations, lantern lectures, “penfriend” schemes, and lending libraries. Educational programs included reading circles, where girls discussed patriotic and imperialist works, including one called “The Beginning of the Colonial Enterprise” about the origins and evolution of the British Empire.12 Like reading circles, study circles educated girls about different colonies and thereby increased girls’ affinity to the empire. For instance, study circles in

Lancashire, the chief region for the cotton industry in Britain, taught students about cotton production in India.13 Similarly, one study circle in Bradford, a town central to the woolen industry in Britain, discussed the woolen industry in Australia. These study

9 See the appendix for the full list of questions for the examination. The other two sections covered “Candidates’ Catechism” and asked girls about why they wanted to join the GFS and tested them on their knowledge of the GFS’s principles, with questions about the organization’s motto and prayer as well as the meaning of its core values, like purity, thrift, and being truthful. 10 “Candidates’ Central Examination,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (Easter 1907), 4. 11 Ibid. 12 GFS Empire Education Committee, “Conference at the Mansion House on Empire Citizenship for Girls.” 13 Letter to Mrs. Orde, June 1927, 1-2, 5/GFS/2/223, Overseas—Empire Scrapbook Competition, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

125 circles deepened girls’ understanding of their own region and the empire and also helped establish a more personal connection with these disparate parts of the empire. GFS- sponsored lectures reinforced the themes of the study and reading circles with topics like

“our Imperial Heritage,” “Empire Citizenship for Girls,” and “Round the World with the

G.F.S.”14 Lectures often featured women who related their experience in the colonies, providing a personal point of connection to the empire for girls.15 The GFS also sponsored exhibitions, which included lectures on the GFS’s work in the empire and also models of colonial scenes, like an Indian bazaar.16 Even smaller events, like garden parties, provided occasions to learn about the empire. For instance, candidates in the town of Wakefield in West Yorkshire hosted a garden party that included a lecture “about the G.F.S. and where it is to be found.” Following the lecture, the girls “all dressed in costumes to represent those different countries” (see figure 4).17 In addition to teaching girls about the empire, such activities also reinforced traditional gender norms.

Like parties, lectures, and exhibitions, pageants educated girls about the empire but they also raised revenue for the organization and promoted its work in the colonies, with one article in Our Letter noting that “the Pageant will have been invaluable in bringing G.F.S. before the general public.” It continued to emphasize the educational dimensions of the pageants, describing them as “a means of instructing and inspiring

14 “Some Ideas and a Little News,” The Girls Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the Girls’ Friendly Society (January 1897), 119. “Report on GFS Empire Education Committee,” Minutes of a Meeting of the Imperial & Overseas Committee held on Monday October 22nd 1928 at Townsend House at 2:30 PM, 50, 5/GFS/1/98, GFS Minute Book Imperial & Overseas No. 3, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 15 “Report on GFS Empire Education Committee.” 16 “What Candidates are Doing,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (Christmas 1909), 8. 17 “What Candidates are Doing,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (September 1917), 3.

126 enthusiasm and loyalty.”18 This sentiment was echoed in another article, which encouraged branches to stage a pageant since it “gives Candidates a wonderful opportunity of learning about the different nations.”19

Figure 4: GFS Garden Party20

18 “What Candidates are Doing,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (Christmas 1909), 8. See also Mary Heath-Stubbs, Friendship’s Highway: Being the History of the Girls’ Friendly Society, 1875-1935 (London: G.F.S. Central Office, 1935), 109; and, “New Zealand,” A Jubilee Chronicle for Overseas, 1935, 5/GFS/4/128, A Jubilee Chronicle for Overseas. Diamond Jubilee, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. This stated: “Apart from the financial success, the Pageant will have been invaluable in bringing G.F.S. before the general public, showing that it is a live, efficient, and progressive Society, upholding a high standard of life and character, and prepared to cope with all the demands of the modern girl in every walk of life” (20). For more on pageants, see Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Paul Readman, and Charlotte Tupman, “The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Twentieth-Century England,” International Journal of Research on History Didactics, History Education, and History Culture 37 (2016): 19-35. See also Kristine Alexander’s discussion of historical pageantry in chapter 5 of Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017). 19 “Candidates and Missions,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (Christmas 1910), 4. 20 “What Candidates are Doing,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (September 1917), 3.

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Pageants formed such a key part of the GFS’s educational work that the organization produced a booklet, GFS in Picture and Pageant, to instruct branches on how to produce pageants. The booklet contains suggested scenes for pageants, including

“Members’ Drilling Class” (figure 5), “Camp Scene,” “Caravan Scene” (figure 6),

“Hampstead Heath Temperance Stall,” and “Missions: an Indian Scene.”21 As reflected in these titles, pageants not only aimed to teach girls how to be GFS members and engage in the activities of membership but also promoted the work of the GFS, both in Britain, as with the temperance stall, and abroad, like the mission scene, in which girls act as nurses and doctors to Indian women (figures 7 and 8).

Figure 5: Members’ Drilling Class22

21 Edith Murray, The G.F.S. in Picture and Pageant (London: G.F.S. Central Office, c. 1910), 7. 22 Members’ Drill, c. 1930, 5/GFS/11/3, Photographs III, Photographs and Films, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

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Figure 6: “Wingham Candidates as ‘Caravaners’ in the Isle of Wight Pageant”23

Figure 7: “Indian Tableaux at Endon”24

23 “Wingham Candidates as ‘Caravaners’ in the Isle of Wight Pageant,” Our Letter (September 1927). GFS caravans were a way of promoting the organization. GFS associates and members would travel to different towns in Britain as a means of fundraising, publicizing the organization, and recruiting and training new members. 24 “Indian Tableaux at Endon,” G.F.S. Magazine (September 1923).

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Figure 8: “North Indian Tableaux”25

GFS in Picture and Pageant also contains instructions for producing a segment of the pageant devoted to the growth of the GFS, entitled “Expansion.” This part of the pageant opens with a monologue about how England is the “stem” and the colonies are the

“branches” of the “Tree of Empire” and is followed by a procession of girls bearing the banners of countries of the empire and the signing of the national anthem.26 It concluded with a parade of girls of different occupations: nurse, business girl, student, domestic servant, teacher, factory girl, doctor, land girl. This emphasis on having girls perform future occupations suggests that a further underlying rationale for producing pageants was that they provided a space where womanhood and the qualities of womanhood could be learned and practiced. Other pageants, like “Pageant of the Girls’ Friendly Society”

25 “North Indian Tableaux,” Rhayader, c. 1929, 5/GFS/4/127, Block Book IV, 1926-1931, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library 26 Edith Murray, The G.F.S. in Picture and Pageant, 8-9.

130 held in 1920, had girls assume historical roles of great women in history, including

Hatshepsut, Boadicea, St. Helena, Joan of Arc, and finally Queen Elizabeth.27

The GFS also instituted “penfriend” programs to educate members about the empire and connect girls living in different parts of the empire.28 For girls in the colonies, GFS organizers hoped the exchange of correspondences and small gifts would both ease the hardships of life in the colonies and have an elevating influence by reminding them of their English identity and thus counteracting the potentially contaminating effects of the colonial environment.29 As Harriet Wemyss, the head of the

Gloucestershire GFS branch, noted, “letters are so valuable when far away and any news from familiar places so precious, and these memories will help to keep them true to their

Church and to the best traditions of the old country, and so help to elevate and make beautiful their lives that they will be good citizens of the new country which will be their home.”30 Correspondences established personal connections and gave girls “a share in what our friends in other cities are experiencing.”31 GFS organizers hoped that interest and knowledge in the empire might then translate into a desire among girls to settle and

27 Heath-Stubbs, Friendship’s Highway, 110. 28 GFS Central Council, “Linked Branches,” 5/GFS/2/257, Penfriends, links, etc., Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. A report from September 1923 lists fifty-five branches and involved branches from large and small towns in Britain linked with branches in Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. A list published in the GFS newsletter, Friendly Words, in July 1908 records nearly one-hundred linked branches. 29 For instance, Sir James Hulett, the speaker in the Legislative Assembly in South Africa, warned that the environment of South Africa posed a further obstacle: “the climate offers great temptations to girls.” See Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 9, 1902, A2/52/115, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. On the dangers of the tropical climate, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 157. 30 Harriet Wemyss, “Emigration,” Gloucester Diocesan Report for 1911 (Gloucester: H. Osborne, 1912), 23. 31 Mrs. Orde, “Speech at the Conference at the Mansion House on Empire Citizenship for Girls,” 5/GFS/2/225, Overseas—Empire Education Committee—suggested schemes of work, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

131 emigrate in the colonies. For instance, when a branch of the GFS in Port Elizabeth,

South Africa, was linked with the English town of Henley-on-Thames, the associates in

Port Elizabeth wrote of their excitement in receiving “many interesting letters from these friends overseas” and promised that they “shall succeed in interesting them in our own doings in sunny South Africa.”32 The GFS was not alone in its use of such programs and its appreciation of the effects such correspondences could have. For instance, in a discussion about the emigration of children between Herbert Asquith, then Home

Secretary, and organizers of child charities and emigration societies, Asquith asked the organizers what happens if children refuse to emigrate. E. M. Hance, the clerk of the

Liverpool School Board, responded: “there was some difficulty in getting children to go but since their children have written back favourably to their old school fellows. A constant influx of such letters has caused emigration to be looked forward to by the children. There is no difficulty now in the schools from which children have been sent out.”33 As reflected in Hance’s response, correspondences from peers was recognized as an effective mode of propaganda for emigration.

However, as the GFS discovered, the problem with such programs is that girls did not always stick to the prescribed scripts. For example, Miss Whitley, who oversaw one of the GFS branches in South Africa, wrote to the GFS in London and “spoke strongly on the inadvisability of correspondence between Members at home and in S. Africa.”34

32 “St. Paul’s G.F.S. Port Elizabeth Junior Branch,” c. 1931, 5/GFS/2/260, South Africa—scrapbook, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 33 “Emigration of Industrial School Children,” February 1895, HO 144/495/X42032, Home Office: Reigstered Papers, Supplementary, The National Archives. 34 Lily Frere, “Miss Whitley spoke against Domestic Servants writing to individuals in S. Africa,” Minutes of a Meeting of the Sectional Committee for S. Africa held at the G.F.S. Central Office, 39 Victoria Street, London S.W. on Wednesday 4 October 1911, GFS Minute Book South Africa, 58, 5/GFS/01/102, Imperial, Colonial and Overseas Committee—South Africa, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

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Whitley “found that Correspondence with English Members…was not always appreciated by Members in the Colonies that often in fact been the cause of arresting the progress of the GFS work.”35 She particularly highlighted how letters from Britain increased the frustration felt by emigrant domestic servants, since “[d]omestic services in

S. Africa, being about entirely performed by coloured people, is looked upon in a different light to what it is at home.”36 Although the GFS envisioned penfriend programs as supporting their emigration efforts, Whitley’s comments demonstrate how correspondences actually highlighted the difficulties of colonial life and differential notions of domestic service in Britain and the colonies, a theme the next chapter explores in greater depth. As the problems with the penfriend program illustrate, GFS efforts could backfire at times and actually have the opposite effect that organizers intended.

“Little Sisters Across the Seas”: Creating an Imagined Community through GFS Newsletters

As evidenced by the story at the opening of this chapter, newsletters formed an important part of the GFS’s imperial educational work. Like other emigration societies, including

Barnardo’s, the GFS used newsletters to publicize their work in the empire. However, while Barnardo’s newsletters were directed to an adult audience, specifically possible donors, the GFS’s newsletters were directed to girls themselves. The organization produced a variety of newsletters—including G.F.S. Candidate, G.F.S. Associates

Journal and Advertiser, G.F.S. Reading Union Leaflet, G.F.S. Workers’ Journal, and The

Empire and Beyond—each aimed at a different category of participants in the GFS.

35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 59.

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Despite their different purposes and audiences, almost all the newsletters contain regular features about the empire. Friendly Leaves was the first newsletter published by the

GFS, with its inaugural issue appearing in 1876. In 1911, the newsletter published a series of articles—“Our Colonies”—that described the history and geography of the colonies. Accompanied by photographs and drawings, these articles detail what life was like for girls in these colonies and provide advice for readers who wished to emigrate and settle there. For instance, the installment about New Zealand describes how “girls live in the open air, and are very carefully educated. They generally learn to swim and can ride and take part in all outdoor games.”37 The article concludes by encouraging girls to emigrate and settle there, noting that New Zealand is “waiting for the pioneer.”38 This call to emigrate to the colonies is reinforced by another regular section of the newsletter,

“Emigration News,” which provides updates about parties of girls and young women that emigrated to the colonies and advertised free passages and job openings to the different colonies.39

Another GFS newspaper—Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the

World—circulated throughout the empire and focused on producing articles for candidates under the age of twelve. Our Letter regularly contained articles about the lives of women and girls around the world and the GFS’s work in different areas of the empire. Girls submitted articles and often pictures to the newsletter to share what their branches of the GFS did and to give other girls a sense of their “home-life” and “help one

37 “Our Colonies II.—New Zealand,” Friendly Leaves (March 1911), 105. 38 Ibid., 107. 39 See for instance, Hon. Mrs. Joyce, “Emigration News,” Friendly Leaves (November 1911), 375.

134 another to understand something of each other’s lives.”40 Accompanied by a photograph

(figure 9), one article about “Candidates in New Zealand” in Our Letter emphasizes the similarities about candidates in New Zealand and England: “These children love Our

Letter, which goes to them by post across the sea; they have Candidates’ Classes just as you have in England.”41

Figure 9: Avonside Branch in Christchurch, New Zealand42

40 “A Spring Greeting,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (March 1905), 1. See also, Ethel S. Thompson, “Correspondence: A Letter from A G.F.S. Candidate in Canada,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (Summer 1904), 4. 41 “Candidates in New Zealand,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (September 1904), 3. 42 Ibid.

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One of the newsletter’s regular columns—“What Candidates are Doing”—informs girls

“something about life and surroundings of these little sisters across the seas.”43 This familial imagery formed a common theme of articles. For instance, an article published in 1906 and written by “An Associate,” describes the organization as “a very large family” composed of “thousands of G.F.S. Candidates at home and abroad.”44

The recurring use of this familial imagery highlights how GFS newsletters helped foster an “imagined community.”45 In her study of colonial literature for girls, Kristine

Moruzi explains how fiction and periodicals encouraged girls to emigrate and that one of the key ways they accomplished this was to “to situate colonial girlhood within an international sisterhood that promoted the ties of imperialism in an effort to reassure girls that life in the colonies would allow them to maintain their purity and virtue.”46 For girls in Britain contemplating emigration, friendly and familial motifs helped to ease trepidations about colonial life and its dangers. For girls living in the colonies, such imagery made them feel more connected to the empire and their “home.” As Moruzi observes, “Often colonial girls had little direct experience with England or other colonies.

Through their magazines, however, they could see themselves as part of the community but also as uniquely situated within the empire, thereby creating a model of girlhood that is simultaneously transnational, imperial, and colonial.”47 Like other girls’ periodicals,

43 “What Candidates are Doing,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (September 1906), 3. 44 An Associate, “A Friendly Letter to all Candidates Everywhere,” Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (June 1906), 1. 45 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (New York: Verso, 2006). See also Simon J. Potter, “Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire,” The Journal of British Studies 46, no. 3 (July 2007): 621-46. 46 Kristine Moruzi, “‘I am content with Canada’: Canadian Girls at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4 (2012): 119. 47 Ibid., 123.

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GFS newsletters made esoteric ideas about the empire and their “home” more tangible and allowed girls to visualize their place within the wider, interconnected communities of both the GFS and the empire. Other organizations, like Barnardo’s, also employed this familial imagery. Children at Barnardo’s homes were encouraged to think of each other as brothers and sisters, and the organization referred to child migrants as Thomas

Barnardo’s “children” and the children of the emigrants as his “grandchildren.”48 In the case of both Barnardo’s and the GFS, this terminology served as a way to teach children the proper social roles and values but it also reinforced the idea that these organizations were creating a better family to compensate for the conditions of children’s homes and a model community for children.49

“Our Friends at Home”: Narratives of Empire and Colonial Life in GFS Scrapbooks

Like newsletters, scrapbooks and scrapbook competitions sought to foster transcolonial connections and strengthen girls’ sense of patriotism towards the empire by educating them about the colonies and providing insights into girls’ lives in disparate parts of the empire.50 Scrapbooks feature drawings, photographs, and essays about the members’ activities in the colonies, including field trips, charity work, and picnics at farms. They also include observations about colonial life and pictures of buildings, beaches, and wild

48 “Men and Women of the Future,” For God and Country 65 (1930), 29-44. 49 The employment of familial rhetoric in Barnardo’s is discussed by Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London, Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 32-33, 43-44. See also Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Durham: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 172-73, for more on the employment of “sisterhood” as a way to give feminism a familial basis. 50 Overseas Secretary to Miss Timewell, November 22, 1932, 5/GFS/2/261, South Africa, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

137 life.51 This section focuses in particular on two scrapbooks—one produced by the Port

Elizabeth GFS branch in South Africa and the other by various branches in Western

Australia—to examine the motifs and imagery employed by the GFS to garner support for its emigration and imperial work.

Like in newsletters, familial imagery forms a recurring motif in the scrapbooks.

One of the essays in a scrapbook created by the Port Elizabeth branch describes the purpose of the book as a way of “giving our friends at home” a sense of what life was like in South Africa. Essays in the Western Australian scrapbook contain salutations like

“To a Dear G.F.S. Friend” and “Dear Sister Candidates Overseas.”52 Photographs reinforce this sense of community by showing girls together, appearing almost as a family (figures 10 and 11). The idea of the GFS as a family, coupled with the ubiquitous emphasis on knowing and understanding the lives of girls in other parts of the empire, produced a consciousness of girls’ roles in and connection to the GFS and the empire.

The scrapbooks draw parallels between life in Britain and in South Africa and

Australia to cultivate a sense of familiarity and commonality. For instance, the South

Africa scrapbook describes Port Elizabeth as “the Liverpool of South Africa,”53 while the

Australia scrapbook contains the following description of one of its beaches: “South

Beach—Known as the ‘Brighton of the West’ can be reached by tram, train or Boat—and is one of the best beaches for children” (figure 12).54

51 For more on what photographs can illuminate about colonial girlhood, see Kristine Alexander, “Picturing Girlhood and Empire: The Girl Guide Movement and Photography,” in Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950, eds. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 197-213. 52 Blanche Neave, “To a Dear G.F.S. Friend,” May 27, 1929, Western Australia Scrapbook, 5/GFS/02/357, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library; and Mollie Thomas, “Dear Sister Candidates Overseas,” Western Australia Scrapbook. 53 “Port Elizabeth,” South Africa scrapbook. 54 South Beach page, Western Australia scrapbook.

138

Figure 10: “Some of the candidates with three Candidate workers (senior members) from St. Bartholomew’s Branch, East Perth”55

Figure 11: GFS Picnic56

55 “Some of the candidates with three Candidate workers (senior members) from St. Bartholomew’s Branch, East Perth,” Western Australia Scrapbook. 56 “These Speak for Themselves. Girls generally can.!,” 5/GFS/2/260, South Africa—scrapbook, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

139

Figure 12: South Beach—“Brighton of the West”

Several essays read like travel advertisements. For instance, the following description in the Western Australia scrapbook highlights the attractions and accessibility of the town of

Toodyay: “Toodyay nestles among fine tree-covered hills on the left bank of the River

Avon and is one of the oldest and most charming of the inland town…there are opportunities for sport of many kinds, including golf and tennis—Toodyay is ideal as a

140 winter and spring holiday resort, being 65 miles by rail from Perth and 53 miles by road, the drive being one of the most picturesque in the state.”57

The Port Elizabeth scrapbook portrays life in the colony as a satisfying and enjoyable one, though not without its challenges. One essay reflects: “Having lived out here just six years, and although England will always have first place in my heart, yet I love Africa, for its sunshine and brightness, and the beautiful scenery, and even its dark places, which are many, and call for our sympathy, our work and our whole-hearted interest.”58 The scrapbooks also accentuate the modernity of the regions. For instance, an essay in the Port Elizabeth scrapbook, “Walking to Work in South Africa” begins by dismissing any idea that it is a wild and untamed place: “there will be no thrilling accounts of encounters with lions and tigers!” The essay instead highlights the town’s features, including the “up-to-date Hotel” and “a fine Public Library” and “the Shops,” which “contain everything, almost, that mankind, or womankind, could want.”59

Photographs of buildings and monuments—including one described in a caption as “One of the finest Memorials in the world”—complement these written descriptions.60 The

Western Australia scrapbook similarly contains pictures of the region’s buildings and infrastructure, including Mundaring Weir, which it proclaims to be “the greatest scheme in the world” (figure 13).61 Both through words and images, the scrapbooks sought to demonstrate to those in Britain that Western Australia and South Africa should not be written off as unrefined backwaters and were inviting places to settle and live.

57 Toodyay page, Western Australia scrapbook. 58 “A Trip By Motor Car to Basutoland,” South Africa scrapbook. 59 “Walking to Work in South Africa,” South Africa scrapbook. 60 Monuments page, South Africa scrapbook. 61 Mundaring Weir page, Western Australia scrapbook.

141

Figure 13: Mundaring Weir—“The Greatest Scheme in the World”62

GFS scrapbooks reaffirmed emigration discourses and propaganda by emphasizing how the colonies provided girls with opportunities and freedoms that were not possible in Britain. Like newsletters, the images in this scrapbook reinforce the freedom and benefits of colonial life to encourage emigration. In contrast to the cramped and overcrowded conditions of London and other British cities, girls in the scrapbooks are pictured enjoying the outdoors (figure 14). Girls within the photographs perform traditional gender and racial roles. Images of churches and girls at church sought to show

62 Ibid.

142 that girls’ religious commitment and the maintenance of their virtue (see figures 15 and

16).63 The Western Australia scrapbook features a photograph of girls sewing outside

(figure 17), highlighting their commitment to domesticity within the Australian frontier.

Like newsletters, they sought to show their audience “at home” in Britain that their lives were not that different than in Britain.

Figure 14: “Miss Whatley and Junior St. Andrews at picnic”64

63 For more on the Christian ideals of the GFS, see Vivienne Richmond, “‘It Is Not a Society for Human Beings but for Virgins’: The Girls’ Friendly Society Membership Eligibility Dispute 1875-1936,” Journal of Historical Sociology 20, no. 3 (September 2007): 304-27; Brian Harrison, “For Church, Queen, and Family: The Girls’ Friendly Society 1874-1920,” Past and Present 61 (November 1972): 107-38; and Julia Bush, “Edwardian Ladies and the ‘Race’ Dimensions of British Imperialism,” Women’s Studies International Forum 21, no. 3 (1998): 277-89. 64 “St Andrews Junior Candidates Subiaco,” Western Australia scrapbook.

143

Figure 15: Girls Attending Ascension Day Services65

Figure 16: Page of Church Photographs66

65 “After service on Ascension Day. 1931.,” South Africa scrapbook. 66 Page with various churches, Western Australia scrapbook.

144

Figure 17: “Candidates’ Sewing”67

Understanding the photographs requires looking beyond the surface and disentangling the layers of meaning embedded within them. As Homi Bhabha cautions,

“the image is only ever an appurtenance to authority and identity; it must never be read mimetically as the appearance of reality.”68 The photographs of GFS members reflect a self-fashioning and performativity, shaped by their purpose and the perceived expectations of their intended audience. The essays reveal girls’ consciousness about their audience and a desire to please and entertain them, with lines such as “I hope that you will like the pages that St. Albans are putting in the Album” and “I hope this will be

67 “G.F.S. Bassadean Candidate Class. 1930.,” Western Australia scrapbook 68 Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 81. Emphasis in the original.

145 of interest to some of friends at home.” 69 The performativity within the photographs and essays indicate that girls in South Africa and Western Australia were influenced by girls in Britain, or at least by their perceptions of what girls in Britain did and liked.

Created for publicity purposes, the scrapbooks sought to portray an attractive picture of colonial life and thus cannot taken as neutral or authentic representations of colonial life.

In his study of photography and the British Empire, James Ryan describes how photographs “reveal as much about the imaginative landscape of imperial culture as the do about the physical spaces or people pictured within their frame.”70 Elizabeth Siegel makes a similar observation in Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of

Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums, describing how Victorian-era photo albums were put on display in the parlor “to help people understand who they were” and shape how they “imagined their memories and histories.”71 Photographs within the GFS scrapbooks depicted the organization as it wished to be seen and projected an idealized version of colonial society.

The portrayal and marginalization of non-British subjects in the scrapbooks reflects this desire to present an idealized society. Although branches for coloured and

Aboriginal girls existed, there are no photographs of them or essays about their activities.

When African or Aboriginal people appear in the scrapbooks, they are used for specific purposes, namely to reaffirm racial hierarchies and reinforce the civilizing mission of

69 Mollie Thomas, Letter to “Dear Sister Candidates Overseas,” Perth, Western Australia scrapbook; “A Trip By Motor Car to Basutoland,” South Africa scrapbook. 70 James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 19-20. 71 Elizabeth Siegel, Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 7, 10.

146 imperialism.72 The photos in the Port Elizabeth scrapbook perpetuate stereotypes and narratives about Africans’ backwardness. For instance, one photo (figure 18) shows an

African man and woman outside their home with the caption: “Taken from the same farm. The Native Boy would not allow his wife to be snapped without him.”73 Her passiveness and powerlessness stand in contrast to the GFS girls, who are pictured moving freely in South Africa. The caption brands the African woman as submissive and an object of sympathy, underscoring backwardness of African societies and the necessity of Britain’s civilizing mission. In another photograph (figure 19), a woman stands behind her husband, with the caption: “A Fine Native. His Wife peeps from behind.”74

Throughout the scrapbook, African women are barely visible, and when they are, they appear in the shadows or as stock figures.

Figure 18: An African Man and Women outside Their Home75

72 For more on the portrayals of Aboriginal women, see Liz Conor, Skin Deep: Settler impressions of Aboriginal women (Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2016). 73 South African farm page, South Africa scrapbook. 74 South African countryside page, South Africa scrapbook. 75 South African farm page.

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Figure 19: Photograph of an African Man and Woman76

The scrapbooks also aimed to validate Britain’s “civilizing mission.” For example, one of the essays in the Port Elizabeth scrapbook describes the transition of

Africans from a primitive, superstitious people to a civilized one: “The Basutos have their own religious and witch doctors, but, as they are becoming more civilized, they are generally giving up their superstitions.”77 Similarly, the Western Australia scrapbook features a photograph of a man that it describes in a caption as a drunken “heathen” but who “is a good Christian now.”78 Other images within the Western Australian scrapbook reaffirm the transition from “primitive” to “civilized.” Aboriginal children are pictured playing cricket and boxing, Aboriginal men attending church, and Aboriginal women

76 South African countryside page. 77 “A Trip By Motor Car to Basutoland.” 78 Photograph of “‘Armless’ Ned,” Western Australia scrapbook.

148 waiting for their tea.79 For the British, who equated civilization with the 3 C’s—Classics,

Christianity, and cricket—such images served as undeniable markers of the success of the civilizing mission.80

The GFS archives contain little information about how the scrapbooks were produced or how girls responded to them. One key problem in researching the history of childhood is judging the extent to which child-produced sources are mediated by adults.

Because I have been unable to find information on the process of producing these scrapbooks, it is difficult to assess the extent to which adults intervened in scrapbooks production. While adult associates were involved in the creation of the scrapbooks, girls assisted with the writing of essays and in taking photographs and making the drawings.

Consequently, scrapbooks acted as a rare forum where girls could share their perspectives and experiences of colonial life, act as experts about colonial life, and instruct others about colonial history and geography and everyday life. They also provide insights into how girls viewed the empire and their place in it. What is particularly significant about the scrapbooks is that it is a source not only produced by girls but for an audience of girls, something made clear by salutations in the essays, like “Dear Sister Candidates

Overseas.” Following their completion, scrapbooks were sent to other parts of the empire and circulated among various GFS branches. The scrapbook from Port Elizabeth circulated among fourteen branches mainly located around the Cheshire area of England while the one from Western Australia was sent to London. A log page at the end of the

South Africa Scrapbook gives very specific instructions to the branches: “Please let the

79 “A young cricketer,” “A boxing match,” “Camp men leaving the Church after Service,” and “Single girls waiting for their tea,” Western Australia scrapbook. 80 Keith A.P. Sandiford, Cricket and the Victorians (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), 145.

149 members of your Branch look at this Log Book, then send it on to the next name on the list…Please do not keep it more than 2 weeks in one Branch.”81 The circulation of the scrapbooks to Britain demonstrates how the GFS served as a mode for systems of knowledge about race to circulate in the wider empire.

Scrapbooks, along with newsletters, were cornerstones of the GFS’s educational work, but evaluating their reception and influence poses a challenge. Like scrapbooks, newsletters were circulated and read by girls throughout the empire. Subscription numbers show that newsletters were sent to every colony where the GFS had branches.

In addition to subscription numbers, sections like “Our Imperial Mail-bag” or

“Correspondence,” which featured letters written by girls to the newsletter, also reflect a geographically broad readership with letters coming from girls throughout the empire.

Reports from branches in the colonies about girls requesting more copies of newsletters also attest to the popularity of the newsletters among members. However, the question of how girls interpreted the scrapbooks and stories in the newsletters is more difficult to determine.82 Did they shape girls’ views of the empire and perhaps even encourage them to emigrate, as GFS organizers had hoped? Or did girls view the photographs and read the essays and articles and find the descriptions of colonial life unappealing? Each girl who viewed the scrapbooks and read the newsletters understood them and was influenced by them in different ways, and unfortunately, I have been unable to find any records about girls’ reaction to the scrapbooks and newsletters that might point towards an answer to these questions. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the scrapbooks and

81 Log page, Port Elizabeth Scrapbook. Emphasis in the original 82 As Sarah Schwebel has observed, books and toys are created by adults but once in children’s hands may be used in ways both intended and not intended by producers. Sara L. Schwebel, “The Limits of Agency for Children’s Literature Scholars,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8, no. 1 (August 2016): 280.

150 newsletters alone persuaded girls to emigrate, and as illustrated by the problems with the

GFS’s “penfriend” program, not all the GFS’s efforts went according to plan.

“An Utterly Different Life”: Debates over the Central Rule and Divisions within the GFS

Images within GFS newsletters and scrapbooks of a unified, harmonious family in reality masked widening divisions within the organization. Fundamental misunderstandings about the complexities of the colonies and realities of colonial life plagued the GFS.

Correspondences among GFS associates and members in the colonies reveal frustrations at the misconceptions of organizers in Britain. For instance, F.G. Parrish—who oversaw the GFS in Port Elizabeth—wrote to London that “[t]he working of a Branch in South

Africa is very different from that of work a Branch in England.”83 Other associates also viewed organizers in Britain as misjudging the necessities of the colonial branches and underestimating the difficulties they faced. A GFS associate in Bombay similarly wrote to the GFS Secretary in India, Caroline Mytton, about the lack of understanding from the

Central Branch and the challenges faced by Indian branches, stating: “I doubt whether anyone at home realises altogether what we are up against.”84 GFS associates in the colonies frequently discussed the unique obstacles encountered by the organization and drew contrasts between life in Britain and life in the colonies. For instance, a report by the Indian branches to the GFS headquarters in London detailed the challenges that girls

83 F.G. Parrish, “Girls’ Friendly Society Grahamstown Dioceses Port Elizabeth St. Paul’s Branch,” 1937, 5/GFS/2/262, South Africa and Rhodesia, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. The GFS in Southern Africa faced particular complications due to the complexities of race and the deep anxieties about racial mixing, which is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. 84 Hon. Sec. GFS Lodge Bombay to Caroline Mytton, April 8, 1932, 1, 5/GFS/2/231, Minutes and Papers of Overseas—India, Burma and Ceylon: Bombay, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

151 faced when they arrived in India and described how a girl “is plunged into an utterly different life and the loneliness is perfectly awful.”85 Margaret Scott—who oversaw the branch in Lahore—echoed this sentiment, writing: “to be a girl here is much more difficult than in England.”86 While the GFS attempted to propagate a singular notion of

“girlhood,” the observations of GFS associates in India demonstrate how geography shaped girls’ lives and call attention to the differential experiences of girlhood. The structure, ideals, and programs of the GFS operated on metropolitan models and understandings that could not necessarily be applied to the colonies.

Debates about the Central Rule and purity reflected a fundamental disconnect in conceptions about the role and purpose of the GFS in girls’ lives and wider society and growing divergence between the GFS Central Branch in London and its branches in other parts of the empire. As discussed in the previous chapter, the GFS had a strict policy of admitting only girls with unquestionable purity. However, struggling with declining membership and competition from other organizations, GFS branches in various parts of the empire, including India, argued that the Central Rule about purity should be amended to take into consideration girls who were not virgins but repentant, reasoning that “failure in the past should not disqualify a girl from membership.”87 In arguing for this change, they drew attention to girls’ differential experiences: “Here in India, where, owing to the circumstance of their lives, European girls mature young, and are often faced with

85 “The India ‘At Home,’” 1, 5/GFS/2/235, Minutes and Papers of Overseas—India, Burma and Ceylon: Various, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 86 Margaret Scott to Caroline Mytton, November 26, 1928, 1, 5/GFS/2/235, Minutes and Papers of Overseas—India, Burma and Ceylon: Lahore, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 87 Ibid.

152 temptations and a knowledge of evil beyond their years.”88 E. W. Cary, the president of the GFS Diocesan Council in Ceylon, invoked the Christian ideal of forgiveness in her plea for a change in the rule about purity, noting that the organization should “not to exclude the Mary Magdalenes of our world who had sinned in the past.”89 Like other

GFS associates in India, Cary argued for the need to recognize the complexity of life in

India and the differences in the experiences of girls in England and India, writing: “There is a wide difference between the England of fifty years ago (and even of this day) and the conditions in India and Ceylon.”90 Despite requests from numerous branches that the

GFS needed more flexibility in the application of the principle of purity, the Central

Branch remained intransigent. A letter from the President of the GFS Central Council concluded that the GFS could not make accommodations since “[t]he whole purpot of the

Society is to help girls to maintain a high moral standard.”91 The refusal of the GFS

Central Council to amend its standards of purity led to increasingly strained relations between associates in India and associates in London, with the GFS in India concluding that the organization “did not meet the need in India at the present time” and needed

“new life.”92 Olive Carden, president of the Lahore Diocesan Council, reiterated this

88 Olive Carden and Ethel J. Shepard to Caroline Mytton, January 14, 1932, 1, 5/GFS/2/235, Minutes and Papers of Overseas—India, Burma and Ceylon: Lahore, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 89 E.W. Cary to Mrs. McMillan, October 24, 1932, 1, 5/GFS/2/237, Minutes and Papers of Overseas – India, Burma and Ceylon: Withdrawal of GFS, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 90 Ibid. 91 Mrs. Arbuthnot to Mrs. Carden, February 11, 1932, 5/GFS/2/230, Minutes and Papers of Overseas— India, Burma and Ceylon: Lahore, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 92 “The future of G.F.S. work in the Diocese,” A Meeting of the Lahore Diocesan Council was held on Tuesday 23rd February, 1932, at St. Hilda’s House, Lahore, 1, 5/GFS/2/230, Minutes and Papers of Overseas—India, Burma and Ceylon: Lahore, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. In their respective studies of the GFS, Bush and Richmond both address how the GFS’s adherence to purity led to its decline. Richmond’s article on Central Rule III focuses on the British context of the debates but does not examine the imperial context. See “It Is Not a Society for Human Beings but for Virgins.” Bush also addresses purity in her work on the GFS and specifically the GFS’s adherence to racial

153 sentiment in a letter to GFS headquarters, writing that “they had almost entirely failed in keeping in touch with Anglo-Indian girls in Lahore.”93 The GFS’s failure to evolve and adapt to the changing social conditions meant that it had become irrelevant for girls. As a result, the Lahore branch—the first GFS branch established in India in 1885 and one of main branches in India—closed in November 1932. Although the GFS continued its work in India and eventually did amend their Central Rule to remove the stipulation about virginity, this closure symbolized the GFS’s waning influence and resonance for girls in India.

