Genteel Women: Empire and domestic material culture, 1840–1910 by Dianne Lawrence (review)

When thinking of colonial elites, images of verandas, many-layered dresses apparently out of place in their sultry surroundings, or pianos carefully transplanted to overseas sitting rooms, come readily to mind, but they are rarely placed at the centre of an historical analysis. In Genteel Women, Dianne Lawrence does just that to argue material culture was crucial to the making of “genteel” homes and of social identities in the British Empire. The argument, though new, is hardly radical, but the effect is powerful. By exploring colonial space and practice at micro-level, Genteel Women brings a new perspective to the lives of Victorian and Edwardian colonial elites and is full of fascinating and intimate insights into the everyday lives of women all over the British Empire.

In each of the book’s four substantive chapters Lawrence deconstructs an element of genteel woman’s practice: her dress, her sitting room, her garden and her food. Challenging assumptions that women who sweltered in heavy and elaborate clothes in tropical climes were passive victims of fashion, convention and patriarchy, Lawrence emphasises the ways in which dress was an active process of adaption. Women were active consumers, selecting their fabrics in keeping with good taste and changing fashion, making up clothes in order to demonstrate their own fine needlework, wearing them to effect particular kinds of social relations, cleaning, pressing and repairing them in keeping with British notions of cleanliness, and, recycling them through complex social networks of status, hierarchy and economy. Lawrence identifies the living room as a critical space, the creation of which played a crucial psychological and social role in helping migrating women adapt and establish herself in new surroundings. Tending flowers and managing kitchen gardens was equally important for women in “taming the wilderness” of their new environments, “rooting” themselves in a new home, and demonstrating their horticultural skills to neighbours and visitors. Food, of course, holds multiple and complex social and emotional meanings in its creation, preparation, presentation and consumption and Lawrence effectively demonstrates how these meanings took on new resonances in colonial spaces as recipes were swapped in letters to family members, and as old conventions and new ingredients were mixed. Lawrence’s study combines an analysis of material objects themselves, now in museums and private collections, with rich and fascinating reflections on these objects from contemporary women in their letters and journals.

Lawrence defines gentility as “a system of values” or a “highly nuanced form of knowledge” that consisted of a theoretical stance (where individuals conceived themselves as “superior” to those who were “vulgar”), a social performance (particularly of “constraint”) and for which the possession of the material artefacts of “genteel” living were of utmost importance, and a form of self-identification (3). Interestingly, Lawrence is very resistant to aligning her discussion with issues of “class.” She claims the category of “middle class” (which at first glance seems to correspond with the “genteel” social group she is discussing) “will not suffice” being “as dangerous as it is slippery” (4). Nor does she feel identifying the women in question by the occupation of the man of the house does true justice to the cultural capital in defining the parameters of female gentility (4–5). Whilst, as Lawrence notes, traditional markers of class such as place of birth or income are certainly complicated by colonial and comparative locations, I could not help feeling that a more thorough engagement with the wider social context, including the material performance of class, would have been helpful. In particular, I wondered if gentility was not also a relational process and how the women she explored might also have defined themselves against those who were not considered “genteel,” Indigenous or settler. I also wondered about how the women of empire that I have looked at in most depth, missionary women, might have fitted into Lawrence’s schema. They were not “genteel” women of the kind Lawrence explores, but they nevertheless performed many of the same tasks in their daily work to...