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WOMEN, GENDER, AND THE PROMOTION OF EMPIRE: THE VICTORIA LEAGUE, 1901–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2002

ELIZA RIEDI
ELIZA RIEDI
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
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Abstract

The Victoria League, founded in 1901 as a result of the South African War, was the only predominantly female imperial propaganda society in Britain during the Edwardian period. To accommodate women's activism within the ‘man's world’ of empire politics the League restricted its work to areas within woman's ‘separate sphere’ while transforming them into innovative methods of imperial propaganda. Through philanthropy to war victims, hospitality to colonial visitors, empire education, and the promotion of social reform as an imperial issue, the League aimed to encourage imperial sentiment at home and promote colonial loyalty to the ‘mother country’. The League's relationship with its colonial ‘sister societies’, the Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa and the Canadian Imperial Order, Daughters of the Empire, demonstrates both the primacy of the self-governing dominions in its vision of empire, and the importance of women's imperial networks. The Victoria League illustrates both significant involvement by elite women in imperial politics and the practical and ideological constraints placed on women's imperial activism.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , September 2002 , pp. 569 - 599
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I have to thank Alan Sykes, Deborah Thom, Stuart Ball, James Bothwell, and the editors of the Historical Journal for their comments on various versions of this article. I am also grateful to the Victoria League for Commonwealth Friendship for permission to quote from unpublished Victoria League papers, and to the following for permission to quote from unpublished personal papers: the relatives of Violet Markham; the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford (Violet Milner papers); T. G. Talbot (Meriel Talbot papers); and Lord Chandos (Edith Lyttelton papers).