“They Are Not on an Equal Footing”: The Problem of Coloured Members in the GFS

Like debates over standards of purity, issues of race exposed the contradictions of the

GFS’s stated commitment to “Imperial sisterhood” and revealed the contradictions between rhetoric and reality, especially in India and South Africa.94 The GFS presented itself an organization that transcended racial divisions. For instance, Mary Townsend, the founder of the GFS, described one of the organization’s goals as “welding together those whom differences of race so often keep apart.”95 The official history of the GFS also emphasized its role in uniting different races: “In that great work which England to- day is doing for her Indian Empire, I have proud hopes that our G.F.S. may play its part, helping to break down racial distinctions, binding together Anglo-Indian, Eurasian, and

purity but does not go into depth about debates over this rule in the empire in “Edwardian Ladies and the ‘Race’ Dimensions of British Imperialism.” 93 “The future of G.F.S. work in the Diocese.” 94 M.E. Townsend refers to “Imperial sisterhood” in “Colonial Committee Minutes of a Meeting held on Nov. 20th 1905,” 10, 5/GFS/1/97, GFS Minute Book Colonial No. 2, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 95 Money, History of The Girls’ Friendly Society, 70.

154

Christian native with its cord of love and sympathy and prayer.”96 However, the realities of race revealed the hollowness of these pronouncements. As Julia Bush commented in her discussion of the GFS’s racial policies, the GFS “stood emphatically for purity, especially racial purity.”97 For the GFS—and wider colonial governments and societies—children of mixed-race descent were viewed as particularly problematic. By complicating binary racial distinctions of black and white, these children seemingly undermined the cohesion of British society in colonial societies and raised the specter of racial degeneration, calling into question beliefs about British prestige and privilege in the colonies.98

The sense of uneasiness caused by coloured girls is reflected in an essay,

“Walking to Work in South Africa,” which was included in the GFS scrapbook from Port

Elizabeth that was circulated to branches in England. The author of the essay, likely a

GFS member, begins by describing the topography of Port Elizabeth and then proceeds to provide a racial ethnography of the city, devoting over a page of the three-page essay to delineating the “wide diversity” of races: the English, “South African Dutch,” “Natives,”

Chinese, Malays, Indians, and “Coloured People.” The author provides the following description of this last category: “the Coloured People—whom one could almost call tragic. They are of course, descendants of children born to parents one of whom has been

White and one Native. Through the years by intermarriage, they have built up practically a separate race of people.”99 The description of coloured people as “tragic” suggests a perception that they are not only a source of shame but that their existence is regrettable

96 Ibid., 70-71. 97 Bush, “Edwardian Ladies and the ‘Race’ Dimensions of British Imperialism,” 285. 98 See chapters four and five for a greater discussion of racial anxieties in British settler societies. 99 “Walking to Work in South Africa,” Port Elizabeth Scrapbook.

155 and even disastrous to South African society. The essay’s deconstruction of racial groups in South Africa reveals the ways in which girls appropriated and reproduced wider discourses about race and consequently contributed to the racialized empire.

The liminal position of mixed-race children caused prolonged debates about their inclusion in the GFS.100 Opponents feared that the admittance of mixed-race girls would leave European girls vastly outnumbered and denigrate the reputation of the organization.101 However, the more general anxiety was that their admittance would compromise the racial purity of the GFS and its white members. Despite these apprehensions, necessity eventually outweighed this opposition and led the GFS to admit mixed-race girls. As discussed in chapter two, the GFS in the colonies struggled to recruit and retain members, due in part to vast distances between urban areas and branches. The GFS in India faced an additional challenge due to the mobility of the

British population. When describing the GFS’s activities in India, the History of The

Girls’ Friendly Society highlighted this hurdle: “One of the greatest difficulties in the work is the lack of continuity in the workers, the English in India not being a settled population, but scattered here and there and constantly moving either from place to place in India, or to and from England.”102 In contrast to Anglo-Indian girls, who were often moved around the country, Eurasians “live[d] there always” and provided a stable source

100 Dr. Symes Thompson and his wife, who was “a leading person in the Girls’ Friendly Society,” described “considerable difficulties connected with the working of the G.F.S. here, owing to the colour question, and also owing to the terribly demoralized condition of the coloured and semicoloured women of Cape Town.” See Correspondence with Fr. Benson on SSJE missionary work in the Cape Town area of South Africa, 2- 3, August 29, 1888, SSJE/6/9/1/6, ff. 47-48, Records of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, Church of England Record Centre. 101 “Sectional Committee for South Africa: Minutes of a Meeting Held on Sept. 19th 1906,” 8, 5/GFS/1/102, GFS Minute Book South Africa, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 102 Money, History of The Girls’ Friendly Society, 26

156 of membership.103 Therefore, it needed non-white members to help ensure its continuation.104 The GFS gave their begrudging approval of admitting Eurasian girls in

India in the early 1900s and coloured girls in South Africa in the early 1890s. The decision to admit Eurasian girls experienced less resistance than the decision of South

African branches to admit coloured girls, in part because the organization could argue that Eurasian children were essentially British in temperament. Describing the decision to admit Eurasian girls, the History of The Girls’ Friendly Society reported: “Our

Government classes them as Europeans; they are Christians; they dress like ourselves, and their daughters go to the High Schools with our English girls. They have the greatest love for England and for all that belongs to it, and will speak of England as ‘home,’ though they have never seen it, and know that they can never expect to do so.”105 Despite these descriptions of Eurasian children and the admittance of Eurasian girls beginning in the early 1900s, the GFS simultaneously worked to limit the interaction between Anglo-

Indian and Eurasian girls and specifically forbade Eurasian girls from staying at the same hostels as British emigrants and Anglo-Indian girls.106 As a home away from home for girls, the hostel represented an intimate domestic space that needed to remain virtuous, pure, and racially segregated.

Like in India, the GFS in South Africa insisted on separate branches for white and coloured girls and typically refused financial support for branches and hostels for

103 Ibid., 66. 104 M.E. Townsend, “G.F.S. in India,” 5/GFS/1/96, Imperial, Colonial and Overseas Committee Minute Book No. 1, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 105 Money, History of The Girls’ Friendly Society, 66. 106 “re Hostels for English girl employees,” Minutes of a Meeting of the Committee for Extension Work in India and Ceylon, held at Townsend House, Greycoat Place, S.W., on Thursday, June 9th, 1927, at 11 am, 95, 5/GFS/1/102, GFS Minute Book South Africa, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. For more on this topic, see Bush, “Edwardian Ladies and Race,” 284.

157 coloured girls.107 Eventually, the lack of equality between GFS branches for European girls and “coloured branches” led them to leave the GFS. For instance, in 1906, one branch in Cape Town withdrew from the GFS stating that “they are not on an equal footing with the white members, they gain nothing by belonging to the GFS, the Society gains strength from them.”108 A report by the Sectional Committee for South Africa on this closure indicates that the withdrawal of coloured branches was a common occurrence, citing similar incidents in East London and Port Elizabeth and at other branches in Cape Town. Despite the withdrawal of the branch, the GFS Diocesan

Council in Cape Town refused to consider any form of integration or greater support for the coloured branches but instead advocated the extension its segregationist policies, proposing “[t]hat in future only white girls be admitted to the G.F.S. in Capetown

[sic].”109 However, this proposal experienced resistance from other branches, who noted the infeasibility of policy of excluding coloured members altogether. For instance the head of the GFS branch in Grahamstown wrote that “they could not lose their coloured members” and instead advocated the continuation of segregationist policies and to keep the branches for white and coloured girls “quite distinct” so “that the Members should not be invited to visit the other Members except at special services in Church.”110 At the time of these debates in 1906, the GFS refused to establish mixed branches and

107 Ellen Joyce, ed., “Reports of the Department for Members Emigrating” 1893, 54, D3287/68/1/3, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. “Miss Atlee’s Work in Cape Town,” Minutes of a Meeting of the Imperial & Overseas Committee held on Monday, March 18th, 1929 at Townsend House at 2:30 PM, 53-54, 5/GFS/1/98, Imperial, Colonial and Overseas Committee Minute Book No. 3, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. For similar discussions in the Indian context, see “re Hostels for English girl employees,” 95. 108 Lily Frere, “Branches of Coloured Girls,” Sectional Committee for South Africa: Minutes of a Meeting held on May 22nd, 1906, 5, 5/GFS/1/102, GFS Minute Book South Africa, Records of Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid.

158 concluded that the matter of what to do with coloured branches was “one of grave and increasingly difficulty.”111 Although the GFS continued its work in South Africa, the failure to accommodate coloured branches symbolized the GFS’s declining influence and resonance among both British and coloured girls in South Africa. The treatment of coloured and Eurasian girls revealed the disparities and disunities within the “very large family” of the GFS and also the hollowness of the GFS’s professed commitment to “the care of the girlhood of the empire.” Universalist notions of girlhood and family propagated by the GFS were in reality very exclusionist; only racially “pure,” white girls could be part of the “Imperial sisterhood” of the GFS.

Conclusion

The problems encountered by the GFS in the colonies bring into focus the instability and contested nature of girlhood. The construction of girlhood did not occur in a vacuum but was shaped by cross-cultural exchanges, and through the exchange of scrapbooks and letters, the GFS served as a conduit by which ideas about girlhood circulated. In expressing its dedication to caring for girlhood, the GFS propagated a certain notion of girlhood—one based on whiteness and middle-class values, namely purity—and crucially reinforced associated social, racial, and colonial power structures. As demonstrated by the withdrawal of coloured branches and disputes over the central rule, girls also challenged these systems of colonial power and in the process drew attention to the constructed nature of girlhood. Geography, class, and race mediated girls’ specific roles in the colonial project and experiences of colonialism. The GFS attempted to construct a

111 Ibid., 5-6.

159 singular “girlhood of our empire,” but the observations and experiences of girls and GFS associates in the colonies underscored its complexity and plurality. The difficulties faced by the GFS in the colonies reflected broader tensions and challenges within emigration programs, which the next chapter explores in depth.

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CHAPTER FOUR

“TROUBLE WITH THE GIRL”: RACE, CLASS, AND COMPETING IMPERIAL PROJECTS IN SOUTH AFRICA AND NEW ZEALAND

In February 1902, Eliza Hobbs and Eliza Cook appeared before a magistrate’s court in

Bulawayo, Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), on the charge of infringement of the

Masters’ and Servants’ Ordinances. They had arrived Bulawayo in June 1901 and were contracted to work as servants for the Robinson household for a minimum of two years.

However, upon their arrival, Hobbs and Cook found life in Southern Africa laborious, alien, and full of hardships, very different from the “Great Garden” promised in emigration propaganda.1 Hobbs wrote to Ellen Joyce and Edith Lyttleton Gell, who had helped arrange her passage to Bulawayo, about the difficulties in adjusting the life in

Bulawayo and her sense of loneliness and isolation, confiding: “I cannot tell you how earnestly I have longed for one friend since I have been here.”2 She described the challenges of “be[ing] in a strange land penniless.”3 These feelings were compounded by

Hobbs’s difficult relationship with her mistress, Sidonia Robinson. Hobbs expressed being “unjustly treated” by Robinson, describing her as “dreadful to live with.”4 Hobbs stated how Robinson referred to her and Cook as “low-grade” and explained: “I can truthfully say I have never been so much insulted all my life put together, as I have been

1 Ellen Joyce, Thirty years of Girls Friendly Society work (London, The Girls’ Friendly Society, 1912), 1. 2 Eliza Hobbs to “Honoured Madam,” January 20, 1902, D3287/67/11/84, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.

161 the short timeI [sic] have been with Mrs. Robinson.”5 Due to the confluence of these circumstances, Hobbs and Cook decided to leave their situations eight months after their arrival. They were eventually arrested, and at the trial, Hobbs testified that she would rather “go to prison” than return to work for Mrs. Robinson, stating that if she was compelled to stay, it would mean that “the law seems to uphold tyranny.”6 She also pleaded her case to Joyce, writing “we have done no crime, only took ourselves out of an unhappy life.”7 The magistrate ruled in favor of Robinson and fined Hobbs and Cook two pounds and ordered them to fulfill their contracts and return to work for the

Robinsons. Hobbs criticized the verdict and broader legal system, writing: “it is not justice, the law seems made for monied people.”8 Ultimately, Robinson released Hobbs from her contract, but unable to pay for her passage back to England, Hobbs remained in

Bulawayo and found a new position as a housekeeper.9 In contrast to finding a land full of sunshine with greater freedom and opportunities as promised in emigration propaganda, Hobbs concluded: “I must say I do dislike the little I have seen of S. Africa.”

5 Eliza Hobbs to “Honoured Madam,” February 11, 1902, D3287/67/11/79, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. On being called “low-grade,” see “Two Imported Servants Quietly Leave at Night and Are Arrested. Sequel in Court.,” The Bulawayo Chronicle, February 8, 1902, D3287/67/11/80, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 6 Ibid. 7 Eliza Hobbs to “Honoured Madam,” 11 February 1902. 8 Eliza Hobbs to “Honoured Madam,” May 23, 1902, D3287/67/11/83, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 9 Ibid. The archives contain less information about Eliza Cook; there are no correspondences or writings from her. Robinson seems to have had less trouble with Eliza Cook, even writing that she would take Cook’s sister, who wanted to emigrate, as Hobbs’s replacement. See Sidonia C. Robinson to Miss Lefroy, December 23, 1901, D3207/67/11/84, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. At the trial, Robinson portrayed Cook as negatively influenced by Hobbs, testifying that she was “very well satisfied” with her. However, Eliza Cook provides a different view, testifying that “she left because she was not happy. Mrs. Robinson had been at times very nice and at other times not so. She had overheard her say that Mrs. Hobbs and herself were two low common women.” See “Two Imported Servants Quietly Leave at Night and Are Arrested. Sequel in Court.”

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She reiterated this belief in a later letter, concluding: “I cannot see that servants should come to a strange place to be treated just anyhow.”10

As described in the previous chapters, there was tremendous support to emigrate girls to work as domestic servants, but the logistics proved more complicated in reality, as demonstrated by the case of Hobbs and Cook. This chapter examines the challenges faced by emigration programs to South Africa and New Zealand and ultimately why large-scale child migration were never implemented in these regions, especially considering that ones to other settler colonies, namely Australia and Canada, succeeded.

The chapter begins by examining logistical problems—namely racial and political divisions in South Africa and distance to New Zealand—and how these problems brought into focus competing, rather than complimentary, objectives among emigration organizers and the South African and New Zealand governments. Different notions of domestic service and debates over the “right type” and ideal age of emigrants further underscored inherent contradictions within emigration ideology and the limitations of imperial ideals. The last part of the chapter focuses on the “poor white” problem and how the emigration of working-class girls to work as domestic servants threatened to destabilize fragile class and racial hierarchies within South Africa and New Zealand. As described in chapter one, girls were heralded as cultural and racial bulwarks, but within the challenging and shifting contexts of emigration and colonial life, this role—and girls’ place in the broader colonial project—was called into question.

“A Crying Want”: Stuart Barnardo’s Tour of South Africa

10 Eliza Hobbs to “Honoured Madam,” May 23, 1902.

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As detailed in the first chapter, the conclusion of the South African War provided an ostensibly golden opportunity for emigration organizations to extend or reinstate their programs in the region. Thomas Barnardo, regarded as “one of the great pioneers of child migration,” seized the chance to extend his successful emigration program in

Canada to a new continent following the War.11 This period did not mark the first time

Barnardo attempted to emigrate children to the region. Barnardo had sent around 100 children to South Africa before 1902, mainly children who would not do well in the climate of Canada due to “some delicacy of lung or chest.”12 Barnardo’s annual reports featured stories of these boys and girls who emigrated to South Africa. For instance,

“From the Slums to South Africa” describes the rescue of thirteen-year-old Eliza Green from London in 1873. The wife of a South African merchant who was visiting London

“chose Eliza to return with her to South Africa, as nurse having charge of her two little ones.”13 She later made “a good match” and married a young farmer in 1879. Eliza

Green’s story follows the ideal progression for emigrants. The article portrays her as an innocent child struggling to survive in the cruel environment of the London slums. She is rescued from this life by a respectable family and journeys to South Africa not alone but under their protection. After a customary length of time, she marries someone of her class, a farmer, and although the article does not explicitly mention it, the assumption is that she will have children of her own. Eliza Green’s progression “from the slums to

11 For this description of Barnardo, see “Migration,” For God and Country: The 66th Annual Report of Dr. Barnardo’s Homes: National Incorporated Association for the Year 1931, 28. 12 “Introduction: Copy of the General Instructions Given by T.J.B.,” in Stuart Barnardo, Journal of Visit to South Africa, 1902, iv, A3/17/42, Publications, Barnardo’s 13 “From the Slums to South Africa,” Night and Day: A Record of Christian Missions and Practical Philanthropy (December 1890), 214.

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South Africa” provided the archetypal emigrant story that organizations like Barnardo’s hoped girls would follow.

In this nascent, small-scale South African enterprise, Barnardo relied upon the help of an informal network of “several lady friends” to travel with the girls from

England to South Africa and also supervise the girls upon landing in Cape Town or Port

Elizabeth and find places for them as domestic servants. Yet Barnardo found such a system unreliable, since the women “continued in an irregular and somewhat uncertain fashion to supervise such of my girls as settled near them.”14 Ultimately, the experience led Barnardo to conclude that “[i]n the main the experiment was not an encouraging success, although many of the girls did fairly well, still the failures among them were considerable.”15 It became obvious that a greater organizational and institutional structure was needed, and while proposals for expanding Barnardo’s work in the region were discussed in the 1880s, instability and lack of funding due to conflicts meant that such plans gained little traction until the close of the South Africa War.

Barnardo seized the opportunity presented by the end of the war in 1902 and sent his son, Stuart Barnardo, on an exploratory tour to South Africa to assess the viability of sending child emigrants to the colony.16 His efforts received instrumental support from high-profile figures, including John Campbell, the son-in-law of Queen Victoria, who provided Stuart Barnardo with letters of introduction to notable figures, including Alfred

Milner and Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, the governor of the Cape Colony, and even

14 “Introduction: Copy of the General Instructions Given by T.J.B.,” iv. 15 Ibid., v. 16 Thomas Barnardo was suffering from a heart condition and unable to travel himself. He died in 1905. Gillian Wagner and Ellen Boucher discuss Barnardo’s time in South Africa. See Gillian Wagner, “From Salvation to Empire: Letters from South Africa,” chapter 9 in Children and Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 162-87; Ellen Boucher, Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 46-50.

165 offered Barnardo land in the Orange River Colony and in the Transvaal to establish his institutions for children.17 Thomas Barnardo gave his son specific instructions about

“getting information from all sides” on the question of child emigration and to gauge public opinion and to publicize the work of Barnardo’s and its potential extension into

South Africa through newspaper interviews.18 As much as Thomas Barnardo couched his work in patriotic terms and as being in the best interest of the empire, his instructions to his son suggest that his motives were not entirely unselfish, advising his son: “We want to find out what South Africa will do for us if we send them children.”19

Closely adhering to his father’s directives, Stuart Barnardo wrote back detailed letters chronicling his interactions with people—ranging from his fellow ship passengers to colonial governors—and their perceptions of South Africa as well as his own observations. Stuart Barnardo’s letters paint a vivid portrait of a country at a critical time in its history, providing an illuminating social and political survey of South Africa following the war and also revealing tensions within the emigration programs and among different proponents. Over the course of his five-month journey, Stuart Barnardo traversed the breadth of the country, arriving in Cape Town in late August and then travelling to the Orange River Colony/Orange Free State through the Transvaal and back through Natal and then the Cape Colony before departing in late December 1902. During

17 “Introduction: Copy of the General Instructions Given by T.J.B.,” v; “Letter to the Right Hon. Sir Gordon Sprigg, Cape Town, from Argyll,” in Stuart Barnardo, Journal of Visit to South Africa, 157. 18 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 1, 1902, A2/53/146, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 19 “Introduction: Copy of the General Instructions Given by T.J.B.,” xvii. Although Barnardo’s was confined to certain areas of the empire, namely Britain, Canada, and later Australia, Barnardo frequently reported on the global reach of the organization and how he received donations from various parts of the empire, including South Africa, India, and New Zealand and how children came to his homes form various parts of the world, including Europe, the United States, and New Zealand. See for example, “Personal Notes,” Night and Day: A Record of Christian Missions and Practical Philanthropy (April 1903), 25-31.

166 his tour, Barnardo found great support for facilitating the emigration of girls. He related exchanges with various people who spoke of the dire need for domestic labor, including

H. Wood, a merchant in Grahamstown, who told Barnardo that the organization “would do the country inestimable good by giving them domestic servants.” 20 He wrote to his father about “greatest need” and “crying want” for girl emigrants in South Africa and recounted his numerous encounters with people who spoke of the great demand for girl emigrants who “would eagerly be snapped up as soon as they came out.”21

In many ways, Thomas Barnardo’s plans to extend his work into South Africa echoed those of the Children’s Friend Society (CFS) from seventy years earlier.

Barnardo envisioned establishing two institutions in South Africa, one for boys and one for girls. The children would be selected by Barnardo in London through a careful process that would ensure the selection of the “right sort of girls” who were “healthy, hard working, and honest.”22 They would then be sent to institutions in South Africa, where under the careful supervision of “trained expert Englishmen and women,” they would remain for two to four years “until they are acclimatized and thoroughly familiarized with the nature of their new country.”23 To this end, Stuart Barnardo frequently sought recommendations for the best setting for a training institution in South

Africa and even proposed to his father that they could repurpose “some of the

20 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 1, 1902. 21 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 15, 1902, A2/53/127, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902, A2/52/13, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, October 19, 1902, A2/52/94, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 22 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 1, 1902. 23 “Introduction: Copy of the General Instructions Given by T.J.B.,” v. Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 24, 1902, A2/53/134, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s.

167 magnificent buildings put up for the Boer Concertation Camp” to use for his girls’ institution. His letters to his father included a layout of the camps (figure 20).

Figure 20: Stuart Barnardo’s Drawing of a Proposed Institution for Girls24

These institutions were seen as a way to obviate some of the common problems with emigration programs and to help children adapt to the colonial climate and make them more prepared for the hardships of colonial life and the conditions of domestic service.

24 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 24, 1902.

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Such procedures meant that girls “being accustomed to work from their first arrival out here, then by the time they were fitted to be sent out to situations the habit of work would be engrained in them.”25 Unlike Barnardo’s previous piecemeal efforts in the region during the 1880s and 1890s, the establishment of these institutions would allow the organization to retain control of the girls and provide continuity and “thus not giving the girls the idea that they are on their own resources right from the first.”26 Following this time in the institutions, the children would then be engaged as general helps around fifteen to seventeen years of age.27

“An Unhappy State of Turmoil and Seething Discontent”: Political and Racial Divisions in South Africa

In letters to his father, Barnardo repeated similar lines of argumentation employed by

Milner, Philip Gell, Campbell, and others by casting emigration of girls in terms of

Britain’s broader imperial interests, security, and prosperity, writing to his father that “the great question” during his tour “was that of an increase of the British by children born out in S. Africa and that any agency which could and would help that on by providing girls who might in the near future be the wives of the colonists and the mothers of the next generation would be heartily welcomed and helped.”28 As reflected in Barnardo’s writings, the value of girl emigrants was not only that they would help populate South

25 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 1, 1902. 26 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 6, 1902, A2/53/167, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 27 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 24, 1902. 28 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 6, 1902, A2/52/4, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s.

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Africa, but also in their capacities as future wives and mothers, they would be ensuring the continuation of British society in the colony.

These racial imperatives coupled with economic need for more laborers, the strategic imperative to build up British society, and political support, particularly from high-profile figures like Campbell and Milner, all appeared to indicate that the postwar period presented an ideal moment for emigration. Yet, the challenges facing the region in the aftermath of the War also posed formidable obstacles to such plans, as Stuart

Barnardo quickly discovered upon his arrival in South Africa. Barnardo found a region deeply divided—socially, racially, and politically—reporting to his father: “The first thing to be remembered when dealing with a scheme such as yours is that the British possessions in South Africa consist at present of four Colonies, each of which is a complete state in itself, with its own officials, laws, parliament, aims and ambitions, with nothing to bind it to its neighbour except, perhaps, the somewhat vague influence of a common flag.”29 He continued by noting how these circumstances presented logistical difficulties since “[a]ll this prevents South Africa from being looked at as a whole, like the Dominion of Canada. Consequently each Colony has to be treated with separately and each Government approached for help in the furtherance of your scheme.”30 As

Barnardo’s letters reveal, different priorities and conditions in each region made it difficult to establish a coherent plan for emigration.

Ethnic and racial divisions within Southern Africa further compounded these problems. The divisions between Europeans and Africans and the Dutch and the British

29 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 20, 1902, A2/53/175, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 30 Ibid.

170 form a recurring theme in Barnardo’s writings. Shortly after his arrival in South Africa,

Barnardo wrote to his father that “the Racial feeling is frightfully bitter.”31 Towards the end of his time in the region, Barnardo returned to the problem of race and race relations and provided a more extensive reflection:

Throughout all South Africa the racial question has to be faced in a way that it has not in Canada. In the first place in S. Africa the great bulk of the population is black, and the majority of the Native races, instead of dying out like the Native American Indians, are increasing in number very rapidly. Neither do they appear to be degenerating physically by their contact with the whites. Then the white population in S. Africa is divided into two chief classes, the British and the Dutch. These latter as a general rule are absolutely opposed to all British aims and influences, and to what these bring, viz. progress.32

Barnardo’s letters paint a dire picture of the immense task facing British colonists in their efforts to Anglicize the region. The African population—unlike Native Americans in

Canada, Aboriginals in Australia, or the Māori in New Zealand—showed no signs of

“dying out.”33 Controlling the African population—and thus the region—was complicated by the hostility from the Dutch settlers, who Barnardo, like other British colonists and settlers, portrayed as the antithesis of British progress and an opposing force to British interests. As discussed in the first chapter, the fact that the British comprised a small minority within the broader population of South Africa provided a persuasive rationale for emigration programs but it also a presented a major challenge.

31 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 27, 1902, A2/52/27, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 32 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902, A2/53/157, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 33 In the 1830s, when visiting New Zealand, Edward Markham commented on the “fatal impact” of contact with the Europeans and predicted that the Africans would suffer the same fate as other indigenous groups: “It seems to me that the same causes that depopulated the Indian Tribes are doing the same all over the World. In New Zealand the same as in Canada or North America, And in Southern Africa the Hottentots are a decreasing people and by all accounts the Islands of the South Seas are the same. Rum, Blankets, Muskets, Tobacco and Diseases have been the great destroyers.” See Edward Markham, New Zealand or Recollections of It, ed. E. H. McCormick (Wellington: Government Printer, 1963), 83.

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The different class and racial dynamics in South Africa meant that what worked in

Canada would not necessarily apply to South Africa and created additional hurdles in enacting emigration programs. For organizations like Barnardo’s, the vastly different racial dynamics would require forging into unchartered territory.

Tensions between the Dutch and British also meant that British settlers could not take advantage of a potential labor source in South Africa: Dutch girls. The negative reputation of domestic service meant that Dutch girls shunned such positions. As an article in the Rand Daily Mail observed, “There has always been a difficulty in getting white Dutch girls to do cleaning-up, because they have an idea that it is slavery.”34 The

South African War increased this antipathy, with Dutch girls and women equating domestic service as working for their conquerors.35 British settlers also expressed little enthusiasm for the idea of employing Dutch girls. As Barnardo reported in his correspondences, Dutch girls’ presence within the home and their possible influence was seen as “detrimental to the peaceable settlement of British supremacy in South Africa.”36

The presence of non-British servants was viewed as undermining the British nature of homes.

For similar reasons, the employment of British girls in Dutch homes or on Dutch farms was never considered a serious option. Despite their need for more labor, Dutch farmers were unwilling to employ British children.37 British settlers also resisted plans to

34 Special Correspondent, “Lonely Lives on the Rand: Our Dismal Flats. The Kaffir Servant Problem. Why Not London’s System.,” Rand Daily Mail, August 31, 1909, 8. 35 The Star, March 10, 1906. Quoted in Charles van Onselen, “The Witches of Suburbia: Domestic service on the Witwatersrand, 1890-1914,” Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886- 1914, Vol. 2: New Nineveh (New York: Longman, 1982), 16. 36 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 1, 1902. 37 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 27, 1902.

172 place girl emigrants on Dutch farms, fearing that sending girls to Dutch farms could cause girls “to be turned into Boers” and expose them to “a most objectionable set of life.”38 According to British politician J. G. Fraser, the Dutch settlers “live in an untidy, dirty way, and quite unfit a girl for service elsewhere.”39 Fraser’s remarks on the Dutch lifestyle reflected broader anxieties about girls’ loss of British identity and fears that such an experience would teach them improper domestic habits and morals. As discussed in chapter one, this fear also existed when the CFS sent children to the Cape in the 1830s.

The high-profile cases of Harriet Pollack and Edward Trubshaw raised fears that children working for Dutch settlers would absorb the undesirable qualities of the Dutch and, in the eyes of the British, become more uncivilized.

Conflicts between the Dutch and British settlers made it more difficult for emigration organizers like Barnardo to secure the necessary funding and resources.

Dutch settlers saw through the veneer of emigration plans, recognizing that such programs were not primarily designed to alleviate the region’s labor shortage but to increase the British population and, in the long term, politically disempower them.40 For instance, Barnardo reported a conversation with Mr. Merriman, a Dutch settler, “who expressed concern that they [child emigrants] are being sent out with the idea of swamping them [Dutch settlers].”41 Consequently, local and regional governments controlled by Dutch settlers opposed giving aid to any sort of programs, recognizing that the emigration of British settlers would lead to their social and political relegation.

38 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 15, 1902, A2/52/47, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 39 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 7, 1902, A2/52/35, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 40 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902. 41 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 3, 1902, A2/52/28, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s.

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However, even in areas controlled by or favorable to the British, securing any monetary support proved difficult. In spite of support from high-ranking British officials and from wealthy colonists like Philip and Edith Gell, the war had impoverished the country and generated greater animosity between the Dutch and British settlers, with

Barnardo commenting that the whole “country is in such an unhappy state of turmoil and seething discontent.”42 Given the immense task of postwar reconstruction, earmarking money to encourage emigration was not practical or politically viable.43 In his letters,

Barnardo relates a conversation with Mr. Bach, described as a “Dutch Britisher,” who informed Barnardo that “the Government must provide for their own people first before aiding a scheme having as the object of its work the bringing out, training, and finding employment for children who will enter into competition with the colonial children.”44

As Bach’s comments suggest, of the many postwar projects that required funding, sponsoring child emigration fell towards the bottom of the priority list. Competition among the different emigration organizations also stymied the work of emigration societies. Barnardo conveyed that a possible deterrent to his father’s plan was that

Women’s Emigration Society was “not likely to welcome any rival in the field at present.”45 The economic situation and the limited financial resources available to support emigration following the South Africa War heightened competition among organizations. Barnardo informed his father that he would be unlikely to receive

42 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902. Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 3, 1902. For more on Philip Gell, see chapter one. For more on Edith Gell, see chapter two. 43 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 3, 1902. Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 6, 1902. Stuart Barnardo acknowledged this reality, writing to his father that “Aid to Emigration is purely a political question and has to be treated as such.” Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902. 44 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902. Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 3, 1902. 45 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, October 12, 1902, A2/52/80, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s.

174 government support, because women’s emigration societies were already receiving the limited government aid that was available.46

“For the Good of Every Part of the Empire”: Maria Rye’s and Barnardo’s Emigration Plans to New Zealand

Although New Zealand did not face same political and racial divisions as South Africa, it faced its own distinctive challenges—namely distance—that hindered the development of plans to the region. The invention of steam power made voyages faster, so that by 1903, the average journey to New Zealand and Australia was about fifty days, half of the length of the voyage around the mid-nineteenth century.47 As a comparison, the average voyage to South Africa lasted about seventeen to twenty days by the turn of the century, considerably better than the journey to Australasia but still longer than the one-week voyage to Canada. The voyage to New Zealand cost almost double the one to South

Africa: 17 to 21 pounds versus 9 pounds and 9 shillings.48 The difficulties faced by earlier, mid-century emigration programs to New Zealand—including the time, distance, and expense of voyages—continued through the end of the nineteenth century and posed perpetual problems, even with the development of new, more efficient transportation technologies. For instance, an article printed in the Cheltenham College Ladies’

Magazine in 1928 outlined the challenges of travelling to New Zealand, describing how

“New Zealand seems such a long way from England, literally the other end of the earth,

46 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, October 6, 1902, A2/52/76, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 47 Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners to Poor Law Commissioners, March 14, 1848, MH 19/22, Ministry of Health—Local Government Board and Predecessors: Correspondence with Government Offices. Emigration, The National Archives. 48 “Combined Circulars on Canada, Australasia, and the South African Colonies” (Emigrants’ Information Office, July 1903), 6 and 42, D3287/94/8/1-1, Printed Reports of the British Women’s Emigration Association, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

175 and going there is quite an adventure into the unknown.”49 Although advancements in communication and transportation drew Britain and New Zealand closer together, there still existed a physical and symbolic distance between these parts of the empire.

