Empire’s Daughters: Girlhood, Whiteness and the Colonial Project

Empire’s daughters traces the interconnected histories of girlhood, whiteness, and British colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the study of the Girls’ Friendly Society. The society functioned as both a youth organisation and emigration society, making it especially valuable in examining girls’ multifaceted participation with the empire. The book charts the emergence of the organisation during the late Victorian era through its height in the first decade of the twentieth century to its decline in the interwar years. Employing a multi-sited approach and using a range of sources-including correspondences, newsletters, and scrapbooks-the book uncovers the ways in which girls participated in the empire as migrants, settlers, laborers, and creators of colonial knowledge and also how they resisted these prescribed roles and challenged systems of colonial power.

Elizabeth Dillenburg is an Assistant Professor of History at The Ohio State University at Newark