Empire's Daughters

This book provides a study of the Girls’ Friendly Society to examine how the construction of girlhood was intricately tied to constructions of whiteness and ideas of empire. It uses correspondences, newsletters, scrapbooks, and photographs to reveal the often-overlooked role of girls in the British empire. -- .

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Girlhood and whiteness in the British empire 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. -- .