Like with South Africa, Barnardo’s succeeded in sending some children to New

Zealand through smaller scale programs. In 1897, Thomas Barnardo reported that “469 young emigrants [were] sent to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa” since the organization began.50 Despite interest and cursory efforts to initiate larger programs,

Barnardo’s realized that larger programs needed greater supervision and staff than his organization could provide.51 Barnardo observed that emigration to these regions

“presents many serious difficulties that do not arise in connection with Canadian emigration.”52 The main issue was the “dangers of the long journey for young people and the impossibility of providing sufficient or adequate support.”53 He elaborated on the problems posed by the longer voyages in his organization’s annual report:

Young people find themselves cooped up in close quarters, and brought in contact day by day very often with most undesirable emigrants who occupy the steerage. The result is that acquaintances are formed which, to say the least, do not exercise an elevating or advantageous influence upon their future. With girls especially

49 C. West Watson, “University Life in New Zealand,” Cheltenham Ladies’ College Magazine 13 (1928), 16. 50 “Concerning Emigration,”“Dr. Barnarndo’s Homes” Containing Nearly 5,000 Orphan, Waif and Destitute Children Annual Report for 1897, 66–86. It is difficult to estimate the number of emigrants sent to New Zealand by Barnardo’s because the numbers published in reports and newsletters often group New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa together. For instance, the 1897 report states that 8,927 boys and girls were sent to Canada and 469 emigrants were sent to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (74). While the number of emigrants to Canada greatly expanded over the next decade, the number of emigrants to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa remained roughly the same. In 1911, Barnardo’s newsletter For God and Country recorded the number of emigrants to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as 494 and 23,128 to Canada. See “Our Emigrants,” For God and Country 46 (1911), 28. For more on Barnardo’s emigration efforts to New Zealand, see Wagner, Children of the Empire, 198-201. 51 “Concerning Emigration,” 29th Annual Report of the Institutions Known as “Dr. Barnarndo’s Homes” for Orphan and Destitute Children Annual Report, 1894, 21. 52 “Concerning Emigration,” 31st Annual Report of the Institutions Known as “Dr. Barnarndo’s Homes” for Orphan and Destitute Children Annual Report, 1896, 75. 53 David Potter, New Zealand Report, 1967, D1/1/b31, Overseas Management Committees (re Australia, Kenya, and New Zealand), Barnardo’s.

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these conditions are almost prohibitive, unless, indeed, I could send a sufficiently large party to enable two or three matrons to accompany the emigrants. Hence, it is only comparatively few of my emigrants whom I send to the Far South, and those who I do send are chiefly boys.54

The distance meant the voyage was both long and expensive, making it not only impractical but also more dangerous for impressionable children. Implicit in these fears was that working-class children, and girls especially, were susceptible to the contaminative environment of the ships and colonies. As discussed in more detail below, even though emigration organizations portrayed working-class children as vital empire builders, they remained marginal and suspect members of British society, even in the colonies. Such views about the challenges posed by the voyages were reiterated decade later in an article published in the Auckland Star in 1907, which records a conversation with a manager of Barnardo’s in England about why Barnardo’s did not send more children to New Zealand. The manager highlighted the challenges presented by the long distance:

Well, you see those 13,000 miles of dreary waterway prevent us from turning our eyes in your direction. We know all about the servant difficulty in your country, and we feel sure that we could cope with, it, because our girls are domesticated in the best sense of the word, and make good housewives wherever they are asked to take charge of a young farmer’s home. No, until you could bridge those 13,000 miles, and reduce the steaming time to 24 or 25 days, there is no chance of us sending our girls over to you. Besides Canada, with her boundless resources, her proximity, her cheap fares, and the readiness with which her backblock farmers seek out wives from among our girls, presents a most promising field, which we shall continue to exploit for all it is worth.55

Given the success of the Canadian project, there seemed to be little incentive to divert resources to the uncertain project of emigrating children to New Zealand. Although

54 “Concerning Emigration,” 31st Annual Report of the Institutions Known as “Dr. Barnarndo’s Homes” for Orphan and Destitute Children Annual Report, 76. 55 “A Garden City for Girls,” Auckland Star, August 14, 1907, 3.

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Barnardo would claim that emigrating children to New Zealand on a larger, more systematic scale was financially and logistically impractical, but he nonetheless recognized that the colony could be a valuable source of income for the organization and would frequently appeal to New Zealanders for financial support and donations. For instance, in the 1890s, Barnardo had established “a standing Committee on behalf of the

Homes” in Invercargill to help support his work in Britain and arranged for a group of boys to tour the country for musical performances to help raise money for the organization.56 As much as Thomas Barnardo framed his program as serving broader imperial interests, his reluctance to send children to New Zealand revealed that imperial duty and patriotism had its limits.

The distance and high cost of passages made governmental support—both from

Britain and New Zealand—even more vital to the advancement of emigration programs in New Zealand, but emigration proponents often found governmental objectives and priorities at odds with their own. Although Maria Rye would later be hailed as “the most successful of the priestesses of emigration,” her first foray into emigration to New

Zealand met with little success.57 Rye formed the Female Middle-Class Emigration

56 See “Notes,” Night and Day: A Record of Christian Missions and Practical Philanthropy (May 1896), 24; “Barnardo’s. Dr Barnardo’s Home,” Star, January 26, 1892, 3. Barnardo’s newsletters recorded contributions to the organization from children in New Zealand. See for instance “Personal Notes,” Night and Day: A Record of Christian Missions and Practical Philanthropy (June 1896), 41. In 1914, the organizers also started Barnardo Helpers’ League with “the purpose of stimulating colonial interest.” See “Dr. Barnardo’s Boys,” Wanganui Chronicle, June 21, 1909, 4. Barnardo’s looked to restart its presence and programs in New Zealand in the 1960s. See P. J. Potter, “Report on Visit to New Zealand,” October 30, 1966, D1/1/b27, Overseas Management Committees (re Australia, Kenya, and New Zealand), Barnardo’s. 57 “Litle Emigrants,” The Times, October 29, 1869, 10. Between 1869 and 1896, Rye’s agency, the Female Middle Class Emigration Society, helped emigrate 3,623 children. For more on Rye, see Marion Diamond, Emigration and Empire: The Life of Maria S. Rye (New York: Routledge, 1999); Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869-1924 (London, 1980); and Wagner, Children of the Empire. See also Marion Diamond, “Maria Rye’s Journey: Metropolitan and Colonial Perceptions of Female Emigration,” in Imperial Objects: Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), 126-43; and, Nupur Chaudhuri, “‘Who Will Help the

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Society in 1862 with the intention of solving the problem of “surplus women” and redressing demographic imbalances in Britain and the colonies.58 In 1863, she escorted a party of one hundred women to Otago and Canterbury and then proceeded on a tour of

New Zealand to assess the viability of establishing more extensive female emigration programs.59 In many ways, as with Barnardo’s program following the South African

War, it seemed to be an opportune moment to initiate such programs. She received support from the Otago Provincial Government, which was anxious to attract more female settlers to balance the large number of men arriving following the discovery of gold in 1861. Yet she quickly discovered that emigration programs would be more difficult to enact than she envisioned and that government support had its limits. Rye criticized the poor conditions onboard ships and inhospitable, overcrowded accommodations upon arrival, but the Otago government seemed uninterested or unwilling to subsidize improvements, and Rye’s outspoken criticism of their resistance generated tension between the government and Rye.

One key issue of contention was the type of emigrants that were needed. Rye found that there was high demand for servants but little interest for middle-class young women, who were largely interested in becoming governesses. In the wake of such criticism, Rye shifted her attention to an alternative labor source, workhouse children who, with proper training, could be employed as the servants that the colonies so desperately needed and, according to Rye, would be “acting their part as useful citizens in

Girls?: Maria Rye and Victorian Juvenile Emigration to Canada,” in Imperial Objects: Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience, 19-42. Charlotte MacDonald discusses Rye’s time in New Zealand in more detail in A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1990). 58 See the introduction for a greater discussion of the phenomenon of surplus or redundant women. 59 Patricia Clarke, “Following Miss Rye to New Zealand,” in The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies, 1862-1882 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 151-73.

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Greater Britain beyond the seas.”60 However, if Britain had a “surplus” of middle-class women, it, like New Zealand, faced a dire shortage of servants; consequently Rye’s emigration programs were seen as depriving British homes of a valuable labor source during the “domestic servant crisis.” While proponents argued that emigration was a mutually beneficial solution to problems in the colonies and Britain, opponents viewed emigration programs for servants as a zero-sum situation. Rye’s scheme encountered resistance in Britain, since a servant’s “departure was looked upon as tending to thin the ranks of efficient domestics—from whom there is always more than room in the Home

Country.”61 In her 1876 pamphlet, “The Immigration of Infant Life to Canada,” she lamented that the common complaint against emigration societies was that they were

“enriching of our colonies is the impoverishing of England.”62 Emigration was acceptable as long as it did not deprive Britain of “good” children and servants.

While proponents within Britain championed emigration as a safety valve that relieved the strain of the growing population, critics argued that emigration led to the loss of integral members of society and the labor force. A 1915 report by the emigration department of the GFS shows the persistence of these reservations against emigration as it noted general resistance to their plans, stating that “Emigration is looked upon as an uncomfortable way of losing servants.”63 For instance, Robert Parr, Director of the

60 Report for 1892 of Miss Rye’s Emigration Home for Destitute Little Girls, 14, D630/1/76, Papers relating to Maria Rye’s Emigration Home for Little Girls—Annual Reports and Statistics, University of Liverpool Department of Special Collections and Archives. 61 Ibid. 62 Maria Rye, “The Emigration of Infant Children to Canada,” December 1876, D630/2/8, Papers relating to Maria Rye’s Emigration Home for Little Girls—Annual Reports and Statistics, University of Liverpool Department of Special Collections and Archives. 63 “A Meeting of the Aid and Reference Committee for the Emigration Department Held at the GFS Central Office, 39 Victoria Street London SW on Thursday 6th May 1915 at 11:30am,” 3, 5/GFS/1/44, Employment Committee—Emigration Department Agenda Book, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

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National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, wrote to the Home Office in

1910, advising that emigration should only be considered as a last resort: “Personally, I feel very strongly against emigration of able-bodied and intelligent children if there is the slightest prospect of their being able to do well at home.”64 However, Parr’s perspective was incompatible with the views of settlers and emigration advocates, who believed the precise type of emigrant the colonies needed were “able-bodied and intelligent.”

Emigration organizations attempted to quell criticism that emigration deprived the metropole of good servants and children by emphasizing the need to consider the good of the entire empire. For instance, GFS associate Lady Cecilie Cunliffe gave an address at a conference on “Empire Citizenship for Girls” and praised the GFS’s efforts “to help with the right distribution of women throughout the British Empire,” arguing “They must work for the good of every part of the British Empire, not for the good of Britain alone.”65 While emigration societies often invoked ideas of imperial duty and patriotism to gain support, Cunliffe’s comment suggests that in reality personal or local interests still took precedence over concerns about broader imperial needs.

“A Good Servant Never”: Differential Definitions of Domestic Service

Criticisms about emigration programs were underscored by the fact that duties of domestic servants were different in Britain and the colonies. In her letters to Joyce and

Gell, Eliza Hobbs describes the difficulties of understanding and adjusting to different

64 Robert J. Parr to the Home Secretary, June 22, 1910, National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Emigration of Children. Forwards Observations in and to H.O. Letter, HO 45/10598/188663, The National Archives. 65 “Conference at the Mansion House on Empire Citizenship for Girl: Mrs Amery and Mrs. Philip Snowden Present,” The G.F.S. Worker’s Journal (December 1928), 200.

181 responsibilities, tasks, and expectations of domestic servants in the colonies. While

Robinson downplayed the hardships of domestic labor and contended that “[t]he duties on the whole are very slight” and “only child’s play,”66 Hobbs instead found “work here rougher than at home.”67 Emigrant servants like Hobbs found themselves unprepared for colonial life due to the differential nature of domestic service in the colonies. Unlike in

Britain, where domestic servants primarily worked in houses in urban centers or manorial estates, the greatest demand for servants was in rural areas and on farms. While Britain had strict hierarchies and specialized definitions attached to servants, the definition of servant was more nebulous in the colonies. Because colonial households had fewer servants, there was a need for “general” servants and less specialization and distinctions between different servants, and girls were often expected to perform more labor-intensive duties and tasks beyond the purview of servants in Britain.68 An article in The Imperial

Colonist highlights the differences in the definitions and expectations of domestic service in Britain versus South Africa: “The great difficulty in the selection of girls of the servant class is chiefly the fact that the servant most in demand in the Transvaal is not known in

England.”69 A brochure on “South Africa Republic (Transvaal)” produced by the

66 Sidonia Robinson to Miss Lefroy, December 31, 1901, D3287/67/11/84, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office; Eliza Hobbs to Madam, January 8, 1902, D3287/67/11/84, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 67 Eliza Hobbs to Madam, October 24, 1901, D3287/67/11/84, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 68 See for instance, Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 15, 1902. Barnardo related his conversation with Reverend Rogers, the Wesleyan minister of East London, who testified that South Africa “could do with an almost unlimited supply of suitable girls of the ‘general servant’ type.” 69 The Imperial Colonist 11 (June 1903), 66. A job advertisement for a children’s nurse posted in The Imperial Colonist advises prospective applicants that “although of course I try to keep my home as far as possible on English lines, there are many things she would have to get used to out here.” See Violet L. M. Paterson to Mrs. Joyce, February 24, 1902, D3287/77/5/75, Correspondence to, from, and about several

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Emigrants’ Information Office in Britain, made a similar observation: “It must, however, be understood that the conditions of domestic service are not regulated on the same hard and fast lines as exist in England. Even in the establishments of well-to-do people in

Johannesburg, except in the case of the very wealthy, a white domestic servant is expected to attend to a wider class of duties than she would be called upon to perform in

Great Britain.”70 The fact that typical duties and qualities of domestic servants in Britain had less utility in the colonies bolstered arguments against emigration programs. In a speech to the South African Colonisation Society (SACS), Lord William Onslow, the

Colonial Under-Secretary, expressed how one of the common criticisms of the SACS’s work was that “there was plenty of demand for domestic servants in England, and what was the good of sending the best of them to South Africa? They did not want anything of the kind, highly-trained parlourmaids and housemaids would be entirely useless out there.”71 Servants in the colonies were expected not only to cook and clean and take care of the house but also to help with the farm, duties that girls often regarded as demeaning and undignified.72

Since many emigrants originally came from urban cities in Britain, the transition to rural life increased their difficulties in acclimating to life in South Africa and New

Zealand and intensified feelings of dislocation and alienation, as revealed in Hobbs’s

women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 70 Emigrants’ Information Office, “South African Republic (Transvaal),” June 1898, D3287/68/11-12, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 71 “South African Colonisation Society Report,” 1903, 16, 1/SAX/1/1, Committee Papers: Minutes; Executive Committee, Records of the South African Colonisation Society, The Women’s Library. 72 For more on this point, see van Onselen, “The Witches of Suburbia,” 26. For more on household labor in South Africa, specifically Natal, see Keletso E. Atkins, “Origins of the Amawasha: The Zulu Washerwoman’s Guild in Natal, 1850-1910,” The Journal of African History 27, no. 1 (1986): 41-57.

183 letter to Gell about her desire for friendship in Bulawayo. These differences also posed challenges for emigration organizers. For instance, during his tour of South Africa,

Stuart Barnardo recognized that farm life would be “lonely for girls” and also observed that sending girls to work on farms would led to financial and logistical difficulties for the organization, since “the towns are so scattered the expense of sending them to situations and then visiting them would be very great.”73 The distance made it more difficult to track and keep in touch with girls.74 Barnardo advised his father that:

it was important to bear in mind, that if you scattered them and did not place a number of girls in the same vicinity they would have no friends or companions and would be forced to mix with the Kaffirs and half castes. It was most important to avoid this. That this had been one of the chief causes of non success in importing servants. They had been only brought out singly and not in sufficient numbers for them to found a little circle of their own.75

As Barnardo’s letters suggest, girls working in rural areas posed serval problems. First, this isolation generated concerns that girls would lose their sense of British identity if separated from a broader British community. Relatedly, and even more worrisome, this isolation could force them to socialize with Africans. Furthermore, the isolation was seen to make girls more dissatisfied with their positions and more likely to leave their positions. In correspondences and memoirs, settlers, like Olive Schreiner and Mary Ann

Broome, frequently bemoaned their inability to keep servants due the tedium of rural life.

Schreiner wrote to a friend about the problems she had in securing servants: “This place

73 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 1, 1902. 74 This was also a problem in New Zealand. See for instance, “New Zealand,” 1932, 19, 1/SOS/1/32, Minute Books: Australia and New Zealand Committee, Records of the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women, The Women’s Library. 75 Stuart Barnardo, Letter to Thomas Barnardo, December 6, 1902.

184 being so far out of town servants feel lonely, naturally, & don’t like to come.”76 In her memoir, Colonial Memories, Lady Mary Ann Broome reflected on similar challenges faced by settlers in New Zealand, writing: “my damsels could not endure the monotony of their country life longer than three of four months.”77 The isolation of rural life, compounded with difficulties of domestic labor on farms, led emigrants like Hobbs and

Cook to leave their situation, creating a high turnover in servants.

Servants’ living arrangements and conditions compounded their dissatisfaction.

While houses and estates in Britain had dedicated servants’ quarters, servants, particularly in Southern Africa, lacked similar accommodations, and the problem was made more acute by racial anxieties. Because settlers had traditionally employed African servants, who slept in meager “sheds,” “out-houses,” or “lean-tos” outside of the home or alternatively returned to their own homes, houses in South Africa did not have accommodations for servants.78 Emigrant servants found the idea of living in sheds and outhouses demeaning and intolerable, causing some to leave their positions. A settler in

South Africa, Mrs. Le Feuvre, wrote to her daughter about a servant who left her position over the poor accommodations, complaining that “if she wasn’t good enough to have an inside room like other girls she wasn’t good enough for my situation.”79 Situations like this caused Judith Wimbush, who worked at the Rhodes Hostel in Bulawayo, to identify

76 Olive Schreiner to Jessie Rose Innes, November 29, 1894, BC16/Box1/Fold2/1894/12, University of Cape Town, Manuscripts & Archives, Cape Town, available at Olive Schreiner Letters Project, accessed September 20, 2018, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=86&letterid=12. 77 Lady Broome, Colonial Memories (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1904), 210. 78 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902. 79 Mrs le Feuvre, “Extract from Mrs Le Feuvre’s Letter to Miss Le Feuvre,” n.d., D3287/76/2/2/139, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

185 finding satisfactory lodging as “the great drawback” in securing positions for girls.80 It was not only girls who opposed such arrangements and found meager shelters objectionable but also emigration organizers. The idea of housing girls in accommodations outside of the home raised concerns about British girls mixing with

Africans and the specter of immoral behavior.81 In his letters, Barnardo warned his father that he “would have to be very careful however that you only let girls go to houses where there was proper accommodation in the house itself for them to sleep, as at many of the houses they have been so accustomed to Natives that they put their servants to sleep in some outhouse.”82 By the end of the nineteenth century, newer houses began to “build proper quarters for white girls” but this accommodation raised the cost of keeping servants. Consequently, C. J. Smyth, the Colonial Secretary, told Barnardo that “he thought people would rather have the native than the white servant. That the white servant cost so very much more both for wages and ‘keep’ and the accommodation had to be superior.”83 While emigration societies like the GFS built hostels where girls could stay, these lodgings were usually located in urban areas, and thus not easily accessible to girls working on farms, and designed to provide only temporary accommodations for girls and young women and were not equipped to house a large number of girls for extended periods of time.84

80 Judith Wimbush to Mrs. Gell, March 29, 1901, D3287/93/3/5, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 81 See Cecille Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820-1839 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 81-86. 82 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 6, 1902. 83 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 9, 1902, A2/52/114, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s 84 Some girls did spend long periods of time at hostels, much to the consternation of emigration organizers, who feared that their continued, long-term presence would denigrate the reputation of hostels. For instance, a letter to Gell by Edith Blagrove bemoaned how servants were overrunning the hostel: “this

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The differential nature of domestic servant meant that girls were unprepared and lacked the specific skills for domestic work in the colonies, causing commentators to portray them as indolent and inept. For instance, an article printed in The Natal Witness complained that “we get plenty of single girls, but a good servant never. They are allowed the title of ‘servant’ by courtesy, but they do not deserve it. They are as ignorant of the domestic duties as they are of differential calculus.”85 Problems with emigrant servants led to opposition towards emigration programs and a gradual shift in preferences to servants. Judith Wimbush expressed a growing aversion to emigrant servants, writing:

“Several ladies have come to me about servants (white) but none will take the work of having them out all the way from England. They prefer to have white servants who have already been servants out here.”86 Stuart Barnardo made similar observations and wrote to his father that about how the women in the Cape Colony “said that most of the servants imported out here from England if asked to do anything, replied that they had always been accustomed to do it quite a different way and did not see to be able or willing to adapt themselves to the methods of the colony.”87 While there had existed a preference for servants from “back Home,” believing that such servants were better trained and brought with them the “civilized” habits of British domestic life, settlers increasingly wanted servants who had more practical skills that were more relevant to the types of

Hostel is for ladies, but Miss Tarleton gets servants out who are supposed to go straight to their places. We have had to put up some time.” See Edith Blagrove to Mrs. Gell, January 22, 1903, D3287/74/3/44, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. See also “Mrs. Owen,” December 29, 1903, D3287/76/2/2/181, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 85 “Single Women but No Servants,” The Natal Witness, November 15, 1883. 86 Judith Wimbush to Mrs. Gell, September 18, 1900, D3287/93/3/7 Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 87 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 6, 1902.

187 labor they would have to perform in the colonies. Lord Onslow described the necessary qualifications of a successful emigrant in his speech to the SACS, stating that the organization “wanted to send out strong, capable people who would maintain that great talent for colonization which was inherent in the British race. It was necessary to send out women who would be ready, not to suffer hardships, but at any rate to do a great deal of ‘roughing it.’”88 However, as emigration societies found, this ideal type of emigrant— one that was refined and cultivated yet physically, mentally, and emotionally strong enough to withstand the hardships and hard work of colonial life and could perform a range of household tasks—was difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in reality.

“The Right Spirit for an Emigrant”: False Promises and Disputes between Settlers and Emigration Organizers

As described in relation to the GFS in chapters two and three, emigration societies often exaggerated the opportunities and benefits that awaited girls in the colonies and minimized the difficulties of colonial life in their efforts to attract emigrants. To enhance the appeal of domestic servants, organizations emphasized the higher standing—and even relative equality—of servants in the colonies. The GFS’s “Report for Members

Emigrating” for 1892 emphasized the more equitable status of servants and how “the household work shared with the mistress of the house in the way a sister would undertake it.”89 This notion that servants would become extended family members and occupy an elevated status within the household structure and colonial society circulated widely in

88 “South African Colonisation Society Report,” 1903, 16. 89 Ellen Joyce, ed., “Report for 1890,” in Reports of the Department for Members Emigrating, 1883-1897 (Girls’ Friendly Society, 1897), 37, D3287/68/1/3, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

188 emigration discourses. Despite such promises, servants found their situations little changed. An annual report by the National Council of Women of New Zealand painted a less egalitarian picture of servant life than the one promised in emigration propaganda and detailed how the servant is “looked down upon with gentle contempt by her employers, and frequently spoken of as ‘the slavey’ and ‘our Biddy’; and even where the elders are more outwardly considerate, the children of the family—with the brutal candour of their age—soon make the girl understand that they consider her of an inferior and altogether lower order of flesh and blood than themselves.”90 As reflected in this report, servants often found that they occupied a lowly position in the colonial households and were still a class apart, which in turn increased their dissatisfaction and led to contentious relationships with their mistresses.

In Southern Africa, this dissatisfaction was compounded by the employment of

African servants. The GFS and other emigration organizations emphasized that the employment of African servants constituted a singular advantage of Southern Africa, since African servants could do the more difficult, labor intensive work.91 Yet emigrants, like Hobbs, found living and working alongside African servants one of the more difficult aspects of adapting to life in Southern Africa. Hobbs found that she still had to perform demanding—and demeaning—labor, writing to Joyce: “Anywhere else here the washing

90 Mrs. F.E. Cotton, “Domestic Servants,” in The National Council of the Women of New Zealand, Fifth Session, Dunedin, 3-12 May 1900 (Christchurch: Smith, Anthomy, Sellars and Company Ltd, 1900), 63-64. The Bulawayo Chronical printed an article that included a complaint by a servant about her treatment, saying she was treated worse than dogs kept by “a woman well known in society.” See “Out of the Mouth of Servants,” Bulawayo Chronicle, March 18, 1922, 12. 91 Ellen Joyce, ed. “Report from 1890,” in Reports of the Department for Members Emigrating, 1883-1897 (Girls’ Friendly Society, 1897), 37; and Ellen Joyce, ed., “Report from 1892,” in Reports of the Department for Members Emigrating, 1883-1897 (Girls’ Friendly Society, 1897), 52, D3287/68/1/3, Girls Friendly Society: Reports of the department for members emigrating, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

189 is put out, or done by blacks, and the scrubbing and dirty work done by them also, but I have had all to do, and people tell me it is not the custom for white woman and that I am silly to do it.”92 She also observed that Robinson “is much more considerate to Kaffirs than to us.”93 Instead of elevating her position in the colonial household, Hobbs found that the presence of African servants and the seeming parity between black and white servants degraded the meaning of her work and depreciated her already lowly position.94

As reflected in Hobbs’s testimony, British settlers had long desired white servants, but when white servants arrived, settler women found themselves unfamiliar with how to treat and relate to white servants. Mrs. Walpole, “one of the chief ladies interested in the ‘British Women’s Emigration,’” described this situation to Stuart

Barnardo, noting: “people have been so accustomed to Native servants, that many do not know how to treat white girl servants.”95 A similar observation was made in an unsigned letter to Edith Gell sent from the Rhodes Hostel in Bulawayo which observed that

“[c]olonial women are not accustomed to have these latter [white servants] and do not always know quite the best way of treating them.”96 Edith Gell received numerous criticisms about mistresses’ mistreatment of servants that seemed to substantiate this statement. Mrs. G. B. Beavan in Rhodesia wrote to Gell expressing a similar view about

92 Eliza Hobbs to Madam, January 8, 1902. 93 Eliza Hobbs to “Honoured Madam,” February 11, 1902. 94 On this point, see also P.L. Gell to “My dear Alfred,” January 23, 1903, D3287/MIL/1/597/1, Correspondence mostly between P.L. Gell and Alfred Milner (cr. Viscount Milner), Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 95 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 6, 1902. 96 Letter to Mrs. Gell, April 30, 1902, D3287/93/4/4 (ii), Letters to Edith Lyttelton Gell regarding applications for positions at women emigrants hostel in Bulawayo, etc., Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. My guess is that the letter is from Judith Wimbush who often wrote Gell from the Rhodes Hostel. The author wanted this criticism of colonial women to be kept confidential, adding: “please let this be quite between ourselves.”

190 the “rudeness” of one mistress to her servants and how her behavior was “beyond any manners you would use to a Kaffir—no servant would stand for it.”97

Hobbs was not unique in her frustration at the inflated promises of emigration propaganda. Like Hobbs, Sarah Elliot expressed displeasure at the misrepresentations of emigration societies and the lack of transparency. Elliot applied to travel to

Johannesburg with the assistance of the SACS in 1903. The SACS approved Elliot’s application, but instead of arranging for her passage to Johannesburg as she specified, they sent her to work as a servant for a family in Salisbury, a fact that she learned only upon landing in Southern Africa. Elliott wrote to the SACS, criticizing them for deceiving her: “I think it very unpleasant that any young girl should be brought out and misled in this way.”98 Like Hobbs, Elliot found life in Southern Africa challenging, writing about difficulties with her mistress and especially was that “life is too quiet” in

Salisbury.99 Mother Annie, who ran the SACS hostel in Salisbury, wrote to organizers in

London that Elliot’s discontentment originated in part with the voyage, which drew attention to the distinct disadvantages of working in rural areas: “I wonder if it would be possible to send our people in another boat—not with the Johannesburg emigrants. They get dissatisfied on the voyage out with the comparatively small wages, etc. and of course this is a quieter place than Johannesburg and all that they learn on the voyage out.”100

Mother Annie’s correspondence illustrates the ways in which emigration societies sought

97 Mrs. G.B. Beavan to Mrs. Gell, May 4, 1904, D3287/94/16/50 (ii), Reports and correspondence from women emigrants Hostels in Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 98 E. F. Thompson to Madam, May 18, 1903, D3287/76/2/2/131, South African Expansion Application Information for Sarah Elliot, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 99 Geraldine R. Glasgow to Madam, April 23, [1903?], D3287/76/2/2/122, Correspondnce from Bylawayo and Salisbury, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 100 “Extract from Mother Annie’s Letter,” April 25, 1903, D3287/76/2/2/130.South African Expansion Application Information for Sarah Elliot, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

191 to exert power over girls by controlling their access to knowledge about emigration and emigrant life. Elliot’s resentment at the false pretenses that brought her to Salisbury created tension with her employers, who wrote back to the SACS describing how they had “such trouble with the girl.”101 The employers’ sister, Geraldine Glasgow, wrote to the SACS detailing these complaints and criticized Elliot’s attitude, remarking: “This does not seem quite the right spirit for an emigrant does it?”102 The correspondences highlight not only a lack of empathy towards emigrants and employers’ and organizers’ unrealistic expectations but also the ways in which organizers sought to cultivate and control emigrants’ emotions and the limitations of such efforts. Joyce had a similar response to Hobbs. When Hobbs wrote about the difficulties she faced in the employment of the Robinsons and her plans to leave, Joyce advised her to stay in her position, telling her to “make the best of things” and invoking the principles of loyalty and duty:

People never better themselves when they break their word and you must remember this when a lady is rude to you, it is because you are not used to the ways of the country. People in the colonies do not always speak quite in the same way as people in England, and believe me, it would be far better for you to stop where you are for the present, and keep your word, and have a good name in the Colony for doing so.103

Like Elliot, Hobbs went against the emotional norms expected of emigrants. Joyce’s attribution of the problem to the servant and not the mistress was common. When problems arose with emigrants, organizers expressed little sympathy towards the girls and

101 Geraldine R. Glasgow to Madam, April 23. 102 Ibid. 103 Ellen Joyce to Miss Hobbs, February 22, 1902, D3287/67/11/84, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

192 the challenges they faced in acclimating to a new country and instead blamed any difficulties on girls.

While emigration organizations absolved themselves of responsibility for problems with emigrants, settlers increasingly criticized organizations for perpetuating unreasonable expectations and inadequate preparation. Stuart Barnardo found considerable dissatisfaction with emigration societies, writing to his father: “The British

Women’s Emigration Dept. are not giving, by any manner of means, satisfaction. I had been hearing on all sides the worthlessness of the women sent out.” 104 Lady Mary Hely-

Hutchinson—the wife of the Cape governor who, according to Barnardo, “takes a very keen interest in the subject of domestic servant emigration”105—blamed emigrants’ “most lamentable ignorance of conditions of life in a colony” to the inadequate training and information they received from organizations in Britain.106 Lady Lucy Jervois, the president of the Christchurch Diocese of the GFS, similarly complained that emigrants often had “a very exaggerated view of the prosperity which they expected to await them.”107 Settlers like Jervois and Hely-Hutchinson recognized that these misrepresentations and tactics did more harm than good to the overall cause of emigration and that societies should be more upfront about the realities of colonial life.

For instance, a letter in the New Zealand newspaper, Poverty Bay Herald, noted: “What

104 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, October 19, 1902. 105 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902, A2/52/10, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 106 Mary Hely-Hutchinson, “Female Emigration to South Africa,” Nineteenth Century 51 (March 1902), 71- 87. 107 Ellen Joyce, ed., “Report for 1892,” in Reports of the Department for Members Emigrating, 1883-1897 (Girls’ Friendly Society, 1897), 52, D3287/68/1/3, Girls Friendly Society: Reports of the department for members emigrating, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. Jervois’s husband was William Jervois, the Governor of New Zealand from 1883 to 1889. In A View of the Art of Colonization (London: J. Parker, 1849), Edward Wakefield also acknowledged how many emigrants travelled “with their imaginations full of vague notions of future riches” (111).

193 was required as far as New Zealand was concerned was for some person to go Home and lecture to these girls about New Zealand.”108 As evidenced by the situation of Sarah

Elliot, misleading propaganda and the lack of transparency could backfire by enhancing servants’ dissatisfaction and brought into focus conflicting views between settlers in the colonies and emigration organizers in Britain.

These disagreements over emigrants’ lack of preparation reflected broader frustrations among settlers that emigration organizers in Britain did not fully grasp the reality of the situation in the colonies and thus could not train girls properly for the challenges they would encounter in the colonies. In her memoir Life in South Africa,

Mary Ann Broome crafts an eviscerating critique of women in Britain who lacked experience of colonial life: “I have no patience with the pampered Londoners, who want perpetual sunshine in addition to their other blessings, for saying one word about discomfort. They are all much too civilized and luxurious, and their lives are made altogether too smooth for them. Let them come out here and try to keep house on the top of a hill with servants whose language they don’t understand, a couple of noisy children and a small income, and then, as dear Mark Twain says, ‘they’ll know something about woe.’”109 This perception of Britain being out of touch with the difficult realities of colonial life also emerges in the correspondences of organizers at the Rhodes Hostel in

Bulawayo to emigration organizers in Britain. For instance, Margaret James, who helped supervise the Rhodes Hostel, wrote to the BWEA in Britain about the challenges of placing and protecting girls at the hostel, stating: “It is far from being a bed of roses here,

108 “Domestic Servants,” The Poverty Bay Herald, June 10, 1910, 5. 109 Lady Barker, Life in South Africa (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1877), 33.

194 there are many disagreeables to put up with.”110 Organizers in Britain seemed to see things in abstract terms while those in the colonies were confronted with the realities and practical challenges. As these debates reveal, what seemed like a promising idea in

Britain was not a useful—or even feasible—option in the colonies.

“Being Younger and More Under Control”: Debates over the Ideal Age of Emigrants and the Marriage Problem

Questions about the ideal age to emigrate girls mirrored these debates about the necessary qualifications for emigrants and also brought into focus different views about domestic service. Stuart Barnardo found a strong preference for children over young adults, since they were seen as more malleable and lacking attachments and thus could be more easily controlled and molded into the servants that were required in the colonies. In his letters to his father, he reported settlers’ views that “when adult whites were sent out their employers had no sort of control over them…Your children would, being under your control, therefore be much more likely to settle down and give satisfaction.”111 In another letter, he wrote about the advantages of these perceived qualities: “people would gladly welcome a class of white servant girls who being younger and more under control could be depended on to do some work and not put on frills.”112 Mrs. Mackie, the wife of a member of Parliament in the colony, echoed these sentiments, informing Barnardo that

“the younger a child was when it came out here the better it got on.”113

110 Margaret James to Lady Malmesbury, December 10, D3287/67/11/170, Correspondence to, from, and about several women who emigrated to South Africa and Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 111 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 15, 1902. 112 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, October 19, 1902. 113 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 10, 1902, A2/52/165, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. A similar view is also expressed in Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 9, 1902.

195

In addition to these qualities, colonists saw girls as effectively a better long-term investment, since they did not get married soon after their arrival. For instance, Mrs.

