3 - “At home” on a Mission Station and in a Female Factory

Summary

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the administrators of British colonial institutions were predominantly male. Architecturally, the institutions they ran occupied public space. As local manifestations of imperial power, the buildings which housed colonial institutions stood out from the vernacular architecture, and by design could be easily identified as belonging to the imported culture. The tenacity of a colonial presence was signalled by the number and scale of public buildings housing administrative offices. For the most part, male administrators also had access to other spaces where they could be “at home,” buildings in a distinctively domestic style which marked a separation between their public and private lives. If an administrator was married, the space available for his private life was managed by his wife, who had no daily role to play inside the public buildings where her husband worked. On the frontier and its outposts, however, where the footprint of empire was less visible, administrative officers often lived and worked in the same location, usually without their wives. Likewise, male missionaries setting up stations authorised within the imperial enterprise, if often at odds with its officials, began with space serving both public and private functions – and their wives went with them. “From an early date,” writes Clare Midgley in her study of women on the mission fields in the early nineteenthcentury British Empire, “missionary societies recognized the benefits of recruiting married men as missionaries, and thus, as early as there were foreign missionaries, there were missionaries' wives” (339).