Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s-1930 (review)

Agents of Empire is an example of mission creep in the area of women, migration, and empire. By the early 1990s the work of Marilyn Barber, Jan Gothard, Paula Hamilton, James Hammerton, Marjory Harper, Charlotte Macdonald, Joy Parr, and Barbara Roberts in particular had revealed the complexities of agency, structure, origin, and destination in the migration of women around the British Empire. Gender, class, race, and empire were themes of discussion, and riveting timely oral histories added depth to analysis. Through the 1990s and beyond, a new generation of work emerged, adding depth and detail in the areas of female imperialism and migration, the construction of Britishness and the significance of its English, Scottish, and Irish components, the relationship between women's organizations and the nation and empire, extending John MacKenzie's pioneering work on 'propaganda and empire,' and gendering David Cannadine's 'ornamentalism.' It was revealed that women shared in the imperial project, and in multiple ways that encompassed maternal feminism and challenged masculinist constructions of class. International networks of imperial women were examined, highlighting the politics of class and professionalism, in particular the changing relationship between state and voluntary organizations, and problematizing constructions of metropolis and colony (Bell, Bush, Harper, Paisley, Pickles, Reidi, Swaisland, Van Heynigen, Woollacott).

Chilton's interest is in the middle- and upper-class women in Britain who attempted to persuade women of the same classes to migrate around the empire between the 1860s and 1930. Agents of Empire is based upon the study of a limited number of British-based female emigration societies previously brought to historians' attention. It examines in particular the Girls' Friendly Society, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and the Travellers' Aid Society. It draws extensively upon the Imperial Colonist, the monthly journal of the dominant female emigration societies. Chapter 1 introduces female emigrators, making nuanced comments about the difference between middle-class and elite women. Chapter 2 concerns women in transit to imperial destinations. Chapter 3 is about the societies' emphasis on middle-class migration. Chapter 4 attempts to recover the agency of women migrants through their letters home as published in the Imperial Colonist (a task that Chilton proceeds with, despite reluctantly recognizing these letters as propaganda). Chapter 5 is about the reception of migrants by a selection of women's organizations in Canada and Australia. Chapter 6 is a case study of a domestic servant project in Canberra.

There are no new arguments in these chapters, with discussion of maternal feminism, the success and failure of migration schemes, and the position of voluntary versus state control all lacking the sophistication of earlier work in the field. Furthermore, the narrow number of primary sources means that the net is not cast wide enough to make general arguments about British female migration. For example, the omission of the Salvation Army, the YWCA, and the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire and church reception work means that Chilton is only ever dealing with minority players in the Canadian history of her book. Critical distinction between the various locations in the book, especially between metropolis and colony, is weak. Most disappointingly, Chilton offers very little in the way of quantitative evidence. How many middle-class women were helped? Such evidence can be pieced together through colonial office, government, and individual organization's records. The nuts and bolts of the Canberra scheme is disappointingly absent.

Chilton's major passion in Agents of Empire is to rehabilitate those women who lobbied for, organized, and oversaw middle-class women's migration. Here her mission is the same as the published institutional histories of the organizations under examination. These insider stories have already shown that great confidence and effort was displayed. Historians know, however, that significance is a measure critically gleaned. A celebratory mode leads Chilton to view the women in her book as victims of encroaching state control, rather than, as previous work has argued, redundant...