Walpole expressed this view to Barnardo that “[p]eople would gladly take girls as servants especially if they were of such an age that they could get several years of service out of them before they married, which was what happened to most girls who were brought out.”114 Barnardo heard a similar opinion from Mr. Beckett, who thought “[t]hat girls are more likely to be a success than women servants as the latter leave their situations so soon to get married.”115 As reflected by Walpole and Beckett, the “marriage problem” posed a significant challenge to emigration programs. Mistresses in the colonies frequently bemoaned the number of servants they lost to marriage. In her memoirs, Broome reflected that the marriage and subsequent loss of her servants “greatly added to my difficulties” and expressed her preference for older, unattractive servant, writing about one servant: “I rejoiced in her beard, and would not have had her without it for worlds, as I selfishly hoped it might stand in her matrimonial path.”116 Like Broome, other settler women expressed their partiality for “ugly” servants so that the chances of retention would be higher. For instance, Helen Wilson, the wife of the colonial surgeon in New Plymouth in New Zealand, wrote about her frustration with servants: “The last one committed the sin of matrimony, and I fear my present one is too young and too pretty to keep long without her falling into the same error. Poor Mrs Campbell was in the same plight a short time ago but was in the hope of soon getting an old highland body—

114 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 1, 1902. 115 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, October 6, 1902, A2/52/75, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 116 Lady Broome, Colonial Memories, 6; Lady Barker, Station Amusements in New Zealand (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1874), 219.

196 simple, ugly, deaf, and who could not speak one word of any language but gaelic, so was in high glee at the prospect of being able to keep her.”117 The problem facing emigration societies was that girls viewed service as a temporary position and a means to an end, namely a way to emigrate, and thus servants readily left when better opportunities arose or ideally when they found a husband.

Despite the apparent benefits of emigrating younger children, considerable debate existed over the question of the ideal age of emigrants. By the time girls were mature enough to undertake useful domestic labor, they became increasingly dissatisfied with their position and harder to control or married. Lady Hely-Hutchinson encapsulated the problem in finding girls of the right age, informing Stuart Barnardo that “[s]ervants here are not much use until they reach the age of eighteen and when they reach that age they refuse to be servants any longer, but go to restaurants, bars etc or marry young men who ought to have wives of a higher class.”118 Organizers wanted to ensure that children were not too old that they had been influenced or “corrupted” by their home environments but old enough to undertake heavy labor and household responsibilities and withstand the challenges of colonial life. While the marriage problem and the related challenge of determining the golden mean for the age of emigrants posed a problem for emigration societies throughout the empire, the racial question and fears over girls’ close contact with Africans made the problem even more complicated in South Africa.119 According to

117 Helen Wilson to Donald McLean, Wellington, Henui, New Plymouth, November 1, 1857, reprinted in “Colonial housekeeping and moving in society,” in My Heart Writes What My Heart Dictates: The Unsettled Lives of Women in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand as Revealed to Sisters, Family and Friends, eds. Frances Porter and Charlotte MacDonald with Tui MacDonald (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996), 164. Emphasis in the original. McLean would hold a variety of government positions, including Minister of Native Affairs, and served as a member of New Zealand Parliament for Napier. 118 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902. 119 Ibid.

197

Barnardo, Mrs. Russet, the Women’s Emigration Department Secretary, related to him that “girls younger than 16 or 17 would be suitable to go into service in this country as a great many natives are kept and it needs a fairly respectable girl to manage them” and added that “[s]till they might go out as servants to houses where another servant (white) is kept who is older.”120 In his interviews, Barnardo found that most people recommended sixteen as the best age to emigrate girls and also advised pairing a younger girl with an older girl if possible, but there was far from an overwhelming consensus that this was the right age to emigrate girls.121

“A Constant Source of Anxiety”: The Disruption of Class and Racial Hierarchies and the Problems of Employing Working-Class British Girls

Debates about the ideal age to emigrate children were rooted in racial and class anxieties and symptomatic of broader concerns about the liabilities posed by poor white children, which in turn reflected different conceptualizations of colonial societies, girls, and their role in the colonial project. Emigration societies focused on selecting emigrants who

“were the very pick of their class,” but fears about the “poor white problem” and susceptibility of children slipping down to social scale made British settlers less accepting of working-class emigrants.122 Young servants, like children of British settlers in South Africa and New Zealand, were viewed as particularly vulnerable to the

120 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 22, 1902, A2/52/58, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 121 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 7, 1902; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 6, 1902, Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902. 122 Robert Francis Irvine, Oscar Thorwald, and Johan Alpers, The Progress of New Zealand in the Century (London: W.&R. Chambers, Limited, 1902). Ellen Boucher discusses this point in greater detail in chapter one of Empire’s Children, “Poverty and possibility in the era of Greater Britain.” In her discussion of Barnardo’s planned emigration program to South Africa, she argues that its failure revealed that pauper children would never count as fully British and called into question the common view that Britishness was a coherent identity (50).

198 contaminating colonial environment and perhaps even more so, since they came from poor backgrounds and thus were seen as lacking the proper upbringing and values.123

Settlers feared that the corrupting influence of poverty and urban life in Britain could spread to the colonies and that the presence of poor children and children of bad moral character could damage white prestige in the colonies.124 This generated an aversion towards working-class emigrants. Miss Rye’s Home for Destitute Girls frequently reminded its readers: “The colonies will not take our paupers.”125 While emigration societies portrayed children as “empire builders” and conduits of British “civilization,” settlers viewed emigrants in different terms and feared that, instead of bringing British values and mores with them to the colonies, children, and particularly poor white children, would spread the supposed vice and immorality associated with poverty and urban life in Britain to the colonies. Consequently, poor white children remained on the margins of society, even in South Africa and New Zealand, and were viewed as potentially undermining “white prestige” and blurring class and racial boundaries.126

Because of the threat poor emigrants seemingly posed to colonial society, colonists and emigration societies focused on emigrating girls of the “right character.”

However, the vague and intangible nature of “the right character” created much debate

123 See chapter two for a greater discussion about middle-class and upper-class critiques of working-class childrearing and domesticity. 124 Macdonald, A Woman of Good Character, 171. 125 See for example “Report for 1881,” D630/1/5-3, Miss Rye’s Home for Destitute Little Girls, University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives. 126 For more on anxieties about poor whites in the Cape, see Duff, Changing Childhoods, esp. ch. 5. Perhaps the best example of how poor white children functioned on the margins of colonial society is the eponymous character in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. For more on this point, see David Arnold, “European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7, no. 2 (1979): 110. For a greater discussion of poor whites, see, Teresa Hubel, “In Search of the British Indian in British India: White Orphans, Kipling’s Kim, and Class in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 227-51.

199 about what qualities composed this prerequisite and how to ensure a girl possessed such qualities. In many ways, these debates about the meaning of “the right character” paralleled discussions about definitions of purity in the GFS, discussed in chapters two and three. Competing demands within emigration programs meant finding a consensus on the “right type” of emigrant proved equally difficult and made the selection process of servants precarious. Emigration societies attempted to obviate any problems through a careful vetting process for potential emigrants. Joyce personally checked the references of prospective emigrants for the GFS, corresponded with them, and made the final decision about whether they should emigrate.127 Yet, as evidenced by the frequent complaints about servants, such safeguards did not prevent unqualified servants from emigrating. One letter from Judith Wimbush at the Rhodes Hostel expressed her irritation at one servant, noting “she had good references and testimonials and we cannot understand how it is she came by them.”128 Barnardo found similar anxieties about the standards used to assess potential emigrants and the selection process during his trip, with interviewees urging him that, if Barnardo’s would establish an emigration program, it

“would have to be extremely careful in selecting both boys and girls who should be of as superior a class as possible in view partly of the fact that white servants of both sexes have not proved a success when brought out here in the past.”129 Calls for a more thorough selection process circulated in broader public discourses. A letter to the editor of the Natal Witness, for instance, questioned the rigor of the selection process in Britain

127 Lisa Chilton discusses Joyce’s direct involvement in Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 45. Cecille Swaisland estimates that only around 1 in 10 people who applied for servants were suitable in Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land, 91. 128 Judith Wimbush to Mrs. Gell, November 22, 1907, D3287/94/16/14, Reports and Correspondence from Women Emigrants Hostels in Rhodesia,” Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 129 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902.

200 and argued for the inclusion of additional references and greater punishments for fraud if girls were “not in fact bona fide domestic servants.”130 Emigration societies responded by making assurances about the selection process and arguing that such problems were the exception rather than the rule. Like his wife Edith, Philip Gell received correspondences criticizing the selection process of emigrants and tried to ease these concerns by claiming that such problems were transitory. For instance, in a letter to MP

Sir Edward Grey, Gell assured him: “you must be prepared for finding that all our candidates have not fitted in equally well, but our experience is that these who, at first, are upset by the new experience of Colonial life, and by settling down into helpful members of the community. The excitement and novelty has a tendency to perturb them for a time, but that soon wears off.”131 Emigration organizers, like Gell, attempted to assuage concerns by arguing that problems would be remedied over time and with careful training in the colonies.

However, even with such vetting and training processes in place, emigration societies had no guaranteed formula to predict how girls would adjust to colonial life.

While emigration societies sought to emphasize the benefits of supposedly more wholesome colonial environments and portray them as “Better Britains” and “Great

Gardens,” there were also trepidations about the potentially corrupting effects of colonial societies. Similarly, while Maria Rye argued that emigration benefited girls themselves by providing them with “a happy girlhood,” she also expressed doubts about the ability of the colonies to provide girls with the foundation of a “respected and virtuous age.”132

130 L., “Immigration.,” The Natal Witness, May 29, 1880, 4. 131 Philip Lyttelton Gell to Lord Grey, September 24, 1902, D3287/93/4/1, Letters regarding Rhodes Hostel, Bulawayo, Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 132 Rye, “The Emigration of Infant Children to Canada.”

201

Such concerns had existed even with the CFS in the 1830s, as discussed in the first chapter in relation to Harriet Polack, whose mistreatment and interactions with African servants and Dutch settlers threw into doubt the ennobling rhetoric of emigration.

Despite initially organizing emigration programs to New Zealand, Australia, and

Natal, Rye ultimately decided on Canada as the most opportune site of her newly reconfigured emigration programs. In explaining this decision to limit her efforts to

Canada, Rye drew attention to the perceived deficiencies of various colonies. In regard to South Africa, she references the failed programs of the CFS. Although she defended the organization, stating that their “work was a far greater success than has been generally believed” and that critics tended to “exaggerate reports upon isolated cases,” she does acknowledge that the racial question—the “great preponderance there of coloured peoples”—proved an “insuperable objection…to anything like a large emigration of pauper children to the Cape.”133 In addition to citing these fears about white children mixing with Africans, Rye implies that society in South Africa was not conducive to her program of child rescue and emigration, citing the “equally objectionable” reason of the “increase of riches, which has necessarily destroyed the simplicity of the homes there and the home-life which makes the earthly salvation of the child.”134 Rye also references the problems of decadent or corrupt home life in relation to

New Zealand:

The same fatal objection of wealth applies equally to Australia and New Zealand; wealthy and luxurious homes are no places for untaught and untrained pauper children; houses where many and educated servants work can never in our colonies, any more than in England, receive such children; while the working settlers in these two latter-named colonies have not been long enough in those countries to be sufficiently raised above their own class to have tone and moral

133 Ibid., 4. 134 Ibid., 4-5.

202

power enough to guide, control, and soften such children as those we have to deal with; even if this were not the case, the distance in these two-latter-named colonies makes a difficulty.135

Rye’s criticism of the inability of “working settlers” to care for children encompasses a broader critique about the domesticity of the poor and about social mobility and class structure and relations within South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. As mentioned in the second chapter in the discussion of Violet Paul, the perceived disruption of class hierarchies with working-class women assuming the role of mistresses of the house formed a persistent concern for emigration organizers. By questioning working-class emigrants’ ability to manage a home properly, Rye threw into doubt the domestic foundations of colonial societies and the notion that colonies provided a more wholesome environment for children.

As reflected in Rye’s writings, race and the “great preponderance there of coloured peoples” made emigration to South Africa even more adverse for girl migrants.

Reports and correspondences from emigration societies reflect pervasive fears about the contaminative and degenerative effects of the colonial environment. For instance, one letter by Alicia M. Cecil, a member of the SACS, observed that employers in South

Africa preferred “fresh girls” instead of girls “who have been some time in the country, who may in their opinion be deteriorated.”136 Barnardo frequently references how society and the environment in South Africa had deleterious rather than beneficial effects.

Politician John Fraser, for instance, informed him that “it would not do to let your girls go to families except those who help only white servants. He tells me that white girls

135 Ibid., 5. 136 Alicia M. Cecil to Mrs. Logan, October 4, 1907, 1/SAX/3/2/6, SACS affairs in Transvaal, Records of the South African Colonisation Society, The Women’s Library.

203 who go as servants to families who keep some native servants also, always quickly deteriorate when they find there are servants lower than them and become quite useless.”137 In his travels, Barnardo heard of copious examples of “young white emigrants have almost always in the past owing to some unexplained cause been very apt to deteriorate morally after being out here a short time. This is the universal opinion.”138

This was reiterated by Sir Henry Bale, the chief justice of Natal, who told Stuart

Barnardo that “this colony was inclined to be lowering to the moral tone of girls unless well looked after and placed in good homes.”139 To help obviate these problems,

Barnardo emphasized the need for safeguards to be implemented, the most important of which was to find “respectable”—meaning British, Christian, and middle-class—families and homes for child migrants.140

Anxieties about poor white children arose not only from fears about the possible damaging effects of the colonial environment on them but also their potentially

“corrupting” effect on colonial societies. Although organizations like Barnardo’s, Maria

Rye’s Home, and the GFS focused on reforming and transforming poor white children into good “empire builders,” prejudices against poor white children persisted. Emigrant domestic servants continued to be associated with lower-class girls. For instance, at a

GFS meeting on emigration in 1915, one of the representatives from New Zealand, Miss

Russell, gave a pessimistic assessment of the GFS’s work to transform girls into respectable members of society: “For Domestic Servants emigration is all girls but not

137 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902, A2/52/13. Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 7, 1902. 138 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902. 139 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 9, 1902. 140 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, October 6, 1902.

204 ladies.”141 Emigration societies failed in their attempts to change the perception of servants as largely disagreeable girls. In her memoir about living in New Zealand, Sarah

Amelia Courage frequently criticizes the servants’ lack of preparation for colonial life, calling her various servants a “fool,” “gowk,” and “confessed ignoramous.”142 She also remarks on the difficulty of training her servants, commenting “you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”143 In this remark, Courage suggests that no amount of training could remedy the perceived inherent deficiencies of working-class girls. Like Courage,

Mary Ann Broome had contentious relationships with her servants, which form a recurring theme in her writings.144 For instance, in Colonial Memories, Broome reflects on the paradoxical nature of domestic service:

But certainly the strangest phase of colonial domestics within my experience were the New Zealand maid-servants of some thirty-five years ago. Perhaps by this time they are “home-made,” and consequently less eccentric; but in my day they were all immigrants, and seemed drawn almost entirely from the ranks of factory girls. They were respectable girls apparently, but with very free and easy manners. However, that did not matter. What seriously inconvenienced me at the far up-country station where my husband and I had made ourselves a very pretty and comfortable home was the absolute and profound ignorance of these damsels. They took any sort of place which they fancied, at enormous wages, and when they had at great cost and trouble been fetched up to their new home I invariably discovered that the cook, who demanded and received the wages of a chef, knew nothing whatever of any sort of cooking and the housemaid, had never seen a broom.145

141 “A Meeting of the Aid and Reference Committee for the Emigration Department Held at the GFS Central Office, 39 Victoria Street London SW on Thursday 6th May 1915 at 11:30am,” 5, 5/GFS/1/44, Employment Committee—Emigration Department Agenda Book, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. Emphasis in the original. 142 Sarah Amelia Courage, Lights and Shadows of Colonial Life: Twnty-Six Years in Canterbury, New Zealand (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1898), 56, 110, 128, 196. 143 Ibid., 126. 144 For more on Broome and her view of servants and colonial life, see chapter one. 145 Lady Broome, Colonial Memories, 208. She comes back to this point frequently in Colonial Memories and also mentions similar complaints in Station Life in New Zealand.

205

This passage from Broome’s memoir reflects the entrenched prejudices towards working- class emigrant girls and her resentment about the servant situation in the colonies.

Broome needed servants, but the high demand forced her to hire unqualified girls at greater expense and effort than she felt they were worth. She makes the point in this passage and in other parts of her memoirs of emphasizing that she receives “factory girls” who do not know basic domestic skills and have “never seen a broom.” In highlighting this point, she casts doubt on the nature of the girls’ own households and presents a broader critique of working-class morality. By adding that they were “apparently” respectable but had “free and easy manners,” Broome calls into question the abilities and integrity of the girls. For Broome, “the absolute and profound ignorance of these damsels” posed a serious impediment to her efforts to create “a very pretty and comfortable home,” suggesting that servants did not bolster the domestic life of the colonies but actually threatened to undermine it.

Writings from settlers and emigration organizers in South Africa express similar prejudices towards working-class girls. For example, The Natal Witness described working-class emigrants as the “mere refuse of humanity.”146 Correspondences among emigration organizers are replete with instances about emigrants’ poor behavior and concerns over its consequences. For instance, Sister Henrietta Stockdale, matron of

Kimberly Hospital, spoke to the GFS about how some of the girls who emigrated were bad-tempered, “fast, slang-talking, careless girls” who drank and took drugs and were susceptible to temptations.147 In addition to their bad habits, Sister Henrietta criticized

146 “Single Women but No Servants,” The Natal Witness, November 15, 1883. 147 Sister Henrietta, “Women’s Work in South Africa,” 1894, 3, D3287/60/1/6, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office.

206 girls’ attitudes and in particular their perceived selfishness and self-interest, writing that

“a woman should ready at first to do what she can, not what she likes.”148 Such criticism was not confined to the GFS. Edith Gell received frequent complaints from settlers in

Southern Africa dissatisfied with their emigrant servants. For instance, one woman, W.

P. Patterson, wrote to Edith Gell that the BWEA and SACS continually sent a “very indifferent lot of servants” and how her servants served as “a constant source of anxiety.”149 Paterson described how she had to dismiss her maid, Lizzie, because she was a “most wayward girl causing me no end of trouble and scandal.”150 She had another servant who was "incompetent" and "useless" and thus was "compelled to discharge her," and her children’s nurse was "addicted and drinking.”151 As will be discussed in greater depth in chapter five, the Britishness of poor white children remained contested.

Barnardo found similar views when travelling in the region, with various people he encountered describing emigrant children as “loafers” and “criminals or children of animals.”152 He frequently encountered people who complained that the voyage corrupted servants and made them “idle” and “above doing ordinary house work” when coming out to the colonies.153 Fears over the emigration of working-class children to

South Africa were exacerbated by the growing concern over the poor white problem, which as S. E. Duff and others have examined in detail, became a key concern and the focus of increasing governmental intervention by the 1890s and even more so with the

148 Ibid., 1. 149 W.P. Paterson to Hon. Mrs. Lyttleton Gell, May 3, 1903, D3287/68/7/1/12, Papers and Correspondences of the South African Colonisation Society, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid. 152 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 6, 1902; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 22, 1902. 153 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 1, 1902.

207 increasing number of widows and orphans following the South African War.154 Hamilton

Goold-Adams, the lieutenant governor of the Orange River Colony, expressed skepticism about Barnardo’s plan and informed Barnardo that he could not support the plan until he received assurances that children who were sent to the colony would not “become a burden on the country and thus increase our already heavy burdens by joining the great class of ‘poor whites.’”155 Barnardo reiterated this point to his father towards the end of his journey, writing that the colony “does not want to be saddled with children of the criminal class,” adding “[t]his latter point has been much insisted on to me wherever I have gone.”156 As reflected in Goold-Adams’s statement, the economic situation in postwar South Africa made the problem of poor white children even more acute and acted as further hindrance to the implementation of Barnardo’s potential emigration program in South Africa.

Poor whites threatened not only to subvert class structures, social order, and domestic stability but also to undermine racial identity and damage notions of white prestige. In New Zealand, Pākehā settlers feared that poor whites’ behavior could lower the Māori’s esteem for the Pākehā. Such trepidation is reflected for instance in an article in the GFS newsletter The Empire and Beyond, on the topic of “G.F.S. Among the

Maoris.” The article contains a report by an associate in New Zealand, Miss Strachan, who described how “she often has to endure jeers from them [the Māori] when a

European girl has gone wrong ‘You must come from a very bad country,’ they say.” For

154 Duff, Changing Childhoods, esp. ch. 5. 155 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 7, 1902. Goold-Adams served as Lieutenant Governor from 1902-1907 and then became Governor in 1907. In his letters, Stuart refers to him as the Governor and misspells his name “Gould” Adams. 156 Stuart Barnardo, Letter to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902.

208 this reason, the author wishes that GFS members would “think of their influence upon others by setting a good example of purity and goodness.”157 While Pākehā New

Zealanders expressed apprehensions about the loss of prestige in the eyes of the Māori, the poor white problem also called into question Pākehā New Zealanders’ identity as

“best British.” This myth of the “Best British,” which is discussed in more detail in chapter six, was seen as the cornerstone of New Zealand’s national distinctiveness as

New Zealanders proudly distinguished themselves from other colonies, especially their

“convict” Australian neighbors, by casting themselves as “not only British, but the best

British.”158 Pākehā New Zealanders were resistant to programs like John ’s “parish colonization,” discussed in chapter one, fearing that the influx of workhouse children would cause the colony to descend to the status of a “convict colony,” like Australia.159

These prejudices against working-class emigrants and fears about white prestige were even more pronounced in South Africa, due to the racial composition of the region and racial insecurities of British settlers. Even Alfred Milner, who strongly advocated for the increased emigration of girls and young women, expressed concern about the potential detrimental effect that poor white emigrants could have in this colonial project:

Our welfare depends upon increasing the quantity of our white population, but not at the expense of its quality. We do not want a white proletariat in this country. The position of the whites among the vastly more numerous black population

157 Edith Marion Welch, “G.F.S. Among the Maoris,” The Empire and Beyond (Advent 1916), 4. Emphasis in the original. 158 Irvine, Thorwald, and Alpers, The Progress of New Zealand in the Century, 421. For more on this nationalist context of the domestic servant debates, see David Capie, “New Zealand and the World: Imperial, International and Global Relations,” in The New Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. Giselle Byrnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 582. Barbara Brookes, “Gender, Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand,” Gender & History 19, no. 3 (November 2007): 514. 159 Fears about New Zealand becoming a “convict colony” is illustrated, for instance, in the resistance of New Zealanders to the “Pankhurst Boys,” who were emigrated from Pankhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight to Auckland in the 1840s. They were often the subject of blame and ridicule by Aucklanders, who feared that New Zealand was becoming a convict colony. See Chris Brickell, Teenagers: The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand (Auckland: The University of Auckland Press, 2017), 32-33; and Matthew Wright, Convicts: New Zealand’s Hidden Criminal Past (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 165.

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requires that even their lowest ranks should be able to maintain a standard of living far above that of the poorest section of the population of a purely white population…However you look at the matter, you always come back to the same root principle—the urgency of that development which alone can make this a white man’s country in the only sense in which South African can become one, and that is, not a country full of poor whites, but one in which a largely increased white population can live in decency and comfort.160

Milner’s quote expresses the tension between quantity versus quality of emigrants and more broadly the inherent contradictions of the racial and class objectives of emigration.

In order to achieve the racial objective of emigration and make South Africa “a white man’s country,” the region needed a large quantity of emigrants. Yet as Milner’s quote makes clear, this project also depended on emigrants of a certain quality or class. While emigration programs, like the one envisioned by Barnardo, could help solve the problem of quantity, critics saw it doing so at the expense of quality by making South Africa a

“country full of poor whites.”

The problem facing many emigration societies was that their two main goals—to supply colonial homes with needed domestic labor and to populate the colonies with the

“right type” of emigrant—were discordant. The tension between these two goals is succinctly and crudely captured by Adelaide Ross, who noted in an article on emigration that “our national emigration has often…sent forth the ugliest hussies in creation, to be the mothers—the model mothers—of new empires.”161 While working-class emigrants may make good servants, they were not the ideal candidates to help populate settler societies. Stuart Barnardo also frequently reflected on these competing goals in letters to

160 Alfred Milner, “Reply to Deputation from White Labour League,” June 2, 1903, in, vol. 2, 1899-1905, of The Milner Papers South Africa, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: Cassell, 1933), 459. For more on Milner, see chapter one. 161 Adelaide Ross, “Emigration for Women,” Macmillan’s Magazine 45 (February 1882), 312.

210 his father. For instance, when writing about his conversation with Lady Hely-

Hutchinson, Barnardo relayed to his father:

From her I gathered that domestic servants are a crying want in the colony, but not owing to the fact that none come out here. Indeed she thinks that too many are coming out and that the Colony is now being flooded with women of that class. She tells she has just written home to Miss Frere asking for no more to be sent out at present, as they will not remain as servants for any length of time and are marrying young men of the better class, not farmers. She thinks it undesirable that the mothers of the next generation should be domestic servants.162

Hely-Hutchinson’s views reflect the strain between the quality and quantity of emigrants and the short-term objective—fulfilling the need for servants—and long-term objective of emigration—the need for wives and mothers to increase the British population. In Hely-

Hutchinson’s opinion, quality, not quantity, should be the primary consideration in emigration. However, a key problem in developing emigration programs was that girls who were considered to be of the “right character”—namely middle-class girls—had no interest or desire to work as domestic servants. Moreover, even if middle-class girls possessed the “right character,” they lacked other qualifications necessary for service, namely a knowledge of how to perform basic household tasks. Hely-Hutchinson’s criticism of girls “marrying men of the better class” reveals that middle-class and upper- class emigration organizers had a clear vision of how colonial societies should be ordered, a vision to which emigrant girls did not always adhere, as illustrated by Violet

Paul discussed in chapter two. By the end of the nineteenth century, the tensions and incompatibility of different agendas—quantity or quality, servants or married mothers, imperial or personal objectives—became increasingly problematic.

162 Stuart Barnardo, Letter to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902. Frere was an emigration proponent and the daughter of Sir Bartle Frere, who was the High Commissioner for Southern Africa from 1877-80.

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Conclusion

When Barnardo left South Africa at the end of December 1902, he did not provide any explicit directives to his father about whether to start an emigration program for girls to the region, yet the consensus that emerges from his reports is that it was not a suitable time to initiate large-scale child emigration programs. His findings instead suggest that the moment, if it had existed at all, had already passed. For instance, one settler, Mrs.

Melville, confided to Barnardo that, although she had engaged several servants from the emigration societies, she decided “to give up trying white servants and has gone back to

Kaffir Boys entirely.”163 While politicians and emigration organizers viewed the end of the South African War as a golden moment to implement their programs, on a more individual level, for settlers, the window of opportunity for enacting such a program appeared to have passed. While women still desired white servants, it seems that they had reached an acceptance with the African “houseboy system,” although one that was uneasy and mutable as will be discussed in greater length in the next chapter.

The failure to enact large-scale emigration programs for girls to South Africa and

New Zealand stemmed in large part from various contradictory goals and visions and a growing divide between imperial and regional interests that became more marked in the first decades of the twentieth century. Various parties involved in emigration had different colonial projects, and while organizers may have purported that all these interests were one and the same, their incompatibility became increasingly clear by the early twentieth century as the task of empire building proved more difficult than the organizers had envisioned. Debates over the “right type” of emigrant and the selection

163 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, 19 October 1902, A2/52/94, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s.

212 process reveal that organizers in Britain viewed emigration as a class project and a way to relieve class pressures in the metropole. For Maria Rye and Thomas Barnardo, emigration programs served primarily as a social reform mechanism that would mitigate the problems created by poverty, like juvenile delinquency, by first teaching girls from the poorer sections of society to be “pure” and “virtuous” and possess the right character and then relocating them away from the overcrowded urban areas of Britain to the colonies. Even though they depicted children “empire builders” and the work of the organization in patriotic terms, organizers, like Barnardo, were also motivated by personal, and more specifically financial, interests. Although imperial interests were initially secondary, organizers—like Barnardo, Joyce, and Edith Gell—and proponents— like Milner—argued that domestic and imperial reform were actually one in the same.

Figures like Milner and Philip Gell viewed emigration as primarily a racial project and a means to reinforce social and racial hierarchies by making New Zealand and especially

South Africa more British and morally and racially “pure.” Despite this interest in helping ensure the stability and futurity of British settlement in the colonies, their view of the situation was much different than someone on the ground in the colonies, like

Broome, and the wide range of settlers Stuart Barnardo encountered during his time in

South Africa. Settlers had less interest in these broader racial objectives and instead viewed emigration in terms of labor and their immediate domestic needs.

While the concerns of emigration organizers and settler women pervade the reports and correspondences of emigration societies, little space is given to the concerns and ambitions of the emigrant girls themselves. Organizers saw girls as passive figures in the process of emigration and ones who did not need to have a say in their own future,

213 as reflected in the placement of Sarah Elliot. They intended for emigrants to reinforce social and racial hierarchies, but this blind spot meant that organizers failed to take into account the ways that girls would resist the poor conditions and hardships they faced in the colonies, which led to conflicts between servants and mistresses and contributed to organizations’ poor reputations. Organizers also failed to foresee how girls would use the organizations to accomplish their own objectives, as demonstrated in the resistance of

Eliza Hobbs, Eliza Cook, and Sarah Elliot. Their actions undercut the façade of colonies as a “Great Garden” and instead highlighted the dangers, challenges, and complexities of colonial life and society and the inherent contradictions and irreconcilability of these different objectives.

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CHAPTER FIVE

“WHERE THE HOME LIFE IS WHITE”: DOMESTIC SERVANT DEBATES IN SOUTH AFRICA, C. 1912-1913

People talk a great deal about making South Africa a white man’s country. But to do that you must first of all have a country where the home life is white. A country where the domestic duties of the household are performed by natives, where children are largely brought up in contact with natives, is not a country that can be called a white man’s country.1

In this speech to the South African Colonisation Society (SACS), Leo S. Amery painted a dire picture of the domestic crisis afflicting the region and its widespread repercussions.

Faced with a continued shortage of white domestic servants, Amery used the speech to advocate for greater female emigration to South Africa and an end to the tradition of employing African servants in British colonial households. His speech argued for the need to “strengthen the white element” through emigration and “strengthen themselves

[British settlers] by making their homes white in the fullest sense of the word.”2 As reflected in Amery’s speech, the employment of African servants was a matter at the heart of British identity, since their presence was seen as preventing the creation of

“white” homes and by extension white society. Consequently, emigrant domestic servants fulfilled not only a domestic duty but an imperial one by creating British homes and making “home life white.” However, as discussed in the previous chapter, the emigration of girls and young women to work as servants was fraught with challenges.

1 L. S. Amery, “The South African Colonisation Society,” The Imperial Colonist 6, no. 78 (June 1908): 7-8. At the time of the speech, Amery was a correspondent for The Times. He would later become Secretary of State for the Colonies (1924-29). In a later speech in 1924, Amery would describe emigration as “simply social reform writ large.” See Stephen Constantine, Emigrants and Empire: British Settlement in the Dominions before the War (Manchester: Manchester Unviersity Press, 1990), 26. 2 Amery, “The South African Colonisation Society.”

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The servant crisis afflicted not just South Africa but the wider British Empire, making a good servant hard to find and even harder to keep. The shortage of servants presented not only practical difficulties, by leaving households without servants to perform domestic labor, but also created an identity crisis among the British middle and upper classes, who viewed domestic servants as necessary to preserving notions of domesticity and by extension respectability and morality. The sense of crisis was especially acute for

British settlers in South Africa, who perceived the colonial environment as contaminating and degenerative.

As reflected in Amery’s speech, the servant crisis coincided with an increasing dissatisfaction over the continued employment of African male servants, especially in the wake of black peril scares. Black peril, or fears about sexual relationships between black men and white women, is often viewed as symptomatic of racial and sexual crises but it was also significantly a crisis of domesticity. This chapter traces the intersecting discourses of the black peril scares and servant crisis to better understand why issues of domesticity, masculinity, femininity, and race came to the forefront of public discourse in the first decade of the twentieth century and how these discourses connected to broader political, economic, and social debates. The chapter begins by focusing on how the black peril panic of 1912 and the consequent Commission on Assaults on Women exposed increasing hostility towards the traditional employment of African male servants and also resistance to proposed alternatives, namely the employment of black and coloured girls as domestic servants, which in turn revealed anxieties about racial, class, sexual, and gender boundaries within South Africa and the wider British Empire.

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Although the servant crisis was the product of broader social and economic forces within the British Empire, the problem and the responses to it were also shaped by local contexts. The following chapter will examine similar debates that occurred around the same time in New Zealand, following the proposal of a plan at the Māori Congress in

1908 to train Māori girls as domestic servants. By comparing the responses of South

Africa and New Zealand to the servant crisis, these chapters elucidate how both local and transcolonial forces shaped the nature of these debates. As these two chapters on debates about the “servant girl problem” demonstrate, domestic service was not just a domestic matter but one of imperial and racial importance.

“The Root of the Evil”: Black Peril, the Commission on Assaults on Women, and Debates about Employment of African Male Servants

Although black peril ostensibly referred to fears about assaults of black men on white girls and women, these scares were symptomatic of complex economic, racial, social, and gender anxieties in the settler society. While concerns about assaults were omnipresent in the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these fears became more acute at particular moments, specifically 1893, 1904-5, 1907-8, and 1912, which scholars have shown coincided with periods of economic, political, and social instability.

As historian Charles van Onselen describes in his study of this period, European household relations, especially between black and white servants and European mistresses and black male servants, were at the “eye of these storms” about black peril and ties the emergence of these panics to times of depression and periods of economic

217 tensions, including strikes, union formations, and periods of falling wages.3 Subsequent scholars have called attention to not just economic concerns but broader social, cultural, and political anxieties.4 For example, in his study of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia,

Dane Kennedy argues that the obsession with black peril was rooted in the nature of the household economy in southern Africa and its dependence on black male labor.5

Kennedy argues that these fears over black peril were used to attain social and political objectives, namely reinforcing a sense of solidarity among white settlers.6 Jock

McCulloch does not discount the importance of economic and political causes of the black peril scares in his study, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern

Rhodesia, 1902–1935, but highlights the significance of gendered anxieties and how the black peril emerged at moments when white men felt most powerless.7

In the case of the black peril scare of 1912, all these various factors—political, cultural, social, and economic—came into play. The 1912 panic was reportedly sparked by two incidents: the “Lyndhurst Outrage,” in which an unknown person attacked a governess who was riding a bicycle, and the Harrison Case, in which a group of black

3 See Charles van Onselen, “The Witches of Suburbia: Domestic service on the Witwatersrand, 1890- 1914,” Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914, Vol. 2: New Nineveh (New York: Longman, 1982), 53. 4 See for instance Gareth Cornwell, “George Webb Hardy’s The Black Peril and the Meaning of ‘Black Peril’ in Early Twentieth Century South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22, no. 3 (1996): 441- 53; Norman Etherington, “Natal’s Black Rape Scare of the 1870s,” Journal of Southern African Studies 15, no. 1 (1988): 36-53; Timothy Keegan, “Gender, Degeneration and Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South Africa, ca. 1912,” Journal of Southern African Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 459-77; and, John Pape, “Black and White: The ‘Perils of Sex’ in Colonial Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16, no. 4 (1990): 699-720. 5 Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 140. 6 Ibid., 146. See also Pape, “Black and White.” This idea that fears over black peril served as a way to unify Dutch and British settlers, which is noted in an article in the New Zealand Herald: “The Black Peril has this great good in it, that it welds all white men together and makes the South Africans into a nation.” See “The Black Peril.,” New Zealand Herald, February 12, 1906, 4. 7 Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902-1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), especially the introduction.

