British Female Emigration Societies and the New World, 1860-1914

This book focuses on nineteenth-century British philanthropic societies, ancestors to modern NGOs, and the role they played in the emigration of middle-class women to the Pacific colonies. As government assistance to female emigrants exclusively concerned the working-classes, the responsibility of gentlewomen's emigration rested with female philanthropic societies. Marie Ruiz focuses on the both the female emigration organisers, but also the female emigrants, lower middle-class women described as 'redundant' and unproductive by Victorian society because they were unmarried, had no children, and did not work, to explore the pivotal time in which British women started emigrating independently, and the repercussions of this in the colonies.