218 men attacked a housewife, who committed suicide three days later by taking poison.8 As van Onselen notes, while these incidents coincided with a period of economic recession in the region, the scare also crucially reflected anxieties over broader social and political transformations occurring in South Africa at the time as the new nation struggled to recover from the South African War.9 As discussed in chapter one, the War called into question the identities of British colonists as bearers of civilization as well as British supremacy in the region. Settlers in Southern Africa sought to produce a stable, self- producing, and secure British population in the region, but the demographic imbalances revealed a different reality and further compounded anxieties about British security in the region.

In response to a growing number of reports of black men assaulting white girls and women, the South African government established a Commission on Assaults on

Women in June 1912 to investigate causes of and possible solutions to the black peril scares. In its Report published in 1913, the Commission on Assaults on Women compiled statistics about incidences of rape by region and race, outlined the key causes of black peril, and proposed solutions to the problem. Among the important findings of the

Report were that the fears of black peril were disproportionate to the number of assaults.10 It concluded that assaults were committed by small portion of men and, although the number of assaults had increased, the rise was comparable to overall rise in

8 Van Onselen, “The Witches of Suburbia,” 50. 9 Ibid., 52. 10 The Commission also drew attention to differences in the age of consent and the protection that should be afforded to girls among various regions of South Africa. The age of consent was twelve in the Cape and the Orange Free State, fourteen in Natal, and sixteen in the Transvaal. These differences suggest different understandings of childhood and the markers between childhood and adulthood. Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women (Cape Town: Cape Times Ltd. Govt. Printers, 1913), 35-36. The Report recommended that “intercourse with a girl under fourteen be made rape throughout the union; that a similar act with a girl under sixteen be made a criminal offence” (37).

219 crimes.11 These findings led the Commission to conclude that black peril was more of a social problem than a criminal one.12 Consequently, the Commission did not suggest

“administrative action,” like the implementation of new laws, to deal with the problem of black peril but instead emphasized the need for social reform.13

The Report identified a variety of causes of black peril, including “the excessive use of liquor” by black men, “women of nervous temperament feelings of anxiety and terror,” and the press for fomenting fears.14 While the Report viewed all these factors as contributing to the black peril problem, it described the “house boy system” as “a great danger” and “the root of the evil.”15 The foundations of the houseboy system extended back to the seventeenth century with implementation of British slavery and forced labor.

Even after the abolition of slavery in the early nineteenth century, African men continued to be employed in European homes, especially in Natal and the Transvaal.16 In addition

11 Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women, 9. 12 Ibid., 13. “We are forced to the conclusion, therefore, that the comparative frequency of the detestable crime of assaulting women and children is due to certain conditions of our social system.” See also “A National Peril,” The Rhodesia Herald, May 3, 1912, 9. 13 Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women, 8 and 1 respectively. While the Commission’s Report noted discrepancies in the law—for instance the fact that it was illegal for white women and “natives” or “coloured” men to have sexual relations but not for European men and black or coloured women—it did not act to change these incongruities. 14 Ibid., 9. “Not a few witnesses maintain that some restriction ought to be placed upon the discussions in the press on the subject. The Commission is not prepared to recommend that any steps be taken in that direction, and only desires to impress counsels of moderation upon those in whose power it lies to do so much to guide public opinion.” 15 Ibid., 24. For more on the houseboy system, see Cecillie Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820-1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 95; Ellen Boucher, “The Limits of Potential: Race, Welfare, and the Interwar Extension of Child Emigration to Southern Rhodesia,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 4 (2009): 914-34; Jacklyn Cock, Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980); and, Karen Tranberg Hansen, Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900-1985 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 16 Domestic Native Question,” Natal Witness, June 6, 1881. For more on the origins and decline of the houseboy system in South Africa, see J. C. Martens, “Settler Homes, Manhood and ‘Houseboys’: An Analysis of Natal’s Rape Scare in 1886,” Journal of Southern African Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 379-400; Deborah Gaitskell, Judy Kimble, Moira Maconachie, and Elaine Unterhalter, “Class, Race and Gender: Domestic Workers in South Africa.” Review of African Political Economy, no. 27/28 (1983): 86–108; and Cherryl Walker, “Gender and the Development of the Migrant Labour System, c. 1850–1930: An

220 to more African men being available for domestic labor, the appeal of African servants— as with British emigrants—was their perceived malleability. British settlers claimed that

African boys and men were less expensive to employ, easier to train and manage, and more reliable, especially compared to emigrant girls who often abandoned their positions to get married or because they were dissatisfied with colonial life and working conditions.17 An article in The Imperial Colonist recounted these advantages of African servants, describing how the ‘‘‘boys’ were like children, who could only do a thing well if they were shown how to do it.”18 As evidenced by this article, colonists viewed servants paternalistically and in terms of their utility.

Although colonists considered African male servants “that most useful of individuals” and an “indispensable domestic adjunct,” their employment was always envisioned as a temporary solution until settlers could acquire white girls and young women; consequently their continued presence in British colonial households generated resistance and resentment.19 While some settlers found servants’ “ignorance” an advantage, others complained that African servants were slow to adapt to domestic work, difficult to manage, untrained, and unreliable. For instance, in advocating for the need to

“organize the systematic immigration of British youths for domestic service,” Philip Gell used “the difficulties and scandals of the Kaffir house-boy” as a justification.20 Like

Overview,” in Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. Cherryl Walker (Cape Town: David Philip, 1990), 179. 17 Charles van Onselen, “The Witches of Suburbia,” 29 and 40. Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land, 79. 18 The Imperial Colonist 2, no. 1 (January 1903). 19 “Domestic Native Question,” Natal Witness, June 6, 1881; “Servant Girl Problem,” Nelson Evening Mail, February 7, 1912, 4. 20 P.L. Gell to “My Dear Alfred,” January 23, 1903, D3287/MIL/1/597/1, Correspondence mostly between P.L. Gell and Alfred Milner (cr. Viscount Milner), Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. Emphasis in the original.

221 other colonists, Gell criticized African servants’ “absurd wages” and “ridiculous arrogance and indifference” and emphasized the dangers of “too familiar contact” of

African servants with the British.21 Stuart Barnardo found similar dissatisfaction with the houseboy system during his discussions with settlers, who complained about African servants’ refusal to work and described them as “most unreliable,” “lazy,” and “dirty” “at the best of times.”22 Josiah Slater, the proprietor of the Grahamstown Journal newspaper, explained the challenges of employing African boys and men to Barnardo, recounting how they were “very hard to get as a domestic servant, and after working for a few months wanted to go home and live in idleness for the rest of the year.”23 Such accounts suggest that Africans increasingly rejected the menial conditions of domestic service, leading to a growing realization among settlers of the unsustainability and inherent flaws in the houseboy system.

Various social and economic changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fueled further antagonism towards the houseboy system and generated calls for its replacement. The attraction of other employment prospects as well as rising wages, brought about in part by the Mineral Revolution and then the South African War, led to a shift in the labor market and meant that British settlers could not rely on African servants in the same way that they once had, generating greater discontentment with the existing houseboy system. In a letter to his father, Barnardo detailed his conversation with British

21 Ibid. 22 See for instance, Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, October 6, 1902, A2/52/75, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 7, 1902, A2/52/35; Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 3, 1902, A2/52/105, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s; and, Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, November 9, 1902, A2/52/112, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 23 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 1, 1902, A2/53/149, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s.

222 settler Mrs. Fox-Smith, who reported that African servants had been “spoilt by the military” and that “there is a chance he will never be available for labour as in the past.”24

A. O. Lambert, the former mayor of East London, echoed this observation, telling

Barnardo “[t]hat owing to the military paying the Kaffirs about twice the usual wage it is impossible to get ‘Kaffir Boys’ to work in the town as domestics. They are now so rich that they can buy several wives who do all the work.”25 Like Lambert, Reverend Don, a

Presbyterian minister in East London, observed that “every year, it was getting harder to get Kaffirs to work in the houses in the Towns and consequently white girls would be welcomed.”26 In advocating for the need to develop an alternative system to the houseboy one, settlers framed their arguments by portraying African servants as uncivilized and subhuman and thus a threat to British families and homes. Newspapers reflected these views, with an article in The Rhodesia Herald referring to African servants as “unutterable beast[s]” “whose instincts and passions are necessarily less disciplined than those of the average European.”27 The Natal Witness featured articles with similar descriptions, with one article commenting on African servants’ “abominable immorality” and another describing how “our homes instead of being made dens by the presence of dirty and disgusting natives” and advocated for the need for emigrant

24 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902, A2/53/186; Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. This view is reiterated in Stuart Barnard to Thomas Barnardo, September 22, 1902, A2/52/54, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. Although the war is often termed a “white man’s war,” Africans were involved in the conflict as both combatants and. non- combatants. Most Africans were pro-British, since they believed a British victory would bring more political, economic, and educational opportunities. Unemployment drove the enlistment of African men. Like Dutch settlers, Africans were placed in concentration camps as part of the British “scorched earth” policy and treated even more harshly than the Dutch. 25 Stuart Barnardo, Letter to Thomas Barnardo, November 24, 1902, A2/53/131, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 26 Ibid. 27 A Flippant Contributor, “Casual Remarks,” The Natal Witness, September 9, 1880; “A National Peril,” 9.

223 servants who would make the houses “comfortable and home-like by the presence of servants such as we were accustomed to at home.”28 As evidenced by these articles, settlers viewed African servants as introducing uncivilized, foreign elements into the home and thus transforming the domestic sphere into an alien space. In the face of new threats, or perceptions of threats, British settlers sought to reaffirm class, gender, and racial hierarchies and reassert their whiteness by expelling African servants and constructing new boundaries to further divide the home from threatening and foreign world.29 Emigrant servants helped preserve British conventions of respectability and identity and thus solidify notions of Britishness and British racial superiority in the colonies, which were viewed as necessary to the survival of the British Empire.

In his speech to the SACS, Amery argued that the presence of African servants in the household had repercussions beyond the domestic sphere and potentially endangered national, imperial, and racial security. He was not alone in this view. An article in the

New Zealand Truth echoed Amery’s argument that the seemingly dangerous effects of the close interaction between black servants and white settlers within the home, labeling the employment of African servants as “horrible, scandalous, and a menace to the purity of the white race.”30 As reflected in this article, racial transgressions in the home were viewed as symptomatic of broader racial contraventions in society. The home and family life acted as a model of the state and society. An article in The Imperial Colonist makes this connection explicit and positions the home as an integral part of the colonial project.

28 L., “Immigration,” The Natal Witness, May 29, 1880, 4. 29 For a discussion of the domesticity and imperialism in the American context, see Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70 (1998): 581-82. 30A Flippant Contributor, “Casual Remarks”; “‘The Black Peril.’ Shocking South Africa. The Girls of an Orphanage. Journalist Hardy Vindicated.,” New Zealand Truth, June 29, 1907, 8; “Domestic Native Question,” Natal Witness, June 6, 1881.

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The article begins by describing how “Our Empire rests on Emigration,” and “without female emigration there would be no Empire, for it cannot exist without homes, and homes cannot exist without women. By sending out women, we influenced the rising

States with our Anglo Saxon ideals.”31 It elaborated on this point, asking: “What is the secret of this great world power, laying the foundations of new nations? Home life is its strength and the secret of its greatness at home, which is transferred to homes abroad by the good wives and mothers sent out to every part of the world.”32 The article proceeds to describe how the Empire “cannot exist without homes.”33 Since the home acted as a microcosm of the state and society, social reform began within the home, and reaffirming

British settler’s sense of identity began in the home with the reassertion of purity, order, cleanliness, Christianity, and respectability.

Amery’s speech alludes to the apparent risks of racial degeneration and transgression posed by African servants were particularly acute in colonial households with children. Parents feared that children’s, and especially girls’, close proximity to

African servants had a corrupting influence and exposed them to a greater level of danger.34 In her study of the servants in the Dutch East Indies, Ann Laura Stoler describes the perceived threat servants posed to children and children’s sexuality, writing:

31 “The Annual Meeting of the British Women’s Emigration Association,” The Imperial Colonist 7, no. 89 (May 1909), 68-69. 32 Ibid., 68. 33 Ibid., 68-69. 34 See for example the discussion of “illicit intercourse” occurring between British girls and African domestic servants in Report of the Proceedings of the Fourth General Missionary Conference of South Africa Held at Cape Town, 3rd to 9th July, 1912 (Cape Town: Townshend, Taylor and Snashall, 1912), 88. The Commission on Assaults on Women also stated that one of the greatest causes for concern was “the employment of male natives as domestic servants and as nurse-boys for girl children.” See Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women, 1. Gell also describes “all the trouble and anxiety as to their [African servants’] handling of children.” See Gell to “My dear Alfred,” January 23, 1903.

225

“Servants could steal more than the sexual innocence of European children, but the sentiments that underwrote their identification as European.”35 Although present in other colonies, these fears over possible degeneracy of the white race were particularly acute in

South Africa.36 A letter to the editor of The Star newspaper in Johannesburg warned that the employment of black and coloured servants would lead to a child’s physical deformity: “The child will absorb some of the attributes of the coloured nurse. It will develop a cloudy and oily skin often a blotchy face.”37 These comments reflect the pervasive fear of the contaminative and degenerative effects of the colonial environment on children. Yet it was more the invisible attributes—the dangers to children’s minds— that concerned settlers. Children who grew up in close proximity and under the influence of African servants could potentially fail to learn their proper “place and race” and thus not develop a sense of British identity, undermining the settler colonial project.38

As discussed in the previous chapter, young servants, like children, were viewed as particularly susceptible to the contaminative colonial environment and perhaps even more so, since they came from poor white backgrounds. One of the most difficult aspects of adjusting to colonial life for emigrant servants was working alongside African servants, and the perceived preferential treatment of African servants could generate

35 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 163-64. 36 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 29, 1902, A2/53/62, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. In British India, children’s close proximity to Indian people—notably their ayahs—caused fears over British respectability and the children’s development and that the British would degenerate, leading many British parents to feel that it was necessary to remove children from India and give them a metropolitan education. If children could not be removed from the colonies, they had to be given special attention to counteract the disadvantages of the tropical climate and “heathen” influence. See Elizabeth Buettner, “Danger and Pleasure at the Bungalow,” in Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25-71. 37 Philip Hammond to Editor, The Star, March 11, 1909. 38 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), esp. ch. 5

226 increased animosity within colonial households, as seen in the case of Eliza Hobbs.39

The close working conditions of black and white servants caused uneasiness not only for emigrants themselves but also for colonial officials and emigration proponents, who believed interaction between black and white servants would corrupt white servants and in turn undermine the key purposes of emigration: to “make our Empire full of good homes” and to uphold white respectability and prestige in the colony.40 Concerns about the consequences of interactions between black and white servants and the “grave moral danger” posed by these circumstances form a recurring theme in the letters Stuart

Barnardo wrote to his father. 41 When Barnardo met with Alfred Milner, he recounted how Milner informed him that “the danger of bringing out children of the lower classes is that by doing menial work, which whites do not do, they might fall to the level of the native, a most undesirable state of affairs.”42 Milner feared that British children’s

“mixing with the natives” would “be helping them to a worse state than that from which you [his father Thomas] had rescued them by sending them out here.”43 In a later letter,

Stuart Barnardo reiterates this warning, writing: “the great danger with young emigrants to South Africa is that of getting down to the native level and forgetting that they are whites and consequently the superior race.”44 During his tour, Barnardo spoke with a manager of a match factory in Rosebank who warned Barnardo against emigrating

39 Charles van Onselen, “The Witches of Suburbia,” 24. 40 Question 50, “The GFS Who Knows: A Game for Candidates,” 2nd series, 5/GFS/05/17, GFS in Picture and Pageant, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 41 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 22, 1902. 42 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902, A2/52/13, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 29, 1902. 43 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 7, 1902; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 29, 1902. 44 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 20, 1902, A2/53/175, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s.

227 children to the region and shared his own experience of bringing out boys and girls from match factories in England as a cautionary tale. The manager related how “the result had been so disastrous” and “that soon after arriving here they had become utterly demoralised owing to the natives.”45 The Commission’s Report reflected similar anxieties over the presence of poor white servants and their potential damage to white prestige:

the lowering of the white race and the loss of respect by the native for the white people, by this close association of black and white, are the points upon which the Commission wishes to lay stress. It has been pointed out that a class of poor whites is becoming more and more degraded; it is asserted that, whilst these whites are sinking in the scale, the natives are rising, and that the poor white children are becoming the dregs of the population…The condition of the debased poor whites with whom the natives are brought into contact, cannot but have an evil effect on the mind of the natives in diminishing the respect in which the white race is held by them.46

The Commission returned to this point later in the Report: “The danger of natives working in close contact with white female servants, especially those who have been imported from Europe, and of consequent familiarity between them, is a matter which also deserves serious consideration.”47 As the Commission detailed, emigrant servants’ inexperience and unfamiliarity of the complicated nature of race relations created additional problems, since “they did not know how to act around native servants.”48

Emigrant servants were envisioned as a “gatekeepers” and guardians of interior frontiers that segregated the British from the potentially dangerous African environment and society, but as evident in Barnardo’s correspondences and the Commission’s Report, they

45 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 27, 1902, A2/53/188, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 46 Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women, 23 47 Ibid., 25. 48 Ibid., 28.

228 were increasingly viewed as an unreliable, unstable, porous line of defense.49 Emigration organizers argued that nationality overrode class, that working-class children’s British identity qualified them as “empire builders.” However, in reality, poor white children continued to occupy the margins of colonial society. Instead of strengthening the stability and security of British settler society, poor white emigrants blurred class and racial lines and threatened to undermine, rather than re-affirm, racial boundaries and hierarchies.

To help mediate the threat of black peril, the Report of the Commission recommended that “European servants should be taught how to treat the native” and

“[n]o familiarity should be allowed by the mistress of the house between the white servant and the native.”50 These problems as well as the “unwise selection oversea” and the “many disappointments in connection with systematised immigration” also led the

Commission to conclude that emigration was not a viable solution to solving the servant crisis.51 As mentioned in the previous chapter, Barnardo came to a similar conclusion ten years earlier during his tour. Numerous settlers he interviewed viewed the employment of both British and African servants as an untenable situation. For instance, he reported to his father his conversations with Mr. Bach, who informed that “it is next to impossible to employ them both [African and British servants]. The servants in a house must be

49 For more on this point, see Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (1992): 514-51; In Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, Stoler describes how “[s]ervants were such a charged site of European anxieties” because “servants policed the borders of private, mediated between the ‘street’ and the home, and occupied the inner recesses of bourgeis life; they were, in short, the subaltern gatekeepers of gender, class, and racial distinctions by their very presence they transgressed” (133). 50 Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women, 29. 51 Ibid., 26.

229 either all white or all black.”52 This view was reiterated by another settler, Mr. Cross, who confessed: “the colonist always considered the native as an inferior being, as he is, and consequently there was something degrading to a white to have to work alongside a

Native.” Cross continued “that bearing this in mind it was easy to see that it did not do to have whites and natives working together in the same house. That this precludes the employment of white girls in the majority of houses; the white girl feeling degraded in doing ‘Kaffir work’ and consequent soon refusing to do it, and the mistress not being able to afford to keep only white servants.”53 The Imperial Colonist also noted the impossibility of employing both black and white servants, commenting that “it is rather difficult to make the machinery of the household go smoothly where both are employed.”54 As evidenced by the Report and Barnardo’s correspondences, the presence of African servants in colonial households acted as an important catalyst for emigration programs but also posed major obstacles that ultimately precluded the success of these programs.

Fears over the effects of the close proximity of African servants to British settlers within the home extended to mistresses as well as servants and generated concerns about the subversion of not only racial boundaries but class and gender hierarchies as well.

Contemporary discussions about black peril often remarked that the danger of employing

African servants was that they were not only black but also male. For example, in a speech entitled “Girls vs. House Boys in South Africa,” politician Lionel Phillips advocated for the “expulsion of the pampered houseboy from his effeminate occupation,

52 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, August 20, 1902; Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, September 3, 1902, A2/52/30, Personal and Administrative Correspondence, Barnardo’s. 53 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 1, 1902. 54 “Hands Across the Sea,” The Imperial Colonist (January 1902): 6-7.

230 with the consequent obligation to seek and perform a man’s work, and the installation of

White working women in their proper sphere.”55 As Phillips’s speech suggests, the presence of African servants violated the separation of spheres and undermined traditional gender roles. The Commission’s Report also drew attention to the dangers of this and specially the behavior of white women in how they interacted with their servants.

The Commission criticized mistresses as well as servants for either acting too “familiar” or too “imperious” towards servants. Moreover, it criticized the “indiscreet conduct on the part of the white women” and “the freedom and undue familiarity with which he [the

African servant] is so frequently treated.”56

Underlying these discourses was a fear that physical proximity would create an emotional intimacy between black servants and white women. Concerns about mistress- servant relationships formed part of a broader critique of the rise of the nouveau riche in

South Africa, who were seen to lack the upbringing and knowledge of how to be a proper masters and mistresses.57 Concerns about the familiarity between African servants and white mistresses was not new. For instance, an article published in The Natal Witness in

1801 analyzed reasons for the high turnover rate of black servants and cited settlers’ ignorance of African customs but also the manner with which settlers treated servants. It elaborated: “It happens occasionally, that after residing for a length of time in colonial families, a native becomes somewhat a favorite, and acquires a degree of familiarity not altogether favorable to submissiveness. While any amount of good nature may be

55 L. Phillips, “Girls v. House Boys in South Africa,” The Imperial Colonist 7, no. 87 (March 1909), 36-37. 56 Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women, 24. 57 See for example, Report of the Proceedings of the Fourth General Missionary Conference, 95. See also chapter four.

231 acceptable to the subordinate, one word in anger is as a spark in the gunpowder barrel.”58

Like their servants, mistresses were often recent emigrants to the colony and thus lacked experience and knowledge about the complicated racial dynamics of the colonies and were unfamiliar with how to run a colonial household.

Although servants occupied a seemingly powerless position in social and domestic hierarchies, the close contact within the home gave servants knowledge of the most confidential and secret aspects of masters’ and mistresses’ lives and thus considerable influence that challenged traditional class hierarchies. Colonial homes with servants had a panoptical quality, and as Michel Foucault has argued in Discipline and

Punish: The Birth of the Prison, consciousness of permanent visibility acts as a form of power and means of domination.59 Members of the household, particularly British masters and mistresses, were subjected to the constant possibility of observation and the

“unequal gaze” of African servants, giving servants a form of social power. Their presence and familiarity violated a fragile balance within colonial households. The

Report drew particular attention to the lifestyles of white colonists and the close contact of black and white people in the private sphere of the home. As the Report noted, “[b]y closer contact with the white race in towns the natives have learned that very often white people lead immoral lives.”60 The Report concluded that this lowering of esteem and loss of prestige was the root cause of black peril. According to the Report, “the native’s estimate of the European’s virtue has suffered,” which was “the first beginning of the

58 “Tips about Native Servants,” The Natal Witness, January 4, 1801. 59 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 60 Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women, 21.

232 evil.”61 To preserve the “influence of the white race” and its “moral reputation,” the

Commission advocated the re-establishment of “proper” race relations and reforming the habits of white colonists.62 The solution to black peril, according to the Report, was for white settlers to set an example of “clean, healthy and decent conditions of family and social life.”63 It also recommended that mistresses and servants “should be taught how to treat the native” and trained to fulfill their proper social roles and responsibilities.64

These actions would in turn be “upholding, and where necessary uplifting, the status and prestige of the white race, by maintaining the respect in which it should be held, and by doing away with aught and all that may tend to diminish that status, prestige and respect.”65 The potential subversion of hierarchies and the transgression of separate spheres posed by the presence of African servants within the colonial household revealed the inherent instability of dichotomies—between private and public, men and women, colonizer and colonized, civilized and savage, working class and middle class—that were integral to British colonial identities.66

“The Cause of All the Trouble”: Debates over the Question of African Girls as Domestic Servants

Due to the problems caused by the presence of black male servants in British colonial households, the Report on the Commission on the Assaults on Women discussed

61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 13, 37. 63 Ibid., 28. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 13. 66 There is extensive scholarship on the construction of binaries and hierarchies in the context of imperialism and colonial rule. See for instance, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

233 alternative solutions to the houseboy system, including the employment of black and coloured girls. Although less common than houseboys, African girls were employed, particularly in the Cape Colony, and integral to the running of British households.67

During his tour of South Africa in 1902, Stuart Barnardo reported that “[t]he majority of domestic servants are ‘Cape Girls’, a mixed class of native origin.” While he found the idea of British girls working alongside African male servants objectionable, he saw less danger in employing British girls to work with African girls, writing to his father: “there would be no objection I am told to white girls working in the same houses as long as they do not feed together and [if] the white girl had proper accommodation for sleeping inside the house itself. These two points must be insisted on.”68 Writings by settlers in South

Africa contain frequent references to the employment of African girls as servants.69 In her correspondences, Olive Schreiner describes her reliance on her African servants, male and female, and African women appear frequently as servants in her novels, albeit as passive, one-dimensional, peripheral figures.70 In one letter to her close confidante Betty

Molteno, she writes about how “[m]y dear little Kaffir boy is such a comfort to me.”71 In

67 For more on the integral role of African girls and women as servants in colonial households, see The Editor of Rhodesia, “Woman’s Life in South Africa,” The Imperial Colonist 1, no. 8 (August 1902), 70-72. 68 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902. 69 See for instance the memoirs by Lady Barker and Lady Sarah Wilson’s South African Memories: Social, Warlike & Sporting, from Diaries Written at the Time (London: Edward Arnold, 1909). 70 See for instance, Olive Schreiner to John Brown and Mary Brown, October 14, 1903, Olive Schreiner: John & Mary Brown MSC 26/2.2.14, National Library of South Africa, Special Collections, Cape Town, Olive Schreiner Letters Project, accessed November 30, 2015, www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=58&letterid=13. See also Olive Schreiner, Thoughts on South Africa (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1923) and her description of “a typical Cape household” (59). For more on the representation of African women in Schreiner’s novels, see Anne McClintock, “Olive Schreiner: The Limits of Colonial Feminism,” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 258-95. 71 Olive Schreiner to Betty Molteno, July 30, 1904, University of Cape Town, Manuscripts & Archives, Cape Town, Olive Schreiner Letter Project, accessed November 30, 2015, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=96&letterid=33. Molteno was the eldest daughter of Sir John Molteno, who was the first Prime Minister of the Cape Colony.

234 another letter to friends John and Mary Brown, she expresses feeling overwhelmed by housework, with the only relief provided by a young African girl servant: “I have got a little Bushgirl of about 10 (she looks much younger, but she is that though so small) & she fetches my water & cleans my pots, & that just makes life manageable. She lifts the pots on & off the fire & the buckets of water & that saves me so much. I begin to feel full of hope if only I can keep her.”72 The importance of African servants to the running of colonial households also emerges in a description about life in Pietermaritzburg by fourteen-year-old Edith Clifford. In an installment of “The Children’s Hour,” a column in The Manchester Weekly Times and Examiner that gave children the opportunity to share insights about their lives, Edith discusses servants who work at her house and begins by describing how “[t]he Kaffirs are not a nice people at all.” However, she then proceeds to talk about her positive experiences with her servants and how “[w]e had a very nice Kaffir girl named Eliza. She was very good natured and honest.”73 Edith’s paradoxical description reveals how she had internalized and perpetuated negative stereotypes about African servants, despite her contradictory experiences. Moreover, this article, like the scrapbooks studied in chapter three, exemplifies the ways in which girls contributed to the creation and circulation of knowledge that contributed to the broader colonial project.

The high demand for domestic servants led to efforts to implement domestic training institutions for African girls. Edith Gell explored this possibility of instituting

72 Olive Schreiner to John Brown and Mary Brown, October 14, 1903; See also Olive Schreiner to Betty Molteno, July 30, 1904; and Olive Schreiner to Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, December 1909, Olive Schreiner BC16/Box8/Fold4/MMPr/AssortedCorres/FredPL/10, University of Cape Town, Manuscripts & Archives, Cape Town, Olive Schreiner LetterProject, accessed September 20, 2018, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=115&letterid=10. 73 Uncle Oldman, “The Children’s Hour,” The Manchester Weekly Times and Examiner, August 17, 1889, 6.

235 more systematic, widespread training of African girls to work as servants. In 1901, she corresponded with the Bishop of Mashonaland about establishing “a training school for native girls in domestic life.”74 Despite the demand for servants and concerns about employing African men and boys, Gell’s proposal never got off the ground due to resistance from both African communities and white settlers. In 1909, Anglican women missionaries opened St. Agnes’s Industrial School for Native Girls in Rosettenville,

Johannesburg, to provide an “opportunity for the girls to learn such things as should fit them either for domestic service or to improve their own homes in the future.”75 The school designed its curriculum with the intention of training future maids and sought to impart Christian values, teach girls the value of labor, and improve the quality of servants. However, as Deborah Gaitskell has found in her studies on St. Agnes, the domestic-centered curriculum did not last long, since “[c]haracter-training turned out to mesh imperfectly with domestic work for settlers.”76 Settlers found African girls made poor servants, while parents did not want their daughters to go into domestic service and girls were equally resistant to this domestic education. Consequently, by the 1920s and

74 W.H. Milton to Sir (Secretary, British South Africa Company), March 1, 1902, D3287/93/4/71, Letters to Edith Lyttelton Gell regarding Rhodes Hostel, Bulawayo, Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. Edith Gell to the Bishop of Mashonaland, November 13, 1901, D3287/93/3/51, Letters to Edith Lyttelton Gell regarding Rhodes Hostel, Bulawayo, Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire County Record Office. Edith Gell, “Rhodesia Subcommittee,” July 1, 1901, D3287/94/16/55, Reports and correspondence from women emigrants Hostels in Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 75 Quoted in Deborah Gaitskell, “Leadership (with fun and games) instead of domestic service: Changing African girlhood in a Johannesburg mission, 1907-1940,” in Creating Religious Childhoods in Anglo- World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800-1950, eds. Hugh Morrison and Mary Clare Martin (London: Routledge, 2017), 122. 76 Deborah Gaitskell, “From Domestic Servants to Girl Wayfarers at St Agnes’s, Rosettenville: Phases in the Life of a South African Mission School, 1909–1935,” Southern African Review of Education 19, no. 2 (2013): 101. See also Deborah Gaitskell, “Leadership (with fun and games) instead of domestic service,” 131; and, Meghan Healy-Clancy’s work on African girls’ education: World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education, Reconsiderations in Southern African History Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

236

1930s, the curriculum had shifted to offer girls a more academic curriculum.77

As Gell’s failed proposal and the changing curriculum at St. Agnes demonstrate, despite the high demand for servants and anxieties about employing African men and boys, proposals to institute more extensive and systematic training and employment programs for African girls met with widespread opposition from both African communities and white settlers. General fears by British settlers about degeneration and the presence of the “savage” within the “civilized” space of the home were even more pronounced in the case of African girls and women than with African boys and men.

This view in part stemmed from the belief that black women, especially unmarried black women who would typically be employed as servants, had uncontrollable sexuality.78

Unlike white women, who were seen as possessing a refining and civilizing influence on men and society, black women—like black men—were viewed as potential contaminants in the household. This notion emerges frequently in writings by British settler women.

For instance, in her memoir The Cape as I Found It, Beatrice Hicks describes how “the

Kaffir women as servants leave much to be desired—dirty and lazy, stupid and stealing.”79 A similar portrayal of African girls and women appears in Lady Mary Anne

Broome’s Colonial Memories. Brrome describes the difficulty of trying to train African girls as servants by recounting the story of “a young Zulu girl who had been left an orphan and been carefully trained in a clergyman’s family” for domestic service.80

Despite displaying all the markers of “civilization”—including being able to write, read,

77 Gaitskell, “Leadership (with fun and games) instead of domestic service,” 131. 78 For a greater exploration of this point, see van Onselen’s “The Witches of Suburbia” and Keegan’s “Gender, Degeneration and Sexual Danger.” 79 Beatrice M. Hicks, The Cape as I Found It (London: Elliot Stock, 1900), 148. 80 Lady Broome, Colonial Memories (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1905), 211. For more on Broome, see chapter four.

237 and speak in Dutch and English—she decided after some years to return to “the savage life” and “took to it with delight.” Broome describes this story as “an amazing instance of the strength of the race-instinct” and the “thinness of surface civilisation among these people.” 81 As reflected in Broome’s story, British colonists viewed African girls and women as less “civilized” and thus more difficult to manage as domestic servants.

While there may have been concerns about the difficulty of training African girls as servants, the more compelling rationale behind British settlers’ opposition to employing African girls was that it created opportunities for relationships between white men and black female servants. Although black peril formed the focus of the

Commission’s Report, the Report also dealt with the “unpalatable subject” of “the mischief that arises from the intercourse between Europeans and native women.”82 The

Report describes how relationships between white males and black females “was the cause of all the trouble.”83 The authors of the Report seem particularly distressed that this trouble was not confined to miners or the poor white class but one that involved

“Europeans of good social position.”84 These concerns over the relationships between white men and black female servants were not principally driven by the protection of

African welfare but indicative of the Report’s overall anxiety for white prestige. This is reflected, for instance, in the Report’s declaration that “[t]he respect for and the prestige of the European in the mind of the native make it difficult for a native girl to resist his approaches, and it is a serious reflection that attributes, which it is so essential to maintain unimpaired in the interests of the white race, are the means by which the

81 Ibid., 214. 82 Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women, 8. 83 “A National Peril,” 9. 84 Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women, 8.

238 greatest possible wrong is inflicted on the black.”85 This statement highlights the fragility and paradoxical nature of white prestige. The growing number of mixed-race children stood as visible reminders of the precariousness of white prestige. Mixed-race children represented blurred racial lines and, by doing so, upset racial and class hierarchies, threatened ideas of racial purity, and compromised ideas of white prestige. The Report of the Commission explained how mixed-race children created “a harvest of legal, social, and political problems” and had “disastrous results.”86 As Ann Stoler has examined, mixed-race children formed a problematic group for colonial governments and societies and served as living and uncomfortable reminders of European excess, indiscipline, and sexual transgressions.87 This extreme antipathy is reflected by the marginal status of coloured children, who as a “living testimony” to interracial relationships, complicated the construction of colonial order and governance, ultimately endangering British identity and privilege in the colonies.88

As mentioned in chapter one, the growth of mixed-race children provided a compelling rationale for emigration programs and preoccupied emigration proponents,

85 Ibid., 9. 86 Ibid., 8 and 1 respectively. 87 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 82. On mixed-race children in the French Empire, see Owen White examines perceptions of racial degeneration and métissage in both the metropole and colonies. He describes how the métis “embodied the tensions within dichotomies” of colonial rule and particularly reflected the ambivalence of French attitudes toward miscegenation. Despite viewing the métis as valuable auxiliaries to their rule who could serve as intermediaries between Europeans and Africans, the métis also caused anxiety among the French by complicating colonial binaries and ultimately representing the incompatibility of African and European societies. See Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa 1895-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Similar racial ambiguities and anxieties also existed in colonial Latin America. For instance, Ann Twinam examines how children and specifically expósitos threatened the racial hierarchies and “white prestige” in colonial Havana, due to their unknown racial and genealogical background. See “The Church, the State and the Abandoned: Expósitos in Eighteenth-Century Havana,” in Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Latin America, eds. Odina E. González and Bianca Premo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 163-86. 88 Barbara Watson Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 147. See also the discussion about the Girls Friednly Society (GFS)’s paradoxical positions regarding mixed-race girls in chapter three.

239 like Edith Gell. Edith Gell’s correspondences with various women in South Africa reveal these pervasive concerns over the relationships between white men and black servants.

For instance, Judith Wimbush wrote to Gell about her concerns over the increasing occurrences of white men marrying their servants: “Only within the last few weeks, two cases have come to my knowledge of educated men, in Rhodesia, marrying servants. In one case the bride was a Cape girl, and we all know what these alliances mean for the future of Rhodesia.” Wimbush resigned that without British emigrants, “what else can be expected.”89 Shortly after her arrival in Bulawayo in 1903, British settler Muriel Dayrell-

Browning expressed similar concerns to Gell about the presence of mixed-race children and the need for emigration in order to temper the problem: “With the advent of white girls in the districts here, the districts will become cleaner, and the men who now keep a

Kaffir menage (with horrid little coffee-coloured children running around) will find the position untenable.”90 As shown in these correspondences, the emigration of girls was seen as a way to reassert racial boundaries and a means of social reform, but as discussed in the previous chapter, this solution was not as simple and easy as Gell, Wimbush, and

Dayrell-Browning might have hoped.

Because of these anxieties over relationships between white men and black women and mixed-race children, the employment of coloured girls was also dismissed as

89 Judith Wimbush to Mrs. Gell, March 29, 1901, D3287/93/3/5, Letters to Edith Lyttelton Gell regarding Rhodes Hostel, Bulawayo, Rhodesia, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 90 Muriel Dayrell Browning, “Extract from the private letter of a young married woman to Mrs. Lyttelton Gell,” D3287/76/2/2/88, Application forms for emigration to South Africa through the UBWEA with related correspondence for applicants D-G, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. The GFS was involved in discussions of both black and white peril. The GFS used fears of black peril to help justify the necessity of their work in South Africa. See “White Women to the Rescue,” Ilanga Lase Natal Olwe Sihlanu, July 26, 1912, 4. The GFS advocated for an ordinance prohibiting the cohabitation between white men and African girls and women. See “White and Black. The Social Question. Legislative Council Debate.,” The Bulawayo Chronicle, May 16, 1916, 3.

240 a viable solution to the domestic servant problem.91 During his tour, Barnardo found extreme aversion among settlers to employing coloured girls. Due to the fragile racial boundaries in Southern African, Barnardo advised his father that “you must not send out children who have the least trace of colour in them.”92 Philip Gell also found that “[t]he feeling in South Africa is so strong against with the slightest touch of colour, that any one of the kind is not only at once dubbed ‘a nigger’ but also treated as such.”93

Correspondences reveal that emigration organizers in Britain underestimated the difficulties posed by the racial question in South Africa. This is illustrated, for instance, in the case of Miss Dawson, a young woman of “a very dark complexion, probably of

Indian descent” who was sent by the British Women’s Emigration Association (BWEA) to work as a domestic servant in South Africa. J. A. Stevens, who organized the placement of girls and young women in the Cape, wrote to the BWEA in London about

“the delicate question of colour in this country” and criticized the seeming lack of forethought by the BWEA to realize that Miss Dawson’s darker complexion would cause difficulties: “Why does the Society ship educated coloured ladies to a country where the problem is already difficult enough? True they are superior to our coloured people, but even so the whites will not alter their rules and receive them just because people at home do.” He concludes: “If you can put a word to nip this sort of thing in the bud you will be doing a good turn to South Africa.”94 The case of Miss Dawson brings into focus the

91 Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women, 27. See also “Universal Races Congress,” The Times, July 29, 1911, 4. 92 Stuart Barnardo to Thomas Barnardo, December 17, 1902. He reiterates this point in the same letter, writing: “One of the conditions is that the children must not be coloured.” 93 See J. A. Stevens to Jones, December 23, 1902, D3287/76/2/2/192, Application forms for emigration to South Africa through the UBWEA with correspondence for applicants D-G, Papers of the Gell Family of Hopton, Derbyshire Record Office. 94 Ibid.

241 fundamental disconnect between the priorities of the organizations in Britain and the demands of societies and employers “on the ground” in the colonies and, as detailed in chapters three and four, how metropolitan organizers failed to fully grasp the complexities of colonial societies. Given the complexity of the racial question in South

Africa and citing previously failed attempts to employ coloured girls, the Commission’s

Report concluded that coloured girls were “not strongly desired as servants” and ruled out the possibility of employing them to solve the servant crisis.95

“The Other Side of the Same Picture”: White Peril and African Responses to the Employment of African Girls as Domestic Servants

Around the same time that the Commission on Assaults on Women conducted its inquiry, church leaders also turned their attention to the perceived problem of black peril and its solution but, in contrast to the Commission, gave greater attention to white peril. The

General Missionary Conference, which was held in Cape Town in July 1912 and brought together various church leaders and missionaries, established two commissions, one focused on black peril and another to deal with the “grave problem” of “Native Girls in

Town.” Their report positioned the problem of “native girls” as one of the utmost importance with widespread ramifications: “South Africa is a country of problems. We believe ours of the Native girl is a most serious one, and behind many other problems.”96

In its report, the Conference’s Commission confirmed suspicions about the dangers posed by African girls in domestic service and noted that “[g]irls who come into the towns

95 Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into assaults on women, 27. It also recommended “That in future cohabitation, including marriage, be prohibited between Europeans and natives throughout the Union” (36). 96 Report of the Proceedings of the Fourth General Missionary Conference, 78.

242 usually [to] seek domestic service…drift most easily into evil habits.”97 Representatives at the Conference argued that African girls were not immune to the dangers posed by black peril, and arguably faced even greater threats than their European counterparts, since they were subject to assaults by both black men and white employers.98 Olive

Schreiner was among those who contributed to the report, serving on the organizing committee, distributing questionnaires, and corresponding with James Henderson, the secretary of the Commission. Schreiner had long been interested in the problems faced by African girls and women in European households and wrote to various family members and acquaintances on the topic, explaining that it both interested and distressed her.99 In her correspondences, she remarks on how fears over black peril were misdirected and that actually African men and especially women faced greater danger:

“My feeling of course is that peril which has long over shadowed this country, is one which exists for all dark skinned women at the hands of white men.”100 In other letters to friends, she criticizes “the Black Peril cry” as a “small & cowardly” action and places particular blame on “women who are simply made with petty fear and rage on this

97 Ibid., 74-75. 98 Ibid., 75 and 87-88 99 For instance, in one letter, she wrote: “The subject of the so called Black-Peril is one that interests me.” See Olive Schreiner to James Henderson, December 26, 1911, General Missionary Commission, Folder 25: Letters to Mr. J. Henderson MS 14, 847/2, Cory Library, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letter Project, accessed September 20, 2018, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=103&letterid=10. She described being “so distressed about this Black Peril business” in a letter to her younger brother, William. See Olive Schreiner to William Philip Schreiner, May 25, 1911, BC16/Box4/Fold4/1911/10, University of Cape Town, Manuscripts & Archives, Cape Town, Olive Schreiner Letter Project, accessed September 20, 2018, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=7&letterid=2. 100 Olive Schreiner to James Henderson, 26 December 1911, General Missionary Commission, Folder 25: Letters to Mr. J. Henderson MS 14, 847/2, Cory Library, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letter Project, accessed September 20, 2018, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=103&letterid=10.

243 subject.”101 She observes that fears over black peril stemmed in part from mistresses’ unfamiliarity with colonial life and had little basis in actual lived experiences, writing: “If all our women had but grown up among our wild natives, as I did, they would realize how absolutely safe a women or a little girl-child was among them, and they would realise that, if a change has come owing to our relation with them, the fault is ours.”102

She returns to this point in another letter, writing “Black Peril!—its [sic] a white peril that hangs over every black man.”103 To solve the problem of black peril, Schreiner emphasizes the need for a universal legal code, so that “there shall be one law for the white man and the black, for the white woman and the black.”104

White peril and the precarious position of African girls and women in colonial households also formed a theme at the Natal Native Ministers’ Conference in 1911. John

Langalibalele Dube, an educationalist and the first president of the South African Native

National Congress, described how “[t]he ‘black peril’ was a peril as great and as harmful to them—the black race—to their fair name, their peace, their honour, their political prospects, as it was to the European community” and argued that African girls were

“infinitely more helpless and unprotected,” because they were subject to “moral danger from both white and black men.”105 At the Conference, Jacob Manelle, a priest in the

101 Olive Schreiner to Mrs. Solly, May 24, 1911, BC16/Box4/Fold4/1911/11, University of Cape Town, Manuscripts & Archives, Cape Town, Olive Schreiner Letter Project, accessed September 20, 2018, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=103&letterid=11. Olive Schreiner to James Henderson, July 29, 1912, General Missionary Commission, Folder 25: Letters to Mr. J. Henderson MS 14, 847/5, Cory Library, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letter Project, accessed September 20, 2018, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=7&letterid=5. 102 “White Women to the Rescue,” 4. 103 Olive Schreiner, “Letter to William Philip Schreiner,” May 25, 1911, BC16/Box4/Fold4/1911/10, University of Cape Town, Manuscripts & Archives, Cape Town, Olive Schreiner Letter Project, accessed September 20, 2018, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=103&letterid=10. 104 “White Women to the Rescue,” 4. 105 Rev. J. L. Dube, “A Notable Native Utterance,” The Christian Express, August 1, 1911, 117; Report of the Proceedings of the Fourth General Missionary Conference, 75.

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Cala parish of South Africa, also expressed his opposition to proposals to employ girls as servants by pointing out the risks of sending girls to work as servants: “I would never send my own daughter to be servant in a village, in a European household. When we let our girls go into service we simply give them up as harlots.”106 In contrast to the rhetoric of British imperial propagandists, like the Amery, Manelle’s comments demonstrate that the British home was viewed as a corrupting, not purifying, influence on African society.

Writer and politician Sol Plaatje similarly critiqued the civilizing myth of imperialism in his pamphlet, The Mote and the Beam. Plaatje begins his tract by describing his intention

“to give the other side of the same picture” and to provide a counternarrative to stories of black peril perpetuated by “white contributors of the daily press.” In the concluding section of his pamphlet, entitled “Is it a ‘Black’ or a ‘White’ Peril?,” Plaatje describes the sexual exploitation of black women by white men. He concludes with the statement, “as it is true that white men brought Christianity and civilization to Bechuanaland, it is also true that the first authenticated cases of rape, murder and suicide in Bechuanaland were the work of a white man.”107 Like Manelle, Plaatje’s writings uses black peril and white peril to call attention to the degrading and destructive effects of British colonialism.

While British settlers were primarily concerned with the effect of African servants on white prestige, African men, and ministers in particular, opposed plans to employ girls as servants on the basis that it jeopardized girls’ welfare and specifically endangered their character and “purity” by making them “street girls (or Harlots).”108 They associated

106 “The Month,” The Christian Express, August 1, 1911, 114. 107 Sol Plaatje, “Pamphlet, The Mote and the Beam: An Epic on Sex-Relationship ‘twixt White and Black in British South Africa (1921),” in Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings, ed. Brian Willan (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996), 283. 108 “The Month,” The Christian Express, 114; I.N.N, “Education and Religion,” Ilanga Lase Natal Olwe Sihlanu, October 21, 1910, 14.

245 domestic service with prostitution, in part because service often required girls and young women to live away from their home communities without parental supervision. This relative freedom combined with the conditions of domestic service, particularly the long hours and low pay, was seen as driving girls and young women into prostitution.

A year after the Missionary Conference, the subject of black peril and white peril arose at another meeting involving African leaders, including Dube and Plaatje. The Act of Union was not only important for the European settlers in South Africa but also served as turning point for African communities. The Act, which disenfranchised the black

South Africans, provided a catalyst for the organization of Africans and led to the formation of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the forerunner of the African National Congress. At the inaugural meeting in 1912, Dube was elected the first president, and Plaatje became the first secretary-general. One of the key agenda items at the first meeting included “The Black Peril and White Peril.”109 Dube, Plaatje, and the other founders of the SANNC recognized that addressing the problem of black and white peril was necessary to achieve their primary goals of “progress” for African peoples and “co-operation,” both within African communities and with non-African communities.110 For both the African and British communities, the remaking of South

Africa required not just broader political, social, or economic changes but a reformation of “the homelife.”

109 “‘Native Union.’ Article by Pixley Isaka Seme, in Imvo Zabantsundu, October 24, 1911,” Volume 1: Protest and Hope, 1882-1934, ed. Sheridan Johns III, From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882-1964, eds. Gwendolen M. Carter and Thomas Karis (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1972), 73. 110 Ibid., 72.

246

Conclusion

The connection between the servant girl problem and moments of crisis in the British

Empire reveals the critical role of girls in constructing colonial cultures and identities and how girlhood and girls’ lives were intertwined with conceptualizations of the nation, empire, and race. Domestic spaces, although often marginalized in discussions of colonial power, served as important ideological, political, and social spaces where notions of European superiority and identity were constructed.111 The home served as a microcosm of the state and society and was therefore integral to the colonial project. The employment of servants transformed the home into a significant but contested “contact zone.”112 In the face of new threats, or perceptions of threats, British settlers sought to reaffirm class, gender, and racial hierarchies and reassert their whiteness by expelling

African servants and using British servants as bulwarks that would protect the home from the threatening, foreign world. British settlers sought to create a “pure” and “white”

“little Britain” within colonial homes. Yet these domestic virtues were not absolute but relational and the operation of British colonial households simultaneously required the employment of outside, foreign help and depended upon the inclusion and exclusion of the colonial “Other.”

111 For more on the importance of the domestic sphere and the domestic space as a site of power, see Hall, Civilising Subjects; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1750-1850, revised ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002); McClintock, Imperial Leather; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; and, Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 112 This idea is introduced by Mary L. Pratt in “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40.

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CHAPTER SIX

“THE GIRLHOOD OF MĀORI GIRLS”: DOMESTIC SERVANT DEBATES IN NEW ZEALAND, C. 1907-1908

Like South Africa and other parts of the British Empire, New Zealand faced a servant crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century. As discussed in chapter one, while the demand for servants had perpetually exceeded the supply in New Zealand, the servant crisis reached an “acute stage” by the first decade of the twentieth century, the result of both empire-wide and local circumstances.1 Realizing that orthodox solutions to the servant crisis were not effective, Lady Anna Stout, a well-known figure in New Zealand and Britain for her involvement in suffrage and temperance movements, proposed a different idea: train Māori girls to work as servants.2 Domestic service in New Zealand had traditionally been done primarily by British girls or girls of British descent,3 but given the difficulties of emigrating British girls to work as domestic servants, she contended that “it was quite wrong for New Zealanders to send across the sea for girls to help them in their homes when there were so many Maori girls” and thus recommended the establishment of schools that would train Māori girls to become domestic servants.4

1 “Servant Girl Problem,” Nelson Evening Mail, February 7, 1912, 4. 2 “Maori Maids,” Poverty Bay Herald, July 24, 1908, 4. Between 1909 and 1912, Stout (1858-1931) travelled to Britain to join British suffrage campaigns and touted New Zealand—which was the first country to extend the vote to women in 1893—as a model to follow. She would continue to correspond with suffragists after she left London and returned to New Zealand in 1912. For more on Stout’s role in suffrage, see Sandra Coney, “Zealandia Helps Britannia,” in Standing in the Sunshine: A History of New Zealand Women since They Won the Vote (Auckland: Viking, 1993), 34-35. See also Raewyn Dalziel’s discussion of Stout’s role in the suffrage movement in “The Colonial Helpmeet: Women’s Role and the Vote in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of History 11, no. 2 (1977): 112-23. 3 Charlotte Macdonald, “Why Was There No Answer to the ‘Servant Problem’? Paid Domestic Work and the Making of a White New Zealand, 1840s-1950s,” The New Zealand Journal of History 51, no. 1 (April 2017): 7-35. See also “Taking Colonialism Home: Cook Island ‘Housegirls’ in New Zealand, 1939-1948,” in Colonization and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, eds. Victoria K. Haskins and Claire Lowrie (New York: Routledge, 2014), 273-88. 4 “Maori Maids,” 4. For a greater discussion on why emigration efforts failed, see chapter four.

248

In outlining her plan to the Māori Congress in Wellington in 1908, Stout emphasized the mutual benefits to both the Māori and Pākehā.5 The plan would provide British settlers with a ready supply of servants, and according to Stout, it would also “uplift the Maori people.”6 Stout elaborated on these benefits, stating “[t]he Maori girl would benefit by the training she would receive in service, and she would also benefit by receiving wages.”7 Stout further contended that this plan would improve race relations and serve as

“the means of breaking down the race prejudice [between the Māori and Pākehā], which could only be dissipated by closer contact.”8

This chapter examines the political, national, imperial, and racial contexts that informed domestic servant crisis in New Zealand and Stout’s proposed solution. While the servant crisis reflected economic and social exigencies, namely the need for domestic labor and settlers, this chapter argues that it also signified a deeper anxiety about Pākehā

New Zealanders’ identity as the “best British.” It begins by tracing the precedents of

Stout’s proposal and how the civilizing mission of domesticity informed Māori girls’ education, from early efforts by missionaries in the first half of the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. Stout’s proposal generated passionate responses from various groups—including Māori reformers, Māori women, and Pākehā settlers—that brought to light differential notions of girlhood, domesticity, masculinity, femininity, and race. The chapter concludes by reflecting on points of convergence and divergence between the servant crisis and its response in South Africa and New Zealand.

5 Ibid. The Māori Congress was responsible for legislation dealing with the Māori people. 6 “Maori Maids,” 4. 7 “Maori Women. A Notable Gathering. Hope for the Girl.,” Evening Post, July 16, 1908, 3. 8 “Maori Maids,” 4; “Domestic Service Maori Girls: Lady Stout’s Scheme Discussed by Congress,” Evening Post, July 20, 1908, 7. See also “Maori Welfare.,” The Auckland Star, June 7, 1937, 8.

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“The Uplift of the Māori People”: Māori Education and the Civilizing Mission of Domesticity

Stout’s idea of employing Māori girls as domestic servants had a long precedent in New

Zealand. While historiography about New Zealand domestic servants often contends that

Māori female servants did not exist, primary and secondary evidence suggests that they were not as much an anomaly as often implied and in fact the Pākehā, especially missionaries, had a long history of employing Māori servants.9 Early missionaries to

New Zealand attempted to employ Māori girls as servants in their households in order to convert them to a Christian—and “civilized”—way of life.10 During Charles Darwin’s return journey across the Pacific following his expedition in South America, he spent nine days on the Bay of Islands in December 1835 and observed the effect of these missionary efforts on the Māori. In his journal, he records coming across “an English farm house and its well-dressed fields” with Māori men laboring in the fields who played cricket in the fields and Māori servant girls who were “clean, tidy, and healthy” in appearance and looked like “the dairy-maids in England.”11 For Darwin, these all served as markers of the civilization of the Māori people and gave him a “triumphant feeling at seeing what Englishmen could effect” and “the high hopes thus inspired for the future progress of this fine island.”12

9 Macdonald, “Why Was There No Answer to the ‘Servant Problem’?” See also Macdonald, “Taking Colonialism Home,” 277. 10 “Colonial housekeeping and moving in society,” in My Hand Writes What My Heart Dictates: The Unsettled Lives of Women in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand as Revealed to Sisters, Family and Friends, eds. Frances Porter and Charlotte MacDonald with Tui MacDonald (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996), 148. 11 Charles Darwin, “Chapter 18—Tahiti and New Zealand,” Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the countries visited during the voyage round the world of H.M.S. Beagle under the command of Captain Fitz Roy, R.N. (London: John Murray, 1913), 452-53. 12 Ibid., 453.

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While Darwin hailed the success of missionary efforts, missionaries themselves often experienced frustration at the limited success of their efforts to train Māoris as servants. For example, Eliza White, a missionary at Mangungu mission station in

Hokianga, recorded her efforts to train Māori girls and boys in European domestic practices. A journal entry for February 20, 1832, which she designates as a “day of much trial and vexation,” details her failed attempts to train Māori children: “The conduct of our domestic natives causes me to indulge an angry spirit and this brings darkness and heaviness in my mind…It seems as though Satan was stirring up our Boys and girls to quarrel and be insolent for I never found them more so.”13 In a later journal entry, White similarly describes the difficulties she faced in training Māori boys and girls: “Some of mine I trust are improving but only those who have lived amongst them and been dependent on their services in a measure can imagine how perplexing they are.”14

White’s efforts to train Māori girls as servants were largely ineffective, with some of the servants running away.15 In explaining why such attempts were not successful, missionaries cited the differential notions of childhood between the Pākehā and Māori and specifically the Māoris’ more permissive parenting of their children.16 For instance, one missionary, Mary Caroline Taylor, wrote in her journal about Māori child-rearing practices: “I had a long talk with the women about the management of their children.

They owned that all I said was right but contended that Maori children would not listen to

13 Eliza White, Journal, Mangungu mission station, Hokianga, February 20, 1832, reprinted in “A Place to Live,” in My Hand Writes What My Heart Dictates: The Unsettled Lives of Women in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand as Revealed to Sisters, Family and Friends, eds. Frances Porter and Charlotte MacDonald with Tui MacDonald (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996), 77-78. 14 Ibid., 78. 15 Ibid. 16 For more on the different conceptions of family, community, and society between the Māori and Pākehā, see Sandra Coney, “Whanau, Hapu, Iwi: A View of the Maori Family,” in Standing in the Sunshine: A History of New Zealand Women since They Won the Vote (Auckland: Viking, 1993), 44-45.

251 their parents as a European child would. I told them it was because they were too indolent to enforce what they knew was right. They appeared fully convinced of their error but did not seem inclined to attempt a reformation.”17

As indicated in these missionary encounters, the Māori and Pākehā had different ideas about child-rearing and the role of children in family and community life, which reflected broader differences about social organization.18 The missionary and European emphasis on individualism and the nuclear family as the basic unit of society contrasted with the communal, close-knit, extended kinship structure of Māori society. Care of children was shared among members of the whānau (extended family), who often carried out the same functions as parents and viewed children not as possessions but members.19

As Henry M. Stowell observed in Maori-English Tutor and Vade-mecum, “Parents largely held their children in trust for their immediate relatives and the tribe generally.”20

This community-based approach to child-rearing led in part to a more permissive view of child-rearing, oftentimes generating consternation among European missionaries, like

Taylor.21 As Stowell noted, “Parental control was rarely of a strict nature.”22 Europeans

17 Mary Caroline Taylor Journal, Whanganui River, November 2, 1848, reprinted in “A Place to Live,” in My Hand Writes What My Heart Dictates: The Unsettled Lives of Women in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand as Revealed to Sisters, Family and Friends, eds. Frances Porter and Charlotte MacDonald with Tui MacDonald (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996), 86. 18 Most information about Māori society and childhood, especially in the nineteenth century, comes from contemporaneous accounts by Europeans and are colored by racist views and thus must be approached with a caution. Consequently, in this section, I have primarily focused on Māori perspectives, even they were sometimes influenced by European views. 19 For more on this point, see Coney, “Whanau, Hapu, Iwi,” 68. 20 Henry M. Stowell, Maori-English Tutor and Vade-mecum (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, Limited, 1911),188. Stowell was an interpreter and genealogist of Māori descent. 21 See Margaret Orbell, “The Traditional Maori Family,” Families in New Zealand Society, ed. Peggy G. Koopman-Boyden (Wellington: Methuen, 1978), 109. 22 Stowell, Maori-English Tutor and Vade-mecum, 189. A similar view was expressed by British politician John Eldon Gorst in The Maori King: “In England, we learn the lesson of obedience to constituted authority as son early an age, that we are apt to regard it as a common instinct of mankind, and to forget that it is a lesson that must be learnt before self-government is possible. With Maories [sic] it is not so. Children, like all possessions are regarded as a sort of common property. If a father ventured to punish his own child, the mother’s family would resent it as an affront, and probably claim some payment to atone for

252 frequently commented on how the Māori were “excessively fond of their children” and showed “remarkable tenderness and solicitous care bestowed upon them by the parents.”23 Education largely took place within the home, with fathers, grandfathers, uncles, older brothers, and other male relatives taking responsibility for the training of boys and mothers, grandmothers, aunts, older sisters, and female relatives focusing on the girls.24 As discussed later in the chapter, differences between Māori views and experiences of childhood would recur in debates about Stout’s proposal in 1908, when

Māori women would resist attempts at Pākehā “reformation” by emphasizing distinctions between Māori and Pākehā girls.

Despite the limited success of early missionary efforts, domesticity remained the cornerstone of Māori girls’ education through the mid-twentieth century, both at missionary and government schools.25 The earliest mission school for Māori children was established in 1814, followed by boarding schools in 1846 and then government schools following the Native Schools Act of 1867.26 Colonists framed education as aiding the progress of the Māori people. Schools promoted Pākehā culture and practices

offence. The parent is not absolute over the child, and therefore the child never learns to obey.” The Maori King, or the Story of Our Quarrel with New Zealand (London: Macmillan and Co., 1864), 262. 23 Augustus Earle, A Narrative of Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand (Christchurch: Whitecombe & Tombs Limited, 1909), 81; Richard Cruise, Journal of a Ten Months’ Residence in New Zealand (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823), 290. 24 See Te Rangi Hiroa, The Coming of the Maori (Wellington: Whitcombe and Tombs Limited, 1949), 887. See also Orbell, “The Traditional Maori Family,” 114; Arapera Blank, “The Role and Status of Maori Women,” in Women in New Zealand Society, eds. Phillida Bunkle and Beryl Hughes (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), 38-39. 25 See Tanya Fitzgerald “To Unite Their Strength with Ours: Women and Missionary Work in Aotearoa New Zealand 1827-1845,” Journal of Pacific History 39, no. 2 (2004): 147-161; and Kay Morris Matthews and Kuni Jenkins, “Prioiritising schooling for Māori girls (1850s-1945),” chapter 2 in In Their Own Right: Women and Higher Education in New Zealand before 1945 (Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 2008), 35-58. 26 Sandra Coney, “Educating Girls,” in Standing in the Sunshine: A History of New Zealand Women since They Won the Vote (Auckland: Viking, 1993), 192-93.

253 while actively discouraging Māori culture and language.27 Victorian middle-class gender roles, familial forms, and domestic ideologies defined Māori girls’ education, even into the mid-twentieth century, despite its irrelevance for Māoris. Through teaching girls

European domestic skills, schools aimed to restructure Māori society along more individualistic, rather than communal, lines.28 The routinized nature of school life sought to regulate upbringing of Māori children, and the oral tradition of Māori culture was supplanted by an emphasis on reading and writing.29 Like schools for indigenous children in other parts of the empire, schools, especially boarding schools, in New

Zealand sought to assimilate girls and break their bonds with the Māori community by removing them from their homes and raising them in a Pākehā environment.30 To a

27 Ibid. Dorothy Page, Howard Lee and Tom Brooking “Schooling for a Gendered Future: Gender, Education and Opportunity,” in Sites of Gender: Women, Men and Modernity in Southern Dunedin, 1890- 1939, eds. Barbara Brookes, Annabel Cooper and Robin Law (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), 122. For a more extensive discussion of these dynamics, see Kuni Jenkins and Kay Morris Matthews, “Knowing their Place: the political socialisation of Māori women in New Zealand through schooling policy and practice, 1867-1969,” Women’s History Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 85-105. Iranui Te Aonohoriu Haig describes the connection between Māori identity and Māori language when he writes “If they can speak Māori, it means they are Māori. If they can’t speak Māori, then what are they?” See Iranui Te Aonohoriu Haig, “Titiro, Moko! Whakarongo, Moko!,” in Growing Up Māori, ed. Witi Ihimaera (Auckland: Tandem Press, 1998), 44. Te Kui also discusses this, writing “speaking English for me was agonisingly soul-destroying and challenging. See Te Kui, “The Rhythm of Life,” in Growing Up Māori, ed. Witi Ihimaera (Auckland: Tandem Press, 1998), 86. 28 Angela Wanhalla, “Family, Community and Gender,” chapter 18 in The New Oxford History of New Zealand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 460. See also Sandra Coney, “The Bosom of the Family,” in Standing in the Sunshine: A History of New Zealand Women since They Won the Vote (Auckland: Viking, 1993), 54-55. 29 Jeanine Graham, “‘My Brother and I…’: Glimpses of Childhood in our Colonial Past,” Hocken Lecture 1991 (Dunedin: University of Otago, 1992), 12. Te Rangi Hīroa discusses the importance of oral education in The Coming of the Maori, specifically the section on “Childhood and Education.” Apirana Ngata questions whether education has done more harm than good and faults the British education system for teaching English and argues that the Māori outpaces the Pākehā in their early years due to oral education. See C. A. Younge, “Maori Education II. The Native School System.,” Taranaki Herald, July 8, 1908, 8. 30 Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia 1880-1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). Gordon Lynch, Remembering Child Migration: Faith, Nation-Building and the Wounds of Charity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). In her study of Aboriginal girls, Christine Cheater describes how the separation of Aboriginal girls served as a way to weaken Aboriginal culture by breaking the link between parent and child. Cheater demonstrates that the government particularly focused on girls in their reform efforts due to their role as future mothers and their potential as either a civilizing influence or a threat to the future of white culture. See Christine Cheater, “Stolen Girlhood: Australia’s Assimilation Policies and Aboriginal Girls,” in Girlhood: A Global History, ed. Jennifer Helgren (Piscataway: Rutgers

254 certain degree, the Māori accepted European education as a means to an end, namely that it would provide children, boys especially but also girls, with the tools to help navigate the Pākehā world and thus generate professional and economic opportunities. However, they resisted schools’ attempts to weaken Māori culture, especially following the New

Zealand Wars as fears about Māori decline became more pronounced. This uneasy tension between adoption of some European practices and the maintenance of Māori traditions would continue to shape debates about Māori education into the twentieth century.31

Comments by enumerators in the 1911 Census of the Maori Population reinforced the idea that Māori progress was measured by their adoption of European practices. For example, census enumerator W. Dinnie wrote: “Free education has undoubtedly had and is having most beneficial results amongst the natives, who are in consequence brought into closer contact with the European, and educated in their ways; and it is noteworthy to observe that the parents are anxious that their children should attend school and receive an English education.”32 Another enumerator, A. C. Black, echoed Dinnie, observing: “It may be noted that the bulk of the Maoris in this county have been born and brought up amongst Pakeha surroundings; they mostly understand English, thoroughly understand

University Press, 2012), 250-67. St. Stephens was the first boarding school established for Māori girls in 1846. Reina Whaitiri describes her experiences at a boarding school in the 1940s in “Murihiku is in my Blood.” She writes about how education was a defining experience in shaping her identity as a Māori and accentuated cultural differences: “This changed radically when I was sent away to boarding school. It was a very English boarding school with a very English philosophy. Here I was soon made aware that I was Māori.” See Reina Whaitiri, “Murihiku is in my Blood,” in Growing Up Māori, ed. Witi Ihimaera (Auckland: Tandem Press, 1998), 172. 31 Apirana Ngata, “The employment of Maoris after leaving school,” First Conference of the Association for the Amelioration of the Maori Race (Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library, 1897); Peter Buck, “The Decline of the Maori Race,” Third Conference of the Association for the Amelioration of the Maori Race (Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library, 1899). For more on Māori resistance to education, see C. A. Younge, “Maori Education,” Otago Witness, April 22, 1908, 88. 32 Census of the Maori Population (Wellington: John Mackay Government Printer, 1911) 4, H.—14 A, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives.

255

European customs, and each succeeding year sees their further adoption of our generally accepted ways.”33 While most of the reports in the Census paint a picture of unqualified success of European educational practices among the Māori, they do at times provide glimpses of some of the challenges, including practical difficulties, like the distance and the lack of adequate schools.34 Constable T. Cahill, an enumerator for Bay of Islands, reflected that the educational process was a long one that required patience, writing in his report: “The adoption of European habits of life must, however, necessarily be a slow and gradual process.”35 The Census described how one of the biggest challenges was the

Māori’s resistance to their efforts. For example, sub-enumerator J.H. Mitchell described the poor state of education in Wairoa County: Education “is not encouraged as it should be, and I am afraid the Maori Councils have neglected their plain duty in this matter.

Until men are placed in power who know how to value education, the Maori children must grow up in ignorance, to be hereafter the prey, perhaps, of designing Europeans. But the members of the Maori Councils are generally elected according to the interest they take in the old Maori custom, and not in the interests of the younger generation.”36

Recognizing that such educational efforts sought to weaken their culture, Māori resisted these efforts to convert, teach, and “civilize” their community.37

As with child rescue discourses in Britain, these educational efforts were framed in humanitarian terms and as being in the children’s best interests. Yet such discourses actually concealed multiple, more self-interested motivations, namely demonstrating the

33 Ibid., 6. 34 Ibid., 13 35 Ibid., 5 36 Ibid., 13. 37 New Zealand House of Representatives. Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1874, Vol. II, G-2, 18. “Amongst other things, they oppose the education of children in English.”

256 legitimacy and morality of the interventionist colonial state. From the outset, education served as a way to “domesticate” New Zealand girls—both Māori and Pākehā—and reform them in a way that would make them useful to the colonial enterprise.38 The focus on education, especially Māori education, in the mid-nineteenth century reflected broader social and political changes in New Zealand and the wider empire. As discussed in the first chapter, colonial officials, like Henry Grey, were concerned about the insecurity of British settlers and feared war with the Māori. Grey saw the education and

Anglicization of Māori children as way of make the Māori more sympathetic to the

British and thereby reducing the potential for conflict.39 Colonial officials viewed girls’ education as especially important in this strategic endeavor. Girls’ perceived malleability and their destined roles as wives and mothers meant that they acted as valuable conduits through which British values could enter the Māori communities.40 British settler Jane

Boughton employed this line of argumentation in her efforts to start a school for Māori girls in Wellington in the late 1860s and early 1870s. She wrote to Donald McLean, the minister of native affairs and colonial defence in New Zealand, with the hope that he could assist in soliciting support for the enterprise. Describing the education of Māori girls was a matter “of greatest importance to the Colony,” Boughton detailed how schools could act as a way for Pākehā values and practices to infiltrate Māori communities:

It has been acknowledged in all civilized countries that female influence is very great especially upon the rising generation and for that influence to be beneficial.

38 Page, Lee, and Brooking “Schooling for a Gendered Future,” 122. 39 See Henry George Grey, The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration, vol. 2 (London: R. Bentley, 1853), 129. 40 For more on the education and training of girls, see Coney, “Educating Girls”; Matthews, In Their Own Right; and Melanie Nolan, Breadwinning: New Zealand Women and the State (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000), 129-132. Nancy L. Stockdale examines how domestic education of girls in British Protestant mission schools in Palestine was inextricably connected to conversion efforts and the civilizing mission of imperialism in “Palestinian Girls and the British Missionary Enterprise, 1847-1948,” in Girlhood: A Global History, ed. Jennifer Helgren (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 217-33.

257

It becomes absolutely necessary that the females should first be well trained themselves. A thought has long suggested itself to me that if young Maori girls were trained in thoroughly domestic habits as well as having the advantage of a plain, useful and Christian education their example might do much eventually to soften the tempers and dispositions of their male relative.41

Boughton’s letter reflects the widely held view that the reform of Māori society would begin with the education of girls, who would return to their communities with acquired

Pākehā habits, values, and culture.42 Training girls in domestic skills not only exported the qualities of Pākehā domesticity to Māori communities but also helped meet the critical need for servants. An article about the Hukarere Native School for Girls at

Napier noted this dual purpose, observing that its students are “entering freely into domestic service” and the ripple effects of their education: “These influences are gradually penetrating the prejudices of the Maori, weaning him from his old habits and customs and persuading him to adopt the manners and customs of the Pakeha.”43

Educational institutions sought not only to facilitate the assimilation of the Māori people and transform them into productive members of the colonial state and economy but also acted as a means for colonial governments to extend their influence and policing into the

“uncolonized” sphere of the Māori home, which largely remained outside the purview of colonial governance and consequently were often regarded as mysterious and dangerous.

As discussed in the previous chapters, domesticity served as an instrument in the

“civilizing mission” of imperialism. In New Zealand, as in other parts of the empire,

British settlers sought to export models of the Victorian middle-class family and home to

41 Jane Boughton to Donald McLean, February 2, 1870, Inward letters—A & J Boughton, Reference Number MS-Papers-0032-0167, Collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library, accessed August 4, 2018, http://mp.natlib.govt.nz/detail/?id=1014963&l=en. 42 “It was necessary that any reform of the Maori should begin with the children and through our educational system.” “Maori Welfare,” The Auckland Star, June 7, 1937, 8. 43 Younge, “Maori Education,” Otago Witness, 88.

258 counteract the contaminating and degenerative effects of colonial environments and consequently elevate the status and morality of colonial societies. The key qualities of

Victorian domesticity—including order, cleanliness, and purity—in turn acted as markers of civilization. Observations in the Māori census of 1911 reveals this perceived connection between domesticity and civilization, with the enumerators’ reports containing references to the nature of Māori domestic life as a way to gauge the progress of civilization in various regions. For instance, a report on the Wairarapa region by E. A.

Welch noted that the “Maoris are making continuous progress towards the complete adoption of civilized modes of life. It is a rare exception to find a Maori living in one of the old-time whares, the houses being constructed on European plans.”44 Similarly, in his report on the Makara region, enumerator William Pitt observed: “The Maoris generally have adopted the European methods of living in houses of their own in preference to the old communistic habit of living all together in big meeting-houses. They are also much more industrious than formerly.”45 As evidenced by these reports, the Māori home acted as microcosm of Māori society, and the adoption of European domestic practices was seen as portending the Europeanization and “civilization” of the Māori people.

This connection between European domesticity and European civilization also emerges as a theme in Waihoura, the Maori Girl, a book by the popular children’s writer,

William Henry Giles Kingston.46 The novel focuses on the relationship between the title character and Lucy, a British girl who along with her father Colonel Pemberton, “leave[s] home for a strange land.” Shortly after her arrival in New Zealand, Lucy takes Waihoura

44 Census of the Maori Population, 1911, 16. 45 Ibid., 17. 46 William Henry Giles Kingston, Waihoura, the Maori Girl (Edinburgh: Gall, 1873). It is also sometimes called Waihoura, the New Zealand Girl.

259 under her wing. Although the daughter of a Māori chief, Waihoura is not a “typical”

Māori girl and stands out from other Māoris in that she already exhibits many European traits: “Her complexion was much fairer than that of any of her companions, scarcely darker, indeed, than a Spanish or Italian brunette. No tattoo marks disfigured her lips or chin.” She also can “speak Pakeha tongue,” which she had learned from missionaries.

The novel affirms Britain’s “civilizing” role by casting Waihoura as a vulnerable subject in need of rescue by the British. When Waihoura falls ill, Lucy nurses her back to health, and Lucy helps “the little savage girl…turn into a young lady.” Lucy gives Waihoura clothes, telling her: “Now that you are like us outside, you must become like us inside.”

The novel traces Lucy’s efforts to make Waihoura like Europeans on the “inside” and specifically to convert Waihoura to Christianity. Despite resistance from the Māori community, Waihoura does eventually convert to Christianity, and her conversion is seen as the first step in converting the broader Māori community. Before her marriage, Mr.

Marlow, a missionary, expresses hope that “Waihoura’s marriage may be the means of converting her husband” and that she will have “influence over him.” The novel concludes with Waihoura’s marriage and the construction of a home modeled on

European domesticity: “Waihoura soon afterwards became the wife of Rahana, who built a house after the English model, on some land which he owned in the neighbourhood near the river, and receiving instruction from their friends, both became true and earnest

Christians.” The novel encapsulates the ideal progression, envisaged by colonists, of a

Māori girl from “savage state” to a “civilised and contented” one. The novel’s conclusion and its focus on Waihoura’s house signifies how the adoption of European domestic practices was seen as the culmination of the imperial civilizing mission and an

260 undeniable marker of European civilization among the Māori.

Stout’s plan to the train Māori girls in the methods of European domesticity built upon these discourses and employed many of their tropes. Like Boughton and other colonists, Stout framed her plan for training Māori girls as servants by arguing that the reform of the Māori people would begin with girls through the educational system: “The

Maori girl had only to be trained, had only to have the opportunities, and she could show that she could work as well as the European girl.”47 Like missionaries in early nineteenth-century New Zealand, Stout recognized that cultural differences separated

Māori and European girlhood but that education could reconcile these differences by making Māori girls more European and “civilized.” In outlining her plan, Stout emphasized the benefits to both the Pākehā but especially the Māori: “The Pakeha wished to help the Maoris, and they wished the Maoris to help them in this matter.”48 The plan had both short-term and long-term objectives. Stout indicated that it would not only help

Māori girls in finding useful employment but also reform the Māori people—and New

Zealand society by extension. As Stout noted in her speech, “It is generally recognized by those who have pondered on the problem of the uplift of the Maori people that one of the first requisites of any scheme of reformation is that their womenkind should be induced to accept the modern standards of domestic economy and to model their homes on the European plan.”49 Like Boughton, Stout portrayed girls as valuable conduits through which British habits, values, and culture could enter Māori communities. Stout’s plan to the train Māori girls in the methods of European domesticity served as an

47 “Maori Women. A Notable Gathering. Hope for the Girl,” 3. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.

261 instrument in the “civilizing mission” of imperialism and formed part of a broader colonial agenda.

Stout’s scheme and its veneration of the domestic sphere reflected the shifting political landscape in New Zealand. During the 1890s, the domestic sphere increasingly became the focus of governmental attention.50 The attainment of women’s suffrage in

1893, along with the rise of liberalism, gave a new visibility to the home and domestic issues. In articulating their arguments for suffrage, women positioned themselves as maternal feminists and emphasized women’s duties within the home and marriage, home, and family as the natural vocation of women.51 Following the enfranchisement of women, issues related to the home and family life remained important items on the political agenda. As Jeanine Graham has argued, “Legislative concern for children was not a vote-winning policy before 1893. Once women were enfranchised, the position changed. It would have been impossible for the Liberals to have remained oblivious to demands for social reforms from women’s groups.”52 The election of the Liberal Party in

1891, along with empire-wide social and racial anxieties following the South African

War, increased the state’s attention to and involvement in domestic matters, especially women’s and children’s health and welfare.53 Like in Britain and South Africa, the home was the building block of British society and the colonial state. Thus, equipping girls

50 For more on this point, see Nolan, Breadwinning, specifically ch. 4, “The Domestic Education Debate.” 51 This legislation includes bills legitimizing children born out of wedlock if the parents eventually married, allowing adoption, protecting infants from baby farming, raising the age of consent for girls to 16, and the passage of the Infant Life Protection Act (1896). For more on this point, see Nolan, Breadwinning, 16; Jeanine Graham, “Child Employment in Colonial New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of History 21 (1987): 62-78; and, Raewyn Dalziel, “The Colonial Helpmeet: Women’s Role and the Vote in Nineteenth Century New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of History 11 (1977): 112-23. 52 Graham, “Child Employment in Colonial New Zealand,” 74. 53 Dugald J. McDonald, “Children and Young Persons in New Zealand Society,” in Families in New Zealand Society, ed. Peggy G. Koopman-Boyde (Wellington: Metheun, 1978), 49. In 1907, the Plunkett Society was formed with an interest in child as future citizens.

262 with the proper domestic skills had consequences far beyond the home and became a matter of national and racial importance.54

“The Best British” and “Better Blacks”: Racial Ideologies in New Zealand

In presenting her plan to the Māori Congress, Stout emphasized how the employment of

Māori girls could facilitate racial understanding and the assimilation of the Māori people.

This encouragement of closer contact between the Māori and Pākehā runs counter to the

South African emphasis on segregation. To understand this contrast, the plans must be seen in the wider context of race relations in New Zealand and South Africa at this time.

Although colonists like Earl Grey and Edward Gibbon Wakefield expressed alarm about the threat posed by the Māori majority to British settlers in the 1840s and 1850s, the

Māori population was in reality rapidly declining by the mid-century, due in large part to the introduction of diseases from Pākehā settlers. In 1840, there were approximately

80,000 Māori and 2,000 Pākehā. By 1858, the European population numbered approximately 59,000, surpassing the Māori population of 56,000.55 The Māori population would decline to 42,000 in 1896 before it began to recover. At the same time, the Pākehā population grew exponentially. In 1896, for instance, the population was

701,000. Thus, unlike South Africa, where the size of the African and Afrikaner populations vastly outnumbered British settlers, the Pākehā made up overwhelming majority of New Zealand’s population, composing 94.8% of the population according to

54 Margaret Tennant, “Natural Directions: Education and the Formalization of Sexual Differences in the Education System,” in Women in History: Essays on European Women in New Zealand, eds. Barbara Brookes, Charlotte Macdonald, and Margaret Tennant (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 99. 55 “Māori and European population numbers, 1840–1881,” Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, published June 20, 2012, https://teara.govt.nz/en/graph/36364/Maori-and-european-population-numbers- 1840-1881.

263 the 1911 census.56 New Zealanders proudly distinguished themselves from other colonies, especially their “convict” Australian neighbors, by casting themselves as “not only British, but the best British.”57 As James Belich has argued, this identity has its roots in the history of emigration to New Zealand. In order to attract settlers, colonists frequently portrayed the colonies as “better Britains” and emphasized features, like climate, that was superior to Britain. In order to compete with other areas of the empire and attract both migrants and financial support, New Zealand established itself as distinct from and superior to other parts of the empire. Instead of being known for its long distance, poor soil, and conflicts with the Māoris, New Zealand instead cast itself as a place of greater abundance, independence, security, health, and opportunity.58 This identity of New Zealanders as the “best British” helped to unify the separate cultures of the settlers—Irish, English, and Scottish—and was key in forming its New Zealand’s national distinctiveness.

Pākehā New Zealanders not only envisioned themselves the “best British” but also considered the Māoris “better blacks.” This ideology emphasizing Māoris’

56 The census numbers for 1911 are: White 1,002,959; Māori: 49,844; Half-Castes: 2,879; Chinese: 2,630. “Results of a Census of the Dominion of New Zealand,” Statistics New Zealand, accessed September 20, 2018, http://www3.stats.govt.nz/historic_publications/1911-census/1911-results-census.html#d50e714. 57 Robert Francis Irvine, Oscar Thorwald, and Johan Alpers, The Progress of New Zealand in the Century (London: W.&R. Chambers, Limited, 1902), 421. For more on this nationalist context of the domestic servant debates, see David Cape, “New Zealand and the World: Imperial, International and Global Relations,” in Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. Geoffrey W. Rice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 582; and, Barbara Brookes, “Gender, Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand,” Gender & History 19, no. 3 (November 2007), 514. 58 On New Zealand’s identity as the “best British,” see especially James Belich’s Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880’s to the Year 2000 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). See also David Thomson, “Marriage and Family on the Colonial Frontier,” in Disputed Histories: Imagining New Zealand’s Past, eds. Tony Ballantyne and Brian Moloughney (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006), 140; Barbara Brookes, Annabel Cooper and Robin Law, “Situating Gender,” in Sites of Gender: Women, Men and Modernity in Southern Dunedin, 1890-1939 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), 3; and, Jock Philips and Terry Hearn, Settlers: New Zealand Immigrants from England, Ireland and Scotland 1800-1945, AUP Studies in Cultural and Social History Series (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008).

264 superiority to other indigenous peoples developed following the New Zealand Wars and particularly with the publication of Edward Tragear’s The Aryan Maori in 1885, which argued that Māori shared an ancient origin with Northern Europeans, including the

British.59 An article published in The Evening Post encapsulated the stereotype of the

Ayran Māori, writing “The Maori will yet bloom with the fairest of the Anglo-Saxon,” and thus the need for “Preserving a Fine Race.”60 Pākehā New Zealanders believed that the Māori were the “most convertible” among indigenous peoples. This view was reflected in a children’s book, Little People in Far-Off Lands: Our Island Cousins

(Australia, New Zealand, and Ceylon), which described the Māori as a “race of strong, brave people” who have “come to be quite close friends” with the “white man.” It continues: “‘Are the Maoris black or white people?’ you ask. They are neither. Their skins are a light brown, and their hair and eyes dark brown or black.”61 This suggests that there was a certain exceptionalism afforded to the Māori. The Māori were frequently contrasted with indigenous peoples of other regions, including African peoples in

Southern Africa and especially the Aboriginal population in Australia, which according to racial ideology would always remain a distinct and inferior race.62 Such views regarding the superiority of the Māori are reflected in an article on “the native question”

59 Edward Tregear, The Aryan Maori (Wellington: G. Didsbury, 1885). According to Treager, both the British and the Māori were members of the Aryan master race, who had gone in different directions after leaving their ancient homeland north of India. Race relations became more strained during the New Zealand Wars. Until this point, Pākehā New Zealanders viewed the Māori as a noble yet “barbaric” people. Before the conflict, the Māori were viewed by some early colonists and missionaries as “a fine race” due to their seeming capacity for civilization and conversion, while others described them as “[a] dirty, squalid, unimprovable and intolerably ugly generation.” See Mark Derby, ‘Māori–Pākehā relations—Military conflicts,” Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, published May 5, 2011, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/maori-pakeha-relations/page-3. 60 “Maori Hygeine,” The Evening Post, September 14, 1925, 5. 61 Florence A. Tapsell, Little People in Far-Off Lands: Our Island Cousins (Australia, New Zealand, and Ceylon) (Leeds: E.K. Arnold and Son Ltd., c. 1921), 20. 62 Belich, Paradise Reforged, 210.

265 in Southern Africa, published in New Zealand newspaper Press. The article compared

Māori and African people, writing: “There is as much difference between a donkey and a thoroughbred as there is between the Kaffir and the Maori. Understand, it is not the colour; it is the want of ability to learn, to become civilised.”63 While describing the

Māoris as “better blacks” might at first appear conciliatory and benevolent, such views actually concealed more self-interested motives. As James Belich has observed, “New

Zealand Europeans were not less racist than other settler societies, but they partially exempted Māori from their racism.”64 This idea of Māoris as “better blacks” not only elevated the Māori people but also the Pākehā, since they could consequently claim that they interacted with a superior type of “native” and thus reinforce their professed superiority to other white settler societies, especially Australia.

Citing these notions of the Māoris as “better blacks,” Pākehā New Zealanders cultivated the belief that they had the best race relations in the world and emphasized the colony’s relative racial harmony.65 Since the Māoris descended from the same Aryan race as Europeans, anxieties about interracial relationships that existed in Southern Africa

63 “South African Union.,” Press, September 11, 1908, 8. The only author name that is give is “From Our Own Correspondent.” For a similar view, see William Pember Reeves, who wrote that Māori were probably descended from “a people called Aryans…like our own Anglo-Saxon race.” He described how the average New Zealander “regards a Mongolian with repulsion, a Negro with contempt, and looks on an Australian black as very near to a wild beast; but he likes the Maoris, and is sorry that they are dying out.” William Pember Reeves, The Long White Cloud (Ao Tea Roa) (London: Horace Marshall and Son, 1898), 57. 64 See James Belich, “The Aryan Māori and Other Stereotypes,” Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, published May 5, 2011, https://teara.govt.nz/en/european-ideas-about-Maori/page-5. See also Belich, Paradise Reforged; James Belich, New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Penguin, 1986), especially “The Wars and the Pattern of New Zealand Race Relations,” 298-310; Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and Its Enemies: The Foundations of Modern New Zealand Society, 1850-1900 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989); and, Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism and the British Empire (London: Palgrave, 2001). 65 Belich, Paradise Reforged, 229 and 545. Colin McGeorge, “Race, empire, and the Maori in the New Zealand primary school curriculum 1880-1940,” in The Imperial Curriculum, ed. J. A. Mangan (London: Routledge, 2012), 65-78.

266 did not exist to the same extent in New Zealand. This is seen for example in an article on

New Zealand that appeared in the Natal Witness. It discusses in large part “the native population.” In contrast to Southern Africa, which viewed interracial relationships as

“the cause of all the trouble” and endangering the future of the colony, the article describes the existence of mixed-race children as potentially positive: “from the two

[British and Māori] has sprung a race of half-castes, combining some of the best qualities of both and likely to prove no contemptable addition to the population of the Colony.”66

The Pākehā ostensibly accepted relationships between the Pākehā and Māori, particularly as a means to assimilate the Māori into Pākehā culture and “whiten” the Māori people.67

Stout’s scheme served as a mechanism to hasten this assimilation. In addition to teaching girls Pākehā mores, the employment of Māori in domestic service created possibilities for relationships between the Pākehā and Māori, a concept unimaginable in other colonial contexts, especially South Africa. Situated within this discourse about the “best British” and “better blacks,” it becomes clear that the preservation of white respectability and prestige underlay the ideas of training Māori domestic servants.

While the myth of being the “best British” existed for decades, it gained increasing currency in the early 1900s at a key time for New Zealand. Two concurrent events—the South African War and debates over federation with Australia—forced

Pākehā New Zealanders to reconsider their relationship with Britain and neighboring

Australia and their position in the British Empire. Although Britain continued to be considered “home,” the South African War made New Zealanders more aware of their

66 “New Zealand,” Natal Witness, July 20, 1875. On interracial relationships being “the cause of all the trouble,” see “A National Peril,” The Rhodesia Herald, May 3, 1912, 9. See chapter five for a greater discussion of racial anxieties and race relations in South Africa. 67 Brookes, “Gender, Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand,” 501.

267 place in the British Empire and connected them more concretely to other parts of the empire.68 Moreover, debates over federation compelled New Zealanders to contemplate what made them distinct from Australia. The political cartoon from the New Zealand

Graphic (figure 21) emphasizes the perceived contrast between the two colonies, portraying virginal Zealandia, accompanied by a Māori woman, as resisting brutish

Australia’s enticements for federation. As suggested by the caption, opponents feared that federation would entrap New Zealanders.

Figure 21: Zealandia Resisting Australia69

68 For a greater discussion of this point, see John Crawford and Ian McGibbon, ed., One Flag, One Queen, One Tongue: New Zealand, The British Empire and the South African War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002). 69 From the New Zealand Graphic, October 20, 1900. “How We See It,” Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated March 10, 2015, https://teara.govt.nz/en/cartoon/601/how-we-see-it.

268

Both before and after its rejection to join the federation of Australia in 1901, New

Zealanders emphasized their unique and distinct identity from Australia, a key part of which was presenting themselves as more British than Australians and the colony as the

“Britain of the South.” To bolster their claims, British New Zealanders proudly touted that the colony was 98.5 percent British, a claim that was not based on census data but on

Australia’s claim to be 98 percent British. The 1911 census revealed that British actually made up 94.8 percent of the population, with the European population numbering one million and the Māori population at 50,000.70 Although arguably not far from 94.8 percent, New Zealand’s claim to be 98.5 percent British demonstrates New Zealanders’ concerted desire to be regarded as the “best British.” When New Zealand became a dominion of the British Empire, rather than a colony, a decision in part motivated by a desire to further distinguish itself from Australia and also to elevate its position within the

British Empire.71 At the same time that Pākehā New Zealander’s “best British” identity was becoming more central, two key demographic and social trends threatened to upend it. Even though the Pākehā outnumbered the Māori 20 to 1 in the first decades of the twentieth century, the fertility of the Pākehā was declining, due in large part to the expansion of birth control, and by 1920, the Māori birth rate would surpass the Pākehā birth rate.72 Such trends resurrected mid-nineteenth-century anxieties about the population crisis and imbalance between the Māori and Pākehā. Compounding concerns

70 “Results of a Census of the Dominion of New Zealand.” 71 David Cape, “New Zealand and the World: Imperial, International and Global Relations,” in Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. Geoffrey W. Rice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 582; Brookes, “Gender, Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand,” 514. 72 By 1900, the Pākehā birth rate in New Zealand was lower than any European country except France. By 1920, the Māori birth rate would outpace the Pākehā birth rate. Sandra Coney, “Populate or Perish: New Zealand Women and Access to Birth Control,” in Standing in the Sunshine: A History of New Zealand Women since They Won the Vote (Auckland: Viking, 1993), 70-71.

269 about the decline of the Pākehā birth rate was the burgeoning Asian population in New

Zealand.

“Yellow Peril”: Anxieties about Chinese Domestic Servants

Although Stout presented her plan as “the means of breaking down the race prejudice,” it functioned in reality as a means of racial exclusion. The desire to have Māori servants stemmed from a fear of a worse alternative: the employment of Chinese servants. The growth of Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century generated fears that the

Asian population in New Zealand would overrun “civilized” New Zealanders.73 Fears over the “Asian menace,” which had existed in the decades before the turn of the century, received new attention in this climate of growing fears about racial decline. As discussed in the previous chapters, the South African War generated new fears about racial decline throughout the empire. Within this context, building up the population gained new urgency, since it would serve as a bulwark that would impede the supposedly imminent threat of degeneracy in the form of Asian immigrants. This sentiment would appear again a decade or so later on the eve of the First World War. At a speech to students at

Cheltenham Ladies’ College in Britain, R. F. Poynder, the president of the school’s guild, gave a speech to students, urging them to emigrate, declaring: “if Australia and New

Zealand are to be strong enough to resist invasion, British women must go out and make

British homes.”74 Like Edward Wakefield, Poynder viewed the emigration and

73 Similar fears and prejudices about the Chinese also existed in South Africa around the same time. See Rachel Bright, Chinese Labour in South Africa, 1902-10: Race, Violence, and Global Spectacle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 74 R. F. Poynder, “Biennial Meeting of the Guild,” The Cheltenham Ladies’ College Magazine (Autumn 1910), 240.

270 settlement of girls and young women as a means of fortifying the home and by extension colonial societies. Building up the home served as a way to build up the nation.

When Stout made her proposal in 1908, Chinese domestic servants did exist but were relatively few in number and mostly male. The proposal importantly coincided with growing anti-Chinese sentiment and legislation. This anti-Chinese discrimination was codified in the Chinese Immigrants Amendment Act of 1907, which set a reading test of

100 words in English, and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1908, which ceased the naturalization of Chinese immigrants and required the thumb-printing of Chinese who wanted re-entry permits. Although Anna Stout expressed conciliatory, if rather paternalistic, views towards the Chinese, praising qualities such as honesty, sobriety, and industry, her husband Robert Stout served as president of the Anti-Chinese League and was a key force behind the passage of the Asiatic Restriction Act in 1896, which raised the poll tax from 10 pounds to 100 pounds and restricted Chinese naturalization.75 In arguing for a greater restriction on immigration, Robert Stout expressed fears about the growing Asian population supplanting the Pākehā, stating the Chinese “have a lower civilisation, which, if introduced into the colony, is bound to affect our civilisation.”76

Discourses and cartoons, such as the one below (figure 22), portrayed the perceived threat of the Chinese and the vices they supposedly brought, including greed, brutality, and drugs. Like the Australia federation cartoon (figure 21), it portrayed New Zealand attempting to escape the chains of a monstrous figure, although one that is even more

75 The tax was not repealed until 1944. In 2002, the New Zealand government officially apologized to the Chinese for the suffering caused by the poll tax. Sir Robert Stout (1844-1930) served as Premier of New Zealand from 1884-87 and Chief Justice from 1899-1926. 76 “Asiatics Restriction Bill,” June 23, 1896, New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, Third Session of the Twelfth Parliament. Legislative Council and House of Representatives 92 (June11-July 7, 1896), 253.

271 subhuman than the Australian brute.

Figure 22: “The Yellow Peril”77

Unlike Pākehā-Māori relations, there was great anxiety about interactions and sexual relationships between the British and Chinese.78 For instance, a report to the

Chinese Immigration Committee of the New Zealand House of Representatives noted that the Chinese should “not mix or consort with Europeans, nor Europeans with them.”79

77 From New Zealand Truth, February 16, 1907. 78 For more on the Chinese in New Zealand, see Stevan Eldred-Grigg with Zeng Dazheng (曾达峥), White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand 1790–1950 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2014); Nigel Murphy, Unfolding History, Evolving Identity: The Chinese in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003); and, Manying Ip, ed., Unfolding History, Evolving Identity: The Chinese in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003). 79 Mr. Vincent Pyke to Mr. W.J. Steward, September 9, 1871, “Chinese Immigration Committee,” Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives 2, no. 2 (1871): 5.

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Discussions about Chinese servants had many parallels with the discourses surrounding

African servants in South Africa, with opponents in both cases expressing fears about the savagery of Chinese or African servants and their corrupting presence in the home.80 For instance, W. E. Swanton wrote in his Notes on New Zealand that although “yellow servants” were “inexpensive, industrious, and willing,” “they are apt to spoil one’s appetite when they wait at table.”81 Opponents also criticized the brutality of Chinese men to white women and how male servants subverted gender roles, since men assumed women’s tasks.82 For instance, an article in the Thames Advertiser described Chinese servants as “very capable in some respects, though undesirable in others.” The article lists Chinese servants’ positive qualities—including that “[t]hey never gossip,” “[t]hey learn wha’ever is desired they should know,” and “[t]hey are perfectly willing to do every sort of household work”—but continues that the main drawback is that “[t]hey cannot however, bear to be ordered about by women.” To support this point, it describes two cases of Chinese servants who “chased their mistresses out of their houses with axes.”83

As in the South African context, opponents to the employment of Chinese servants cited fears about their corrupting presence in the home. Although this discrimination reflected fears of about the growth of prostitution and economic competition from Chinese immigrants, the greater fear among the anti-immigration advocates was that the presence of the Chinese would compromise the identity of New Zealanders as “best British” and a

80 The 1911 Census records 2,542 Chinese men and 88 Chinese women living in New Zealand. The census records 27 Chinese men engaged as domestic cooks and only one Chinese woman as being employed in domestic service. This great gender imbalance was not only due to the nature of the work available— mainly mining—but also the cost of the poll tax, which prohibited many wives from immigrating with their husbands to New Zealand. See “Results of a Census of the Dominion of New Zealand.” 81 W. E. Swanton, Notes on New Zealand (London: Eden, Remington & Co., 1892), 244. 82 See for instance, “The Chinaman as a Domestic Servant,” Thames Advertiser, July 17, 1895, 1. 83 Ibid.

273 desire to “Keep New Zealand White.” Situated within this discourse about the “best

British” and “better blacks,” it becomes clear that—similar to South Africa—the preservation of white respectability, racial purity, and social order underlay the plan to train Māori girls as servants.

“The Pride of Race”: Reactions to the Proposal of Māori Servants in Pākehā Homes

Stout’s proposal to train Māori girls as servants generated much discussion among both the Māori and Pākehā and met with varying degrees of acceptance and opposition. The responses of various groups reveal differing visions of New Zealand society and the future of Māori and Pākehā communities at this critical juncture in New Zealand’s history. As in the South African context, sections of Pākehā society opposed the plan, fearing the presence of the racial “other” within the home, but other Pākehā—especially women eager for servants—supported the scheme and cited successful examples of

Māori girls working as domestic servants to prove the viability of the plan. For example,

Miss Morrison, who was in charge of the Government Women’s Employment Bureau, admitted that the employment of Māori girls provided a good solution to the insatiable demand for servants, stating a “well-trained Maori girl made one of the very best household assistants.”84 Jeanine Graham’s oral history of childhood in New Zealand during this period reveals that children’s first interaction with Māori people was often within their homes, and their first point of contact was a Māori servant, either one who came on a weekly basis to help with the household chores or one who lived in the house,

84 “The Servant Problem.” Evening Post, July 17, 1909, 9. For further reports on the success of employing Māori servants, see “Maori Women. A Notable Gathering. Hope for the Girl,” 3; “Maori Girls as Domestic Servants,” West Coast Times, April 8, 1907; and Younge, “Maori Education,” Otago Witness, 88.

274 and that children often preferred Māori servants to Pākehā ones.85

Stout’s proposal also received support from prominent Māori leaders, including members of the Young Māori Party, a group of Māori men, primarily educated at the well-known European missionary boarding school, Te Aute College, who were dedicated to improving the welfare of Māori people. The Young Māori Party emerged during a particularly crucial time for the Māori people, when the Māori population was rapidly declining and colonists emphasized their imminent assimilation, leading to concerns among the Māoris that they belonged to a “dying race.”86 Focusing on improving the health and welfare of the Māori, the Young Māori Party saw themselves as “saviours of a race.”87 The Young Māori built upon other Māori reform movements and organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably the Te Aute College

Students’ Association, which was founded in 1897 with the twin objectives of social reform and improving Māori educational achievements, and the Kotahitanga (Māori

Unity) movements, which advocated for Māori political autonomy and a pan-Māori identity and sought to solve various problems—including educational inequality, the declining Māori population, the purchasing of Māori land, and governmental indifference to Māori concerns—by creating a separate Māori parliament.88 Like the Kotahitanga

85 Jeanine Graham, “‘They Were No Different…’: Probing Childhood Perceptions of Cultural Encounter in Edwardian New Zealand,” British Review of New Zealand Studies 5 (1992): 64. 86 This view that the Māoris were facing extinction as a race was examined in George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt- Rivers, The Clash of Culture and the Contact of Races: An Anthropological and Psychological study of the Laws of Racial Adaptability, with special reference to the Depopulation of the Pacific and the Government of Subject Races (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1927). Many Young Māori members did read Pitt- Rivers’s work, including Apirana Ngata. For more on this point, see Brookes, “Gender, Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand,” 504. 87 Philippa Mein Smith, “Managing globalisation 1891-1913,” A Concise History of New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 111. 88 For more on the movement, see Richard S. Hill, State, Authority, Indigenous Autonomy: Crown-Māori Relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1900-1950 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004), especially “Kotahitanga.”

275 movements, the Young Māori Party emphasized cooperation—not competition—with the

Pākehā. The Young Māoris did not necessarily advocate assimilation with Pākehā, but they also did not wholly reject European influences and instead emphasized selective adaptation to European culture while also encouraging the revival and preservation of many Māori traditions and preserve a sense of cultural identity. 89

Since most Young Māori members believed that improving the Māori race meant the adoption of some European ways of life, they supported Stout’s plan as complementary to their objective of improving Māori welfare. Even before Stout even proposed her plan in 1908, members of the Young Māori had put forward their own proposal to train Māori girls as servants at the 1907 Conference of the Te Aute College

Students’ Association. At this Conference, Reweti Kohere, a Young Māori clergyman who co-founded the Association for the Amelioration of the Māori Race, presented employment in service as a way of instructing future Māori mothers in the methods of the

Pākehā and argued that such knowledge could not be acquired in Māori communities. 90

The Conference resolved to support the training of Māori girls as domestic servants, emphasizing its potential to both improve race relations and preserve the Māori race, and argued that girls had been in domestic service for a long time with success.91 The resolution stated: “That this Conference, believing that the future welfare of the Maori race is largely dependent on the work of women in the management of the home, and the

89 For example, see Belich’s Paradise Reforged and John Adrian Williams’s Politics of New Zealand Māori: Protest and Cooperation, 1891-1909 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), especially 95 and 134. Although the group has come under criticism, particularly from members of the Māori Renaissance in the 1970s, recent historians have emphasized how cooperation was an effective means to safeguard Māori interests. 90 Sandra Coney, “Maori Women Shun Domestic Service,” in Standing in the Sunshine: A History of New Zealand Women since They Won the Vote (Auckland: Viking, 1993), 225. 91 “Maori Girls as Domestic Servants.”

276 training of their children, would strongly advocate Maori girls seeking employment in good Pakeha homes as domestic servants, where they may most effectively be fitted to benefit both themselves and their race."92 These views were echoed a year later when

Stout proposed a similar idea to the Māori Congress. In reaction to Stout’s speech,

Āpirana Ngata, a Young Māori member and Member of the New Zealand Parliament, expressed support for this plan, stating the Māoris’ “open, communal life encouraged immorality” and that the “Maori must somehow learn to know the meaning of ‘home’ as

Europeans should understand it.”93 Ngata would later qualify his support for plans to

Europeanize Māori home life, stating that “the Maori should be given the opportunity to live the life of the Pakeha if he so desires” and elaborated that “we are seeking to give the

Maori the most suitable life of the Pakeha, but in their social life we are seeking to retain for reasons of sentiment the old Maori customs.”94 Although at the time his support for

Stout’s plan might have been viewed as encouraging assimilationist policies, Ngata saw the adoption of European domestic practices as a means to broader goals, namely the maintenance and preservation of the Māori people.

Despite receiving support from some Young Māori members, the idea of training

Māori girls as servants also encountered resistance. Critics expressed fears that the plan was “very risky.”95 Like in Britain and South Africa, domestic service was seen as a route to prostitution, making Māori families reticent to send their girls into service.

92 “Maori Girls as Domestics.” The Manawatu Daily Times, April 6, 1907, 4. 93 Quoted in Williams Politics of the New Zealand Maori, 154. 94 See Native Affairs Commission, “Part VIII.—Whether the Schemes Are Likely to Achieve the Results Intended or Are Justified by the Benefits which They Confer upon the Maori People,” in Report of the Commission on Native Affairs, 46, G-11, 1934 Session I, Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives. For more on Ngata’s ideology, see Jeffrey Sissons, “The Post-Assimilationist Thought of Sir Apirana Ngata,” New Zealand Journal of History 34, no. 1 (2000): 47-59. 95 “Maori Girl Domestics,” Taranaki Daily News, April 6, 1907, 2.

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These fears were compounded by the fact that Māori predominantly lived in rural areas, so employment in domestic service would require girls moving far away from their families and home communities. Attendees at the Māori Congress expressed trepidation at “the great moral harm suffered by Māori girls, and through them by the whole Māori race” by their employment in domestic service and “urge[d] parents and guardians of young girls to deter them from seeking such employment.”96 One Young Māori member,

Frederick Augustus Bennett, expressed these concerns and argued that he “could see grave danger, unless the greatest care was exercised in placing the girls in good, Christian households.”97 In addition to expressing fears over the potentially damaging conditions of domestic service, Young Māori members like Bennett questioned whether work as a servant was really the best means to “uplift” the Māori people. In response to Stout’s speech, Maui Pomare, the Native Health Officer, “urged that to uplift the girls what was required was not the kitchen atmosphere, but the influence of the drawing-room, with its refinement and culture.”98 Te Rangi Hīroa, a Young Māori member who worked under

Maui Pomare as a medical officer to the Māori, also objected “to their being made to occupy lowly positions in European households.”99 Especially for Young Māori, which was largely composed of elite Māori, such a position would be degrading and represent downward, rather than upward, social mobility.

96 “Wild Utterances,” Marlborough Express, April 29, 1911, 6. 97 “Maori Girl Domestics,” Otago Daily Times, February 28, 1908, 5. 98 “Maori Maids,” 4. Maui Pomare (c. 1875-1930) worked to halt the decline of the Māori through addressing Māori health problems and in particular promoting better hygiene. Along with Kohere and others, he co-founded the Association for the Amelioration of the Māori Race. He supported assimilation and believed that the new population of Māori with European ancestry would have the best characteristics of both races. He welcomed intermarriage and believed that the Māori should adopt a European lifestyle. His goal was ultimately to help the Māori survive and adapt in the Pākehā world. That being said, there was some resistance to Pomare representing the Māori since he was “half-caste.” See “Servant Girl Problem,” Nelson Evening Mail, 4. He worked closely with Anna Stout’s husband, Robert Stout. 99 “Maori Girl Domestics,” Otago Daily Times, 5. He is also known as Sir Peter Henry Buck.

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Like Pomare and Hiroa, Māori women criticized the logic of Stout’s proposal that service would “uplift” girls.100 As part of her proposal, Stout attempted to reframe domestic service as ennobling to ensure that the Māori “did not think they lost caste by being engaged in domestic service.” However, Māori women realized that domestic service was not an avenue of social mobility but one of exploitation and instead contended that such work would degrade girls, who came from “a proud race,” and make them “slaves of the Pakeha.”101 One article, written by “a native lady,” responded to the proposal with skepticism: “Maoris from their infancy have been taught to look down on anything to do with slavery, and they are very proud by nature.”102 Miria Pomare, the wife of Maui Pomare and one of the most vocal critics of Stout’s plan, made a similar observation in an article entitled “The Pride of Race”: “I have yet to learn that any race in the history of the world has been uplifted through the medium of domestic service.”103

100 An editorial in the Otago Daily Times also criticized this rationale in commenting on the exploitative conditions of domestic service for European girls. It stated: “White slavery is a more fitting name for it than domestic employment.” It continued: “I would ask any doctor if he considers that the hours I have mentioned worked in a hot, stuffy kitchen is conducive to the general health of our future mothers of the nation.” See Working Man, “Servant Girl Problem,” Otago Daily Times, December 29, 1899, 8. 101 “Maori Maids,” Poverty Bay Herald, 4; “Maori Domestics,” Marlborough Express, July 18, 1908, 4. 102 “The Girlhood of Maori Girls and How Best to Help Them, By a Native Lady,” Outlook, May 23, 1908, 37. 103 “A Native Woman’s Protest: The Pride of Race,” Evening Post, July 20, 1908, 7. Like Stout, Pomare (1877-1971), whose full name was Mildred Amelia Woodbine Johnson, was the daughter of a Pākehā father and Māori mother and raised with a bicultural education. While her mother ensured that she never lost contact with her Māori kin, her father ensured she had an upper-class European education. Like her husband, Maui, Miria bridged both the Māori and Pākehā worlds and gained the respect of both communities. During her tour of New Zealand in 1939, Winifred Preston mentions meeting “Lady Pomare” at the opening of a Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS) Annual Exhibition in Wellington. She reported in her correspondences: “In declaring the Exhibition open, Lady Pomare said she felt it a great privilege to do a little for such a good movement as the G.F.S. Associates as she was with the Māori arts and crafts all her life, she was most interested in the handcrafts displayed by the girls that evening.” One of the GFS Associates commented that “this was one of those occasions where Maori and Pakeha might well co- operate in promoting the interest of each.” See Winifred Preston to Miss Angus,” August 3, 1939, 5/GFS/2/246, Overseas—New Zealand, Miss Winifred Preston’s tour, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library; and “56th Annual Report with Balance Sheets for Year Ending October 31st, 1939,” 5/GFS/2/246, Overseas—New Zealand, Miss Winifred Preston’s tour, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

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Pomare challenged not only the genuineness of Stout’s desire to uplift the Māori people but also her rhetoric of equality. Despite Stout’s emphasis that domestic service could be ennobling, Pomare emphasized that domestic service still kept the Māori people in a subservient position: “We Maori women do not want color distinction, and if our Pakeha sisters are really sincere, neither do they; but let the two races meet on equal terms and blend, so that in time to come they will be in reality one people—a jewel in the crown of

Empire.”104 As evidenced by Pomare’s reaction, she—like her husband and other Young

Māori members—did not disagree with the intention of Stout’s plan but the means.

Moreover, like Bennett, Pomare warned about the risks associated with servant life and argued that employment in domestic service would introduce Māori girls to poor whites and be “bringing the Maori girl into contact with this class of Pakeha at the most impressionable period of her life.”105 This discourse echoed anxieties about poor whites in Southern Africa and their association with immorality and vice and having a potentially corrupting influence on colonial societies. Pomare’s observation that Māori girls would be interacting with the poor white class of Pākehā further undermined the notion of service as means of elevating the Māori. It was not just the future of the British race that was at stake in this plan but also the future of the Māori race.

In addition to criticizing the servant life as “uplifting,” Māori women significantly framed their opposition to Stout’s plan by emphasizing the distinctive “girlhood of Maori girls.”106 Stout’s scheme rested on a singular, universal notion of girlhood and emphasizing the similarities of Pākehā and Māori, as evidenced by the plans for her

104 “Maori Maids,” 4. Emphasis in the original. 105 Ibid. 106 “The Girlhood of Maori Girls and How Best to Help Them, By a Native Lady,” 37.

280 training college built on the lines of Pākehā schools and based on Pākehā conceptions of gender roles. In arguing against the practicality of Stout’s scheme, Māori women cited the incompatibility of domestic service with the Māori way of life, since a Māori girl primarily lived in rural areas and was “born an open-air girl” and not suited to the confined space of the home.107 Moreover, girls typically worked as servants during their adolescent and teenage years between childhood and adulthood, a stage that Māori girls did not experience because they reached sexual maturity and married earlier than

Europeans, often around fifteen although betrothals could occur earlier.108 In response to

Stout’s belief that education could mediate the differences between Māori and Pākehā girlhoods, Māori women instead emphasized the different cultural values of the Māori and Pākehā and resisted the potential reformation of girlhood—and Māori culture more broadly.109 The resistance of the Māoris towards domestic service not only stemmed from fears of degradation but also from concerns of identity loss. Colonists—encouraged by the declining population of Māoris—envisioned the imminent assimilation of the remaining Māori people into the Pākehā culture. However, the Māori recognized the threat that assimilation posed to their culture, and that for them, “fusion spells annihilation.”110 The welfare of girls was inextricably connected to racial survival. This plan would not only disrupt their way of life but also extend the influence of the colonial

107 “Maori Maids,” 4. 108 Hīroa remarks on Māori girls earlier menstruation and betrothals in The Coming of the Maori, 892 and 894. See also Elsdon Best, The Maori—Volume II (Wellington: The Polynesia Society, Inc.,1941): “It would appear that girls often married young, but it must be remembered that they mature at a much earlier period than do our own folk. Colenso states that girls arrived a puberty at twelve, and even eleven years of age” (485). On these differences, see also Charlotte Macdonald, “Strangers at the Hearth: The Eclipse of Domestic Service in New Zealand Homes, c. 1830s-1940s,” in At Home in New Zealand: Houses, History, People, ed. Barbara L. Brookes (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2000), 51. 109 “Maori Maids,” 4. 110 “Educating the Maoris,” The Hawera and Normanby Star, November 23, 1909, 4.

281 government into the Māori home.111 Due to the vociferous opposition, particularly by

Pomare and other Māori women, the Māori Congress at Wellington dismissed the scheme, concluding that “the employment of Maori girls as domestic servants amongst

Europeans was not desirable in general practice.”112

When looking at the domestic servant question in New Zealand and debates over

Māori servants, historians focus on Pākehā racial anxieties as the principal, decisive reason for the plan’s failure.113 However, Pākehā New Zealanders were not entirely adverse to employing Māori girls, as demonstrated by the long history of the Pākehā employing Māori servants, stretching back through at least the early nineteenth century.

The work by Jane McCabe and Charlotte Macdonald has demonstrated that Pākehā women were also willing to accept girls from the Cook Islands or Anglo-Indian girls as domestic servants.114 Interestingly, in complete contrast to prewar policies, the domestic servant crisis became so severe after the First World War that Pākehā New Zealanders even encouraged legislation that would facilitate the emigration of Chinese domestic

111 For more on these points in the Indian context, see Satadru Sen, “The Savage Family: Colonialism and Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century India,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 3 (2002): 54. See also Ruby Lal, “Recasting the Women’s Question: The Girl-Child/Woman in the Colonial Encounter,” Interventions 10, no. 3 (2008): 321-39. 112 “Maori Maids,” 4. 113 For instance, Jane McCabe writes: “numbers of Indigenous women in domestic service were never high, suggesting that Maori women too were an uncomfortable presence.” See “Settling In, From Within: Anglo-Indian ‘Lady-Helps’ in 1920s New Zealand,” Domestic Service and Colonization, eds. Victoria K. Haskins and Claire Lowrie (New York: Routledge, 2014), 71. 114 These programs also met with limited success. As Jane McCabe explains in “Settling In, From Within: Anglo-Indian ‘Lady-Helps’ in 1920s New Zealand,” New Zealand recognized the potential source of servants in India and did initiate a small-scale program to train Anglo-Indian girls and emigrate them to New Zealand. Organizers of this scheme believed that the taint of illegitimacy hindered girls’ social mobility in India and reasoned that they had better opportunities if they emigrated to New Zealand. The program was small, with only sixty-five girls emigrating to New Zealand between 1909 and 1938. See also her monograph, Race, Tea, and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Around the time of World War II, New Zealand also established a program to train Cook Island girls as servants, an initiative that is explored in greater depth by Macdonald in “Taking Colonialism Home: Cook Island ‘Housegirls’ in New Zealand, 1939-1948.”

282 servants, including the removal of the poll tax.115 The existence of these plans suggests that racial anxieties alone did not preclude the employment of Māori girls, as it did for

African girls in South Africa, and instead other factors, particularly Māori resistance, had a key role in preventing Māori girls from becoming “slaves of the Pākehā.”116

Conclusion

At first glance, the contexts surrounding the servant crisis in South Africa and New

Zealand seem to have few points of intersection. Conflicts and racial tensions plagued

South Africa, while New Zealand professed to have the “best race relations” in the world.

Vastly outnumbered by the African and Afrikaner populations, British settlers in South

Africa strove to exclude the colonial “Other” and keep Africans out of the household, while British settlers in New Zealand outnumbered the Māori and advocated for the

“domestication” of the Māori “Other,” but did so as a means to exclude the Chinese

“Other.” Yet despite being separated by over 7,000 miles and their different histories, societies, and racial dynamics, the situations in South Africa and New Zealand bear notable similarities and demonstrate the ways that imperial and local discourses intersected. The South African War and growing international competition and tensions during the first decade of the twentieth century, which would ultimately precipitate the

First World War, called into question beliefs in Britain’s imperial security and racial supremacy. The first decade of the twentieth century represented a moment of crisis for

115 HD. Vavasour, “The Servant Problem,” Marlborough Express, September 29, 1919. The article states: “The domestic servant in this country is conspicuous by its absence, and it is no use looking for relief to the Old Country, as things are nearly as bad there as here…The Chinese men make the best domestic servants in the world, being energetic, clean, honest, thoroughly trustworthy and loyal.” See also, “Yellow Servants,” Marlborough Express, October 28, 1918, 6. 116 See Macdonald, “Why Was There No Solution.”

283 the British Empire, on both a local and more general level. The emergence of servant debates occurred at particularly crucial times for both South Africa and New Zealand— economically, socially, and geopolitically—and when ideas of the nation and national identities was undergoing a transition. Both colonies used servants as part of their attempts to construct social boundaries and reassert class, gender, and specifically racial hierarchies, which were integral to their respective visions of colonial societies.

British settlers sought to create an empire of home by creating an empire within the home. But while the domestic world was a site of colonial power, it was also a site of resistance. The servant debates reveal the precariousness of colonial power. When looking at the failed plans to train African and Māori girls as domestic servants, scholars focus on British settlers’ racial prejudices as a decisive factor without acknowledging the importance of the resistance of the Māori and African communities to the proposals. The

South African Native National Congress and Young Māori—both dedicated to the improvement and advancement of their respective communities—used similar rhetoric in articulating their resistance, namely by challenging myths of the British as bearers of civilization. The discourses employed by British settlers and African and Māori peoples reveal the centrality of marginal figures, like servants, in the colonial project and the high stakes invested in this seemingly inconsequential subject of domestic service. The home—far from being an apolitical realm—was inextricably connected to ideas of national, racial, and imperial survival.

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CONCLUSION

CONSTRUCTING AND CONTESTING THE “GIRLHOOD OF OUR EMPIRE”

In 1939, Winifred Preston travelled from Britain to New Zealand to assess the state of activity of the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS) in the country and to strengthen the bond between “this country [Britain] with the Dominion of New Zealand.” Upon her arrival, she found that these aims were complicated by “our own peculiar problems here in New

Zealand.”1 She detailed these challenges in a letter to the Central Branch in London, confiding: “I must confess it is more difficult than I imagined it would be. Conditions out here are so entirely different to what they are at home, so that what applies there does’nt [sic] apply here at all, and I see that ‘Home’ does’nt [sic] really know a great deal about New Zealand.”2 Preston was disappointed to find that New Zealanders were “so very self-satisfied” and “in fact horribly insular in outlook” and that “they are not really very interested in English things as far as they touch themselves. You can talk to them about home but they are far more interested in their own local gossip and affairs.”3

While the GFS in Britain continued to see themselves as the head of the GFS family, the

“mother” to its “colonial daughters,” Preston found that branches in New Zealand acted

1 Winifred Preston, “Report on New Zealand Tour for the Girls’ Friendly Society, 1940,” 5/GFS/2/248, Overseas—New Zealand, Miss Winifred Preston’s tour, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library; Ethel Hervey to Miss Angus, July 13, 1939, 5/GFS/2/248, Overseas—New Zealand, Miss Winifred Preston’s tour, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 2 Winifred Preston to Miss Angus, May 1, 1939, 5/GFS/2/248, Overseas—New Zealand, Miss Winifred Preston’s tour, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. Like Preston, an article in The Empire Annual for Girls remarked life in New Zealand has little “family resemblance to days in English life, even in the country.” A High School Girl, “Tent Life in New Zealand,” The Empire Annual for Girls (1916), 130. 3 Winifred Preston to Miss Angus, July 8, 1939, 5/GFS/2/248, Overseas—New Zealand, Miss Winifred Preston’s tour, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library.

285 independently and no longer viewed the organization in such hierarchical terms. These shifts in the relationships among GFS branches mirrored broader geopolitical shifts during the interwar years, which witnessed the further development of a distinct New

Zealand identity and the weakening of New Zealand’s ties with Britain.4

Winifred Preston’s correspondences back to the GFS Central Branch paint a picture of the organization in decline, not only in New Zealand but worldwide. Her accounts contrast the public reports by the GFS that portrayed the organization as flourishing.5 In her reports, she draws particular attention to the problem of the aging membership of the organization, noting that the associates “are far too old to understand and hold the girls.”6 This impression is affirmed when she visits another branch to find

“there was quite a crowd there, but my heart sank to see so many elderly, grey heads.”7

Preston’s fears that the GFS was perceived an outdated, irrelevant, and aging organization was confirmed by the archbishop of Colombo (present-day Sri Lanka), who wrote to GFS associates about the difficulties faced by the organization in his diocese:

“G.F.S. has probably shot its bolt…it is too Victorian and patronizing for modern youth who resent ‘kind ladies and tea parties’!”8 He concluded that many in his “Diocese are not in favour of going on with the G.F.S.: they do not find it suitable.”9 As reflected in these correspondences, the organization clung to its Victorian foundations, even as that

4 The 1931 Statute of Westminster of the British Parliament marked a shift in imperial relations with the formal establishment of the British Commonwealth of Nations and removing Britain’s right to legislate for New Zealand as well as South Africa, Australia, Canada, and Ireland. New Zealand was the last of these countries to ratify the statute in 1947. 5 See for instance “A Successful Year Reported: Work of the Girls’ Friendly Society,” 1937, 5/GFS/2/246, Overseas—New Zealand, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 6 Preston, “Report on New Zealand Tour for the Girls’ Friendly Society, 1940.” 7 Preston to Angus, July 8, 1939. 8 Bishop of Colombo to Miss Gardner Williams, December 16, 1932, 5/GFS/2/307, Rules and Regulations with Other Church Bodies, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 9 Ibid.

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Victorian social order was being uprooted during the First World War and interwar years.

Girls instead found organizations like the Young Women’s Christian Association

(YWCA) and Girl Guides more relevant to their changing lives.10 Preston frequently commented on the loss of members and resources to other organizations, which instead were “fulfilling the work of the G.F.S.”11 On this subject, she also related her conversation with Mrs. White, a seventy-five-year-old associate in New Zealand, who observed that “everyone feels that unless fresh younger people are drawn in it will die down” and “unless the G.F.S. does something now about it, the Y.W.C.A. will at the same time will wipe out the G.F.S.” 12 White saw the writing on the wall. Although the

GFS desired to continue its work and saw itself as performing a necessary role for girls, there was little interest in the GFS among the girls themselves.13 Although the GFS had succeeded in making early inroads in the colonies, other organizations supplanted the

GFS by the interwar years.14 While associates claimed that other organizations could not replace the GFS, girls themselves felt differently and saw the Girl Guides in particular as a more amenable avenue to gain a sense of friendship and comradery and engage in various activities.15 Girls found the GFS increasingly out of touch with their lives, and

10 GFS associates expressed dismay and bewilderment at the phenomenon of the “modern girl.” For instance, the author of an article on “The Modern Girl” in The Girls’ Quarterly advises girls not to forget their “old ways” and concludes “I confess the modern girl often makes my heart burn within me.” See “The Modern Girl,” The Girls’ Quarterly: A Paper for Workers in the Girls’ Friendly Society (April 1900), 35. 11 Preston to Angus, May 1, 1939. 12 Winifred Preston to Miss Angus, August 3, 1939, 5/GFS/2/248, Overseas—New Zealand, Miss Winifred Preston’s tour, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 13 Caroline Mytton to Miss Marsh, December 4, 1933, 5/GFS/2/238, Minutes and Papers of Overseas— India, Burma and Ceylon: General, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. Winifred Paine to Caroline Mytton, February 26, 1931, 5/GFS/2/230, Minutes and Papers of Overseas— India, Burma and Ceylon: Lahore, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 14 Olive Carden to Caroline Mytton, November 26, 1932, 5/GFS/2/230, Minutes and Papers of Overseas— India, Burma and Ceylon: Lahore, Records of the Girls’ Friendly Society, The Women’s Library. 15 For more on the Girl Guides during the interwar years, see Kristine Alexander, Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017).

287 although the organization continues to exist today with around 20,000 members in branches throughout the world, the GFS’s unwillingness to adapt to the changing conditions of girls’ lives led to its inevitable decline.16

The decline of the GFS also symbolized an increasing skepticism and disillusionment with the GFS’s professed commitment to caring for, preserving, and protecting “the Girlhood of Our Empire.”17 Crucially, the GFS’s primary focus was on girlhood, not girls themselves. As detailed in chapter three, girls’ concerns and well- being were often regarded as secondary or even immaterial in relation to broader organizational and colonial objectives. Thus, when the GFS expressed its dedication “to the service of girlhood” and cast itself as “a guardian of girlhood,” it propagated a specific notion of girlhood—one based on whiteness and middle-class values, namely purity—and crucially reinforced associated social, racial, and colonial power structures.18

While this commitment may at first glance appear to be altruistic and inclusive, it was in reality a means of exclusion and marginalized girls who were not white, as evidenced in the organization’s treatment of mixed-race girls, or did not adhere to middle-class values, as demonstrated by the purity debates.

16 GFS branches exist today in a variety of countries throughout the world, including England, Australia, Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea, Japan, Honduras, Mozambique, Korea, and the United States. According to its website, it offers programs for evangelism, support, empowerment, education and encouragement. For more about the current activities of the GFS and where the organization is active today, see “GFS Countries,” GFS World, accessed September 10, 2017, http://www.gfsworld.org/gfs- countries.html. 17 “Appeal for £20,000 for the Lodges and Homes of Rest of the Girls’ Friendly Society,” 1907, Davidson 143, ff. 215, Administration of Girls’ Friendly Society, Lambeth Palace Library. Variations of this phrase can be found throughout GFS literature. See for instance “Vision and Mission Slides,” The Empire and Beyond, Occasional Leaflet XII (Anniversary Week 1916), 14. See also Kathleen M. Townsend, “Beginnings of the G.F.S.,” chapter 3 in Some Memories of Mrs. Townsend: Foundress of the Girls’ Friendly Society (London: GFS Central Council, 1923), 19. 18 The Book of the GFS: What It Is and What It Does (June 1920), 11. Mary Heath-Stubbs, Friendship’s Highway: Being the History of the Girls’ Friendly Society, 1875-1935 (London: G.F.S. Central Office, 1935), 19.

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The GFS’s employment of the concept of girlhood to promote and reinforce systems of colonial power mirrored strategies employed by other organizations and the broader colonial state, which also used girlhood—and specifically a white, middle-class construction of girlhood—as a “marker of civilization” to measure social “progress” and modernity. Under the auspices of caring for and protecting girlhood, the state justified intervening in African and Māori homes and communities and removing working-class

British girls from their homes and migrating them to other parts of the empire. The state used humanitarian rhetoric and framed such efforts in terms of children’s welfare, but such discourses masked more self-interested motivations, namely demonstrating the legitimacy and morality of the colonial state and upholding social and racial hierarchies.

As detailed in chapter six, efforts to train Māori girls as domestic servants, although coded in terms of providing girls with useful skills and “uplifting” the Māori people, in reality served as a way to “domesticate” Māori girls and reform them in a way that would make them useful to the colonial enterprise. Girlhood thus functioned as a powerful rhetorical tool that bolstered colonial power, but it could also be employed as a mode of resistance. Māori women’s emphasis on the particular “girlhood of Māori girls” in framing their opposition to colonial efforts to train Māori girls as servants illustrates how the malleability of girlhood made it an effective means to challenge colonial power.

The construction of girlhood did not occur in isolation but was shaped by cross- cultural, transcolonial exchanges as well as shifting racial, colonial, national, and social exigencies. As illustrated by the “servant girl problem,” discussions about the education, employment, and emigration of girls both reflected and influenced broader political, economic, and social changes in the British Empire. While there was a continual demand

289 for domestic servants throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became a

“problem” and “crisis” at key times, specifically in the wake of economic and social changes following the abolition of slavery in South Africa in the 1830s, the consolidation of British sovereignty in New Zealand during the mid-century, and especially after the

South African War, as British settlers in both South Africa and New Zealand sought to

(re)define their places and roles in the changing British imperial system. The connection between the “servant girl problem” and moments of crisis in the British Empire reveals the critical role of girls in constructing colonial cultures and identities and how girlhood and girls’ lives were intertwined with conceptualizations of the nation, empire, and race.

During these times of crisis, British settlers sought to reassert their whiteness and reaffirm class, gender, and racial hierarchies by using British girls as racial, cultural, and strategic bulwarks that would protect the home from the threatening, foreign world.

However, as anxieties over the poor white problem and the creation of “white” homes demonstrated, they were an unreliable, unstable line of defense.

This dissertation sought not only to understand how girlhood functioned discursively but also to examine the experiences of girls themselves. Studying the relationship between discursive constructions of girlhood and girls’ lived experiences draws attention to the different forms of labor performed by girls in the British Empire.

The colonial project depended upon girls’ reproductive labor of domestic work but also the more visible—yet paradoxically hidden—cultural work and emotional labor of girlhood. In colonial scripts, such as those in GFS stories about Joan of Arc, Alice Ayers, and sisters Patricia and Georgina, girls were cast as imperial citizens, good servants, model mothers, and valued migrants. In performing these roles, girls were seen as vital

290 to building up settler societies and thus ensuring the futurity of the British Empire. Yet girls’ participation in the colonial project was much more complex and paradoxical than such stories suggest. Girls did inhabit these roles and, as described in chapter two, wrote positively about their experiences emigrating to and living in the colonies. However, they also challenged these scripts. As chapter four details, abstract notions of imperial duty and the need to exhibit “the right spirit” had little meaning for emigrants like Eliza

Hobbs, Eliza Cook, and Sarah Elliot, faced with innumerable hardships in emigrating to and living in “a strange land.”

While there is a growing body of scholarship about children’s roles in the empire and how the colonial state viewed children, less research exists about how children—and girls in particular—experienced and understood the empire. As Kristine Alexander has observed in her work on colonial girlhood, the history of girlhood reflects a tradition of girls being “spoken for and about” by adults.19 This focus on adult perspectives, whether those of colonial officials or emigration organizers, renders girls silent and passive.

Consequently, this dissertation endeavored to bring the perspectives of girls to the forefront and show how girls were agents with their own views who actively shaped their environment. However, the marginalization of child, female, working-class, and indigenous voices within the archive posed a formidable challenge to this undertaking.

Little space is given to girls’ voices or concerns, even on issues directly impacting their lives, such as education, employment, and emigration.

Even within the archives of the GFS, individual girls and their voices rarely appear, and instead the perspectives of upper-class women—like the organization’s

19 Kristine Alexander, “Can the Girl Guide Speak?: The Perils and Pleasures of Looking for Children’s Voices in Archival Research,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4, no. 1 (2012): 134.

291 founder Mary Elizabeth Townsend and Ellen Joyce—dominate the archival record. Their memoirs, correspondences, and reports form the core of the GFS archives, and within these writings, financial matters and debates over the logistics about building hostels and organizing events eclipse the stories of girls. To contend with the challenges of the colonial archive and to give a more holistic picture of girls’ experiences, I employed a variety of sources and mediums, including popular literature, correspondences, official reports, and scrapbooks. While the written records of the GFS largely obscure the experiences of girls, girls do emerge from the shadows of the archives and became visible through photographs in the scrapbooks discussed in chapter three. Photographs are not unproblematic sources and present new challenges and questions, but they can help to fill in some of the silences and gaps within the archive and enhance the visibility of girls.

The GFS recognized the power of visual media in conveying the significance of its work, as evidenced by its prominence in newsletters and the creation of scrapbooks. My analysis of these photographs in chapter three only scratched the surface of the organization’s rich photographic records; further study can provide insights into questions about the role of photographs and visual media in the GFS and other colonial organizations, girls’ use of photography, and the relationship between visual and textual media in studying colonial girlhoods.

This dissertation has aimed to demonstrate the value of a “multi-sited history of the empire” and a more global approach to studying the history of girlhood—and childhood more broadly.20 While this dissertation focuses on girls’ movement in a unilateral direction, from Britain to South Africa and New Zealand, migration of course

20 Tony Ballantyne, “Introduction: Arynaism and the Web of Empire,” in Orientalism and Race: Aryanism and the British Empire (London: Palgrave, 2001), 14.

292 involved more complex, multi-directional networks of mobility, and more research needs to be done about the different ways that girls moved throughout the empire, including among non-settler colonies, like India, that were shaped different strategic, social, and racial exigencies and thus provide constructive points of comparison to South Africa and

New Zealand. In her recent monograph, Race, Tea, and Colonial Resettlement, Jane

McCabe highlights these different networks by studying the movement of girls between colonies, specifically the migration of mixed-race children of British tea planters from

Bengal to work as servants and agricultural laborers in New Zealand between 1908 and

1938.21 Around the same time, in 1898-1899, there was also a proposal to bring young

Indian girls and women, between the ages of thirteen and forty, to Britain to work as domestic servants. Like the efforts to migrate British girls to South Africa and New

Zealand, such programs were envisioned as not only fulfilling a critical labor need but also strengthening imperial ties by creating “an additional bond between the two countries.”22 Yet like the programs to emigrate British girls and employ African and

Māori girls as servants, this proposal faced many challenges that prevented it from being a viable solution to the servant crisis. Among these difficulties were that Indian girls and women did not know English, and that British women resisted the idea of employing

Indian servants within the home.23 The case of Nasiban, an Indian servant who had accompanied her mistress back to England, illustrates the resistance to employing Indian servants. After arriving in England, Nasiban was turned out on the street (the reason for

21 Jane McCabe, Race, Tea, and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 22 “Scheme for the employment of young Indian women as domestic servants in the UK,” May 13, 1898, IOR/L/PG/6/480, File 993, India Office Records and Private Papers, The British Library. 23 Ibid. This scheme is also discussed in Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The Story of Indians in Britain 1700-1947 (London: Taylor and Frances Limited, 2016), 19.

293 which is unclear from the archival records) and was unable to find another situation because people would not “engage native servants.”24 The fate of Nasiban is not clear from the archives, but records suggest she was likely sent back to India.25 The case of

Nasiban and the limited success of programs to migrate Indian girls and women to Britain warrants further investigation but it elucidates how fears over the influence of the colonial “Other” within the domestic sphere and a desire to keep “the home life…white” were not confined to settler colonies.

The legacies of colonialism continue to inform the global politics of girlhood, migration, and labor. Discourses about girlhood and girls’ culture, labor, and mobility during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reverberate through the present day. Children remain at the center of migration politics, starkly demonstrated by the refugee crisis and current US policies towards undocumented immigrants. In justifying the separation of parents from their children, the US government employs similar tactics used by organizations like the Children’s Friend Society and Barnardo’s in the nineteenth century, including placing blame on parents and framing such actions in terms of national interest and security. Domestic labor continues to be the defining experience of childhood for over 11.5 million girls.26 Such employment still places girls in vulnerable, precarious positions, where they are subject to physical and sexual abuse. Similarly, ideas of girlhood are often deployed to advance various—sometimes contradictory—

24 “The case of Nasiban, a female servant and native of India, destitute in England,” IOR/L/PJ/6/518, File 1676, 2 Sep 1899, India Office Records and Private Papers, The British Library. 25 Ibid. 26 These numbers come from the International Labor Organization, which estimates that 17.2 million children are in paid or unpaid domestic work in the home of a third party or employer and that 67.1% of all child domestic workers are girls. See “Child Labor and Domestic Work,” International Labour Organization, accessed September 20, 2018, https://www.ilo.org/ipec/areas/Childdomesticlabour/lang-- en/index.htm.

294 political and social agendas. Stories about Malala Yousafzai and the kidnapping of the

Chibok school girls, for instance, echo earlier discussions about African and Māori girlhood in their employment of similar colonialist language and assumptions, including portraying girls as non-agential figures, using the status of girls as measures of modernity and civilization, and emphasizing the need for white men and women to save brown girls from brown men.27 Such debates illustrate an ongoing process of negotiation among different conceptions of girlhood and how girls continue to serve as central sites of contestation in broader political, social, economic, and cultural debates. These continued resonances highlight the importance of integrating historical sources and methodologies with contemporary discussions about girls’ agency and experiences and the value of an interdisciplinary approach to studying girlhood.

27 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 297. See for instance, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, “Why is Malala such a polarizing figure in Pakistan?,” Al Jazeera, April 1, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/malala-polarising-figure-pakistan- 180401054631496.html; and, Chitra Nagarajan, “Focusing on schoolgirl abductions distorts the view of life in Nigeria,” The Guardian, March 2, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/02/nigeria-boko-haram-abductions-chitra- nagarajan.

295

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APPENDIX

GIRLS’ FRIENDLY SOCIETY CANDIDATES’ CENTRAL EXAMINATION

From: Our Letter: For G.F.S. Candidates all over the World (Easter 1907), 4.

Part I. of Candidates’ Catechism (For Children under 10 years of age.)

1. Why should you wish to belong to the G.F.S.? 2. What name is given to those who are going to be Members; what does the word mean; and what does it teach you? 3. Write out the Motto, and say what it means. 4. Write out the Candidates’ Prayer. 5. How can you be ‘truthful’ and ‘thoughtful for others’? 6. Write out the three Texts on the Candidates’ Card.

Part II. of Candidates’ Catechism (For Children of 10 to 12 years of age.)

1. Why is it a good thing for a girl to belong to the G.F.S.? 2. Who may become Members, and what does a Member receive when she is admitted? 3. How much does a Member pay quarterly, and how does her subscription help the work of the Society? 4. For who do you pray in the Member’s Prayer, and in what other ways may you help them? 5. Suppose you were going to Canada, how could you continue to be a Member of the G.F.S.? 6. What do you understand by Thrift, and how can a girl be thrifty?

The G.F.S. in the Colonies (For Girls of 13 and 14 years of age.)

1. Draw a map of any one Colony, and mark on it any places where you know the G.F.S. is at work. (This may be done with the aid of an atlas and tracing- paper.)—Or: Give the name of any Colony in which you are interested, and write out all that you can remember about the G.F.S. which goes on in it. 2. In what way are some of the Branches in England specially interested in those of other countries? Name any so interested in each other. 3. How does the work in South Australia show the advantage of belonging to the G.F.S.? 4. Which Colonies have been visited by Workers from England, and give the names of a Bishop and ladies who did so much to help on G.F.S. work in those places? 5. Give a short account of the work done by Candidates in Newfoundland, and state where that colony is situated.

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